Formulations on the two principles of mental functioning 1 страница

(1911)

We have long observed that every neurosis has as its result, and probably therefore as its purpose, a forcing of the patient out of real life, an alienating of him from reality. Nor could a fact such as this escape the observation of Pierre Janet; he spoke: of a loss of ‘la fonction du réel’ [‘the function of reality’] as being a special characteristic of neurotics, but without discovering the connection of this disturbance with the fundamental determinants of neurosis.¹ By introducing the process of repression into the genesis of the neuroses we have been able to gain some insight into this connection. Neurotics turn away from reality because they find it unbearable - either the whole or parts of it. The most extreme type of this turning away from reality is shown by certain cases of hallucinatory psychosis which seek to deny the particular event that occasioned the outbreak of their insanity (Griesinger). But in fact every neurotic does the same with some fragment of reality.² And we are now confronted with the task of investigating the development of the relation of neurotics and of mankind in general to reality, and in this way of bringing the psychological significance of the real external world into the structure of our theories.

In the psychology which is founded on psycho-analysis we have become accustomed to taking as our starting-point the unconscious mental processes, with the peculiarities of which we have become acquainted through analysis. We consider these to be the older, primary processes, the residues of a phase of development in which they were the only kind of mental process. The governing purpose obeyed by these primary processes is easy to recognize; it is described as the pleasure-unpleasure [Lust-Unlust] principle, or more shortly the pleasure principle. These processes strive towards gaining pleasure; psychical activity draws back from any event which might arouse unpleasure. (Here we have repression.) Our dreams at night and our waking tendency to tear ourselves away from distressing impressions are remnants of the dominance of this principle and proofs of its power.

¹ Janet, 1909.

² Otto Rank (1910) has recently drawn attention to a remarkably clear prevision of this causation shown in Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea.3

I shall be returning to lines of thought which I have developed elsewhere¹ when I suggest that the state of psychical rest was originally disturbed by the peremptory demands of internal needs. When this happened, whatever was thought of (wished for) was simply presented in a hallucinatory manner, just as still happens to-day with our dream-thoughts every night.² It was only the non-occurrence of the expected satisfaction, the disappointment experienced, that led to the abandonment of this attempt at satisfaction by means of hallucination. Instead of it, the psychical apparatus had to decide to form a conception of the real circumstances in the external world and to endeavour to make a real alteration in them. A new principle of mental functioning was thus introduced; what was presented in the mind was no longer what was agreeable but what was real, even if it happened to be disagreeable.³ This setting-up of the reality principle proved to be a momentous step.

¹ In the General Section of The Interpretation of Dreams.

² The state of sleep is able to re-establish the likeness of mental life as it was before the recognition of reality, because a prerequisite of sleep is a deliberate rejection of reality (the wish to sleep).

³ I will try to simplify the above schematic account with some further details. It will rightly be objected that an organization which was a slave to the pleasure principle and neglected the reality of the external world could not maintain itself alive for the shortest time, so that it could not have come into existence at all. The employment of a fiction like this is, however, justified when one considers that the infant - provided one includes with it the care it receives from its mother - does almost realize a psychical system of this kind. It probably hallucinates the fulfilment of its internal needs; it betrays its unpleasure, when there is an increase of stimulus and an absence of satisfaction, by the motor discharge of screaming and beating about with its arms and legs, and it then experiences the satisfaction it has hallucinated. Later, as an older child, it learns to employ these manifestations of discharge intentionally as methods of expressing its feelings. Since the later care of children is modelled on the care of infants, the dominance of the pleasure principle can really come to an end only when a child has achieved complete psychical detachment from its parents. - A neat example of a psychical system shut off from the stimuli of the external world, and able to satisfy even its nutritional requirements autistically (to use Bleuler’s term), is afforded by a bird’s egg with its food supply enclosed in its shell; for it, the care provided by its mother is limited to the provision of warmth. - I shall not regard it as a correction, but as an amplification of the schematic picture under discussion, if it is insisted that a system living according to the pleasure principle must have devices to enable it to withdraw from the stimuli of reality. Such devices are merely the correlative of ‘repression’, which treats internal unpleasurable stimuli as if they were external - that is to say, pushes them into the external world.

4 (1) In the first place, the new demands made a succession of adaptations necessary in the psychical apparatus, which, owing to our insufficient or uncertain knowledge, we can only retail very cursorily.

The increased significance of external reality heightened the importance, too, of the sense-organs that are directed towards that external world, and of the consciousness attached to them. Consciousness now learned to comprehend sensory qualities in addition to the qualities of pleasure and unpleasure which hitherto had alone been of interest to it. A special function was instituted which had periodically to search the external world, in order that its data might be familiar already if an urgent internal need should arise - the function of attention. Its activity meets the sense-impressions half way, instead of awaiting their appearance. At the same time, probably, a system of notation was introduced, whose task it was to lay down the results of this periodical activity of consciousness - a part of what we call memory.

The place of repression, which excluded from cathexis as productive of unpleasure some of the emerging ideas, was taken by an impartial passing of judgement, which had to decide whether a given idea was true or false - that is, whether it was in agreement with reality or not - the decision being determined by making a comparison with the memory-traces of reality.

A new function was now allotted to motor discharge, which, under the dominance of the pleasure principle, had served as a means of unburdening the mental apparatus of accretions of stimuli, and which had carried out this task by sending innervations into the interior of the body (leading to expressive movements and the play of features and to manifestations of affect). Motor discharge was now employed in the appropriate alteration of reality; it was converted into action.

Restraint upon motor discharge (upon action), which then became necessary, was provided by means of the process of thinking, which was developed from the presentation of ideas. Thinking was endowed with characteristics which made it possible for the mental apparatus to tolerate an increased tension of stimulus while the process of discharge was postponed. It is essentially an experimental kind of acting, accompanied by displacement of relatively small quantities of cathexis together with less expenditure (discharge) of them. For this purpose the conversion of freely displaceable cathexes into ‘bound’ cathexes was necessary, and this was brought about by means of raising the level of the whole cathectic process. It is probable that thinking was originally unconscious, in so far as it went beyond mere ideational presentations and was directed to the relations between impressions of objects, and that it did not acquire further qualities, perceptible to consciousness, until it became connected with verbal residues.

(2) A general tendency of our mental apparatus, which can be traced back to the economic principle of saving expenditure, seems to find expression in the tenacity with which we hold on to the sources of pleasure at our disposal, and in the difficulty with which we renounce them. With the introduction of the reality principle one species of thought-activity was split off; it was kept free from reality-testing and remained subordinated to the pleasure principle alone.¹ This activity is phantasying, which begins already in children’s play, and later, continued as day-dreaming, abandons dependence on real objects.

(3) The supersession of the pleasure principle by the reality principle, with all the psychical consequences involved, which is here schematically condensed into a single sentence, is not in fact accomplished all at once; nor does it take place simultaneously all along the line. For while this development is going on in the ego-instincts, the sexual instincts become detached from them in a very significant way. The sexual instincts behave auto-erotically at first; they obtain their satisfaction in the subject’s own body and therefore do not find themselves in the situation of frustration which was what necessitated the institution of the reality principle; and when, later on, the process of finding an object begins, it is soon interrupted by the long period of latency, which delays sexual development until puberty. These two factors - auto-erotism and the latency period - have as their result that the sexual instinct is held up in its psychical development and remains far longer under the dominance of the pleasure principle, from which in many people it is never able to withdraw.

In consequence of these conditions, a closer connection arises, on the one hand, between the sexual instinct and phantasy and, on the other hand, between the ego-instincts and the activities of consciousness. Both in healthy and in neurotic people this connection strikes us as very intimate, although the considerations of genetic psychology which have just been put forward lead us to recognize it as a secondary one. The continuance of auto-erotism is what makes it possible to retain for so long the easier momentary and imaginary satisfaction in relation to the sexual object in place of real satisfaction, which calls for effort and postponement. In the realm of phantasy, repression remains all-powerful; it brings about the inhibition of ideas in statu nascendi before they can be noticed by consciousness, if their cathexis is likely to occasion a release of unpleasure. This is the weak spot in our psychical organization; and it can be employed to bring back under the dominance of the pleasure principle thought-processes which had already become rational. An essential part of the psychical disposition to neurosis thus lies in the delay in educating the sexual instincts to pay regard to reality and, as a corollary, in the conditions which make this delay possible.

¹ In the same way, a nation whose wealth rests on the exploitation of the produce of its soil will yet set aside certain areas for reservation in their original state and for protection from the changes brought about by civilization. (E.g. Yellowstone Park.)6

(4) Just as the pleasure-ego can do nothing but wish, work for a yield of pleasure, and avoid unpleasure, so the reality-ego need do nothing but strive for what is useful and guard itself against damage.¹ Actually the substitution of the reality principle for the pleasure principle implies no deposing of the pleasure principle, but only a safeguarding of it. A momentary pleasure, uncertain in its results, is given up, but only in order to gain along the new path an assured pleasure at a later time. But the endopsychic impression made by this substitution has been so powerful that it is reflected in a special religious myth. The doctrine of reward in the after-life for the - voluntary or enforced - renunciation of earthly pleasures is nothing other than a mythical projection of this revolution in the mind. Following consistently along these lines, religions have been able to effect absolute renunciation of pleasure in this life by means of the promise of compensation in a future existence; but they have not by this means achieved a conquest of the pleasure principle. It is science which comes nearest to succeeding in that conquest; science too, however, offers intellectual pleasure during its work and promises practical gain in the end.

(5) Education can be described without more ado as an incitement to the conquest of the pleasure principle, and to its replacement by the reality principle; it seeks, that is, to lend its help to the developmental process which affects the ego. To this end it makes use of an offer of love as a reward from the educators; and it therefore fails if a spoilt child thinks that it possesses that love in any case and cannot lose it whatever happens.

(6) Art brings about a reconciliation between the two principles in a peculiar way. An artist is originally a man who turns away from reality because he cannot come to terms with the renunciation of instinctual satisfaction which it at first demands, and who allows his erotic and ambitious wishes full play in the life of phantasy. He finds the way back to reality, however, from this world of phantasy by making use of special gifts to mould his phantasies into truths of a new kind, which are valued by men as precious reflections of reality. Thus in a certain fashion he actually becomes the hero, the king, the creator, or the favourite he desired to be, without following the one roundabout path of making real alterations in the external world. But he can only achieve this because other men feel the same dissatisfaction as he does with the renunciation demanded by reality, and because that dissatisfaction, which results from the replacement of the pleasure principle by the reality principle, is itself a part of reality.²

(7) While the ego goes through its transformation from a pleasure-ego into a reality-ego, the sexual instincts undergo the changes that lead them from their original auto-erotism through various intermediate phases to object-love in the service of procreation. If we are right in thinking that each step in these two courses of development may become the site of a disposition to later neurotic illness, it is plausible to suppose that the form taken by the subsequent illness (the choice of neurosis) will depend on the particular phase of the development of the ego and of the libido in which the dispositional inhibition of development has occurred. Thus unexpected significance attaches to the chronological features of the two developments (which have not yet been studied), and to possible variations in their synchronization.

¹ The superiority of the reality-ego over the pleasure-ego has been aptly expressed by Bernard Shaw in these words: ‘To be able to choose the line of greatest advantage instead of yielding in the direction of least resistance.’ (

Man and Superman.)

² Cf. the similar position taken by Otto Rank (1907).7

(8) The strangest characteristic of unconscious (repressed) processes, to which no investigator can become accustomed without the exercise of great self-discipline, is due to their entire disregard of reality-testing; they equate reality of thought with external actuality, and wishes with their fulfilment - with the event - just as happens automatically under the dominance of the ancient pleasure principle. Hence also the difficulty of distinguishing unconscious phantasies from memories which have become unconscious. But one must never allow oneself to be misled into applying the standards of reality to repressed psychical structures, and on that account, perhaps, into undervaluing the importance of phantasies in the formation of symptoms on the ground that they are not actualities, or into tracing a neurotic sense of guilt back to some other source because there is no evidence that any actual crime has been committed. One is bound to employ the currency that is in use in the country one is exploring - in our case a neurotic currency. Suppose, for instance, that one is trying to solve a dream such as this. A man who had once nursed his father through a long and painful mortal illness, told me that in the months following his father’s death he had repeatedly dreamt that his father was alive once more and that he was talking to him in his usual way. But he felt it exceedingly painful that his father had really died, only without knowing it. The only way of understanding this apparently nonsensical dream is by adding ‘as the dreamer wished’ or ‘in consequence of his wish’ after the words ‘that his father had really died’, and by further adding ‘that he wished it’ to the last words. The dream-thought then runs: it was a painful memory for him that he had been obliged to wish for his father’s death (as a release) while he was still alive, and how terrible it would have been if his father had had any suspicion of it! What we have here is thus the familiar case of self-reproaches after the loss of someone loved, and in this instance the self-reproach went back to the infantile significance of death-wishes against the father.

The deficiencies of this short paper, which is preparatory rather than expository, will perhaps be excused only in small part if I plead that they are unavoidable. In these few remarks on the psychical consequences of adaptation to the reality principle I have been obliged to adumbrate views which I should have preferred for the present to withhold and whose justification will certainly require no small effort. But I hope it will not escape the notice of the benevolent reader how in these pages too the dominance of the reality principle is beginning.

TYPES OF ONSET OF NEUROSIS (1912)

In the pages which follow, I shall describe, on the basis of impressions arrived at empirically, the changes which conditions must undergo in order to bring about the outbreak of a neurotic illness in a person with a disposition to it. I shall thus be dealing with the question of the precipitating factors of illnesses and shall have little to say about their forms. The present discussion of the precipitating causes will differ from others in that the changes to be enumerated will relate exclusively to the subject’s libido. For psycho-analysis has taught us that the vicissitudes of the libido are what decide in favour of nervous health or sickness. Nor are words to be wasted in this connection on the concept of disposition. It is precisely psycho-analytic research which has enabled us to show that neurotic disposition lies in the history of the development of the libido, and to trace back the operative factors in that development to innate varieties of sexual constitution and to influences of the external world experienced in early childhood.

(a) The most obvious, the most easily discoverable and the most intelligible precipitating cause of an onset of neurosis is to be seen in the external factor which may be described in general terms as frustration. The subject was healthy so long at his need for love was satisfied by a real object in the external world; he becomes neurotic as soon as this object is withdrawn from him without a substitute taking its place. Here happiness coincides with health and unhappiness with neurosis. It is easier for fate to bring about a cure than for the physician; for it can offer the patient a substitute for the possibility of satisfaction which he has lost.

Thus with this type, to which, no doubt, the majority of human beings on the whole belong, the possibility of falling ill arises only when there is abstinence. And it may be judged from this what an important part in the causation of neuroses may be played by the limitation imposed by civilization on the field of accessible satisfactions. Frustration has a pathogenic effect because it dams up libido, and so submits the subject to a test as to how long he can tolerate this increase in psychical tension and as to what methods he will adopt for dealing with it. There are only two possibilities for remaining healthy when there is a persistent frustration of satisfaction in the real world. The first is by transforming the psychical tension into active energy which remains directed towards the external world and eventually extorts a real satisfaction of the libido from it. The second is by renouncing libidinal satisfaction, sublimating the dammed-up libido and turning it to the attainment of aims which are no longer erotic and which escape frustration. That these two possibilities are realized in men’s lives proves that unhappiness does not coincide with neurosis and that frustration does not alone decide whether its victim remains healthy or falls ill. The immediate effect of frustration lies in its bringing into play the dispositional factors which have hitherto been inoperative.

Where these are present and sufficiently strongly developed, there is a risk of the libido becoming ‘introverted’.¹ It turns away from reality, which, owing to the obstinate frustration, has lost its value for the subject, and turns towards the life of phantasy, in which it creates new wishful structures and revives the traces of earlier, forgotten ones. In consequence of the intimate connection between the activity of phantasy and material present in everyone which is infantile and repressed and has become unconscious, and thanks to the exceptional position enjoyed by the life of phantasy in regard to reality-testing,² the libido may thenceforward move on a backward course; it may follow the path of regression along infantile lines, and strive after aims that correspond with them. If these strivings, which are incompatible with the subject’s present-day individuality, acquire enough intensity, a conflict must result between them and the other portion of his personality, which has maintained its relation to reality. This conflict is resolved by the formation of symptoms, and is followed by the onset of manifest illness. The fact that the whole process originated from frustration in the real world is reflected in the resulting event that the symptoms, in which the ground of reality is reached once more, represent substitutive satisfactions.

¹ To use a term introduced by C. G. Jung.

² See my ‘Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning’ (1911b).1 (b) The second type of precipitating cause of falling ill is by no means so obvious as the first; and it was in fact only possible to discover it through searching analytic investigations following on the Zurich school’s theory of complexes.¹ Here the subject does not fall ill as a result of a change in the external world which has replaced satisfaction by frustration, but as a result of an internal effort to obtain the satisfaction which is accessible to him in reality. He falls ill of his attempt to adapt himself to reality and to fulfil the demands of reality - an attempt in the course of which he comes up against insurmountable internal difficulties.

It is advisable to draw a sharp distinction between the two types of onset of illness - a sharper distinction than observation as a rule permits. In the first type what is prominent is a change in the external world; in the second type the accent falls on an internal change. In the first type the subject falls ill from an experience; in the second type it is from a developmental process. In the first case he is faced by the task of renouncing satisfaction, and he falls ill from his incapacity for resistance; in the second case his task is to exchange one kind of satisfaction for another, and he breaks down from his inflexibility. In the second case the conflict, which is between the subject’s effort to remain as he is and the effort to change himself in order to meet fresh purposes and fresh demands from reality, is present from the first. In the former case the conflict only arises after the dammed-up libido has chosen other, and incompatible, possibilities of satisfaction. The part played by the conflict and the previous fixation of the libido is incomparably more obvious in the second type than in the first, in which such unserviceable fixations may perhaps only emerge as a result of the external frustration.

¹ Cf. Jung (1909).2

A young man who has hitherto satisfied his libido by means of phantasies ending in masturbation, and who now seeks to replace a régime approximating to auto-erotism by the choice of a real object - or a girl who has given her whole affection to her father or brother and who must now, for the sake of a man who is courting her, allow her hitherto unconscious incestuous libidinal wishes to become conscious - or a married woman who would like to renounce her polygamous inclinations and phantasies of prostitution so as to become a faithful consort to her husband and a perfect mother to her child - all of these fall ill from the most laudable efforts, if the earlier fixations of their libido are powerful enough to resist a displacement; and this point will be decided, once again, by the factors of disposition, constitution and infantile experience. All of them, it might be said, meet with the fate of the little tree in the Grimms’ fairy tale, which wished it had different leaves. From the hygienic point of view - which, to be sure, is not the only one to be taken into account - one could only wish for them that they had continued to be as undeveloped, as inferior and as useless as they were before they fell ill. The change which the patients strive after, but bring about only imperfectly or not at all, invariably has the value of a step forward from the point of view of real life. It is otherwise if we apply ethical standards: we see people falling ill just as often when they discard an ideal as when they seek to attain it.

In spite of the very clear differences between the two types of onset of illness that we have described, they nevertheless coincide in essentials and can without difficulty be brought together into a unity. Falling ill from frustration may also be regarded as incapacity for adaptation to reality - in the particular case, that is, in which reality frustrates satisfaction of libido. Falling ill under the conditions of the second type leads directly to a special case of frustration. It is true that reality does not here frustrate every kind of satisfaction; but it frustrates the one kind which the subject declares is the only possible one. Nor does the frustration come immediately from the external world, but primarily from certain trends in the subject’s ego. Nevertheless, frustration remains the common factor and the more inclusive one. In consequence of the conflict which immediately sets in in the second type, both kinds of satisfaction - the habitual one as well as the one aimed at - are equally inhibited; a damming-up of libido, with all its consequences, comes about just as it does in the first case. The psychical events leading to the formation of symptoms are if anything easier to follow in the second type than in the first; for in the second type the pathogenic fixations of the libido do not need to be freshly established, but have already been in force while the subject was healthy. A certain amount of introversion of libido is, as a rule, already present; and there is a saving of some part of the subject’s regression to the infantile stage, owing to the fact that his forward development has not yet completed its course.

3 (c) The next type, which I shall describe as falling ill from an inhibition in development, looks like an exaggeration of the second one - falling ill from the demands of reality. There is no theoretical reason for distinguishing it, but only a practical one; for those we are here concerned with are people who fall ill as soon as they get beyond the irresponsible age of childhood, and who have thus never reached a phase of health - a phase, that is, of capacity for achievement and enjoyment which is on the whole unrestricted. The essential feature of the dispositional process is in these cases quite plain. Their libido has never left its infantile fixations; the demands of reality are not suddenly made upon a wholly or partly mature person, but arise from the very fact of growing older, since it is obvious that they constantly alter with the subject’s increasing age. Thus conflict falls into the background in comparison with insufficiency. But here, too, all our other experience leads us to postulate an effort at overcoming the fixations of childhood; for otherwise the outcome of the process could never be neurosis but only a stationary infantilism.

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