Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings Read online

  Even if we proceed further with our examination of children's play, this does not resolve our uncertainty as to which of the two postulates to adopt. It is plainly the case that children repeat everything in their play that has made a powerful impression on them, and that in so doing they abreact the intensity of the experience and make themselves so to speak master of the situation. On the other hand, however, it is equally clear that all their play is influenced by the one wish that is dominant at that particular age: the wish to be grown up, and to be able to do the things that grown-ups do. It is also an observable fact that the unpleasurable nature of an experience does not always render it unusable for play purposes. If a doctor examines a child's throat or performs some minor operation on him, we can be quite sure that this frightening experience will become the content of his next game – but the gain in pleasure from a different source is plain to see. Exchanging his passive role in the actual experience for an active role within the game, he inflicts on his playmate whatever nasty things were inflicted on him, and thus takes his revenge by proxy.

  One thing that does emerge from this discussion is that there is no need to posit a specific imitative drive as the motive force behind children's play. We might also bear in mind that the form of play and imitation practised by adults, which in contradistinction to that of children is directed at an audience, does not spare its spectators the most painful of experiences, for instance in the performance of tragedies, and yet may none the less be regarded by them as something supremely enjoyable. This encourages us in the conviction that even under the dominion of the pleasure principle there are ways and means enough for turning what is essentially unpleasurable into something to be remembered and to be processed in the psyche. Some economically oriented aesthetic theory may wish to concern itself with these cases and situations where unpleasure leads ultimately to a gain in pleasure; for our particular purposes, however, they are of no value at all, for they presuppose both the existence and the dominion of the pleasure principle, and offer no evidence for the prevalence of tendencies beyond the pleasure principle; tendencies, that is, that are arguably more primal than the pleasure principle, and quite independent of it.

  III

  Twenty-five years of intensive work have meant that the immediate aims of psychoanalytic practice are completely different today from what they were at the beginning. At first, the analysing physician could hope to do no more than construe the unconscious of which the patient himself was quite unaware, put the various elements together into a coherent picture, and communicate this to the patient at the appropriate time. Psychoanalysis was above all an art of interpretation. As the therapeutic need was not met by this process, the next task that immediately arose was to compel the patient to confirm the analyst's interpretation on the basis of his own memory. In this enterprise the emphasis lay chiefly on the patient's resistances. The art at this juncture was to uncover these resistances as rapidly as possible, make them clear to the patient, and then induce him to relinquish them by bringing one's influence to bear on a directly human level (this being the point where suggestion15 plays its part, operating in the form of ‘transference’).

  It then became increasingly clear, however, that the intended aim of making the patient conscious of his unconscious could not be fully achieved even by this means. The patient is unable to remember all that is repressed within him, especially perhaps its most essential elements, and thus fails to be convinced that the interpretation presented to him is the correct one. Instead he is driven to repeat the repressed matter as an experience in the present, instead of remembering it as something belonging to the past, which is what the physician would much rather see happen.16 The content of these all-too-accurate reproductions of the past is always a particular element of infantile sexual life, namely the Oedipus complex and its offshoots, and they always take place within the ambit of the transference process, that is to say of the relationship with the physician. Once the treatment has reached this point, one may reasonably say that the original neurosis has been replaced by a brand-new transference neurosis – the physician having done his best to limit the scope of this transference neurosis as much as possible, to force as much as possible into the realm of memory, to allow as little as possible to come out in the form of repetition. The ratio as between remembrance and repetition varies from case to case. As a rule the physician cannot spare the patient this phase of the treatment; he must necessarily make him re-experience a certain portion of his past life, and must see to it that he remains to some degree above it all so that he remains cognizant at every turn that what appears to be reality is in truth the refracted image of a forgotten past. If the physician manages to achieve this, then the battle is won: the patient accepts the validity of the interpretation, and the therapy – which wholly depends on this acceptance – can be successfully concluded.

  If we are to stand a better chance of understanding this ‘compulsion to repeat’ that manifests itself during the psychoanalytic treatment of neurotics, we must above all free ourselves of the mistaken idea that in combating the resistances within a patient we are dealing with resistance on the part of the ‘unconscious’. The unconscious, that is, the ‘repressed’,17 offers no resistance whatever to the endeavours of the therapy; indeed it has but a single aim itself, and that is to escape the oppressive forces bearing down on it, and either break through to consciousness, or else find release in some form of real action. The resistance that manifests itself in the course of treatment derives from the same higher levels and systems of the psyche that effected the repression in the first place. However, since experience tells us that patients undergoing treatment are initially not conscious of the motive forces behind the resistances, or indeed of the resistances themselves, we would do well to amend our inappropriate terminology. We make things much clearer if we posit an antithesis not between the conscious and the unconscious, but between the coherent ego and the repressed. Much of the ego is itself no doubt unconscious – especially the part we may term its nucleus18 – and only a small portion of that is covered by the term ‘pre-conscious’. Once we have thus substituted a systematic or dynamic definition for what was merely a descriptive one, we can say that the patient's resistance stems from his ego,19 and we then immediately realize that the compulsion to repeat is attributable to the unconscious repressed within him. It seems likely that this compulsion to repeat can only manifest itself once the patient's treatment has had the necessary benign effect of loosening the grip of the repression.20

  There can be no doubt that the resistance of the conscious and pre-conscious ego serves the interests of the pleasure principle; it seeks after all to forestall the unpleasure that would be caused if the repressed part of the psyche were to break free – whereas our own efforts are all directed at opening the way to just such unpleasure by calling upon the reality principle. But what of the compulsion to repeat, the show of strength put on by the repressed part of the psyche: how does that stand in relation to the pleasure principle? It is plain that most of what the compulsion to repeat makes the patient relive necessarily causes the ego unpleasure, since it brings out into the open the workings of repressed drive-impulses; but, as we have already seen, this is unpleasure of a kind that does not conflict with the pleasure principle, for though it constitutes unpleasure for the one system, it simultaneously constitutes gratification for the other. The new and remarkable fact that we now have to report, however, is that the compulsion to repeat also brings back experiences from the past that contain no potential for pleasure whatever, and which even at the time cannot have constituted gratification, not even in respect of drive-impulses that were only subsequently repressed.

  The early florescence of infantile sexuality is doomed to come to nothing because a child's desires are incompatible with reality, and its physical development insufficiently advanced. Its demise is brought about in the most harrowing circumstances, and accompanied by intensely painful emotions. The loss of love and the fai
lure that this represents leave an enduring legacy of diminished self-feeling amounting to a narcissistic scar; in my experience, as also corroborated by the findings of Marcinowski (1918), this contributes more than any other factor to the ‘feeling of inferiority’ so common in neurotics. Sexual exploration, necessarily circumscribed by the child's state of physical development, cannot be brought to any gratifying conclusion; hence the lament later on that ‘I can't accomplish anything, I can't succeed in anything’. The child's bond of intimacy, usually with the parent of the opposite sex, is killed off by disappointment, by the vain wait for gratification, by jealousy at the birth of a sibling – an event that unambiguously demonstrates the infidelity of the loved one. The child's attempt – undertaken with tragic solemnity – to produce such a baby himself is a humiliating failure. The ever-diminishing affection shown to the child, the ever-increasing demands of his upbringing, the reprimands, the occasional punishments – all ultimately reveal to him the full measure of the rejection that it has fallen to him to suffer. There is a fairly small and regularly recurring range of ways in which the love so typical of this phase of childhood is brought to an end.

  All these unwelcome circumstances and painful layers of emotion are accordingly repeated by neurotic patients in the transference process, and are brought back to life with immense ingenuity. They seek to break off the treatment in mid-stream; they contrive to rekindle their vivid sense of rejection, and to goad the physician to harsh words and a cold demeanour; they find suitable objects for their jealousy; in place of the passionately desired child of yore they offer the prospect or promise of some grandiose gift, the latter mostly just as unreal as the former had been. None of this was capable of bringing pleasure in the past – and one might reasonably suppose that it would bring less unpleasure in the present if it were to emerge in memories or dreams, rather than reconstituting itself as a lived experience. It is a question, of course, of the action of drives that were supposed to lead to gratification. However, the patient's experience of the fact that then, too, they brought unpleasure instead of gratification makes not a scrap of difference: the action is repeated regardless. The patient is driven to this by a compulsion.

  The same thing that psychoanalysis makes manifest in the transference phenomena exhibited by neurotic patients can also be found in the lives of people who are not neurotic. In their case it takes the guise of an ineluctable fate dogging their every step, a daemonic current running through their whole existence, and from its earliest beginnings psychoanalysis has regarded such semblances of fate as being largely self-engendered, and determined by experiences in early infancy. The compulsion that reveals itself in these cases is no different from the neurotic's compulsion to repeat, even though such people have never shown the telltale signs of a neurotic conflict resolved as a result of symptom-formation. Thus we all know people whose human relationships invariably end in the same manner: benefactors who are angrily abandoned after a certain period by each of their protégés in turn, no matter how much these may otherwise differ from one another, and who thus seem destined to drink the cup of ingratitude to its bitter dregs; men whose every friendship ends in betrayal; others who in the course of their lives repeatedly elevate some individual to the status of Great Authority for themselves or even for society at large, and then in due course bring them crashing down in order to replace them by someone else; lovers whose every intimate relationship with a woman goes through the selfsame phases and leads to the selfsame outcome. We are never particularly surprised at this ‘eternal recurrence of the same when it involves active behaviour on the part of the individual concerned, and when we recognize the unchanging character trait that defines his being, and that necessarily finds expression in the repetition of similar experiences. We are much more strongly affected by cases where people appear to be the passive victim of something which they are powerless to influence, and yet which they suffer again and again in an endless repetition of the same fate. One need only think, for instance, of the story of the woman who married three men in succession, each one of whom soon fell ill and had to be nursed until finally he died.21 The most moving poetical depiction of such a predisposition to fate is given by Tasso in his romantic epic Gerusalemme liberata. The hero Tancred unwittingly kills his beloved Clorinda, she having done battle with him in the armour of an enemy knight. After her burial he penetrates the strange charmed forest that so frightens the army of crusaders. There he smites a tall tree with his sword, but blood gushes from the wound, and the voice of Clorinda, whose spirit has magically entered into that very tree, accuses him of yet again doing harm to his beloved.

  Taking due account of such observations of the way patients behave in the transference process and of the kinds of fate that befall people in ordinary life, we shall dare to postulate that within the psyche there really is a compulsion to repeat that pays no heed to the pleasure principle. We shall accordingly also be disposed to relate both the dreams of patients with accident-induced neurosis and the play-urge of children to this same compulsion. At the same time, though, we do need to bear in mind that only on rare occasions will we be able to catch the compulsion to repeat operating purely on its own, without the interaction of other motive forces. In the case of children's play we have already emphasized that its emergence lends itself to a variety of different interpretations. The compulsion to repeat, and the direct and pleasurable gratification of drives, seem here to interconnect with each other in an intimate mutuality. The phenomena of transference clearly serve the interests of the resistance offered by the ego, which remains bent on repression; the compulsion to repeat, which the therapy sought to divert to its own ends, is so to speak enlisted by the ego in its determination to hold fast to the pleasure principle. As for what one might term the ‘fate compulsion’, much of it seems on rational consideration to be comprehensible, so that we see no need to posit some new and mystical motive force behind it. The case that least arouses our suspicions is perhaps that of dreams recalling accidents; but on closer reflection one really does have to admit that in the other examples, too, the facts of the matter are not fully accounted for by the effect of the motive forces currently known to us.22 remains to justify the hypothesis of a compulsion to repeat; and this compulsion appears to us to be more primal, more elemental, more deeply instinctual than the pleasure principle, which it simply thrusts aside. But if there is indeed such a compulsion to repeat in the psyche, then we should like to know something about it. We should like to know what function it corresponds to, what circumstances it can arise in, and what relationship it bears to the pleasure principle – to which, after all, we have hitherto attributed sole dominion over the manner in which excitational processes develop within the psyche.

  IV

  What now follows is speculation, often quite extravagant speculation, which readers will regard or disregard according to their own particular standpoint. For the rest, it is an attempt to follow an idea right through to its logical conclusion, undertaken out of sheer curiosity as to where this will lead.

  Psychoanalytic speculation takes its impetus from the strong impression conveyed by the study of unconscious processes, that consciousness surely cannot constitute the universal character of psychic processes, but can only be one particular function of them. To express it in metapsychological terms: such speculation asserts that consciousness is the product of a particular system that it terms Cs. Since consciousness chiefly delivers perceptions of excitations emanating from the external world, and feelings of pleasure and unpleasure that can come only from within the psychic apparatus, a specific locus can be attributed to the Pcpt-Cs system:23 it must lie at the border between the external and the internal; it must face out towards the external world, and simultaneously embrace the other psychic systems. We might note at this point that in making these suppositions we are not taking some bold new step, but are aligning ourselves with the locational hypotheses of cerebral anatomy, which places the ‘seat’ of consciousness in the cereb
ral cortex, the outermost, enveloping layer of the central organ. Cerebral anatomy has no need to devote any thought to the question of why – anatomically speaking – consciousness is located on the surface of the brain, instead of being safely lodged somewhere in its innermost recesses. Perhaps we shall help to clarify the issue by explaining this location in terms of our Pcpt-Cs system.

  Consciousness is not the only distinctive characteristic that we are disposed to ascribe to the processes in this system. We are basing ourselves on the evidence garnered in our psychoanalytic experience when we postulate that all excitation processes occurring in the other systems leave lasting traces within them which form the basis of memory – residual memories, in other words, that have nothing to do with consciousness. These traces are often strongest and most enduring when the process that brought them into being never entered consciousness at all. We find it difficult to believe, however, that such lasting traces of excitation also arise in the Pcpt-Cs system. Were they to remain conscious, they would very soon limit the ability of the system to absorb new excitations;24 if on the other hand they were unconscious, they would land us with the problem of explaining the presence of unconscious processes in a system the operation of which is otherwise characterized by the phenomenon of consciousness. We would, so to speak, have changed nothing and gained nothing by putting forward our hypothesis that consciousness belongs within a specific system. While this may not be an absolutely binding consideration, it may none the less lead us to the supposition that it is not possible within a given system for something both to enter consciousness and also to leave a memory trace. We would accordingly be able to argue that excitation processes do indeed enter consciousness within the Cs system, but leave no lasting trace there; and that all the traces of these processes that memory depends upon arise in the proximate inner systems to which the excitations migrate. It is in precisely these terms that I conceived the diagram included in the speculative section of my Interpretation of Dreams in 1900.25 When one considers how little we know from other sources about the origins of consciousness, one is bound to give at least some credence to the proposition that ‘consciousness arises instead of a memory trace’.