Instead, the psychic apparatus had to resolve to form an idea of the real circumstances in the outside world and to endeavour actually to change them. It was due only to the failure of the anticipated satisfaction, the disillusionment as it were, that this attempt at satisfaction by means of hallucination was abandoned.
Freud says that, “whatever was thought of (wished for) was simply hallucinated, as still happens every night with our dream thoughts. The Reality PrincipleĪs our mind searches for pleasure, and thinks of ideas of pleasure, there comes inevitably a conflict with reality, and an attempt to assimilate it.
In the ancient world, if we wanted to achieve the most basic goal, to eat enough to survive, we had to hunt first, or cultivate plants, before we could gratify ourselves. (350 BC).Īs rational as this principle is, there is a problem with it: Humanity must face many situations that call for some pain first to gain a greater pleasure later. “Let it be assumed by us that pleasure is a certain movement of the soul, a sudden and perceptible settling down into its natural state, and pain the opposite. If such is the nature of pleasure, it is evident that which produces the disposition we have just mentioned is pleasant, and that which destroys it or produces the contrary settling down is painful. Necessarily, therefore, it must be generally pleasant to enter into a normal state.” ~ Rhetoric – Aristotle – Book I, Chapter 11. As usual, when you think something is new in psychology, philosophy had something to say about it much earlier. Our dreams at night, our tendency when awake to recoil from painful impressions, these are vestiges of the rule of this principle and evidence of its power.”Īt the time Freud was worried about being accused of plagiarism, as Carl Jung was also developing two modes of thinking, associative, and directed thinking in his Symbols of Transformation. “These processes strive to gain pleasure our psychic activity draws back from any action that might arouse unpleasure (repression). Thus we are presented with the task of studying the development of the relationship of neurotics – and mankind in general – to reality, and so of assimilating the psychological significance of the real outside world into the framework of our theories.” The Pleasure Principleĭepending on the translation, Freud’s theory focuses on how “lust” or “unlust” manifests in our day to day thinking processes. Actually, though, every neurotic does the same thing with some fragment of reality. The most extreme type of this turning away from reality is exhibited in certain cases of hallucinatory psychosis where the patient attempts to deny the event that has triggered his insanity. The neurotic turns away from reality because he finds either the whole or parts of it unbearable. Freud’s contribution found that “every neurosis has an effect…of forcing the patient out of real life, of alienating him from reality. By the time Freud was reaching 1910, certain patterns were emerging from his patients, and with competing contributions from his followers, especially Carl Jung, there was some pressure to provide a heuristic, or a method of investigation to solve these psychological problems.
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