Freud - Complete Works (621 page)

Beyond The Pleasure Principle

3735

   This would seem to be the place,
then, at which to admit for the first time an exception to the
proposition that dreams are fulfilments of wishes. Anxiety dreams,
as I have shown repeatedly and in detail, offer no such exception.
Nor do ‘punishment dreams’, for they merely replace the
forbidden wish-fulfilment by the appropriate punishment for it;
that is to say, they fulfil the wish of the sense of guilt which is
the reaction to the repudiated impulse. But it is impossible to
classify as wish-fulfilments the dreams we have been discussing
which occur in traumatic neuroses, or the dreams during
psycho-analyses which bring to memory the psychical traumas of
childhood. They arise, rather, in obedience to the compulsion to
repeat, though it is true that in analysis that compulsion is
supported by the wish (which is encouraged by
‘suggestion’) to conjure up what has been forgotten and
repressed. Thus it would seem that the function of dreams, which
consists in setting aside any motives that might interrupt sleep,
by fulfilling the wishes of the disturbing impulses, is not their
original
function. It would not be possible for them to
perform that function until the whole of mental life had accepted
the dominance of the pleasure principle. If there is a
‘beyond the pleasure principle’, it is only consistent
to grant that there was also a time before the purpose of dreams
was the fulfilment of wishes. This would imply no denial of their
later function. But if once this general rule has been broken, a
further question arises. May not dreams which, with a view to the
psychical binding of traumatic impressions, obey the compulsion to
repeat - may not such dreams occur
outside
analysis as well?
And the reply can only be a decided affirmative.

Beyond The Pleasure Principle

3736

   I have argued elsewhere¹
that ‘war neuroses’ (in so far as that term implies
something more than a reference to the circumstances of the
illness’s onset) may very well be traumatic neuroses which
have been facilitated by a conflict in the ego. The fact to which I
have referred in the first paragraph of Chapter II, that a gross
physical injury caused simultaneously by the trauma diminishes the
chances that a neurosis will develop, becomes intelligible if one
bears in mind two facts which have been stressed by psycho-analytic
research: firstly, that mechanical agitation must be recognized as
one of the sources of sexual excitation,² and secondly, that
painful and feverish illnesses exercise a powerful effect, so long
as they last, on the distribution of libido. Thus, on the one hand,
the mechanical violence of the trauma would liberate a quantity of
sexual excitation which, owing to the lack of preparation for
anxiety, would have a traumatic effect; but, on the other hand, the
simultaneous physical injury, by calling for a narcissistic
hypercathexis of the injured organ,³ would bind the excess of
excitation. It is also well known, though the libido theory has not
yet made sufficient use of the fact, that such severe disorders in
the distribution of libido as melancholia are temporarily brought
to an end by intercurrent organic illness, and indeed that even a
fully developed condition of dementia praecox is capable of a
temporary remission in these same circumstances.

  
¹
See my introduction (1919
d
) to
Psycho-analysis and the War Neuroses
.

  
²
Cf. my remarks elsewhere (
Three
Essays
) on the effect of swinging and railway-travel

  
³
See my paper on narcissism
(1914
c
).

Beyond The Pleasure Principle

3737

V

The fact that the cortical layer which
receives stimuli is without any protective shield against
excitations from within must have as its result that these latter
transmissions of stimulus have a preponderance in economic
importance and often occasion economic disturbances comparable with
traumatic neuroses. The most abundant sources of this internal
excitation are what are described as the organism’s
‘instincts’ - the representatives of all the forces
originating in the interior of the body and transmitted to the
mental apparatus - at once the most important and the most obscure
element of psychological research.

   It will perhaps not be thought
too rash to suppose that the impulses arising from the instincts do
not belong to the type of
bound
nervous processes but of
freely mobile
processes which press towards discharge. The
best part of what we know of these processes is derived from our
study of the dream-work. We there discovered that the processes in
the unconscious systems were fundamentally different from those in
the preconscious (or conscious) systems. In the unconscious,
cathexes can easily be completely transferred, displaced and
condensed. Such treatment, however, could produce only invalid
results if it were applied to preconscious material; and this
accounts for the familiar peculiarities exhibited by manifest
dreams after the preconscious residues of the preceding day have
been worked over in accordance with the laws operating in the
unconscious. I described the type of process found in the
unconscious as the ‘primary’ psychical process, in
contradistinction to the ‘secondary’ process which is
the one obtaining in our normal waking life. Since all instinctual
impulses have the unconscious systems as their point of impact, it
is hardly an innovation to say that they obey the primary process.
Again, it is easy to identify the primary psychical process with
Breuer’s freely mobile cathexis and the secondary process
with changes in his bound or tonic cathexis.¹ If so, it would
be the task of the higher strata of the mental apparatus to bind
the instinctual excitation reaching the primary process. A failure
to effect this binding would provoke a disturbance analogous to a
traumatic neurosis; and only after the binding has been
accomplished would it be possible for the dominance of the pleasure
principle (and of its modification, the reality principle) to
proceed unhindered. Till then the other task of the mental
apparatus, the task of mastering or binding excitations, would have
precedence - not, indeed, in
opposition
to the pleasure
principle, but independently of it and to some extent in disregard
of it.

  
¹
Cf. my
Interpretation of Dreams
,
Chapter VII.

Beyond The Pleasure Principle

3738

   The manifestations of a
compulsion to repeat (which we have described as occurring in the
early activities of infantile mental life as well as among the
events of psycho-analytic treatment) exhibit to a high degree an
instinctual character and, when they act in opposition to the
pleasure principle, give the appearance of some
‘daemonic’ force at work. In the case of
children’s play we seemed to see that children repeat
unpleasurable experiences for the additional reason that they can
master a powerful impression far more thoroughly by being active
than they could by merely experiencing it passively. Each fresh
repetition seems to strengthen the mastery they are in search of.
Nor can children have their
pleasurable
experiences repeated
often enough, and they are inexorable in their insistence that the
repetition shall be an identical one. This character trait
disappears later on. If a joke is heard for a second time it
produces almost no effect; a theatrical production never creates so
great an impression the second time as the first; indeed, it is
hardly possible to persuade an adult who has very much enjoyed
reading a book to re-read it immediately. Novelty is always the
condition of enjoyment. But children will never tire of asking an
adult to repeat a game that he has shown them or played with them,
till he is too exhausted to go on. And if a child has been told a
nice story, he will insist on hearing it over and over again rather
than a new one; and he will remorselessly stipulate that the
repetition shall be an identical one and will correct any
alterations of which the narrator may be guilty - though they may
actually have been made in the hope of gaining fresh approval. None
of this contradicts the pleasure principle; repetition, the
re-experiencing of something identical, is clearly in itself a
source of pleasure. In the case of a person in analysis, on the
contrary, the compulsion to repeat the events of his childhood in
the transference evidently disregards the pleasure principle in
every way. The patient behaves in a purely infantile fashion and
thus shows us that the repressed memory-traces of his primaeval
experiences are not present in him in a bound state and are indeed
in a sense incapable of obeying the secondary process. It is to
this fact of not being bound, moreover, that they owe their
capacity for forming, in conjunction with the residues of the
previous day, a wishful phantasy that emerges in a dream. This same
compulsion to repeat frequently meets us as an obstacle to our
treatment when at the end of an analysis we try to induce the
patient to detach himself completely from his physician. It may be
presumed, too, that when people unfamiliar with analysis feel an
obscure fear - a dread of rousing something that, so they feel, is
better left sleeping - what they are afraid of at bottom is the
emergence of this compulsion with its hint of possession by some
‘daemonic’ power.

   But how is the predicate of being
‘instinctual’ related to the compulsion to repeat? At
this point we cannot escape a suspicion that we may have come upon
the track of a universal attribute of instincts and perhaps of
organic life in general which has not hitherto been clearly
recognized or at least not explicitly stressed.
It seems, then,
that an instinct is an urge inherent in organic life to restore an
earlier state of things
which the living entity has been
obliged to abandon under the pressure of external disturbing
forces; that is, it is a kind of organic elasticity, or, to put it
another way, the expression of the inertia inherent in organic
life.¹

  
¹
I have no doubt that similar notions as to
the nature of ‘instincts’ have already been put forward
repeatedly.

Beyond The Pleasure Principle

3739

   This view of instincts strikes us
as strange because we have become used to see in them a factor
impelling towards change and development, whereas we are now asked
to recognize in them the precise contrary - an expression of the
conservative
nature of living substance. On the other hand
we soon call to mind examples from animal life which seem to
confirm the view that instincts are historically determined.
Certain fishes, for instance, undertake laborious migrations at
spawning-time in order to deposit their spawn in particular waters
far removed from their customary haunts. In the opinion of many
biologists what they are doing is merely to seek out the localities
in which their species formerly resided but which in the course of
time they have exchanged for others. The same explanation is
believed to apply to the migratory flights of birds of passage -
but we are quickly relieved of the necessity for seeking for
further examples by the reflection that the most impressive proofs
of there being an organic compulsion to repeat lie in the phenomena
of heredity and the facts of embryology. We see how the germ of a
living animal is obliged in the course of its development to
recapitulate (even if only in a transient and abbreviated fashion)
the structures of all the forms from which it is sprung, instead of
proceeding quickly by the shortest path to its final shape. This
behaviour is only to a very slight degree attributable to
mechanical causes, and the historical explanation cannot
accordingly be neglected. So too the power of regenerating a lost
organ by growing afresh a precisely similar one extends far up into
the animal kingdom.

   We shall be met by the plausible
objection that it may very well be that, in addition to the
conservative instincts which impel towards repetition, there may be
others which push forward towards progress and the production of
new forms. This argument must certainly not be overlooked, and it
will be taken into account at a later stage. But for the moment it
is tempting to pursue to its logical conclusion the hypothesis that
all instincts tend towards the restoration of an earlier state of
things. The outcome may give an impression of mysticism or of sham
profundity; but we can feel quite innocent of having had any such
purpose in view. We seek only for the sober results of research or
of reflection based on it; and we have no wish to find in those
results any quality other than certainty.¹

  
¹
The reader should not overlook the fact
that what follows is the development of an extreme line of thought.
Later on, when account is taken of the sexual instincts, it will be
found that the necessary limitations and corrections are applied to
it.

Beyond The Pleasure Principle

3740

   Let us suppose, then, that all
the organic instincts are conservative, are acquired historically
and tend towards the restoration of an earlier state of things. It
follows that the phenomena of organic development must be
attributed to external disturbing and diverting influences. The
elementary living entity would from its very beginning have had no
wish to change; if conditions remained the same, it would do no
more than constantly repeat the same course of life. In the last
resort, what has left its mark on the development of organisms must
be the history of the earth we live in and of its relation to the
sun. Every modification which is thus imposed upon the course of
the organism’s life is accepted by the conservative organic
instincts and stored up for further repetition. Those instincts are
therefore bound to give a deceptive appearance of being forces
tending towards change and progress, whilst in fact they are merely
seeking to reach an ancient goal by paths alike old and new.
Moreover it is possible to specify this final goal of all organic
striving. It would be in contradiction to the conservative nature
of the instincts if the goal of life were a state of things which
had never yet been attained. On the contrary, it must be an
old
state of things, an initial state from which the living
entity has at one time or other departed and to which it is
striving to return by the circuitous paths along which its
development leads. If we are to take it as a truth that knows no
exception that everything living dies for
internal
reasons -
becomes inorganic once again - then we shall be compelled to say
that ‘
the aim of life is death
’ and, looking
backwards, that ‘
inanimate things existed before living
ones
’.