Honey is what I am trying to bring you, the honey of my reflections on something that, my goodness, I have been doing for a number of years and which is beginning to add up, but which, as time goes by, ends up not being that much out of proportion with the time you devote to it yourselves.
If the communication effect here sometimes presents difficulties, reflect on the experience of honey. Honey is either very hard or very fluid. If it’s hard, it is difficult to cut, since there are no natural breaks. If it’s very liquid, it is suddenly all over the place – I assume that you are all familiar with the experience of eating honey in bed at breakfast time.
Hence the problem of pots. The honey pot is reminiscent of the mustard pot that I have already dealt with. The two have exactly the same meaning now that we no longer imagine that the hexagons in which we tend to store our harvest have a natural relationship to the structure of the world. Consequently, the question we are raising is in the end always the same, i.e., what is the significance of the word?
This year we are more specifically concerned with realizing how the ethical question of our practice is intimately related to one that we have been in a position to glimpse for some time, namely, that the deep dissatisfaction we find in every psychology – including the one we have founded thanks to psychoanalysis – derives from the fact that it is nothing more than a mask, and sometimes even an alibi, of the effort to focus on the problem of our own action – something that is the essence and very foundation of all ethical reflection. In other words, we need to know if we have managed to do anything more than take a small step outside ethics and if, like the other psychologies, our own is simply another development of ethical reflection, of the search for a guide or a way, that in the last analysis may be formulated as follows: “Given our condition as men, what must we do in order to act in the right way?”
This reminder seems to me difficult to disagree with, when every day of our lives our action suggests to us that we are not far removed from that. Of course, things present themselves differently to us. Our way of introducing this action, of presenting and justifying it, is different. Its beginning is characterized by features of demand, appeal and urgency, whose specialized meaning places us closer to earth as far as the idea of the articulation of an ethics is concerned. But that does not change the fact that we may in the end, or at any point whatsoever, discover such an articulation once again in its completeness – the kind of articulation that has always given both meaning and arguments to those who have reflected on morals and have tried to elaborate their different ethics.
Last time I sketched an outline of what I wish to cover this year. It extends from the recognition of the omnipresence of the moral imperative, of its infiltration into all our experience, to the other pole, that is to say, the pleasure in a second degree we may paradoxically find there, namely, moral masochism.
In passing, I pointed out the unexpected and original approach I intend to develop with reference to those fundamental categories of the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real, that I use to orient you in your experience. My thesis, as I already indicated – and don’t be surprised if it first appears confused, since it is the development of my argument that will give it weight – my thesis is that the moral law, the moral command, the presence of the moral agency in our activity, insofar as it is structured by the symbolic, is that through which the real is actualized – the real as such, the weight of the real.
A thesis that may appear to be both a trivial truth and a paradox. My thesis involves the idea that the moral law affirms itself in opposition to pleasure, and we can sense that to speak of the real in connection with the moral law seems to put into question the value of what we normally include in the notion of the ideal. Thus for the moment I will not attempt to polish further the blade of my argument, since what will likely constitute the thrust of my purpose has precisely to do with the meaning to be given to the term real – within that system of categories that I profess as a function of our practice as analysts.
That meaning isn’t immediately accessible, although those among you who have wondered about the final significance I might give the term will nevertheless have already noticed that its meaning must have some relationship to that movement which traverses the whole of Freud’s thought. It is a movement which makes him start with a first opposition between reality principle and pleasure principle in order, after a series of vacillations, oscillations and imperceptible changes in his references, to conclude at the end of the theoretic formulations by positing something beyond the pleasure principle that might well leave us wondering how it relates to the first opposition. Beyond the pleasure principle we encounter that opaque surface which to some has seemed so obscure that it is the antimony of all thought – not just biological but scientific in general – the surface that is known as the death instinct.
What is the death instinct? What is this law beyond all law, that can only be posited as a final structure, as a vanishing point of any reality that might be attained? In the coupling of pleasure principle and reality principle, the reality principle might seem to be a prolongation or an application of the pleasure principle. But, on the other hand, this dependent and limited position seems to cause something to emerge, something which controls in the broadest of senses the whole of our relationship to the world. It is this unveiling, this rediscovery, that Beyond the Pleasure Principle is about. And in this process, this progress, we see before our eyes the problematic character of that which Freud posits under the term reality.
Is it a question of daily reality, of immediate, social reality? Of conformity to established categories or accepted practices? Of the reality discovered by science or of the one which is yet to be discovered? Is it psychic reality?
It is on the road to the investigation of this reality that we find ourselves as analysts, and it leads us a long way from something that can be expressed under the category of wholeness. It leads us into a special area, that of psychic reality, which presents itself to us with the problematic character of a previously unequaled order.
I will, therefore, begin by attempting to explore the function that the term reality played in the thought of the inventor of psychoanalysis and, at the same time, in our own thought, the thought of those of us who have followed in his path. On the other hand, I will straight away point out to those who might be inclined to forget it, or who might think that I am following in this direction only by referring to the moral imperative in our experience – I will point out that moral action poses problems for us precisely to the extent that if analysis prepares us for it, it also in the end leaves us standing at the door.
Moral action is, in effect, grafted on to the real. It introduces something new into the real and thereby opens a path in which the point of our presence is legitimized. How is it that psychoanalysis prepares us for such action, if it is indeed true that this is the case? How is it that psychoanalysis leaves us ready, so to speak, to get down to work? And why does it lead us in that way? Why, too, does it stop at the threshold? That’s where one finds the other pole on which I will focus what I hope to formulate here – it being understood that what I pointed to last time constitutes the limits of the things I have to say – and the extent to which we claim to be able to formulate an ethics. I will say right off that the ethical limits of psychoanalysis coincide with the limits of its practice. Its practice is only a preliminary to moral action as such – the so-called action being the one through which we enter the real.
Among all those who have undertaken the analysis of an ethics before me, Aristotle is to be classed among the most exemplary and certainly the most valid. Reading him is an exciting activity and I cannot recommend too highly that by way of an exercise you find out for yourselves – you will not be bored for a moment. Read the Nicomachaen Ethics, which of all his treatises scholars seem to attribute to him with the least hesitation and which is certainly the most readable. There are no doubt a number of difficulties to be found at the level of the text, in its digressions and in the order of his arguments. But skip over the passages that seem too complicated or acquire an edition with good notes that refers you to what it is sometimes essential to know about his logic in order to understand the problems that he raises. Above all, don’t overburden yourself by trying to grasp everything paragraph by paragraph. Try instead to read him from beginning to end and you will certainly be rewarded.
One thing at least will emerge, something that to some extent the work has in common with all the other ethics – it tends to refer to an order. This order presents itself first of all as a science, an ἑπıστἡμη, the science of what has to be done, the uncontested order which defines the norm of a certain character, ἔθos. Thus the problem is raised of the way in which that order may be established in a subject. How can a form of adequation be achieved in a subject so that he will enter that order and submit himself to it?
The establishment of an ἦθos is posited as differentiating a living being from an inanimate, inert being. As Aristotle points out, no matter how often you throw a stone in the air, it will never acquire the habit of its trajectory; man, on the other hand, acquires habits – that’s what is meant by ἦθos. And this ἦθos has to be made to conform to the ἡθos, that is to an order that from the point of view of Aristotle’s logic has to be brought together in a Sovereign Good, a point of insertion, attachment or convergence, in which a particular order is unified with a more universal knowledge, in which ethics becomes politics, and beyond that with an imitation of the cosmic order. The notions of macrocosm and microcosm are presupposed from the beginning in Aristotle’s thought.
It is then a question of having a subject conform to something which in the real is not contested as presupposing the paths of that order. What is the problem constantly taken up and posed within Aristotelian ethics? Let us start with him who possesses this science. Of course, the one whom Aristotle addresses, that is the pupil or disciple, by the very fact that he listens is supposed to participate in this scientific discourse. The discourse in question, the óρθòς λóγoς, the right discourse, the appropriate discourse, is therefore already introduced by the very fact that the ethical question is posed. In that way the problem is clearly returned to the point where Socrates had left it with an excessive optimism that did not fail to strike his immediate successors – if the rule of action is in óρθòς λóγoς, if there can be no good action except in conformity with the latter, how is it possible that what Aristotle calls intemperance can survive? How is it possible that a subject’s impulses draw him elsewhere? How is that to be explained?
However superficial this demand for an explanation may seem to us, since we believe we know so much more about the matter, it nevertheless constitutes the greater part of the substance of Aristotle’s thought in the Ethics. I will come back to this later in connection with Freud’s reflections on the same topic.
For Aristotle the problem is delimited by the conditions imposed by a certain human ideal that I already briefly referred to in passing as that of the master. It is a question for him of elucidating the relationship that may exist between ἀκολασíα, intemperance, and the fault revealed relative to the essential virtue of the master, that is of the man whom Aristotle is addressing.
I think I indicated enough last time that the master in antiquity isn’t exactly the heroic brute who is represented in the Hegelian dialectic, and who functions for Hegel as an axis and turning point. I will not elaborate here on what is representative of the type; it is enough to know that it is something that enables us to appreciate properly the contribution of Aristotle’s ethics. This comment undoubtedly causes us to set limits on the value of his ethics, to historicize them, but one would be wrong to assume that that is the only conclusion to draw. From an Aristotelian perspective, the master in antiquity is a presence, a human condition joined in a much less narrowly critical way to the slave, than Hegel’s perspective affirms. In fact, the problem posed is one that goes unresolved from an Hegelian perspective, that of a society of masters.
Other comments, too, may contribute equally to limit the significance for us of Aristotle’s ethics. Note for example that the ideal of this master, like that of god at the center of an Aristotelian world governed by νοῦς, seems to be to avoid work as much as possible. I mean to leave the control of his slaves to his steward in order to concentrate on a contemplative ideal without which the ethics doesn’t achieve its proper aim. That tells you how much idealization there is in the point of view of Aristotelian ethics.
Consequently, his ethics is localized, I would almost say limited to a social type, to a privileged representative of leisure – the very term σχολαστικóς suggests it. Yet, on the other hand, it is all the more striking to realize how an ethics articulated within such specific conditions still remains full of resonances and lessons. The schemas it proposes are not useless. They may be found in partially unrecognizable forms at the level of our approach to Freud’s experience. These schemas may be recomposed or transposed in such a way that we will not be putting our new honey into the same old containers.
One can say right off that the search for a way, for a truth, is not absent from our experience. For what else are we seeking in analysis if not a liberating truth?
But we must be careful. One must not always trust words and labels. This truth that we are seeking in a concrete experience is not that of a superior law. If the truth that we are seeking is a truth that frees, it is a truth that we will look for in a hiding place in our subject. It is a particular truth.
But if the form of its articulation that we find is the same in everyone though always different, it is because it appears to everyone in its intimate specificity with the character of an imperious Wunsch. Nothing can be compared to it that allows it to be judged from the outside. The quality that best characterizes it is that of being the true Wunsch, which was at the origin of an aberrant or atypical behavior.
We encounter this Wunsch with its particular, irreducible character as a modification that presupposes no other form of normalization than that of an experience of pleasure or of pain, but of a final experience from whence it springs and is subsequently preserved in the depths of the subject in an irreducible form. The Wunsch does not have the character of a universal law but, on the contrary, of the most particular of laws – even if it is universal that this particularity is to be found in every human being. We find it in a form that we have categorized as a regressive, infantile, unrealistic phase, characterized by a thought abandoned to desire, by desire taken to be reality.
That surely constitutes the text of our experience. But is that the whole of our discovery, is that the whole of our morality? That attenuation, that exposure to the light of day, that discovery of the thought of desire, of the truth of that thought? Do we expect that as a result of its mere disclosure the area will be swept clean for a different thought? In one way, it is indeed so, it is as simple as that. Yet at the same time if we formulate things thus, then everything remains veiled for us.
If the reward or the novelty of the psychoanalytic experience were limited to that, it wouldn’t go much further than the dated notion that was born long before psychoanalysis, namely, that the child is father of the man. The phrase comes from Wordsworth, the English romantic poet, and is quoted respectfully by Freud.
It is no accident that we discover it in that period with its fresh, shattering, and even breathtaking quality, bursting forth at the beginning of the nineteenth century with the industrial revolution, in the country that was most advanced in experiencing its effects, in England. English romanticism has its own special features, which include the value given to childhood memories, to the whole world of childhood, to the ideals and wishes of the child. And the poets of the time drew on this not only for the source of their inspiration, but also for the development of their principal themes – in this respect they are radically different from the poets who preceded them and especially from that wonderful poetry of the seventeenth and early eighteenth century, which for a reason that escapes me is called metaphysical.
That reference to childhood, the idea of the child in man, the idea that something demands that a man be something other than a child, but that the demands of the child as such are perpetually felt in him, all of that in the sphere of psychology can be historically situated.
Another man who lived in the first half of the nineteenth century, a Victorian from the early period, the historian Macaulay, noted that at the time, rather than call you a dishonest man or a perfect idiot, one preferred the excellent weapon of affirming that your mind was not fully adult, that you retained characteristics of a juvenile mentality. This attitude, which is historically datable since you find no evidence of it in any previous history, is the sign of an interval, a break in historical development. In Pascal’s time, when one speaks of childhood, it is simply to say that a child is not a man. And if one speaks of adult thought, it is in no way in order to discover there traces of infantile thought.
For us, the question is not posed in those terms. If we do nevertheless constantly pose it thus, if it is justified by the contents and the text of our relationship to the neurotic and by the reference in our experience to individual genesis, this also disguises what lies behind it. For in the end, no matter how true it may be, there is a very different tension between the thought that we have to deal with in the unconscious and the thought that we characterize, goodness knows why, as adult. We constantly come upon the fact that this adult thought runs out of steam relative to the famous child’s thought that we use to judge our adult. We use it not as a foil, but as a reference point, a vanishing point, where unfulfillments and even degradations come together and reach their end. There is a perpetual contradiction in the reference we make to these things.
Before coming here today I read in Jones a kind of celebration of the sublime virtues of social pressure, without which our contemporaries, our fellow humans, would be vain, egotistical, sordid, sterile, etc. One is tempted to comment in the margin, “What are they but that?” And when we speak of the adult human being, what is our reference? Where is this model of the adult human being?
These considerations incite us to reexamine the true, solid backbone of Freud’s thought. No doubt psychoanalysis has ended up ordering all the material of its experience in terms of an ideal development. But at its beginning it finds its terms in a wholly different system of references, to which development and genesis only give intermittent support – this is, I believe, something that I have made you appreciate sufficiently, even if I am obliged on this occasion to refer to it only in passing. The fundamental reference is the tension or, to designate it finally by its name, the opposition between the primary process and the secondary process, between the pleasure principle and the reality principle.
Freud in the course of his so-called auto-analysis writes in a short letter, it is number 73: “Meine Analyse geht weiter, my analysis continues. It is my principal interest, meine Hauptinteresse. Everything remains obscure, even the problems involved, but there is a feeling of comfort. It is as if,” he writes, “one had only to reach into a larder and take what one wanted. The unpleasant thing,” he says, “are the Stimmungenin the most general sense we can give to that word, which has a special resonance in German, namely, moods or feelings, which by their very nature cover, hide – what precisely? Die Wirklichkeit, reality.
It is in terms of Wirklichkeit that Freud questions what presents itself to him as a Stimmung. The Stimmung is that which reveals to him what he has to look for in his auto-analysis, what he is questioning, the moment when he has the feeling of having, as in a dark room, in a larder or Voπatskammer, everything he needs, and that it is waiting there for him, in store for him. But he isn’t led toward it by his Stimmungen. Such is the meaning of his sentence – the most unpleasant experience, das Unangenehmste, is the Stimmungen. Freud’s experience begins with the search for the reality that is somewhere inside himself. And it is this that constitutes the originality of his point of departure. Moreover, he adds in the same vein that “even sexual excitement is for someone like me unusable in this approach. Even there I do not trust myself to see where are the final realities.” And he adds, “I maintain my good humor in this whole business.” Before achieving results, we must be patient a little longer.
I bring to your attention in passing a recent little book by Erich Fromm that I won’t say I recommend to you, since it is a strangely discordant, almost insidious work, that is close to being defamatory. It is called Sigmund Freud’s Mission and it makes insinuating points that are not without interest and that concern the special traits of Freud’s personality, invariably seen from an obviously belittling point of view. In particular, he selects from the text Freud’s sentences on sexual excitation in order to have us draw the conclusion that by the age of forty Freud was already impotent.
We are now in a position to analyze Freud’s 1895 manuscript concerning his fundamental conception of the structure of the psyche, a manuscript that chance has placed in our hands. He had thought of calling it Psychology for the Use of Neurologists. Since he never published it, the draft remained attached to a packet of letters to Fliess, and it is available to us thanks to the acquisition of these collections.
It is, therefore, not only proper but necessary that we begin at that point our analysis of the meaning in Freud’s thought of the thematics of the reality principle in opposition to the pleasure principle. Is there or is there not something distinctive relative to the development of his thought there, and at the same time to the directions taken by our own experience? It is here that we may find that hidden backbone which, I believe, is required on this occasion.
The opposition between the pleasure principle and the reality principle was rearticulated throughout Freud’s work – 1895, the Entwurf (Project for a Scientific Psychology); 1900, Chapter VII of the Traumdeutung, with the first public rearticulation of the so-called primary and secondary processes, the one governed by the pleasure principle and the other by the reality principle; 1914, return to the article from which I selected the dream that I discussed at length last year, the dream of the dead father, “he didn’t know”; the article, “Formulieringen über die Zwei Prinzipen des Psychischen Geschehens,” that one might translate as “Of the Structure of the Psyche”; 1930, that Civilization and Its Discontents which, I promised you, we will get to by way of conclusion.
Others before Freud spoke of pleasure as a guiding function of ethics. Not only does Aristotle set great store by it, but he finds it impossible not to place it at the center of his ethical teaching. What is happiness if it doesn’t contain the bloom of pleasure? A significant part of the discussion of the Nicomachaen Ethics is designed to restore the true function of pleasure to its proper place; strangely enough it is introduced in such a way that it is given a value that is not merely passive. Pleasure in Aristotle is an activity that is compared to the bloom given off by youthful activity – it is, if you like, a radiance. In addition, it is also the sign of the blossoming of an action, in the literal sense of ένέργεια, a word that expresses the true praxis as that which includes its own end.
Pleasure has no doubt been given other modulations down through the ages as sign, stigmatum, reward, or substance of the psychic life. But let us consider the case of the man who questions us directly, of Freud.
What cannot fail to strike us right away is that his pleasure principle is an inertia principle. Its function is to regulate by a kind of automatism everything that comes together through a process that, in his first formulation, Freud tends to present as dependent on a preformed apparatus that is strictly limited to the neuronic apparatus. The latter regulates the facilitations that it retains after having suffered their effects. It is essentially a matter of everything that results from a fundamental tendency to discharge in which a given quantity is destined to be expended. That is the point of view from which the functioning of the pleasure principle is first articulated.
That attempt at a hypothetical formulation is offered in a way that is unique in Freud’s extant writings. And one shouldn’t forget that he came to dislike it and didn’t want to publish it. No doubt he wrote it in response to certain demands for coherence he made of himself when confronted by himself. But it must be said that this formulation apparently makes no reference to the clinical facts, which doubtless constituted for him the whole force of the demands he had to deal with. He discusses those questions with himself or with Fliess, which under the circumstances comes to the same thing. He presents himself with a probable and coherent representation, a working hypothesis, in order to respond to something whose concrete, experimental dimension is masked and avoided here.
He claims it is a question of explaining a normal functioning of the mind. In order to do this he starts with an apparatus whose basis is wholly antithetical to a result involving adequation and equilibrium. He starts with a system which naturally tends toward deception and error. That whole organism seems designed not to satisfy need, but to hallucinate such satisfaction. It is, therefore, appropriate that another apparatus is opposed to it, an apparatus that operates as an agency of reality; it presents itself essentially as a principle of correction, of a call to order. I am not exaggerating things. Freud himself insists that there must be a distinction between the two apparatuses, although he admits he can find no trace of them in the anatomical structures sustaining them.
The reality principle or that to which the functioning of the neuronic apparatus in the end owes it efficacy appears as an apparatus that goes much further than a mere checking up; it is rather a question of rectification. It operates in the mode of detour, precaution, touching up, restraint. It corrects and compensates for that which seems to be the natural inclination of the psychic apparatus, and it radically opposes it.
The conflict is introduced here at the base, at the origins of an organism which, let us say, seems after all to be destined to live. Nobody before Freud, and no other account of human behavior, had gone so far to emphasize its fundamentally conflictual character. No one else had gone so far in explaining the organism as a form of radical inadequation – to the point where the duality of the systems is designed to overcome the radical inadequation of one of them.
This opposition between the φ system and the ψ system, which is articulated throughout, seems almost like a wager. For what is there to justify it, if it isn’t that experience of ungovernable quantities which Freud had to deal with in his experience of neurosis? That is the driving imperative behind the whole system.
We sense directly that the justification for giving such prominence to quantity as such has nothing to do with Freud’s desire to bring his theory into conformity with the mechanistic ideas of Helmholtz and Brücke. For him it corresponds rather to the most direct kind of lived experience, namely, that of the inertia which at the level of symptoms presented him with obstacles whose irreversible character he recognized. It is here that one finds his first advance in darkness toward that Wirklichkeit, which is the point to which his questioning returns; it is the key, the distinctive feature of his whole system. I ask you to reread this text, without wondering along with the annotators, commentators and connotators who have edited it whether this or that is closer to psychological or physiological thought, whether this or that refers to Herbart, Helmholtz, or anyone else. And you will see that beneath a manner that is cool, abstract, scholastic, complex and arid, one can sense a lived experience, and that this experience is at bottom moral in kind.
People play the historian on this topic, as if to explain an author like Freud in terms of influences had any value, to explain him by means of a greater or lesser similarity between one of his formulas and those which had been used by some previous thinker in a context that was different. But since it is an exercise that people engage in, why shouldn’t I do the same, in my own way? Isn’t the functioning of the apparatus that supports the reality principle strangely similar to what one finds in Aristotle?
Freud’s task is to explain how the activity of review and restraint functions or, in other words, how the apparatus which supports the secondary processes avoids the occurrence of catastrophes that would inevitably follow the lapse of too much or too little time or the abandonment to its own devices of the pleasure principle. If the latter is released too soon, the movement will be triggered simply by a Wunschgedanke; it will necessarily be painful and will give rise to unpleasure. If on the other hand the secondary apparatus intervenes too late, if it doesn’t give the little discharge required to attempt the beginning of an adequate solution through action, then there will be a regressive discharge, that is to say, an hallucination, which is also a source of displeasure.
Well now, this theory is not unrelated to Aristotle’s ideas concerning the question of how it is that someone who knows may be intemperate. Aristotle offers several solutions. I will skip the earlier ones, which introduce syllogistic and dialectical elements that are relatively remote from our concerns here. He also attempts a solution that is not dialectical but physical – he nevertheless advances it in the form of a syllogism of the desirable.
I believe that Chapter V of Book VII on pleasure is worth reading in its entirety. Beside the major premise – one must always taste what is sweet – there is a particular, concrete minor premise, i.e., this is sweet. And the principle of wrong action is to be found in the error of a particular judgment relative to the minor premise. Where is the error found? Precisely in the circumstance that the desire which is subjacent to the major premise causes the wrong judgment to be made concerning the reality of the supposed sweetness toward which the action is directed.
I can’t help thinking that Freud, who had attended the lecture series given by Brentano on Aristotle in 1887, is transposing here the properly ethical articulation of the problem on to a hypothetical, mechanistic point of view. And he does so in a way that is purely formal and gives the question a completely different accent.
In truth, it is no more of a psychology than any other of those that were devised at the time. Let us have no illusions; as far as psychology is concerned, nothing has been achieved so far that is superior to Freud’s Entwurf. Everything that has been devised concerning the functioning of the psyche under the assumption that the mechanisms of the nervous system can account for what is concretely perceived by us as the field of psychological action has a similar air of fanciful hypothesis.
If Freud returns to the logical and syllogistic articulations, which have always been used by ethical philosophers in their field, it is in order to give them a very different meaning. We must remember that in interpreting the true content of his thought, which is to say what I have taught you. The óρθòς λóγος that concerns us here are not simply major premises; they concern rather the way in which I have taught you to articulate what goes on in the unconscious; they concern the discourse that is employed on the level of the pleasure principle.
It is in relation to this óρθóς, ironically highlighted by inverted commas, that the reality principle has to guide the subject in order for him to complete a possible action.
From a Freudian point of view, the reality principle is presented as function ing in a way that is essentially precarious.
No previous philosophy has gone so far in that direction. It is not that reality is called into question; it is certainly not called into question in the way that the idealists did so. Compared to Freud the idealists of the philosophical tradition are small beer indeed, for in the last analysis they don’t seriously contest that famous reality, they merely tame it. Idealism consists in affirming that we are the ones who give shape to reality, and that there is no point in looking any further. It is a comfortable position. Freud’s position, or that of any sensible man for that matter, is something very different.
Reality is precarious. And it is precisely to the extent that access to it is so precarious that the commandments which trace its path are so tyrannical. As guides to the real, feelings are deceptive. That intuition which animates the whole auto-analysis of Freud expresses itself thus concerning the approach to the real. Its very movement can only begin to occur by means of a primary defense. The profound ambiguity of this approach to the real demanded by man is first inscribed in terms of a defense – a defense that already exists even before the conditions of repression as such are formulated.
In order to emphasize what I am calling the paradox of the relationship to the real in Freud, I will put this on the board – the pleasure principle on the one hand and reality principle on the other. Once you have been gently reassured by these two terms, things seem to go along by themselves. Speaking broadly, one can say that the unconscious is on one side and the conscious on the other. Please bear that in mind in your attempt to follow the points I am trying to bring out.
What are we led to articulate the apparatus of perception onto? Onto reality, of course. Yet, if we follow Freud’s hypothesis, on what theoretically is the control of the pleasure principle exercised? Precisely on perception, and it is here that one finds the originality of his contribution. The primary process, as he tells us in the seventh part of the Traumdeutung, tends to be exercised toward an identity of perception. It doesn’t matter whether it is real or hallucinated, such an identity will always tend to be established. If it isn’t lucky enough to coincide with reality, it will be hallucinated. The risk is in the possibility of the primary process winning out.
On the other hand, what does the secondary process tend toward? Once again you should look at Chapter VII, but it is already articulated in the Entwurf. It tends toward an identity of thought. What does that mean? It means that the interior functioning of the psychic apparatus – I will discuss next time how it might be represented schematically – occurs as a kind of groping forward, a rectifying test, thanks to which the subject, led on by the discharges that follow along the Bahnungen already established, will conduct the series of tests or of detours that will gradually lead him to anastomosis and to moving beyond the testing of the surrounding system of different objects present at that moment of its experience. One might say that the backcloth of experience consists in the construction of a certain system of Wunsch or of Erwartung of pleasure, defined as anticipated pleasure, and which tends for this reason to realize itself autonomously in its own sphere, theoretically without expecting anything from the outside. It moves directly toward a fulfillment highly antithetical to whatever triggers it.
In this preliminary approach, thought ought to appear to be on the level of the reality principle, in the same column as the reality principle. But it is by no means the case, since as described by Freud, this process is in itself and by nature unconscious. Understand that unlike that which reaches the subject in the perceptual order from the outside world, nothing that takes place at the level of these tests – thanks to which, by means of approximations in the psyche, the facilitations are realized that enable the subject to make his action adequate – is perceptible as such. All thought by its very nature occurs according to unconscious means. It is doubtless not controlled by the pleasure principle, but it occurs in a space that as an unconscious space is to be considered as subject to the pleasure principle.
Of everything that occurs at the level of inner processes, and thought itself is such a process, according to Freud, the only signs of which the subject is consciously aware are signs of pleasure or pain. As with all the other unconscious processes, nothing else reaches the level of consciousness but those signs there.
How then do we have some apprehension of those processes of thought? Here again Freud responds in a fully articulated way – only insofar as words are uttered. An idea that, with the tendency to facility characteristic of all thought that in spite of itself is tainted by a kind of parallelism, is commonly interpreted as follows: “It is, of course, clear that what Freud is telling us there is that words are that which characterizes the transition into the preconscious.” But the transition of what precisely?
Of what else but movements that belong to the unconscious? Freud tells us that the thought processes are only known to us through words, what we know of the unconscious reaches us as a function of words. The idea is articulated in the most precise and the most powerful of ways in the Entwurf. For example, without the cry that it elicits, we would only have the most confused notion of an unpleasant object, a notion that would indeed fail to detach it from the context of which it would simply be the evil center, the object would instead be stripped of the particularity of its context. Freud tells us that a hostile object is only acknowledged at the level of consciousness when pain causes the subject to utter a cry. The existence of the feindlicher Objekt as such is the cry of the subject. This notion is expressed in the Entwurf. The cry fulfills the function of a discharge; it plays the role of a bridge where something of what is happening may be seized and identified in the consciousness of the subject. This something would remain obscure and unconscious if the cry did not lend it, as far as the conscious is concerned, the sign that gives it its own weight, presence, structure. It gives it as well a potentiality due to the fact that the important objects for a human subject are speaking objects, which will allow him to see revealed in the discourse of others the processes that, in fact, inhabit his own unconscious.
We only grasp the unconscious finally when it is explicated, in that part of it which is articulated by passing into words. It is for this reason that we have the right – all the more so as the development of Freud’s discovery will demonstrate – to recognize that the unconscious itself has in the end no other structure than the structure of language.
It is this that gives value to atomistic theories. The latter do not cover any of those things they claim to cover, namely, a certain number of atoms of the neuronic apparatus, supposedly individualized elements of the nervous system. But, on the other hand, the theories of relations of contiguity and continuity illustrate admirably the signifying structure as such, insofar as it is involved in any linguistic operation.
What do we see offered with this double intersection of the respective effects of the reality and pleasure principles on each other?
The reality principle controls what happens at the level of thought, but it is only insofar as something emerges from thought which can be articulated in words in interhuman experience that it is able as a principle of thought to come to the knowledge of the subject in his consciousness.
Conversely, the unconscious itself is to be situated at the level of elements, of logical components which are of the order of λóγος, articulated in the form of an óρθòς λóγος hidden at the heart of the spot where the transitions, the transferences motivated by attraction and necessity, and the inertia of pleasure occur for the subject, those operations, in short, which cause one sign rather than another to be valorized for him – to the extent that this sign may be substituted for the earlier sign or, on the contrary, have transferred to it the affective charge attached to a first experience.
Thus at these three levels we see three orders emerge as follows.
First, let us say, there is a substance or a subject of psychic experience, which corresponds to the opposition reality principle / pleasure principle.
Next, there is the process of experience, which corresponds to the opposition between thought and perception. And what do we find here? The process is divided according to whether it is a question of perception, and, therefore, linked to the activity of hallucinating, to the pleasure principle, or to a question of thought. This is what Freud calls psychic reality. On one side is the process as fictional process. On the other are the processes of thought through which instinctual activity is effectively realized, that is to say, the appetitive process – a process of search, of recognition and, as Freud explained later, of recovery of the object. That is the other face of psychic reality, its unconscious process, which is also its appetitive process.
Finally, on the level of objectification or of the object, the known and the unknown are in opposition. It is because that which is known can only be known in words that that which is unknown offers itself as having a linguistic structure. This allows us to ask again the question of what is involved at the level of the subject.
Consequently, the oppositions fiction / appetite, knowable / unknowable divide up what takes place at the level of the process and of the object. What is involved at the level of the subject? We need to ask ourselves, what is the division of the two sides between the two principles at this level?
I would propose the following. As far as the pleasure principle is concerned, that which presents itself to the subject as a substance is his good. Insofar as pleasure controls subjective activity, it is the good, the idea of the good, that sustains it. That is why ethical thinkers have at all times not been able to avoid trying to identify these two terms, which are after all fundamentally antithetical, namely, pleasure and the good.
But over and against that, how does one qualify the substratum of reality of subjective activity?
What is the new figure that Freud gave us in the opposition reality principle/pleasure principle? It is without a doubt a problematic figure. Freud doesn’t for a moment consider identifying adequacy to reality with a specific good. In Civilization and Its Discontents he tells us that civilization or culture certainly asks too much of the subject. If there is indeed something that can be called his good or his happiness, there is nothing to be expected in that regard from the microcosm, nor moreover from the macrocosm.
It: is with this question mark that I will end today.
November 25, 1959