Beyond the Pleasure Principle (40 page)
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Authors: Sigmund Freud
72
. [Plato,
The Symposium
, translated by Christopher Gill (London, Penguin, 1999), pp. 22–4.] [
Addition
1921:] I am indebted to Professor Heinrich Gomperz (Vienna) for the following suggestions regarding the origins of Plato's myth, which are reproduced here partly in his own words:
I should like to point out that essentially the same theory already occurs in the
Upanishads
. For in the
Brihad-aranyaka Upanishad
, I,4,3, where the emergence of the world from the Atman (the self or ego) is described, we read: ‘He, verily, had no delight. Therefore he who is alone has no delight. He desired a second. He became as large as a woman and a man in close embrace. He caused that self to fall into two parts. From that arose husband and wife. Therefore, as Yājñvalkya used to say, this (body) is one half of oneself, like one of the two halves of a split pea. Therefore this space is filled by a wife’ [trans. by S. Radhakrishnan, The Principal Upanishads, London, 1953, p. 164]. The
Brihad-aranyaka Upanishad
is the oldest of all the upanishads, and no competent scholar is likely to date it later than c. 800
BC
. As to the question whether Plato could possibly have drawn on these Indian ideas, even if only indirectly: contrary to current opinion I should not want to dismiss the idea completely, given that in the case of the metempsychosis theory, too, such a possibility cannot really be disputed. If there
were
indeed such a link, mediated in the first instance by the Pythagoreans, it would scarcely detract from the significance of the congruity of ideas, since if any such story
had
somehow percolated through to Plato from the oriental tradition, he would not have made it his own, let alone given it such a prominent role, if it had not seemed to him replete with truth.
In his essay
Menschen und Weltenwerden [The Coming into Being of Man and World
] (1913), K[onrat] Ziegler systematically explores the history of this particular notion prior to Plato, and traces it back to Babylonian conceptions.
73
. We would like to add a few words here in order to clarify our nomenclature, which has undergone a certain degree of evolution in the course of this discussion. We derived our knowledge of ‘sexual drives’ from their relationship to the sexes and to the reproductive function. We still retained this term when the findings of psychoanalysis obliged us to recognize that their relationship to reproduction was more slender than we had supposed. With our postulation of narcissistic libido and our extension of the libido concept to the individual cell, the sexual drive transformed itself in our scheme of things into Eros, the force that seeks to push the various parts of living matter into direct association with each other and then keep them together, and the sexual drives – to use the common appellation – appeared to be the portion of this Eros that is turned towards the object. We then speculated that this Eros was active from the beginning of life, and, as the ‘life drive’, pitted itself against the ‘death drive’, which came into being when the inorganic became animate. We sought to solve the riddle of life by supposing these two drives, and supposing them to have been locked in battle with each other right from the very beginning. [
Addition 1921
:] The
changes undergone by the concept of the ‘ego drives’ are perhaps less clear. Originally we used this term for all those drives about which we knew nothing except that their
direction
made them distinguishable from the sexual drives directed at the object; and we represented the ego drives as being in opposition to the sexual drives, the manifestation of which is the libido. Later we began to analyse the ego, and realized that one part of the ego drives, too, is libidinal in nature, having taken the ego itself as its object. These narcissistic self-preservation drives therefore now had to be reckoned as belonging to the libidinal sexual drives. The opposition between ego drives and sexual drives changed into an opposition between ego drives and object drives, both libidinal in nature. This, however, was replaced by a new opposition between libidinal (ego and object) drives and others that may be posited in the ego, and which are perhaps evincible in the destruction drives. In the course of our speculations, this opposition changes into the antithesis of life drives (Eros) and death drives.
The Ego and the Id
1
. [See above,
Beyond the Pleasure Principle,
Chapter VI
, end of third last paragraph.]
3
. [Freud's neologism here is
bewusstseinsfähig
– a word that perfectly exemplifies the terminological difficulties that are posed by almost
all
his attempts to convey his theories of the ‘conscious’ and ‘unconscious’, and which are particularly abundant in these opening paragraphs of
The Ego and the Id
. Quite apart from any translation problems, the German itself is intrinsically problematic, for the
bewusstsein
component of the word is used in a wholly idiosyncratic way: in normal usage it can only be a noun (English ‘consciousness’), but in Freud's neologism it is a verb + predicate (literally: ‘to be conscious’, or ‘being conscious’); indeed, at the very beginning of the paragraph he actually writes it as two separate words: ‘Bewusst sein ist…’ It seems highly likely that this idiosyncratic meaning is also intended by Freud in his chapter title, ‘Bewusstsein and Unbewusstes’ – a formulation that in any case can only be paraphrased, not translated. Lurking here is a fundamental problem inherent in any translation of Freud's writings, namely the fact that English ‘conscious’ and ‘unconscious’ are ill-fitting and often misleading substitutes for the German words
bewusst/unbewusst
, since the two languages arrive at their concepts from opposite directions, so to speak:
‘conscious’ (from Latin
conscius
, ‘knowing’) refers essentially to the
person doing the knowing
, whereas ‘bewusst’ (originally a past participle meaning ‘known’) refers essentially to the
thing that is known
. In practice, ‘conscious’ and ‘unconscious’ often work well enough, partly because of the pervasive influence of Freud himself, and partly because English has long used the words as transferred epithets (‘it was a conscious act’, elliptical for ‘an act of which the perpetrator was conscious’). But there are many cases where ‘conscious’ doesn't really work at all – not least at the beginning of the fourth paragraph here: the
Standard Edition
renders ‘Bewusst sein ist…’ as ‘“Being conscious” is…’, but the phrase ‘being conscious’ can only be read as referring to a
person
in whom there is consciousness, whereas Freud clearly means the
thing
of which there is consciousness, as the next sentence demonstrates beyond question when it remarks that any given psychic element ‘is conscious for no great length of time’ (‘nicht dauernd bewusst ist’).]
4
. [
Vorstellungen
– a word much used by Freud, but almost always impossible to translate with precision: a
Vorstellung
is ‘something that is present to the mind’, and the word thus covers a broad spectrum of meanings from ‘pure idea’ to ‘mental picture’. ‘Notion’ fits tolerably well in contexts such as this present one, but should be understood in a very loose sense. Freud often uses it in association or direct combination with
Inhalt
– an even more teasing word (see below,
Inhibition, Symptom, and Fear
,
note 21
); and as if this weren't enough, he also confronts us with
Wortvorstellung
: see below,
note 17
.]
5
. [
das Verdrangte
. See above,
Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through
,
note 9
.]
6
. [Freud clearly means the word ‘descriptive’ (
deskriptiv
) in a special sense, defined thus in the
OED
: ‘concerned with, or signifying, observable things or qualities, or what is the case rather than what ought to be or might or must be’.]
7
. [
OED: ‘Psychoid
… A name variously given to vital forces that appear to direct the functions and reflex actions of the living body.’ The word was coined by Hans Driesch (1867–1941), initially an experimental zoologist, but subsequently a professor of philosophy and an ardent proponent of vitalism. Driesch is clearly one of the band of ‘philosophers’ that Freud repeatedly alludes to in these opening paragraphs of his essay.]
8
. [Freud is presumably tilting at vitalism here, a philosophy that had flourished in the early to mid-nineteenth century, and then gained fresh impetus through the teachings of Driesch around the beginning of the twentieth.]
9
. In respect of the argument so far, see also ‘Bemerkungen über den Begriff des Unbewussten’ [‘A Note on the Unconscious in Psycho-Analysis’] (1912). A recent development in the critique of the unconscious merits attention at this point. Some researchers who are not averse to acknowledging the facts of psychoanalysis, but are unwilling to accept the unconscious, resolve their dilemma by resorting to the undisputed fact that consciousness too – as a phenomenon – displays a wide range of different degrees of intensity or distinctness. There are processes that are vividly, starkly, palpably conscious, but we also experience others that are only faintly, even barely perceptibly conscious – and according to these researchers it is precisely these faintest of conscious processes for which psychoanalysis seeks to use the supposedly inappropriate term ‘unconscious’, whereas these processes too, so they claim, are conscious or ‘within consciousness’, and capable of being made wholly and powerfully conscious if sufficient attention is paid to them.
In so far as reasoned arguments carry any weight in the determination of a question such as this, which depends so heavily on convention or emotion, the following remarks are pertinent here:
The emphasis on the varying degrees of distinctness appertaining to consciousness carries no conviction whatever, and is no whit more cogent than such analogous propositions as these: ‘There are countless gradations of brightness, from the harshest, most dazzling light through to the merest glimmer, hence there is no such thing as darkness’; or ‘There are varying degrees of vitality, hence there is no such thing as death’. In some way or other these propositions might indeed be deeply meaningful, but in practical terms they are useless, as becomes instantly apparent if one seeks to draw particular conclusions from them, such as ‘… therefore therefore there is no need to turn any lights on’, or ‘… therefore all organisms are immortal’. Furthermore, all one achieves by subsuming the imperceptible under the conscious is to undermine the one direct and certain fact that we possess regarding the psychic realm. The notion of a consciousness of which one is not at all conscious certainly seems to me far more absurd than the notion of an unconscious element within the psyche. Finally, in thus attempting to equate the unnoticed with the unconscious, people clearly failed to take account of the
dynamic
circumstances, which decisively influenced the psychoanalytical viewpoint. For in the process, two facts are ignored – first, that focusing sufficient attention on an unnoticed element of this – sort is very difficult and requires enormous effort; second, that even when this has been achieved, the previously unnoticed element is still not acknowledged by the conscious mind, indeed is often regarded by the latter as wholly alien
and antithetical, and rejected out of hand. Repudiation of the ‘unconscious’ in favour of the ‘scarcely noticed’ or the ‘unnoticed’ thus turns out after all to be cousin to the prejudice that unshakeably regards the psychical as being altogether identical with the conscious.
10
. [Before acquiring its more modern senses, the word ‘organization’ (
Organisation
in Freud's German) related chiefly to ‘organ’, ‘organism’ etc.; cf. the
OED
entry for ‘Organization’: ‘The action of organizing, or condition of being organized, as a living being’; ‘An organized structure, body, or being; an organism’ (etc.).]
11
. [
Instanz
.]
12
. Cf.
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
[Chapter III, third paragraph].
13
. [
Tiefenpsychologie
. Freud appears to use the term as a synonym for ‘psychoanalysis’ (cf.
OED
: ‘depth psychology’).]
14
. [Cf. the 1921 example of the term ‘pathological’ quoted in the
OED
: ‘The pathological method… traces the decay or demoralization of mental life instead of its growth.’]
15
. See
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
[
Chapter IV
, fifth paragraph].
16
. ‘Das Unbewusste’ (1915) [‘The Unconscious’; see
Chapter VII
].
17
. [The terms of Freud's argument here are likely to prove baffling unless the reader refers back to the relevant passage in ‘The Unconscious’ (see preceding footnote), where he asserts inter alia that as subjects we entertain a dual notion of objects: a ‘thing-notion’ (
Sachvorstellung
), and a ‘word-notion’ (
Wortvorstellung
). A
conscious
notion includes both ‘thing-notion’ and ‘word-notion’; an
unconscious
notion consists solely of a ‘thing-notion’; a
pre-conscious
notion consists of a ‘thing-notion’ potentiated by direct association with the corresponding ‘word-notion’. Matters are further complicated by the fact that Freud's terminology is even more difficult to translate than usual: as noted earlier, it can often be difficult to know precisely what Freud means by
Vorstellung
– but the neologism
Wortvorstellung
is likely to perplex even the most sophisticated German reader, and any English rendering of it can be little more than an approximation (the term ‘word-presentation’ used in the
Standard Edition
is a particularly bizarre and misleading concoction).]
18
. [See above,
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
,
Chapter IV
, second paragraph, and the associated
note 23
.]
19
. [In his very early treatise on aphasia,
Zur Auffassung der Aphasien
(1891) (
On Aphasia
), Freud asserts that for the purposes of psychology ‘the word’ is the basic unit of speech-function, and as such is a complex entity or ‘notion’ compounded of four distinct elements: a sound image; a visual image; a dynamic image of
spoken
language;
a dynamic
image of
written
language.]
20
. [According to the aphasia treatise, the development of our dynamic image of spoken language is dependent on our first learning to speak.]
21
. [See J. Varendonck,
The Psychology of Day-Dreams
(London and New York, 1921). Freud provided the Introduction to this volume.]
22
. [See
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
, above,
pp. 67
f.]
23
. [See
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
,
Chapter I
, second paragraph.]
24
. [
ein quantitiv-qualitativ Anderes
. The
Standard Edition
incomprehensibly chooses to ignore Freud's notion of ‘otherness’, and instead turns
ein Anderes
into ‘a “something”’.]
25
. [
Empfindungen
. Throughout this volume the words
Gefühl
and
Empfindung
are rendered as ‘feeling’ and ‘sensation' respectively – though it might be noted that Freud appears to use the words more or less interchangeably.]
27
. G[eorg] Groddeck,
Das Buch vom Es [The Book of the Id]
(1923).
28
. [‘Ego’ and ‘id’ are rather fancy, rather opaque Latinisms, whereas Freud's own terms
das Ich
and
das Es
are plain and forceful, being simply noun forms of the personal pronouns ‘I’ and ‘it’. The ‘I’ is self-explanatory, but the ‘It’ perhaps less so. What is implied is clearly the
impersonal
form of the pronoun, as in ‘It's raining. In German, this impersonal usage is not only very common, but can also convey an unnerving sense of a particular and yet unidentifiable, unbiddable presence or force that can assert itself both within us and in the world around us. Where in English one might say ‘There was a sudden knocking at the door’ or ‘I shudder when I think of it’, German can more ominously say ‘
Es
klopfte plötzlich an der Tür’
, ‘
Es
schaudert mich, wenn ich daran denke’
. It is this potentially menacing order of things that Freud is referring to in his Groddeck-inspired image of ‘unknown and uncontrollable forces’ at the very heart of our existence. See also below,
Inhibition, Symptom, and Fear
,
note 5
.]
29
. [The unshakeably well-established terms ‘ego’ and ‘id’ are retained throughout the present translation – but the real force of this particular sentence can only be appreciated by substituting the direct English equivalents of Freud's own terms: we are essentially an ‘it’, and on top of this ‘it’ sits our comparatively puny ‘I’.]
30
. [The
Standard Edition
alleges that this ‘its’ means ‘the ego's’ – but both logic and the grammar of Freud's German suggest that he means ‘the id's'.]
32
. [See
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
, above,
p. 65
f.]
33
. [See above,
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
,
note 3
.]
34
. [
Das Ich ist vor allem ein körperliches, es ist nicht nur ein Oberflächenwesen, sondern selbst die Projektion einer Oberfläche.
There are surely few statements in Freud's work at once so laconic and enigmatic. The original (1927) English translation sought to clarify things with a footnote (duly reprinted in the
Standard Edition
) that was allegedly ‘authorized by Freud’ – but which arguably puts a slant on his words that he never intended. The sentence itself is translated thus: ‘The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface’; the footnote then comments: ‘I.e. the ego is ultimately derived from bodily sensations, chiefly from those springing from the surface of the body. It may thus be regarded as a mental projection of the surface of the body, besides, as we have seen above, representing the superficies of the mental apparatus.’ The main clue suggesting that Freud meant something rather different lies in the word ‘projection’ (
Projektion
), which he surely uses in the modern neurophysiological sense defined thus in the OED: ‘The spatial distribution, in the brain…, of the points to which nerve impulses go from any given area or organ;… also
concretely
, a tract of projection fibres.’ (See also the sample quotation dated 1938: ‘the cerebral cortex… gives rise to a vast extrapyramidal projection passing to many sub-cortical levels’.) Thus in saying that the ego is not a ‘surface entity’ but the
projection
of a surface, Freud is surely arguing that it is not merely two-dimensional, but is
spatially
and hence three-dimensionally embodied within us. On this interpretation, Freud's ‘körperlich’ does
not
mean that the ego is ‘bodily’, i.e. ‘derived from bodily sensations’, but that it is
itself
‘corporeal’ or ‘body-like’. This reading is supported by the ‘cerebral homunculus’ analogy that Freud proceeds to offer by way of illustration: the anatomical representation now best known as ‘Penfield's homunculus’ depicts the cortex surrounded by a (decidedly grotesque) human figure, in order to demonstrate that neural processes in the brain are organized somatotopically, that is, mapped in such a way that they mimic the locations of the organs and tissues that they serve (see the following note). In the end, however, it has to be acknowledged that Freud simply does not explain himself at all clearly…]