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Freud’s project: back to reality
Freud’s view of human nature: homo homini lupus
Examples of world-directed drives in Freud
Appendix 1: Lear on the newborn baby thought experiment
Appendix 2: Moran’s footnote to Bersani
Freud’s project: Back to reality
Freud’s clinical focus was people (so-called neurotics) who had retreated from the world, to take refuge in their minds. Freud wrote:
What neurotics are guided by is not common objective reality but psychical reality” (SE 18, 80).
“Neurotics are above all inhibited in their actions: with them the thought is a complete substitute for the deed. (SE 13, 161)”
His clinical project was to move them back into the real world of work, love, and play.
Treatment aims to “win back [for the patient] some degree of capacity for work and enjoyment” (SE12, 119).
Freud saw a successful human life as one in which people realized their desires logically. It was due to failures in the real world that they turned inward.
The energetic and successful man is one who succeeds by his efforts in turning his wishful phantasies into reality. Where this fails, as a result of the resistances of the external world and of the subject’s own weakness, he begins to turn away from reality and withdraws into his more satisfying world of fantasy (11, 50).
For a child starting out their life, Freud did not think the idea would be to eliminate desires. He saw a successful life as one of rough and tumble in the real world.
[A child is] meant to grow up into a strong and capable person with vigorous sexual needs and to accomplish during life all the things that human beings are urged to do by their drives." (SE 7, 223).
Freud’s view of human nature:
Homo homini lupus
Moran suggests that Freud views humans as naturally timid and fragile.
As though describing a version of the young Proustian hero trying to accommodate himself to sleeping in a strange hotel room for the first time, Freud invites us to “imagine ourselves in the situation of an almost entirely helpless living being, as yet unoriented in the world, which is receiving stimuli in its nervous substance.”
In the passage Moran is quoting, Freud is imagining a baby experiencing hunger for the first time. See Appendix 1, below, for Lear’s interpretation of this model.
Citing Bersani [See Appendix 2], Moran next says:
The influx of stimuli is a problem for the organism which is easily overwhelmed and which perceives the stimulus as a threat to its integrity, its fragile ego-boundaries.
Freud’s view of human nature was opposite that. Instead of timid, young Marcel, we could think of ruthless Charlie Morel.
Men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved …; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose drive endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbour is for them not only a potential … sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to … use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus. Who, in the face of all his experience of life and of history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion? (SE 21, 111)
Examples of world-directed drives in Freud
i) “One of [Anna O’s] essential character traits was sympathetic kindness. Even during her illness she herself was greatly assisted by being able to look after a number of poor, sick people, for she was thus able to satisfy a powerful drive” (SE 2, 21).
ii) “A child who breaks crockery knows quite well that he is doing something naughty for which grown-ups will scold him, and if he is not restrained by that knowledge, he probably has a grudge against his parents that he wants to satisfy; he wants to show naughtiness” (SE 17, 153).
iii) A man “does not venture to satisfy [perverse sexual aims] with a woman he respects” (SE 11, 185).
iv) [Masturbation could cause injury if it led to] “the laying down of a psychical pattern according to which there is no necessity for trying to alter the external world in order to satisfy a great need” (SE 12, 251-2).
Appendix 1:
Lear on the newborn baby thought experiment
In Freud’s thought experiment of a baby, the first thing the baby does is try to hallucinate nourishment. Only after trying hallucination does the baby go to reality as a second-best option. Lear agrees that that’s weird, but he doesn’t think it is important to Freud’s model. Freud’s model would be the same if the baby had gone to reality first and hallucination second:
Taken literally, developmental account makes no sense. How could a mind operating according to the pleasure principle make a (realistic) decision to operate in a different way? At the very least, we need an account of how realistic mental functioning comes to be selected on the basis of infantile experience. But it is worth noting that one could tell a very different story of the origins of the mind – one that moves in the opposite direction. At birth, the mind is oriented towards the world and trying to comprehend it. It is trying to think realistically as best it can; but part of its own developmental process is learning how to do this. It tries to think of the breast, and as a byproduct has an experience of satisfaction. Because of this satisfaction, imaginative activity gets selected and starts to take on a life of its own. On this story, it is the pleasure principle that develops out of the reality principle.
The point is not to rule in favor of either story, but to bring out their mythological status. Freud’s hypothesis is based not on the observation of infantile development, but on the analysis of adult neurotic patients. He is working backwards from his own clinical experience. Adult neurotics never display a pure culture of the pleasure principle or a pure culture of the reality principle. Neurotic behavior and imaginative activity are always conflicted. And Freud wants to see these conflicts as the outcome of conflicting principles. In this way he purports to provide an analysis of the psyche. The heuristic value of his myth of the origins of the mind is that one can supposedly see each of these principles at work in isolation. Thus one can get a clearer idea of what each principle is. In actual human reality, one never sees these principles at work on their own. (Lear, Freud, 2nd ed., Chapter 5.)
Appendix 2:
Moran’s footnote to Bersani
The influx of stimuli is a problem for the organism which is easily overwhelmed and which perceives the stimulus as a threat to its integrity, its fragile ego-boundaries (149)
Moran drops a footnote after that sentence. The footnote says that Bersani Chapter 1 is “particularly good here.”
I was puzzled by this footnote, especially since Bersani’s book is about Proust (not about Freud or Freud’s baby myth). I read the Bersani chapter and understand Moran to be referring to this passage:
But before being recognized as intellectually unacceptable, the external world is felt as dangerous. Marcel is painfully aware of the weak resistance he can make to new realities. He wants some thing totally new, a revelation, but, because of a sense of his own psychic fragility, he fears being submerged, overwhelmed by anything unfamiliar. (22-23).