The View of Freud's Pleasure Principle and the Simple

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THE VIEW OF FREUD'S PLEASURE PRINCIPLE AND THE SIMPLE HEDONISM OF HUMAN BEING Titik Muti'ah Fakultas Psikologi, Universitas SarjanawiyataTamansiswa, Jalan Kusumanegara 157, Yogyakarta

ABSTRAK

Artikel ini mengetengahkan tentang prinsip kesenangan dari Freud dan apa adanya (makna sehari-hari) hedonisme pada manusia dari perspektif psikoanalisa dan filsafat. Kesenangan diasumsikan sebagai sebuah peran dalam pertimbangan filsafat manusia. Hal ini tidak sebanding perannya dalam perspektif keseharian (masyarakat) yang tidak meragukan karena kepentingan filsafat dalam psikologi dan hedonism yang beretika dan dalam psikoanalisa Freud. Tujuan dari pemaparan ini adalah untuk memahami secara lebih rinci makna sebenar dari prinsip kesenangan Freud, juga mempelajari perbedaannya dengan hedonism apa adanya yang mana keduanya pada dasarnya pencari kesenangan. Kesimpulannya, sesungguhnya apa yang kita pahami tentang `kesenangan' dalam hedonism yang merujuk pada etika filsafat sering dibingungkan karena cara beroperasinya di level-level yang berbeda, yang satunya pada bawah-sadar dan yang lainnya pada level kesadaran manusia. Kata Kunci : Prinsip kesenangan, hedonisme

ABSTRACT This paper presents the view of Freuds pleasure principle and simple-hedonism of human being from psychoanalytic and philosophical perspective. Pleasure is assumed as a role in philosophical consideration of human beings. It is disproportionate to its role in everyday perception which no doubt due to philosophical interest in psychology and ethical hedonism, and also in Freud's psychoanalysis. The purpose of this work is to elaborate more understanding the actual meaning of Freud's Pleasure Principle, also, to study its difference with simple hedonism where they are fundamentally pleasure seeking. The conclusion is what1.we understand about pleasure' in hedonism refers to the ethical philosophy is often confused due to their operating on different levels, on the unconscious and the other on conscious level of human mind. Keywords: Pleasure Principle, Hedonism

INTRODUCTION Freud is the founder of psychoanalysis and well-known as physician, psychiatrist, psychologist and scientist. In the other hand, Freud's interest in philosophy is not at of the professional or academic philosopher. His philosophy was a social and a humanitarian or the form of building a philosophy of life. His philosophy of life is based on science rather than on metaphysics or religion. He felt that a philosophy of life is one of base upon a true knowledge of man's nature and knowledge that could only be gained by scientific inquiry and research. Otherwise, Philosophy itself has aimed to clarity of understanding and the demarcation of knowledge. These linked in the philosophical consideration of theories used in explanation. The relation of Freud's explanations to those in physical and experimental science has long been matter of dispute. Freud considered himself as an experimentalist who sought the characteristics and

Jurnal Spirits Vol 1 No 1 Desember 2010 Page 1 causes of mental disorder. But this did not exhaust Freud's psychological concerns. He was also interested in philosophy by producing an overall theory of the mind, in part, the two concerns were linked. Freud's concern with theory derives as much as his clinical work, from the tradition of scientific though. However, this concern can be seen in his earliest desires for the most comprehensive form of understanding open to men and to identify his passion for theory. Freud young expressed his longing of philosophical knowledge and he examined from medicine to psychology (Wolheim, 1991). Freud exploration was throughout the year 1895 when His thought seemed turning increasingly to the theory of mind and particularly to the relations between the physiological and the psychological levels. This was known as a `project of scientific psychology'. On one level, the `project' is a neurological account of the brain and its functioning, as such it was correspondence to the facts of anatomy. On another level, it was theoretical model of mind and mental processes, both normal and pathological. In general these two levels on which the project is conceived fit together. This was not only for Freud's conviction, grounded in materialism that he never abandoned, but psychology should have a physical base. Freud also believed that psychological phenomena exhibit many of same characteristics and characteristic patterns on which they were causally dependent. Hence the neurophysiological concept in psychological theory could be expected to have a corrective or regulative effect and would ensure the proper shape of the theory. On the other way, Freud had long observed that every neurosis has as its result, and its purpose, a forcing of the patient out of real life, alienating him from reality. Freud (1991) introduced the process of repression into the genesis of the neuroses. Neurotics turn away from reality because they find it unbearable – either the whole or part of it. But in fact every neurotic does the same with some fragment of reality. Psychoanalysis confronted with the task of investigating the development of the relation of neurotics and of mankind in general to reality and the way of bringing the psychological significance of the real external world into the structure of psychoanalytic theories. In the theory of mind, psychoanalysis emphasises the importance of unconscious mental life and importance of conflict between conscious and unconscious. The psychoanalytic viewpoint takes into account the interaction of the biological sources of human motivation with cultural forces and development, and experiential factors that influence the continuity of development from birth to adulthood. The crucial role of early development, the evolution of the structures of the mind, and object relations are among the important factors embraced by this conception of the mind. Dynamic elements can also be observed in the formation of character, in the structural aspects of the mental apparatus, and in the success or failure of adaptive functioning. Therefore, as the purpose of this review, it is important to have more understand the essence of Freud's Pleasure Principle. Whether Freud's Pleasure Principle can also being understand as a simple hedonism.

THE UNCONSCIOUS MENTAL PROCESS AND THE ID TO THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE The Unconscious is also a characteristic that distinguishes psychoanalysis from other psychological theories. It also has become accustomed in psychoanalysis to taking as our starting point of unconscious mental process, with the peculiarities of which we have become acquainted through analysis. Freud used the term `unconscious' in a number of different senses. It is used in a purely descriptive sense to suggest all those contents, Jurnal Spirits Vol 1 No 1 Desember 2010 Page 2

which are not present to consciousness. The first Freud technical use ofthe term is the notion of the unconscious in the dynamic sense. This does not refer to any particular quality of a mental state, but to its function. The unconscious is the site of repressed forces struggling to break into consciousness, but which are held in check by a repressing agency. This dynamic view led to a systematic or structural view (topographic point of view) in which the psychical apparatus is seen as consisting of a number of different regions or agencies each responsible for different functions. Then the economic point of view which endeavours to follow out the vicissitudes of amounts of excitation and arrive at some relative estimate of their magnitude'. Freud (1914) in the `meta-psychological paper' presented in detail what was known as the `first topography'. According to this view, the mind consists of three systems: the unconscious proper (Ucs), contains those contents which have been repressed either by process of primal repression or after-repression. The preconscious (Pcs), contains those contents which, while not being conscious, are capable of becoming conscious, i.e., are nor repressed. And the consciousness-perception system (Cs), contains all those contents that are conscious in descriptive sense (Osborne, 1993). Freud during 1920 through 1923 made revision of his topography. The Id in the second topography looked upon as roughly equivalent to the unconscious system (Ucs.), in the first one always provided a number of differences which were born in the mind. The unconscious is indistinguishable from the repressed. In the Ego and the id, Freud stressed the fact that the repressing agency - the ego- and its defensive operations were also for the most part unconscious. The development of Ego and revision of the instinct theory bring about a further change, since the new agency of the id includes the two types of instincts (life and death instincts) from the outset. This means -that the id is depicted as the `great reservoir' of the libido, and more generally of the instinctual energy (Laplanche & Pontalis, 1988). The boundary with the ego is less rigorous than the former frontier, constituted by the censorship, between Ucs. and Pcs.-Cs. The ego is not sharply separated from the id. The same also with the super-ego, which is not a completely autonomous agency, it merges into the id. Lastly, the distinction between the id and a biological substratum of the source of the instinct, the id is `open at its end to somatic influences. The fact is that Freud transfers to the id most of the properties which in the first topography had defined the system Ucs., and which constitute a positive and unique form of organisation: operation according to the primary process, structure based on complexes, genetic layering of the instincts, etc. Therefore the advent of the second topography is this schism between the agencies of the psyche loses its fundamental character. The genesis of the different agencies is now viewed rather as a gradual process of differentiation as the various systems emerge. Hence Freud concerned to lay stress on continuity in the evolution from biological need to the id, and from the id to the ego as well as the super-ego. For this reason, Freud's new conception of the psychical apparatus lent itself more readily than did the first one to a `biologic' or `naturalistic' reading. Freud considered all of these to be the older, primary process, the residues of developmental phase in which they were the only kind of mental processes. Primary process being characteristic of unconscious mental activity displays condensation and displacement, i.e. (the images tend to become fused and can readily replace and symbolise one another, uses mobile energy, ignores the categories of space and time, and is governed by the pleasure principle). Jurnal Spirits Vol 1 No 1 Desember 2010 Page 3

These processes strive toward gaining pleasure (psychical activity draws back from any events, which might arouse unpleasure). Our dream at night and our waking tendency to tear ourselves away from distressing impressions are remnants of the dominance of pleasure principle. The dominance of the pleasure principle in mental life also finds expression in the hypothesis that the mental apparatus endeavours to keep the quantity of excitation present in it as low as possible or at least to keep it constant. In addition, the pleasure principle follows from the principle of constancy (according to which the apparatus has a tendency to divest itself of energy) or to reduce tension, where tension, is identified with the accumulation of energy. The Constancy Principle can be stated in term of the reduction of tension to zero, and this could be attributed to the mind as its characteristic aim. The mind, in other words, tries to expel all energy as and when it enters the system. But Freud insisted, this is true of the mind only in what he calls its `primary function'. The mind received stimulation not only from the outside world, as in perception, but also from the inside, from the cells of the body, as in appetite and instinct. It is only if we confine out attention to external stimuli, that the simple conception of the mind modelled on the reflex based of neuro-physiology is adequate. The energy that arises from internal stimuli and that corresponds to the major human need of hunger, respiration and sex that cannot be discharged in this way. Relief is achieved if only suitable conditions exist in the external world, for instance; food, where the need is hunger. Actually the idea grounding of regulatory principle on pleasure is by no means Freud's own. A profound mark on Freud had put forward a `principle of the pleasure of action'. What Fechner (Laplanche & Pontalis, 1988) understood by this was not as final purpose of human action was pleasure, but rather that our actions were determined by the pleasure and unpleasure procured in the immediate by the idea of action to be accomplished or its consequences. These motives are not necessarily perceived consciously. It is quite natural since the motives are lost in the unconscious, the same shall hold good in respect to pleasure and unpleasure. This immediate aspect of motivation is also the core of Freud's approach: the psychical apparatus, which is regulated by the avoidance or discharge of unpleasurable/tension. The idea of the pleasure principle undergoes little modification throughout Freud's work. One of Freud's permanent theses regarding his model of the psychical apparatus, an operating principle of the perception-consciousness system is sensitive to a great diversity of qualities originating in the external world. It only apprehends internal reality in terms of the increase and decrease of tension, as expressed on a single qualitative axis-namely, the pleasure–unpleasure scale. For the meanwhile Freud is satisfied by the mere postulation of equivalence between pleasure and the reduction of tension, and between unpleasure and a corresponding increase in it. In 1920 (Freud, 1975) in `beyond the pleasure principle' Freud remarked that unpleasure and feeling of tension should not be treated as identical: pleasurable tension, in other words, does exist. Whatever obstacles may be to hinder the laying down of exact quantitative equivalents to pleasure and unpleasure as qualitative states, the advantages of an economic interpretation of these states for psychoanalytic theory are obvious (such an explanation clears the way for the formulation of a principle which hold good as much for unconscious agencies of the personality as for its conscious aspects. In fact, the relationship between pleasure and constancywhat Freud calls the pleasure principle means the maintenance of energy at a constant level or a radical reduction of Jurnal Spirits Vol 1 No 1 Desember 2010 Page 4

tensions to the minimum level. On the one hand, this tendency is manifested by compulsion to repeat, which operates in spite of unpleasure which the repetition revives. On the other hand, it was possible to connect with task that is prior to the seeking of pleasure, the task of "binding" free energy. Undoubtedly, this tendency is not opposed to the pleasure principle, but at least they do not derive from it. Another thing which is debatable in Psychoanalysis, `beyond the pleasure principle' cannot be validly posed until the problem raised by the concepts of pleasure, constancy, binding and the reduction of tension to zero have been fully resolved. According to Freud, the existence of principle or instinctual forces transcends the pleasure principle on those occasions when he is opting for an interpretation of the principle tending to identify it with the principle of constancy. Whenever he/she is tempted, on the contrary, to conflict the pleasure principle with the principle of reduction of tension to zero, then there is no doubt in his mind that it has the fundamental character of a first principle (death instincts). Freud's introduction of death instinct was to explain aggressive and self-destructive tendencies in analysis. Return to the old idea of the constancy principle, Freud was arguing that there was a kind of biological drive towards embracing death. He also needed the death instinct in always trying to find the balance of forces at work in driving the human psyche. Freud' state of psychical rest was originally disturbed by the unconditional demands of internal needs. When this happened, whatever thought or wishes for was simply presented in a hallucinatory manner, just as still happens today with our dream-thought every night. Sleep is able to re-establish the likeness of mental life as it was before the recognition of reality, because a precondition of sleep deliberates rejection ofreality (the wish to sleep). The psychical apparatus had to decide to form a conception of the real circumstances in the external world and to endeavour to make a real alteration in them. A new principle of mental functioning was presented in the mind, no longer what was agreeable but what was real. This setting-up of the Reality Principle proved to be a momentous step. Wherein the reality principle is in charge to govern the secondary process (rational), follows the ordinary laws of logic, time and space. Eventually Freud comes out his a fundamental idea in theoretical development is the `two principles of mental functioning' (Freud, -1991), which he called the primary and secondary processes.

HEDONISM AND PLEASURE Hedonism is a doctrine that `pleasure is good'. Usually the pleasure is thought to become a subject's own pleasure, and the view has a form of egoism. But there is no reason in theory it should not be the pleasure of humans, or even of generally sentient being. The first view, called `ethical hedonism', affirmed that only pleasure is intrinsically desirable and that only displeasure (pain) is intrinsically undesirable. More full state, it was the thesis that only pleasant states of mind are desirable in themselves. A distinguished line of philosophers from the early Greeks to the present has defended this thesis. Two hedonistic theories were expounded in ancient Greece. The Cyrenaics, or egoistic hedonists, espouse a doctrine in which gratification of one's immediate personal desires, without regard for other persons, is considered the supreme end of existence. The Epicureans or rational hedonists contend that true pleasure is attainable only by reason and stressed the virtues of self-control and prudence (Edward, 1972). The meaning of the hedonist's thesis depends on what is meant by "pleasure". It is true that the associations of the word "pleasure" are such as "life of pleasure", naturally Jurnal Spirits Vol 1 No 1 Desember 2010 Page 5

taken to be advocating a life dedicated to the sensory enjoyment (Feldman, 2004). Hedonist have not intended the term to carry this implication and the strict meaning of the term. This hedonism is done injustice if it is taken as asimplysaying that an intrinsically desirable state of affairs is always a state of consciousness in which the person is enjoying himself in one way or another. In the post-Aristotelian period, a major dispute was between the `Cyrenaics', who developed the Calliclean position by maintaining that the supreme good is the pleasure of the moment and that bodily pleasures are higher value than mental. On the other hand `Epicurus', who developed the Democritean ideal life of pleasant tranquillity as the supreme good. Epicurus took over Eudoxos' argument that the natural impulse of all animal to seek pleasure shows it to be good and distinguished two types of pleasure; that experienced when the organism is making good a deficiency and that experienced when the organism is in a stable state, free from all pain or disturbance. The latter type was assigned supreme value (Honderich, 2005).

THE DIFFERENCES OF THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE FROM HEDONISM (PLEASURE SEEKING) Thus what is most suspecting in this review is also the most revealing, under a scientific surface, or rather under the coating of a scientific mythology, arises the `Naturphilosophie' which Freud admired in Goethe (Ricoeur, 1970). Freud's entire doctrine is a protest on part of the nature –philosophy against the philosophy of consciousness. Therefore, Freud's theorising is always in excess of interpretation in every field of investigation, where posed him in the quasi-mythological nature of this meta biology. Perhaps it might be that Freud is fulfilling one of his earliest wishes `to go from psychology to philosophy'. If we looks at the Freud's patient reading of desire in its symptoms, its fantasies, and in general its signs never identical the hypothesis of the libido, of instincts and of desire. Freud's doctrine would be animated from beginning to end by conflict between the "mythology of desire" and the "science of psychical eapparatus". This muted conflict will make its appearance again at the end of this explanation, no longer at the level of initial hypotheses, but at the level of final wisdom. Freud interpretation was always with support. As a final note to the death instinct as one of the most remarkable of Freud's short essays, entitled "Die Vemeinung". The word ''vemeinung” ordinarily designates the contrary of Behajung — affirmation; thus the title of the paper is correctly translated as "Negation", for the term purely and simply designates the sense of "no" as opposed "yes." By a series of meanders Freud ends up expressly linking negation, the "no," with the death instinct. The negation belongs to the system Cs., along with temporal organisation, control of action, motor inhibition involved in every thought process, and the reality principle. Thus we meet with an unexpected result; there exists a negative which does not belong to the instincts but defines consciousness, conjointly with time, motor control and the reality principle. Consciousness implies negation – both in the process of "achieving insight" into it own hidden richness and the "recognition" of what is real. Freud's psychoanalysis regarded everything mental as being in the first place `unconscious'; the further quality of `consciousness' might also be present or might be absent. This provoked a denial from philosophers, for whom `consciousness' and mental were identical, and who protested that theycould not conceive of such an illogicality as the `unconscious mental'. This idiosyncrasy of the philosophers could only be Jurnal Spirits Vol 1 No 1 Desember 2010 Page 6 disregarded. Experience of an occurrence and power of impulses (of which one know nothing directly), are understood like some fact in the external world. This leads to Freud's general approach that our behaviour is dictated by unconscious forces within our" mental apparatus' and by instinct. The connection between the primary and secondary processes reveals two kind of relation between the pleasure principle and the reality principle. The reality principle is not truly the opposite of the pleasure principle but an indirect path to satisfaction. The pleasure principle considers in its pure state and prolongs its reign by assuming many types of disguises. The pleasure principle animates the whole of fantasy existence in normal and pathological forms from dream to ideals and to religious illusions. Freud (1975) mentioned why the pleasure principle is absolutely a fiction that has never been the actual condition of man. Firstly, the internal instincts always break the equilibrium and make the total discharge of tension impossible; the psychical apparatus is forced to deviate from the simple energy functioning represented by the constancy principle. Secondly, the experience of satisfaction inevitably involves the help of others, object-relation, and consequently the whole circuit of reality. Finally, unpleasure, is `the sole means of education', gives a hedonistic sense to the reality principle itself and sets it within the prolongation of the pleasure principle. Freud (1975) presented a schematic account of the secondary process in this account the reality principle is maintained within the limit of rational hedonism, which this schematic picture will never be basically altered. This suggests the notion of psychic operating in reserve, a psychic that resists the substitution of the reality principle for the pleasure principle. Hence the pleasure principle no longer designates merely an earlier fictive stage, but reserve movement of the apparatus, where the topographical regression or tendency of the psychical apparatus to restore the primitive form of hallucinatory wish fulfilment. Freud was able to define a `desire' as the tendency to restore the hallucinatory form of fulfilment. This shortest path to fulfilment is no doubt closed to us. But in a figurative and substitute mode it is the path we take in all forms of fantasy (neurotic symptoms, our dreams at night, and our day-dreams) are evidence of the supremacy of the pleasure principle and the proof of its power. According to Aristotle, pleasure completes an activity, a function, an operation, as supervision. But what becomes suspect is the definition of pleasure in purely quantitative terms as a simple function of the increase or diminution of a quantity describe as tension due to stimulus. Freud admitted ('The Economic Problem of Masochism' in 1924) the pleasure principle was not the same thing as the Nirvana principle, it is only the latter that is "entirely in the service of the death instincts." This arose by the implicitly understanding that the aim of all life is death. But philosophers would counter that the aim of all life is evolution. We constantly strive to learn more, to be better. Even other species and organisms evolve, for example the newer, stronger strains of viruses and bacteria. Death is only a step in the process of the evolution, not the ultimate aim.

CONCLUSION There are numerous reasons in Freud's writing for having doubts about our knowledge of the nature of pleasure. Freud has taught us that a wish or a desire was not a tension that could be discharge, desire revealed a constitution that was insatiable (greedy). The Oedipus drama implies that the child desires the unobtainable (to possess his mother, or to have a child by his mother). Moreover, if man can be satisfied, he would be deprived Jurnal Spirits Vol 1 No 1 Desember 2010 Page 7

of something more important than pleasure–symbolisation, which is the counterpart of dissatisfaction, desire, insatiable demand, gives rise to speech. The semantics of desire, which we are focusing upon here, bound up with this postponement of satisfaction, with this endless mediating of pleasure. It appears that the whole of Freud's work tends toward the second hypothesis of the reality principle. The notion of the pleasure principle assumes its main function in psychoanalytic theory when couple with the reality principle. At first the instincts have discharge alone as their aim — they seek satisfaction via the shortest route. The nature of reality is only learnt gradually, but this learning process is the only way for instincts, after the necessary detours and postponements, to reach the sought – for satisfaction. However, that psychoanalysis emphasises the notion of pleasure as a context in which it appears to be connected with processes (experience of satisfaction) and with phenomena (the dream) whose unrealistic character. What we understand `pleasure' in hedonism refers to ethical philosophy is often confused due to their operating on different levels, on the unconscious and the other on conscious level of human mind.

REFERENCES

Bateman, A. & Holmis, J., 1995. Introduction to Psychoanalysis, Contemporary Theory and Practice. London, Routledge. Edwards, P., 1972. The Encyclopaedia ofPhilosophy vol. 3-6, London, Macmillan Publishing, Co., Inc & The Free Press, New York. Feldman, F., 2004. Pleasure and the Good Life. Cambridge University Press, U.K. Freud, S., 1975. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Translated and edited by James Strachey, Norton, New York. Freud, S., 1969. An Outline of Psycho-analysis. Translated and newly edited by James Strachey. London, Hogarth Press: Institute of Psycho-Analysis, Freud, S., 1993. Historical & Expository Works on Psychoanalysis. Vol.15. London, The Penguin Freud Library. Freud, S., 1991. New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. Vol. l . London, Penguin Freud Library. Freud, S., 1984. On Metapsychology: the Theory of Psychoanalysis. Vol.1. London, Penguin Freud Library. Honderich, T., 2005. The Oxford companion to Philosophy (New Eds.) Oxford University Press, U.K. Laplanche, J. & Pontalis, J.B., 1988. The Language of Psychoanalysis. London, Karnac and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis. Osborne, R., 1993. Freud for Beginners. New York, Maurice Median, Writers and Readers Pub. Ricoeur, P., 1970. Freud and Philosophy: an essay on interpretation. Translated by Denis Savage, New Haven, Yale University Press. Wollheim, R. 1991. Freud. 2nd ed., with Supplementary Preface. London: Fontana. Essential reading.

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