The Truth About Freud's Technique. Michael Guy Thompson

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3 Realistic and Wishful Thinking

      Once Freud formulated his theory of the structural model in 1923, his earlier allusions to the unconscious as a “second subject,” depicted by “counter-will,” gradually disappeared. The precedent for this revision was probably determined earlier still, however, by Freud’s distinction between “primary” and “secondary” thought processes. In fact, the publication in 1911 of “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning” (1958b) roughly coincided with his final reference to the unconscious as “counter-will” in 1912.

      Freud believed that the primary thought processes were essentially unconscious. They were presumed to account for displacement, condensation, and the ability to symbolize. This type of thinking is supposed to apprehend time and syntax and gives rise to dreaming. Freud felt these processes were governed by the pleasure principle and so, “strive toward gaining pleasure” and draw back from “any event which might arouse unpleasure. . . . Our dreams at night and our waking tendency to tear ourselves away from distressing impressions are remnants of the dominance of this principle and proofs of its power” (1958b, 219). Freud also believed that unconscious processes were “the older, primary processes, the residues of a phase of development in which they were the only kind of mental process” (219). Originally, whatever the infant wished for “was simply presented in a hallucinatory manner, just as still happens today with our dream-thoughts every night” (219).

      Yet, this state of bliss is soon awakened by the “real world”:

      It was only the non-occurence of the expected satisfaction, the disappointment experienced, that led to the abandonment of this attempt at satisfaction by means of hallucination. Instead of it, the psychical apparatus had to decide to form a conception of the real circumstances in the external world and to endeavor to make a real alteration in them. A new principle of mental functioning was thus introduced; what was presented in the mind was no longer what was agreeable but what was real, even if it happened to be disagreeable. This setting up of the reality principle proved to be a momentous step. (219)

      Freud’s theory of the unconscious—especially after the introduction of the structural model—rests on the distinction between these two principles and related styles of thinking. The secondary thought processes, ruled by the reality principle, characterize the ego’s concern about the outer world. Secondary process thinking “binds” the free energy of the unbound primary processes and is responsible for rationality, logic, grammar, and verbalization. However, if the primary processes are only capable of striving toward pleasure and avoiding unpleasure, and the secondary processes are essential for delaying gratification and forming plans in pursuit of pleasurable goals, to what does Freud refer when he suggests that it’s the psychical apparatus that “decides to form a conception of the real circumstances” and “endeavors to make a real alteration in them” (219)? Is this psychical apparatus the primary or the secondary process? It can’t be the secondary process, because Freud just explained that the psychical apparatus decided to bring these processes into being. On the other hand, he justified the need for “realistic” modes of thinking because the primary processes are presumably incapable of them. If, after all, the primary processes were capable of the kind of judgment and rationality needed to decide to create the secondary processes, wouldn’t the latter prove redundant?

      Charles Rycroft, the British psychoanalyst, questions Freud’s conception of the “two types” of thinking in “Beyond the Reality Principle” (Rycroft 1968, 102–13). He questions, for example, whether it makes sense to argue that the primary processes actually precede the ones that are said to be secondary. Rycroft suggests that even Freud doubted it, because according to a footnote in “Two Principles of Mental Functioning,” Freud himself admitted that

      it will rightly be objected that an organization which was a slave to the pleasure-principle and neglected the reality of the external world could not maintain itself alive for the shortest time, so that it could not come into existence at all. The employment of a fiction like this is, however, justified when one considers that the infant—provided that one includes with it the care it receives from its mother—does almost realize a psychical system of this kind, (quoted in Rycroft 1968, 102–3)

      Freud might have added to this “fiction” the notion that the infant is virtually helpless before it enjoys the “protection” of its developing ego. Rycroft observes that “Freud’s notion that the primary processes precede the secondary in individual development was dependent on . . . the helplessness of the infant and his having therefore assumed that the mother-infant relationship . . . was one in which the mother was in touch with reality while the infant only had wishes” (103). Again, we are struck by the notion, Freud’s notion, that the infant needs somebody else (in this case, the mother) or, later, an ego, to grapple with reality on its behalf. Rycroft believes that infants aren’t as helpless as they seem: “If one starts from the assumption that the mother is the infant’s external reality and that the mother-infant relationship is from the very beginning a process of mental adaptation, to which the infant contributes by actions such as crying, clinging, and sucking, which evoke maternal responses in the mother, one is forced to conclude that the infant engages in realistic and adaptive behavior.” (103)

      Rycroft concludes that the secondary thought processes probably operate earlier than Freud had supposed, that they even coincide with primary process thinking. Did Freud accurately depict the responsibilities of the two (hypothesized) thought processes in question? Even if he was right in proposing that infants are ruled by the ones he presumed were primary, what if those processes happen to include those very qualities he attributed to the secondary, such as rationality, judgment, and decision making; even an awareness of reality? Wouldn’t such a scenario negate the utility of the ego’s “synthetic” powers? If Freud’s original formulation of the ego is retained—that it is essentially defensive in nature—then the so-called unconscious id, governed by primary thought processes, might be conceived as a form of consciousness. Freud’s wish to distinguish between two types of thinking could be retained, but only after remodelling their capacities and functions. Paradoxically, what I’m suggesting would in many ways reverse Freud’s scheme. The primary thought processes—which I believe are “conscious” but prereflective—enjoy a spontaneous relationship with the world (i.e., reality), whereas the secondary thought processes—those employing the tasks of reflective consciousness—determine the individual’s relationship with himself.

      Rycroft reminds us that, by Freud’s definition, the primary processes aren’t necessarily unconscious, which is to say, without awareness or intentional forethought. He adds that “(a) dreams are conscious; (b) the conscious operation of the primary processes can be observed in (i) various pathological phenomena, notably hysterical dissociated states and fetishistic activity, and (ii) imaginative activity such as play in children and artistic creation in adults” (104).

      The line between the conscious and unconscious is ambiguously blurred in Freud’s characterization of primary and secondary thought process. The idea that children require an intermediary to grapple with reality posed insurmountable logical difficulties that Freud’s increasing reliance on “metapsychological” theories couldn’t resolve. Freud’s characterization of the ego as an agency at odds with three sources of “danger”—the id, the superego, external reality—is consistent with a depiction of secondary processes that are subjected to the demands of reality on the one side and the urges of the id on the other. An ego that has no desires of its own, but that “pop out,” as it were, from the depths of an anonymous otherness could never be truly reconciled with those desires but, as Freud says, could only hope to serve, at best, as “a submissive slave who courts his master’s love. Whenever possible, it tries to remain on good terms with the id” (1961d, 56; emphasis added). Consequently, this hen-pecked and near-helpless ego resigns itself to a position somewhere between the id and reality, whereby “it only too often yields to the temptation to become sycophantic, opportunistic and lying, like a politician who СКАЧАТЬ