(Received 28 May 2007; accepted 24 November 2007)

The authors investigate the relationship between the concept of functional pleasure as defined by Fenichel and a number of other psychoanalytic concepts. Considered in the light of this concept, the pleasure-unpleasure principle as defined by Freud is to be distinguished in terms of a pleasure principle and a principle of avoiding unpleasure. These are then reunified in the sense of an unpleasure-functional pleasure principle, to which the substitutive formations of the repressed are subjected. It is argued that, in the realization of substitutive formations of repressed genital-sexual instinctual wishes, the intentional erogenous pleasure changes into a functional pleasure, in which a successful defence finds its experiential expression.