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Dispositions for future ego functions whose growth later influences the pleasure and reality principles exist even before birth. Freud assumes that the tendency to gain pleasure present from the beginning predominates at an early stage over the tendency to avoid unpleasure. Both together cannot fully account for the institution of the reality principle in the sense of postponement of discharge and toleration of unpleasure; we have to assume that the development of ego functions enters the process as an independent variable.
The pleasure-unpleasure balance, that is the sum total of pleasurable and unpleasurable elements in a situation now, includes a consideration of the future. Quantitatively, identical pleasure-unpleasure balances may produce different reactions according to whether the accent is on pleasure gain or the avoidance of unpleasure. This will always remain a variable both developmentally and individually. Anticipation of the future includes judgements on the relations of cause and effect, both as to what happens in outer reality and in the child's mind.
Further, structural differentiation induces a state of affairs in which earlier sources of pleasure lose their pleasurable qualities. In this domestication of the pleasure principle by the formation of the superego not only the reality tuned functions of the ego but also its organizing function play a part. The direct use by the ego of the pleasure principle for the mastery of outer and inner reality becomes at this point important. In the case of the danger signal, an unpleasant feeling is intentionally reproduced by the ego for that purpose. The pleasure-unpleasure balance is changed when an instinctual desire is renounced by the gratification deriving from parental approval, as well as by the pleasures inherent in ego activities (sublimations) themselves.
Throughout life the influence of objects may work for or against objectivity; the acceptance of 'conventional knowledge' may be adaptive witho