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In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Freud assimilates and then attempts to accommodate his clinical finding of the compulsion to repeat “with its hint of possession by some ‘daemonic’ power” (p. 30). As with the preoperational level of cognitive development described by Piaget, the child who can now comprehend quantity in terms of volume and mass must find a means of altering his previous schema of the universe — which construed quantity as equivalent to visual size — so that this new information being assimilated is not left dangling unorganized in the child's mind. The child, in effect, has to reorganize his mind by accommodating it to this new awareness, and he does so by developing a rudimentary law of conservation: e.g., his mind moves to a superordinate level of abstraction in order to organize (make sense of) this new data. A failure to assimilate and accommodate such vital (for survival) information will lead to disorganization and chaos as the individual will exist in a world where two mutually incompatible realities exist simultaneously. Such a state of mental or psychic affairs, of cognitive dissonance, is intolerable.
Freud's “clinical” data in need of accommodation in Beyond the Pleasure Principle are the reports from his patients of traumatic
This paper was awarded the Sidney Blau Memorial Award from the Postgraduate Center for Mental Health.