You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Man's activity, Freud wrote, develops in two directions, according to whether it seeks to realize the experience of pleasure or the absence of pain.2 For an organism that is without a preformed, adapted identity and subject to prolonged dependence, the capacity to feel pleasure, anxiety, and pain are critical safeguards of his adaptation. The structuring and education of the pleasure potential are at the heart of what Freud went on to call the “reality principle.”
In the rendering of the “pleasure principle” to be followed in the pages ahead, the emphasis will be upon pleasure and unpleasure experiences-qualities of awareness. This emphasis is different from that of the more usual versions of the pleasure principle that have evolved in psychoanalytic theory. The version known as the constancy principle holds that an organism tends to maintain itself at an optimal level of tension: increases bring states of unpleasure; returns to the optimum, states of pleasure. The other version combines the constancy principle with a quasi-physiological model of drives pressing for discharge as “stimuli on the mind” (Jacobson, 1953). Indeed, theorists in either mold are likely to warn the reader not to equate their use of the term pleasure with pleasure experience (see, for example, Rapaport, 1960, and Schur, 1966).
In the drive-discharge version pleasure is spoken of in the language of libido. How libido came to be an all-encompassing designation of pleasure is an intricate story that we can touch on here only in outline. It had its beginnings