Notes on the Reality Principle

If we are to study the processes and the problems which the concept "reality principle" is meant to cover, there is still no better point of departure than Freud's paper on the "Two Principles of Mental Functioning," first published in 1911. This work is important and interesting in another respect also. It deals specifically with a number of ego functions, such as consciousness, thinking, attention, judgment, action—and does so avant la lettre, if I may say so, before ego psychology had become an integrated part of psychoanalysis; that is to say, his studies of ego functions had not yet appeared in the framework of the set of propositions which we call ego psychology today. At the time Freud used the terms pleasure ego and reality ego, and what was later to become the distinction of ego and id was still represented as an opposition of ego drives and sexual drives. One of the many essential contributions of the paper was the observation that while the ego drives are ready to yield to the influence of the reality principle, the sexual drives remain much longer under the dominance of the pleasure principle, a fact that is significant for mental development in general and for neurosis in particular.

The idea that pleasure and unpleasure are dominant forces in motivating human behavior had, of course, not escaped the attention of earlier thinkers; it goes far back in the history of philosophy and has been strongly emphasized especially by a school of British philosophers. Bentham, to quote at least one of them, said that nature has put man under the control of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. We find also in the pre-Freudian literature references to a development toward a more adaptive state of affairs. Freud has never claimed property rights in this respect; on the contrary, in discussing the pleasure principle, he said that "priority and originality are not among the aims that psychoanalytic work sets itself" (1920). Originality was not the aim of his