PRINCIPLE OF PLEASURE/DISPLEASURE

Freudism means teaching of Sigmund Freud in the form in which it was created by him in the period from 1900 to 1938 and implies the classical (orthodox) psychoanalysis, in contrast to the neo-Freudism, analytical psychology of Jung and individual psychology of Adler.

I. Babel wrote: “… we are born to enjoy the work, fight and love.”…

Undoubtedly he absorbed all the theories of pleasure, dominating from the mid–20th century to the present day, as the basis of mental world of the man. According to these theories, “the element of the male inner world is an eternal pursuit of pleasure, which he derives from the fight-war, labor and sex. And if the first two the man rejects sooner or later by this or that reason, he is trying to prolong sex by all imaginable and unimaginable ways, beyond time and space. That is why sexuality is more known as the “basic instinct” and not because it serves the instinct of reproduction.

Eric Fromm called researchers first of all to define the terms. Let us follow his wise advice. Without going into the intricacies of psychoanalysis (psychoanalysis requires more careful study), we note that, according to the traditional Freud’s approach, deriving pleasure underlies the psychic world. The explanatory dictionary defines “PLEASURE” as a feeling of joy and contentment from pleasant sensations; enjoyment of the pleasure of meeting, of a trip, work; finding pleasure in reading books; having pleasure of seeing somebody, being engaged in something; pleasing somebody with a conversation, walk; being happy to listen to music, doing something for fun …; and finally live happily, carefree, just for fun.

One may not accept the latter because it is unnatural to man’s mental world; his elements are perpetual search for adventures, comprehension of new, solving or inventing simple or complex puzzles of life. Only in the whirlpool of life the majority of men tear the flowers of pleasure. The aphorism: “Every woman should be a mystery” is a wonderful gift to all women ever invented by man for all times and for all. Women try to comply with a “mystery”, and men are always in search of this “mystery” clue. Dali grotesquely portrayed this mystery of woman.

Salvador Dali, The infinite mystery (1938).

None of psychological terminological dictionaries contains an explanation of the concept “pleasure”, though “pleasure” refers to the category of psychological terms. It is most likely the result of evaluation work of the brain, which occurs after receiving information and its reflection in the form of sensation.

Sensation (Empfmdung) is a psychological function to comprehend the immediate reality through the sense organs. French psychologists call it “la fonction du reel” (a reality function), which is a set of knowledge of external factors obtained through the senses function. “The sensation does not tell me what it is, but only indicates that there is something”. The sensation, as an elementary initial phenomenon of cognition, is something definitely given, not subjected to rational laws, as opposed to thinking or feeling. Physiological sensitivity, which appears upon stroking the skin, is an elementary pleasure.

The presence of skin sensitivity is a genetic factor included into the human genetic program, which can be pleasant, because it does not cause muscle tension, but relaxes it. It can be added – a sensation is an initial change of homeostasis, the local “first wave” of the brain activity, excitement of mental element of the awakening brain. The ability to sense is the need, built into the genetic program, which is necessary for activation of the brain. The vital activity of the brain can be judged only due to a wave nature of the irritation sensation recorded by electroencephalogram.

Feeling – the second level of cognition – is the ability of a living being to perceive the amount of mental and physical sensations, to respond to external stimuli; it is the inner excitement of the whole mental ocean, in which a person lives and able to respond to life’s impressions: can experience the elation, the rush. Feeling is a psychological function, which informs the subject about the value of certain things for him, about their importance. The feeling above all is a process that takes place between the EGO and some given content, moreover, a process that gives the content a certain value in the sense of accepting or rejecting it (“pleasure” or “displeasure”). But at the same time, the feeling is also a process, which besides the specific content of consciousness as an amount of sensations of the moment, may originate in isolation, as the mood. In this case, there is a causal relationship with the earlier consciousness contents or association with the unconscious contents. However, the mood – be it general or only partial feeling – is an evidence of evaluation of the whole state of consciousness (pleasant or unpleasant) available at the moment, rather than evaluation of not specified, single content of consciousness. Therefore, the feeling is above all is quite a subjective process, which can be in all respects independent of external stimulation, though it is attached to every sensation. Even the “indifferent” sensation has “sensual coloring”, namely the coloring of indifference, which again expresses the well-known estimate.

Therefore the feeling is also a kind of judgment, which is different, however, from an intellectual judgment. Evaluation with the help of feeling covers all content of consciousness, whatever kind it may be. If the intensity of feeling is increased, there appears affect, accompanied with noticeable bodily innervations – it is already a storm. The feeling is different from the affect – it does not cause appreciable bodily innervations, i.e. causes no more and no less innervations than a normal thinking process. The sensations, all the more, feelings realize that part of the genetic program, that essentially important unit of it, which evaluates the incoming information of pleasant-unpleasant, “pleasure-displeasure”.

The concept “pleasure” belongs to psychoanalysis, according to which the activity of the mental apparatus begins with an unpleasant sensation (the principle of displeasure), which is automatically regulated by the principle of pleasure. The principle of displeasure/pleasure was understood in classical psychoanalysis as an initial concept, setting the program of mental functioning and based on the innate human unconscious desire to avoid displeasure and achieve pleasure. Freud, realizing lack of knowledge in physiology, neurophysiology, has come to the conclusion that pleasure is somehow connected with the decrease, reduction of the amount of irritations, while dissatisfaction – with their increase, and the mental apparatus serves the purpose of release from irritations coming in from outside and from within. He assumed that on the basis of the facts that prompted to accept the domination of the pleasure principle in mental life, we could talk about the internal tendency of the mental apparatus to keep the quantity of excitation in it is as low as possible, at a constant level. In accordance with this assumption, he expressed the idea of the need to take into account that in the mental life there also existed the principle of constancy (homeostasis), of which, strictly speaking, the pleasure principle was derived.

A newborn baby perceives the surrounding world as a flow of rapidly changing sensations. The bulk of the flow passes a baby because of underdeveloped receptors corresponding to these modalities. Immediately after the birth, skin and pain sensitivities in infants are the most advanced. Perhaps this is due to the fact that in the course of phylogeny, these sensitivities are the oldest. It is through them that a baby gets the first unpleasant sensations, which as the first irritants violate homeostasis, along with hunger and physiological needs. These irritants are the cause of the vibrating (oscillating) activity of the developing brain, which automatically switches the reflexes. Reflex motor activity eliminates the cause of displeasure, changing it to pleasure. A baby is experiencing the feeling of pleasure, first of all, from the pleasant tactile sensations. The baby is born with a pretty impressive collection of tactile reception. Even before birth, it felt the warmth of mother’s hands, touched cheeks with fingers, felt the movement of amniotic fluid as vibration sensations. The little one not merely heard these vibrations but felt by the whole body. A new world prepared a lot of tactile surprises for the baby. Kiss of mother is the first of them, the warmth of her skin – the second. There are so many further discoveries that the count is lost. A newborn baby comes into the world, keeping in stock a large set of behaviors based on the unconditioned reflexes. Most of them are vital for the baby. For example, if you stroke a newborn’s cheek, he turns the head and looks for a pacifier with lips. If you put a pacifier in his mouth, the child will automatically start sucking it. Sensations of different modalities have different dynamics in the development; their degree of maturity at different times is different.

Psychoanalysis practically did not pay due attention to the phenomenon of pain as the cause of vibration and sensation of displeasure. And as claimed by K. E. Izard (1999), the pain is the underlying motivation, which causes a great variety of negative emotions. It cannot be disagreed. Both tactile skin and nonspecific pain receptors are spread throughout the body and are sites of entry through which reality penetrates and stimulates the development of the inner mental world. Nonspecific theory of the origin of pain impulses, or the intensity theory was developed by various authors, including A. Goldscheider (1894). According to this theory, sensation of pain is caused by intense stimulation of different nonspecific sensory receptors (temperature, pressure, visceral, and others) and conduct of pain impulses to certain brain formations. Based on this theory, we can talk about the infancy period of nonspecific pain prevalence. Modern pain theories already relate to a specific phase of the pain as a consequence of psychodynamics. The data of both foreign and domestic scientists (Dionesov S. M., 1963; Reynolds, 1969; Terenius, Schneider, Perth, 1973; Kryzhanovsky G. N., 1973–1993; Kassil G. N. 1975; Kalyuzhny L. V., 1984; Filin V. I., Tolstoy, A.D., 1996, Reshetnyak V. K., Kukushkin M. L., 2001, and others) single out specific pain receptors, specific afferent pathways and specific brain structures forming pain sensation and body responses to it. According to this theory, the pain arises due to the prevalence of activity of nociceptive (algogenic) system over activity constantly functioning in a healthy body of antinociceptive (antialgogenic) system.

A. D. Zurabashvili considered pain as a protective response, which represented the ancient form of experiences and which served to a human as a trouble signal. Pain is associated with fear. Fear is unpleasant in itself. A baby when alone starts crying, and if nobody comes up to it, the crying turns into screaming. The baby gets rid of the tension and takes pleasure only through the sense of the kinetics of someone else or through making movements itself. Therefore, the kinetic modality of irritations is determinative equally with the tactile and pain sensitivities.

Considering the pleasure principle as the main driving force, Freud at the same time admitted that on the whole it would be wrong to say that that principle rules over all the mental processes. The case is that “in the soul there exists a strong tendency to the domination of the pleasure principle, which is, however, opposed to various other forces or conditions, and thus, the final outcome will not always comply with the principle of pleasure”. He admitted that considering the existence of the external world with its all possible limitations, the pleasure principle from the very beginning should be acknowledged useless and sometimes even dangerous to human life. On three sides the psyche is threatened by various distressors: on the part of the body – pain, diseases, traumas; on the part of the society – interpersonal conflicts; on the part of “I” – intrapersonal conflicts and complexes. Therefore, according to Freud, the principle of pleasure under the influence of life circumstances transforms into the reality principle. The task of getting rid of suffering and exclusion of pain forces out the pleasure principle. It must be emphasized that the redistribution of the roles of “pleasure” and “reality” in the structure of the mental world is carried out under the influence of the psychosocial factors associated with human maturation. An adult male is able to consciously control the display of the desire for pleasure, or also consciously move away from the world, for example, to a monastery. In both cases it is a conscious departure from the reality of existence of secret desires that modern man forces out into the unconscious, and curbs them there with the help of mental barrier erected between consciousness and the unconscious. But there is also an unconscious escape from the outside world problems in the form of mental illness, particularly post-traumatic stress disorder, schizophrenia; among semiconscious, can be mentioned deviant behaviors, drugs and alcohol.

Freud did not restrict himself to the consideration of the two principles of mental activity – the pleasure principle and the reality principle. He tried to look beyond the pleasure principle, in order to understand what forces are at work in the depths of the human psyche. Such an attempt has led to the fact that the founder of psychoanalysis recognized striving for the preservation of peace as the dominant tendency of mental life, and even of the entire nervous activity, that is, put forward the third principle – the principle of the constancy (peace, nirvana). Considering that the striving for preservation of peace, the cessation of internal irritant tension finds its expression in the pleasure principle, he has come to the conclusion that this is one of the strongest motives for confidence “in the existence of attraction to death”.

Probably, the presence of the “peace principle” predetermines the presence of its alternative – the principle of vibration (oscillation) as the basic principle of the brain life activity proved by the data of EEG. Cessation of the brain wave activity on the electroencephalograph monitor is the basis to certify person’s death in reanimation. It may make sense to speak about two primary principles, existence of two dominant tendencies of mental life: striving for vibration (“oscillations”) as a neurophysiological principle of the brain activity, deadaptation, according to Selye and striving for preservation of peace – the nirvana principle, which was acknowledged by the founder of psychoanalysis S. Freud. The interaction of these two opposite principles is carried out through the pleasure principle.

If adhere to the psychodynamic approach, the mental world of a male develops through the brain constant need to sensor stimulation recorded by EEG in the form of wave activity. Any constancy and duration of the situation, which is passionately desirable from the point of view of the principle of pleasure and the principle of peace, causes only a feeling of indifferent content.

The psyche is set up so that it is able to enjoy only in the presence of contrast, which can be attributed to the novelty principle. Freud and his followers tried to unify the active principle of the psyche by discovering the pleasure principle and eliminating all discrepancies through discovery of unconscious. But at the later stages, Freud introduced the concept of the reality principle, then of nirvana, later on – intrusive memories, thus proving that the psyche is virtually not subjected to unification, because different laws operate in the biological and mental worlds.

Probably, it is necessary to recognize the existence of the following principles underlying the formation of the structure of the mental world: the principle of vibration, the principle of novelty, the principle of peace – nirvana, the principle of pleasure, the principle of obsessive repetition; and the irritations of the three modalities – tactile, painful and kinetic.

Reflecting on the structure of the mental apparatus, Freud insisted that it consisted of the conscious, preconscious and unconscious phases of the mental process. Preconscious-Consciousness are sensitive to any qualitative difference in impressions from the outside world; from the inside they perceive only the growth and weakening of tension, which on the scale of pleasure – displeasure are expressed by a whole range of mental qualities. Freud realized the difficulty that he faced in the search for a simple answer to this question. At first, he marked equality sign between pleasure and weakening of tension, between dissatisfaction and its increase, but soon this relationship ceased to be simple and clear for him: “… pay attention to the fact that this hypothesis suffers uncertainty, because we were unable to determine the essence of the relationships between pleasure and displeasure through a change in the strength of mental excitations. One thing is clear: these relationships can be quite different and certainly in any case may not be easy”, he wrote. As for the mechanism operating here, we find in Freud several approaches to this problem. In the work “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (Jenseits des Lustprinzips, 1920) Freud called to distinguish displeasure and the feeling of tension (distress by H. Selye) because pleasant tensions also exist (eustress by H. Selye).

Psychologists and humanists traditionally blame Freud for seeing the cause of all disorders in human sexuality and considering the principle of pleasure overriding. If this thesis is partly believable for the early Freud (before he actually talked about the primacy of the pleasure principle), then in 1920, Freud described a more fundamental principle that worked regardless of the principle of pleasure – the principle of obsessive repetition, which gave the mechanism for symbolizing the loss and work of mourning. In all cases, peace is restored by the objective physical activity. According to recent data, the latter implies an objective movement – a movement that meets certain vital need rigidly defined by this need, unfolding in the outside world. In order to be successful it should correspond by its structure to the characteristics of the external world. Such characteristic as the objectivity of movement is very important because the relationship of the subject with the outside world is carried out through the behavioral act and through this relation it becomes possible to form all human mental functions as they provide man’s adaptation to the outside world. Thus, we can say that along with such a characteristic of the movement as its temporal development, there is one more important feature – space-time or subject-time characteristic of the motor act. Motor acts are means of restoring homeostasis, means of obtaining pleasure and stress relief. Subjected to the evolution, kinetics in itself has become a source of pleasure in modern man (fitness classes, running, body building, climbing, all kinds of extreme sports). Gustav Fechner – German physicist, psychologist, one of the first experimental psychologists, founder of psychophysiology and psychophysics substantiated “the pleasure principle of action”. Unlike conventional hedonistic doctrines, he was not referring to the pleasure as the goal of human action, but as the conditionality of our current actions by pleasure or displeasure of committed actions.