BEYOND THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE

BEYOND THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE


James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© June 5, 2013


REFERENCE:

This is yet another excerpt from “Meet Your New Best Friend” that will be published as a second edition this Fall.

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Near the end of his career Sigmund Freud presented his most revolutionary theory, the concept of the death instinct. Freud contended that just as man is driven by the expectation of achieving pleasure, he is, at the same time, obsessed by the need to endure pain; to rehearse his demise by all matter of anguish.

Contrary to the wit of Walt Whitman, who proclaimed, “To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle, every cubic inch of space is a miracle,” most men walk the earth with Little Abner’s dark cloud following them everywhere. In Freud’s attempt to describe the role of the death instinct in ordinary life, he made the somber discovery that hardly an aspect of existence is not vulnerable to its destructive force. For pampered souls of his time, it was hysteria, whereas hypersensitivity of political correctitude is ours.

Modern society is overwhelmed by the complex of demands, its stability shattered, as was Freud’s period with the Industrial Revolution. The leisure class of society couldn’t cope with change, then, expressing its debility in a form of psychoneurosis known as hysteria. We are failing to cope with change, only now a wider segment of society is choosing to express its neurosis in such distractions as political correctness, or an obsession with technology as if a toy. This is especially in evidence with electronic games, social networks (Facebook et al), texting and tweeting for the sheer hell of it. To be fair, the positive aspects of this technological development has led to the Arab Spring (2010-2011) in the middle east, and the ability of these social networks to break through the barriers of nationalities, ideologies, theologies, cultures and political systems.

Psychoanalysis was Freud’s answer to the unique demands of an Industrial Society. His special gift was to look at the atom and see man, look at man and see society. In an age essentially devoid of humanistic invention, he continues to provide concepts to abate our anxiety if failing to contend with our psychosis. For one, his science, if you must call it that, involves talking cures, which are personal, subjective and based on observation and interpersonal examination of culture at the roots of its multiple belief systems. For another, were he less an original thinker or talented writer, with a novelist’s eye for imagery, it is unlikely our time would be deemed the Post–Freudian Period.

Constant often abrupt change is ripping asunder the underpinning of one’s cultural moorings. This has left society impotent to deal effectively with ever changing and accelerating demands. Crime, poverty, disease, chaos and madness are natural outcomes of a world out-of-control.

Freud was a visionary in that he saw the consequences of exploding technology. His science is art and necessarily tortuous and grimly paradoxical. His healing art consists in finding a kind of madness that the patient, and by extension family and neighbors, can live with. Few men have possessed the sort of talent that Freud brought to this delicate balance between sanity and madness.

Many others have attempted to bring sense to our collective nonsense including Carl Gustav Jung, Harry Stack Sullivan, and the young R. D. Laing.

What Freud and his followers dealt with during the 20th century was a kind of madness people have been willing to settle for, such as guilty childhood secrets, terrible traumas and the irrationality of sexual desire. More recently, chemical imbalance has become the newest madness. Still, since the beginning of the 20th century, madness meant hereditary taint, nervous fatigue, endogenous toxins and the like, around a strange nomenclature, which acted as proxy for “cure.” At the very heart of Freudian psychoanalysis was movement from one kind of madness to another. For the practicing analyst it was an opportunity to “play God,” taking the mantle from the priest and the scalpel from the surgeon to revive the atavistic appeal of the witch doctor.

There is precedence for this madness in Western society. The sainted and scholarly Thomas Aquinas in a moment of candor, reflected, “Christ was either liar, lunatic or Lord.” Since man is made in the image and likeness of God, chances are Jesus, the Christ, was all three, a precedence that is reflected in man to this very moment.

Criticize Freud if you must, but you cannot ignore his impact on our times. Only he fills the void between personal belief and societal betrayal. This is an age that is now suffering the consequences of being mainly spectator to its own existence. Things have moved so fast that most people have preferred to watch rather than participate, to avoid the pain of discovery, settling instead for pleasant comfort and non-involvement. Only he took aim at the colossal gap between man’s machines and his convoluted intellect.

More books are written about him today than ever before, the majority to sully his reputation. The main drill is targeted at demonstrating the ineptitude of psychoanalysis to cure mental illness. Psychoanalysis, no matter what practitioners may contend, is much less a remedy than a belief system. It fills the vacuum created by lethargic and inflexible dogma of institutional religion. All mental health professionals today feed from the trough of Freud’s creative energy, either directly or indirectly.

Freud’s detractors rightly see him as mystical. He claimed such saints as St. Francis of Assisi were saved from severe neuroses by their sainthood, their faith. He was not himself a believer in formal religion, but held almost a divine respect for the power of faith. This was for him an expression of the power of mind. Many physical scientists share this deference, even if they cannot quantify its power. He correctly envisioned the dwindling power of institutional religion, and its failure to first comprehend, and then deal with the changing demands of society on the individual. He also foresaw institutional religion becoming perverted numbing the individual’s awareness and acceptance of reality, and by this perversion, leading the individual toward, not away from corruption.

No style of writing is more seductive than Freud’s. He combines argument with myth, exposition with case history, and images that make their point in an original form. He created an intellectual edifice that feels closer to the experience of living, and therefore hurting, than any other system yet developed. When a human being has more self-contempt than self-love, more self-disgust than self-worth, more buried shame than pride, more self-ignorance than self-understanding, guilt drives behavior into the abyss of despair, controlled by competing wants, needs and obsessions. The individual is no longer human, only a being with an insatiable appetite for anger.

To have faith in something is powerful medicine. When the belief is in oneself, one moves beyond coping to prevailing. There is an equally compelling force always at work within us to destroy such faith, and in destroying it, to make coping nigh impossible. We are bombarded every day of our lives to harbor self-doubt, to disbelieve what we know to be true. We have a right to our own absolute truth; such truth is personal and need not be explained, justified or defended. It is what guides us as individuals. Many, however, confuse this truth with relative truth, that is, objective truth as it relates to others and to things held in common (empirical) evidence derived from mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology.

The confusion is often expressed in hypersensitivity, masquerading as political correctness. It is not enough for many self-doubters to have their own absolute truth. They must authenticate themselves by convincing others that it is their ‘absolute truth’ as well; that it is in fact the only truth. True believers are part of the herd mentality of true belief, a mentality which is not satisfied until it tramples on and destroys the personal truths of others, and of course, “Always for their own good.”

The idea with the herd mentality is to magnify differences, not what we hold in common as human beings; to emphasize differences by race, ethnicity, religion, region, occupation, social class, economics, physicality, nationality, color, speech, language, preferences, stature, dexterity, age, beauty, erudition and so on.

Freud provides an anatomical structure of the mind, a roadmap of the will, an invention that helps us to lift language out of the dank basement of despair into the sunlight of hope. Within this cognitive landscape exists many taboos, the chief taboo of which is against self-accepting, self-understanding, self-love, and belief in the power of self above all else. In a word, culture is stacked against knowing ourselves as best friend and ultimate ally in coping.

The topography of personhood is full of tragic comic possibilities. Friend is used in the context here of true friend. There are many we call “friend,” which are seldom true to the expression. A true friend is trustworthy, loyal, and faithful and devoted to the best interest of the friend. A true friend never knowingly hurts a friend. He helps the person become a better person, and all that person could become. We are loyal to a friend. We defend to the death a friend’s right to be himself. We have a friend’s best interest at heart. Yet the most difficult thing is to be our own best friend, as it is far easier (and more culturally acceptable) to put ourselves down and others up, whether they deserve it or not. What is deemed precious humility is actually self-effacement. Self-defeat is the cultural inclination at the expense of self-realization.

Two compelling and opposing forces are always at work in our nature. The creative forces are considerable, but so are the destructive forces. Part of our being is driven by the expectation of pleasure, while another is obsessed with pain. This buried torment is the wish to die, or to escape our fears, Freud’s concept of the death instinct.

Novelist Ernest Hemingway comes to mind for his well-documented self-destructive lifestyle, corroborated in his novels and short stories. Hemingway, the first celebrity author of the media age, was both full of self-realization and self-defeat. During his teens, he made a commitment to eliminate remorse from his existence and live a life without consequences. With equal resolve, he committed himself to participate fully in the joys of the modern world. He lived every day only for the pleasures taken, a life filled with glorious reward and pathetic ruin. Winner of the 1953 Nobel Prize for Literature, he literally reinvented the English language. He was champion of bare-bone prose, and of a hard-drinking, hard-loving, hard-fighting lifestyle. Yet, it was his clinical depression that led to his suicide in Ketchum, Idaho in 1961 at the still productive age of 61.

Hardly an aspect of life is not vulnerable to death instinct’s destructive forces. Therefore, it is well for us to respect our inclination and vulnerability to the death wish.

Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker, a physician who dealt with terminally ill patients, discovered an amazing fact, that is, that most people will themselves to live or die. What he determined is that the direction of this delicate balance is love. Hutschnecker writes in his book, The Will To Live (1951), when the terminally ill found love at death’s door, many of them, as if by a miracle, became once again well and able to resume their lives.

The destructive force or death instinct (Thanatos) in a person may combine with the life instinct (Eros) into masochism or, be redirected against the external world as aggressiveness in sadistic behavior. Put otherwise, the unchecked direction of this instinct determines whether it does harm to others or ourselves. If the aggressiveness directed outward meets with obstacles more powerful than itself, say, Law Enforcement or social convention, it may return to itself and increase the amount of self-destructiveness. Pivotal is the war within the individual between the life instinct and the death instinct. This conflict is a lifetime experience, which revolves around being human, and is directed at self-realization or self-defeat every day of our lives.

We see this dramatized daily in reckless youth, that is, young people doing harm to themselves or others. This is the Id or The Child expressed in two primal forces: sexuality (life instinct) or violence (death instinct), which may fuse and operate together in varying proportions. These dual forces have much to do with society and its discontents. English poet John Donne writes about these conflicting forces:



"Death be not proud, though some have called thee mighty and dreadful, for thou are not so;

For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be, much pleasure, then from thee much more must flow,

And soonest our best men with thee do go, rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery.

Thou art slave to Fate, chance, kings, and desperate men, and dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,

And poppy, or charms can make us sleep as well, and better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then?

One short sleep past, we wake eternally, and death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die."



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