Freud, “The Economic Problem of Masochism” (1924) (II)
I concluded the last entry with some questions raised by the opening paragraph of Freud’s “Economic Problem.” Here again is the paragraph:
“The existence of a masochistic trend in the instinctual life of human beings may justly be described as mysterious from the economic point of view. For if mental processes are governed by the pleasure principle in such a way that their first aim is the avoidance of unpleasure and the obtaining of pleasure, masochism is incomprehensible. If pain and unpleasure can be not simply warnings but actually aims, the pleasure principle is paralysed—it is as though the watchman over our mental life were put out of action by a drug” (413)
Our questions begin with the very first sentence. For what is the nature, exactly, of that perspective — the “economic point of view” — from which the “masochistic trend” shows up as “mysterious?” In the last entry I noted that this text has long been included among Freud’s “metapsychological” works. According to Freud himself, in his 1915 paper “The Unconscious,” the framework of “metapsychology” embraces the following:
“It will not be unreasonable to give a special name to this whole way of regarding our subject-matter, for it is the consummation of psychoanalytic research. I propose that when we have succeeded in describing a psychical process in its [1] dynamic, [2] topographical, and [3] economic aspects, we should speak of it as a metapsychological presentation.” (184, bracketed numbers mine)
The first two “aspects” of a metapsychology are perhaps roughly familiar to most readers. Throughout Freud’s writings, the “dynamic” perspective construes the mind as a site of forces — cooperating or in conflict, as the case may be. The “topographical” perspective, on the other hand, differentiates this same mind into “systems” — so that a given mental item may belong to the layers “unconscious,” “preconscious,” and “conscious.”
In what, however, does the “economic” perspective consist? In the same place, Freud writes:
“We see how we have gradually been led into adopting a third point of view in our account of psychical phenomena. Besides the dynamic and the topographical points of view, we have adopted an economic one. This endeavors to follow out the vicissitudes of amounts of excitation and to arrive at least at some relative estimate of their magnitude.” (184)
An “economic” treatment of mind, then, seems specifically to concern what is quantitative in it: in this place, “amounts of excitation” — their “magnitude” — and thus, we may extrapolate, the drives as quantifiable sources of these inner excitations.
Let us return now to the opening sentence of Freud’s “Economic Problem”: “The existence of a masochistic trend in the instinctual life of human beings may justly be described as mysterious from the economic point of view.” Now if the “masochistic trend” is indeed “mysterious from the economic point of view,” then we may immediately suppose that this trend is not mysterious in relation to the “dynamic" or “topographic” perspectives. Their premises are evidently consistent with masochism both as a “conflictual” entity and one with largely “unconscious” sources. Hence Freud could not have titled his essay either “The Dynamic Problem of Masochism” or “The Topographic Problem of Masochism.
Instead, to repeat, Freud has conceived this neurosis as a narrowly “economic” problem. If masochism is mysterious from the economic perspective, then, we infer this is because it is (seemingly) inconsistent with the psychoanalytic “arithmetical” understanding of excitations in their various magnitudes, or of the mental apparatus in optimally managing these excitations. This, in any case, is our expectation from the forgoing reflections on Freud’s clarifications in “The Unconscious” essay.
And yet this is precisely not what Freud seems to be saying in the opening paragraph as a whole. Instead, there follows a thematic non sequitur. Once again, the next sentences:
“For if mental processes are governed by the pleasure principle in such a way that their first aim is the avoidance of unpleasure and the obtaining of pleasure, masochism is incomprehensible. If pain and unpleasure can be not simply warnings but actually aims, the pleasure principle is paralysed—it is as though the watchman over our mental life were put out of action by a drug” (413)
To be sure, we have little intuitive difficulty grasping the tension between
masochism, the programatic movement toward pain, and
the pleasure principle, which urges us away from pain as its central law
Yet as we just indicated, this hardly constitutes an economic problem sensu stricto. On the contrary, it appears merely to express the perplexity of any folk psychology when confronted with “irrational” human behavior. Here one imagines a commonsense voice: ‘People want to be happy, no? — Why then would they deliberately make themselves unhappy?’
To put this quibble in a slightly different way: the pleasure principle is essentially a first-personal matter. It pertain to the way experience feels, or what it is like, together with the purported “logic” governing it. It has to do, finally, with subjective motivation. Again, however, Freud has led us to expect an account of masochism, not as phenomenologically mysterious — a “mystery” Freud is hardly the first to register — but economically mysterious. For this reason, we may suspect there is some suppressed conceptual link, an omitted premise, to these opening remarks.
And indeed, Freud will presently fill in this missing premise, which involves a theoretical “equivalence” he had until recently taken largely for granted. Briefly stated: masochism is an “economic” problem per se only if, in suspending the pleasure principle, it also suspends the “constancy” or “Nirvana” principle. For the latter principle does pertain to the management of “magnitudes” of excitation, a plainly third-personal, and finally quantitative matter, rather than a first-personal and qualitative one.
We may look a couple paragraphs ahead for Freud’s descriptions of that principle which is recognizably economic, and essentially so. This principle, Freud writes, is an instance of the broader “tendency towards stability” (413) which in the context of mental life is designated the “Nirvana principle” (413). (In other works, again, the same thing appears as the “constancy principle.”) The “economic” perspective, we said above, pertains to quantifiable “amounts of excitation.” Yet in postulating the Nirvana principle, Freud now tells us, psychoanalysis has precisely “attributed to the mental apparatus the purpose of reducing to nothing, or at least of keeping as low as possible, the sums of excitation which flow in upon it” (413). Hence we have no difficulty in perceiving the economic substance of this principle.
Now Freud’s meaning in the first paragraph is somewhat clearer. In that place, recall, Freud emphasized that “mental processes are governed by the pleasure principle” (413). Yet if this pleasure principle is synonymous with the “nirvana principle,” then masochism poses a problem that is not merely phenomenological but economic. In that case, masochism would violate, not only the human being’s uncontroversial desire to avoid pain, but the psychic apparatus’s injunction — third personal and objective — to keep inner stimulation to a bare minimum. To seek pain, on this conception, is to excite the very stimulation it is the proper task of mind to subdue. In such a situation, masochism really would qualify as a narrowly “economic” problem.
I will elaborate on this “equivalence,” and Freud’s reasons for finally rejecting it, in the next entry.