Drive

Abstract

For Freud, the pleasure principle is a fundamental principle of the psychische Geschehen, holding the same import as the reality principle.1 Properly speaking, the pleasure principle is the principle par excellence of the psychic processes, for without it, it would not be necessary to promote the recognition of reality to the status of a "principle." Is that to say that our psyche is entirely subordinated to the pursuit of pleasure? On the other hand, is pleasure really something that one can seek out? If that were the case, would not such a pursuit be the act of the body rather than the psyche? One only looks for something that has not yet been found, and the pursuit of pleasure thus presupposes the experience of a lacking pleasure; such an experience is often called "displeasure." What then comes first in all this: the experience of pleasure or that of displeasure? Is pleasure in fact something determinate enough to allow us to know exactly what is lacking when we experience displeasure? On the other hand, could pleasure be nothing other than a release from a sensation of displeasure? Does the satisfaction of having overcome displeasure then occur by itself or does it require our active collaboration? In addition, if pleasure were in fact to result from the accomplishment of an activity, would it then be the product of this activity or rather a sensation accompanying its accomplishment? Are there activities whose accomplishment is unfailingly accompanied by pleasure? If this were the case, what would then become of pleasure once the activity would be completed? Finally, do we even know what pleasure is? Is it an emotion, a prickling of the body, or a heart beating wildly? We shall return to all these questions, although we shall be forced to limit ourselves to approaching them from a very specific and partial perspective. A first limitation comes from the fact that our investigation on the nature of pleasure takes Freud as its point of departure, and more particularly, departs from his conception of the relationship between drive and corporeity. Secondly, we wish to explore the philosophical foundations underlying this psychoanalytic conception of the pleasure principle. There is no need to specify the exact nature of this undertaking in advance, but it should go without saying that we shall only be able to sketch out a project that would demand a much more robust development. The same might be said of our reliance on Leibniz in order to treat the relationship between pleasure and drive and on Schopenhauer in order to define the relationship between pleasure and corporeity. These might seem like somewhat arbitrary choices, even with the knowledge that these two philosophers both elaborated philosophical systems in which at least the drive and desire, if not pleasure, played a capital role. Finally, we must draw attention to the fact that we shall only deal with the most primitive forms of pleasure. We shall thus skip over not only the spiritual forms of pleasure but also the questions, albeit essential, that concern the relationship of pleasure to subjectivity or again, the overlapping of the pleasure affect with intentional representations or linguistic signifiers. Pleasure and Drive The Freudian conception of pleasure is essentially developed on the back of his theory of the drive. In Instincts and their Vicissitudes,2 Freud understands the drive as the experience of an internal excitation that subjects a particular organ or the whole organism to a state of tension comparable to an electric charge. The drive-like character of this tension is made apparent by the fact that the organism seeks to rid itself of the tension as quickly as possible. The experience of the tension is thus inseparable from a craving for or a push toward release. For Freud, this driving tension is by nature both physiological and psychological, but one could also say it properly belongs to neither of these two orders. …