The Pleasure Principle: The Epistemological Symptom of Psychoanalysis

Abstract

The epistemology of psychoanalysis suffers from an irreconcilability between the formulations of the functioning of the psyche in terms of the courses of the excitation and of subjective wishes and sensations. Freud postulates a pseudo-linear correlation between these levels, stating that qualitative sensations are simultaneously effects of the courses of the quantity and irreducible to them. The unspecified nature of this covariation opens up an epistemological no man’s land between them, accompanied by a conflict over which perspective will occupy it. Freud effectuated a metonymical substitution of “wish” for “accretions of excitations”, displacing the status of cause from the quantitative to the qualitative, resulting in the latter’s occupation of the in-between zone. It is argued that this enables the pleasure principle to act as a compromise formation serving to keep the fundament together, hence functioning as an “epistemological symptom”. It is also argued that this symptom is linked to a constitutive “primal repression” of the principle of constancy, and that “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” might be grasped as the lifting of this repression and the partial dissolution of its symptom.

Keywords:

• Epistemological Symptom Keyword: Epistemological Symptom
• Metapsychology Keyword: Metapsychology
• The Pleasure Principle Keyword: The Pleasure Principle
• The Principle of Constancy Keyword: The Principle of Constancy
• ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ Keyword: ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’

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Rights: In Copyright