Beyond the Pleasure Principle

‘The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.’ Virginia Woolf

In the calm of my office, I find myself tracing the contours of a memory along the coving above. A man with grey hair unkept, telling a familiar story, looking to connect his associations from the large couch adjacent me. His articulations are like traffic lights—red spaces for quiet contemplation or uninterrupted moments, amber for hesitancy or ambiguity, green for yearning validations looked for yoked to slow head nodding and a rhetorical ‘…you know?’ interspersed liberally more as habit than choice.

He has a rare tenderness, a gentleness found in those still unused to the world where one finds themselves thrown like clay. He wishes to please. More precisely, he holds a dread fear of pricking displeasure in others. Like leafy brown puddles in autumn rain, his eyes reflect a difficult world, watery images of a world stripped down to basics, hesitant interactions, constant anxiousness, and drained vibrancy.

For this gentle soul, the pursuit of happiness is not half as compelling as the avoidance of its basilisk counterpart—the unhappiness of others.

This avoidance of unhappiness, a universal yet deeply personal concept, intrigued me then as it fascinates me now. There was the tender man, about my age. In this reverie, the mid-fifties, thin-legged, well-fed grey-haired man has been stuck for as long as he can remember looking to insulate himself from the discomfort of finding displeasure in the eyes of others. The psychoanalytic perspective, however, paints a more nuanced picture. It suggests that his refrainment is not just a simple avoidance of pain in the eyes of others, but rather a synthesis borne initially from an escape from unhappiness and pursuit of happiness, a synthesis further choreographed by a complex interplay of shame, anxiousness of anxiousness, and unmet needs.

From this vantage point, the avoidance of unhappiness, as such, cannot simply flush away using terms to describe a usual defensive repertoire. Are we not the species that shows itself as having apotheosised the avoidance of unhappiness into an overarching raison d’être? Do we not elevate this special avoidance in a way reserved for no other release? For the so-called psychotherapist, this avoidance is unique, for it alone may offer the curious person limited access, tantalising glimpses, into the unspoken, the untellable, the unknown.

This special avoidance operates from the hidden, the background, the quiescent; today it is an unrecognised plea for understanding, tomorrow it may be a behaviour requesting a kinder appraisal of our flaws and failures.

That frozen gazes at everyday avoidances happen to us in amber moments should be clear to all. How it is that we might become increasingly aware, perhaps but not necessarily with age, of our shared, universal, central human avoidance, or at least our partially successful coping attempts at this avoidance—though, it must be said, coping attempts are always partial—to ward off suffering for a short while?

We can enjoy our avoidances, our pursuits, and the act of reducing something distressing, however, there is always the sabotaging part of Self to consider—sabotaging in the sense that Doris Lessing explored in her collection of essays entitled Prisons We Choose to Live Inside , or perhaps following the famous line from the song Hotel California: ‘We are all just prisoners here, of our own device.’ We will return to the concept of sabotage presently.

This morning, I find myself back in the room on my familiar green armchair, sitting across from a woman also momentarily caught in her waking reveries. A PR specialist by training, a singer at heart, she carries an air of simmering discontent. Her life, by most conventional metrics, is a tale of modest success—barely enough salary, estranged from her family of origin, a quiet three-bed semi-rural home and a much-loved dog. Unsurprisingly perhaps, happiness eludes her, or she eludes happiness.

The elusive quest for happiness is a thread that runs counter through the fabric of a more accurate conception that one seeks to escape from unhappiness. The former is etched in our songs, our poetry, our literature. It is legion, glorified in our social-media success stories and mourned in our dramas, our tragedies. Freud himself had come to adopt a sanguine view on this confabulation, suggesting that our life’s purpose was not the pursuit of happiness, but rather the earnest desire to evade unhappiness—a basic distinction, one might argue, but a meaningful distinction, as we shall see.

As my forty-something patient unspools her practical concerns, my trance has fully melted away as it becomes increasingly clear that her disillusionment at pursuing happiness was never about accumulating material or status—as advertisements would have us believe. On the contrary, my client is counting the ways she gives a voice to an ear-worm melody that lives within her, her discontent is alive, and its inevitable birth may bring forth the unfulfilled dream-song of her youth.

The more she has explored these past months, the clearer it becomes to her that her unhappiness did not reside in her achievements or perceived failures—considerable as her achievements were and still are: a First Class Maths degree, surviving a family wounded by separation and alcoholism, no mean feats or commonplace accomplishments—but in the avoidance of her implicit goal, in the dance between her professional ambitions and her heart’s desire to sing—lay something else more potent still, something more urgent and lacking: How to cease her avoidance of finding someone to love and be loved by? Or how to find basic trust, where distrust reigns, should such a thing be possible?

When it comes down to it, the pursuit of happiness is such a banal formulation. I mean this in a few basic senses—that a universal type of happiness cannot or will not fit all, if it were simply a case of material or status then surely those with such fortune would never be met in therapy offices, and, more importantly perhaps, ‘pursuit’ appears to suggest an imaginary destination rather than a realistic approach to life.

Suppose it is a pursuit, and it might be. In that case, it is likely as unique as the individual who tracks it, as complex as the circumstances one finds themselves occupying. And if so, it may be a path always already situated somewhere between personal desire and societal expectation, or the confluence of our dreams and our fears; that is, an imaginary location somewhere between our true potential and false or imposed limitations. Now compare the concept of chasing a mythical destination, some such Avalon or Olympus, with an approach one might readily choose each morning, like smiling. Common sense would predict the latter choice, but humans tend to prefer to be so much more enigmatic.

Happiness cannot be a given. To believe otherwise—that happiness is somehow a birth right—is to date, marry, and raise children with disappointment.

As psychotherapists, we are neither casual observers nor scientists studying the journeying of the Other from afar. We are fellow travellers, experienced ethical people navigating the contoured landscape of human experiences, sharing insights along that shared path, gently challenging assumptions or biases, and learning from our clients as they chose a path away from the captivity of unhappiness or dishabituation or stuckness.

Clearly what we can do is to get better at finding ways to reduce unhappiness.

To discuss the issue at hand, Freud calls this avoidance principle the ‘unpleasure principle’ and directs it towards ‘present unpleasure’ instead of ‘pleasure in prospect.’ This is clearly not a hedonic principle like so many would-be Bacchanalians would have us believe.

Problems with the concept of the pleasure principle (PP) do not necessarily stem from its terms, which are simple—and the PP is consistent throughout after 1911—but they arise from PP’s accommodation alongside his other theoretical innovations or the implicative force of the PP. By ‘implicative force’ I am referring to the influence that a specific level of context or experience has on a more general or abstract level of context or meaning. It is an upward influence from the private to the public. For example, how a particular episode or speech-act may affect one’s general identity or relationships (e.g., ‘I don’t want to talk to you at the moment,’ or ‘As long as I am happy nothing else matters’). Implicative force may also present as resistance or counter-power against a dominant or oppressive actor that shapes our contexts and meaning-making.

One may say that Freud’s early work was imprisoned by his topographic model until 1920, where the psyche, or mind, was categorically divided into the systems named Ucs., Pcs., and Cs and governed exclusively by the avoidance of unhappiness. At this stage Freud saw the PP as the primary motivation for human behaviour, nicely encapsulating our innate drive away from pain and towards pleasure. PP was still a function of the id, the entirely unconscious system of the psyche, striving to reduce tension and increase pleasure, often through an action he called wish-fulfilment. And here Freud used the term ‘wish-fulfilment’ to gesture explicitly towards two things: what it is that we might think we want, and what it is that we might think we want to avoid.

However, as Freud progressed in his innovations, he began to recognise that a continuous drive for immediate gratification, viewed from lived experience, clashed with the demands and constraints of reality and made no adequate consideration of securing or maintaining balance.

Thus, in 1920, following innovations concerning the repetition compulsion (1914), Freud introduced the reality principle (RP) concept, which he saw as an essential part of the reality-ego, a part of consciousness that operates based on the belief of life and external reality. The RP is fundamentally an adaptive strategy, postponing the immediate satisfaction demanded by the PP in favour of gains through deferral. By 1923, the story told has become one where the reality function learns to navigate, negotiate, and sometimes resist the desire for immediate pleasure functioning, not to transgress for transgressions sake but in conformance with societal norms and values.

The RP does not subvert the PP. Instead, these two principles coexist to create a continuous push-and-pull dynamic (or dialectic) that presages all our behaviours. The PP, embedded in the unconscious id, and the RP, associated with the ego’s conscious decisions, negotiate to strike a balance between our inherent desires and the constraints or expectations made by life and social relations. Indeed, the move, says Freud, from the dominance of the PP to shared governance alongside the RP is a crucial part of human development. This achievement of a balancing act more or less reflects the maturation process, from the infant, governed by the PP, to the adult, who has learned to defer gratification in line with the secondary process and RP.

Stepping back for a moment, it is in Beyond the Pleasure Principle that Freud introduced perhaps his most misunderstood concept—the death instinct (years earlier referred to by Wilhelm Stekel as Thanatos and Sabina Spielrein as Destruktionstrieb ).

Freud’s death instinct is situated to oppose and bring balance to the life drive—Eros. The death instinct concept—a concept directly concerned with reducing overall excitation to zero—appears slowly from Freud’s prior recognition of the repetition compulsion and for some marks the most major innovation in his system.

It is not perhaps that the death instinct or drive as a proposal for the existence of another drive that causes a degree of confusion; nothing could be clearer than opposing two forces to create or relieve tension, one sees that in PP and RP, for instance—it is Freud’s rather counterintuitive insistence that the death instinct is silent that runs in direct opposition to common sensibilities. That the death instinct runs from a clinically silent realm compelling individuals, through the reality principle (RP), to seek unhappiness, displeasure, sabotage or repeat traumatic experiences takes time to sink in or think about. What did he mean? And how can that be so?

Critics have inevitably interpreted a desire for zero excitation as equivalent to a prospect of death or destruction. Critics of these critics, however, accuse the former of adopting a childlike simplicity to explain a more subtle and complex concept. Melanie Klein, for example, went as far as to situate the clinically silent Todestrieb at the noisy first stages of infant life—with radically generative consequences for all later psychodynamic theories.

Making clear what is not clear about the death drive may be problematic, controversial and easily misinterpretable. To do otherwise would entail starting from a position of saying what one thinks it cannot be. For Freud at least, it is not a drive towards bringing about one’s demise in any direct sense, but rather a drive towards a state of quiescence, non-stimulation, and non-excitation. It is, for him, a return to the inorganic state from which we came—which, admittedly, may lend itself to misreading or misunderstood easily by most. Contrast this with the idea behind so-called Thanatos, often mistakenly attributed to Freud, who not only did not use the term but openly declined to. Thanatos is a proper attribution—coined by Stekel and popularised by Herbert Marcuse—for aggression and self-destructiveness, but this term cannot be identical with a drive intended to reduce excitation. Does aggression decrease excitation, and if so, how?

Equally, can destruction result in construction or reconstruction? For instance, when a fire destroys a forest habitat one year, only for the same environment to replenish and come back stronger the next, how should one frame that causal link? Spielrein’s (1912) paper Destruction As the Cause for Coming Into Being puts forth a similar argument using biology and archetypal symbols. Hers is a theory where all livings beings are composed of a circular causal union of parts: part of them wants to destroy or sabotage themselves or others (a dissolving part), and another part of them wants to create things from the destruction (a transforming part). Spielrein’s circular causal explanation for a death instinct matches the eternal symbol of the ouroboros.

Spielrein (1912) gave examples of how her theory works in nature and in myth. For example, she cited examples where animals die after they have offspring as they give all their energy and body to their progeny. She also notes that the manifestation of the hero archetype may sacrifice themselves to save others or to make the world a better place. She cites these examples, and others, to support her thesis about how destruction may drive a coming-into-being (Entstehungstrieb). Spielrein’s death instinct theory has points of agreement and disagreement with theories of emergence as well as ex nihilo theory, and, as such, present one with a novel and innovative take on the death instinct as giving rise to the coming-into-being of the life instinct (libido or Eros). That Freud knew about the details of Spielrein’s and Stekel’s different formulations for a sabotaging aspect of self—death instinct—during the period leading to 1920 is clear cut.

A closer examination of Spielrein’s intriguing death instinct theory and life reveals a parallel process or mirroring effect between them, which makes both even more fascinating. Here the clinical phrase ‘parallel process’ covers those situations where a clinical supervisor notices the therapist may be enacting or repeating or acting out the same issues or patterns as the client might towards their therapist. By stretching this point a little more, ‘mirroring’ may refer to one situation or activity, say a theory, with an identical copy in another situation or activity, say, a life. This awe-inspiring woman and analyst, so often looked over, came to believe that new life could only be won after a symbolic death.

One may make of the situation regarding differences between Todestrieb and Thanatos and Destruktionstrieb what one wishes to (i.e., clinically silent or noisy from birth, brake or accelerator, dialectic or circular causal relation), suffice to say that eminent figures from Freudian or Kleinian scholarship have not felt any urgent necessity to ponder poor Thanatos at too much length (alas poor Stekel), whereas post-Jungian scholarship continues to push, with considerable success, for circular causal theories of change.

Our collective pursuit of happiness cannot escape the ideologies or limits set under which different societal norms and expectations run. As citizens of contemporary societies, we find ourselves amid an ongoing spectacle—grand stages on which captivating narrative revolve around an almost continuous quest for pleasure. Suspend disbelief for a moment and imagine the societies we inhabit as dissimilar, but stages nonetheless, and the protagonists are us—individuals ceaselessly engaged in the pursuit of happiness. On such stages as these our lives unfold not as light-hearted comedies with romantic endings nor as hero myths nor as suspense-filled thrillers but more commonly as drama, sometimes even tragedy.

Drama such as this—let us think of it as a societal spectacle—peddles a particularly charming storyline. Here happiness’s portrayal as a state of perpetual pleasure, a coveted prize of boat-drinks at sunset, an unbelievable endpoint in the race of life—are idealisations, nothing more. Milestones such as wealth, social status, and material possessions presented to us as necessary waypoints guiding us towards an elusive destination—again, like Avalon or Olympus. This narrative, not so subtly, nudges us towards consuming a pseudo-pleasure principle. That is, a false pleasure principle that sets up stall where the pursuit of pleasure is made the centrepiece with other shiny trinkets and baubles—and where kindness, integrity and family bonds are merely accessories after the fact. I find disavowal in this regard such a fascinating and primitive response, don’t you?

Should one take a moment to think about whether such an attack on virtue might happen, or under what circumstances it does indeed happen—that kindness, integrity and family bonds come to stand for lower overall priorities than pleasure-seeking—the result may of course be salutary. Equally a result which privileges pleasure-seeking over basic virtues, such as those previously mentioned, cannot easily arise through a rational analysis of the situation at hand—surely no-one rationally chooses to demote their kindness or integrity or family bonds in favour of the prospect of more money do they? Hmm. Enigmatic and irrational; that is us in a nutshell.

Reflect now on a character set within this societal spectacle. Let us call him Christian. As a representative of the modern individual, Christian is on a quest to secure his share of happiness amid the swirling drama of life. The societal narrative, emphasising pleasure and success, propels Christian on a relentless path towards consumption and accumulation. The path to pleasure and success is strewn with long-hours, stress, and overwork, often leading poor souls to the neglect of their most special relationships and health. Pleasure, thus conceived, over months and years, morphs into a double-edged sword, its pursuit paradoxically culminating in suffering and unhappiness. In its zeal to promote the pseudo-pleasure principle, the societal narrative has led Christian into a veneer of life, a thin replica, where the pursuit of pleasure-based happiness reigns supreme, and through stealth it has become synonymous with the Good Life.

Meanwhile, the societal spectacle not content to parade the pleasure principle (PP) upside-down then shifts its attention to undervalue the reality principle (RP)—as the sobering reminder that not all desires can or even should be fulfilled, and that negotiating disappointment is an integral part of mature adult life, or what also might be thought of as an unselfish mindset.

When Christian, like any of us might, encounters setbacks, failures, or disappointments, he finds himself ill-equipped to cope; he crumples like a wood block tower or a snowflake in the hand. The harsh realities of life clash with the societal narrative of tireless boat-drinks at sunset, unending happiness, triggering yawning yet unsurprising discontent.

Christian, like so many others, starts to perceive unhappiness as an aberration, an illness, a disease requiring a cure, rather than an inherent part of the human equation.

He curses and personalises his Fate, he then trawls the internet using his smart phone looking for the cheapest nearby therapist.

Navigating this societal conundrum requires striking a balance between the pleasure and reality principles. Like a tightrope walker keeping poise amid the dizzying height and noisy crowd below, acknowledging and accepting this equilibrium may bring us towards a more authentic, or more whole grasp of what it is that we might think happiness or unhappiness represent for us. If both are aspects of the same coin, so to speak, then, what has what a therapist might say going to help?

Our task it seems, then, is to gently refocus or warmly subvert the current script of the societal spectacle. With its exaggerated emphasis on perpetual happiness and eternal boat-drinks alloyed to constant pleasure, the current narrative sorely needs a revision.

In its place, one might wish to foster a new storyline that recognises the inherent monad of happiness and unhappiness, or pleasure and pain. When societies equip their citizens to appreciate this cultural symbiosis, individuals might find themselves better equipped to navigate for themselves, or hold for others, life’s inevitable dramas.

Life, it seems, is made of many milestones and fences; and ours is not a flat race.

Societal norms and expectations often direct our gaze away from happiness and unhappiness proper. The script, written by culture, societal values, and economic conditions, is an ensemble piece, with each of us performing our part in isolation yet together as majorities we agree each version, new or recycled. The narrative slowly adds to itself—by us and for us—influencing our motivations, muting our desires, and our understanding of what it is we might think happiness as such might mean. Through its elaborate orchestration of social and cultural elements, the societal spectacle has become a production more important perhaps than those who act, or act out, upon its boards.

Under the bright lights, sensation and sparkle, the societal spectacle seduces with a hypnotic appeal. It whispers tempting promises of happiness into our children’s ears, persuading them, and us before them, that The Good Life is nothing more than a state of constant pleasure. The golden leaf pillars of wealth, social status, and material possessions appear compelling, as the drama unfolds with each year.

As we wake, let us remember that happiness cannot be a destination, but is in fact an approach, one to choose every day. It should now be clear that a continuous pursuit of pleasure cannot be somehow better than the balanced acceptance of life in all its complexity. That it is harder to look at, or that it takes great courage to live, are givens it is true.

Let us aspire to rewrite the script of the societal spectacle by crafting personal narratives that accurately reflect what it is that we might think we want and what it is that we might think we want to avoid.

As we endeavour to rewrite personal happiness narratives, it becomes crucial to reconsider the so-called death instinct. Just as the pleasure and reality principles, the death instinct is not something the wise ignore. We may recall that Freud reconstructed this instinct as a desire for an inanimate state, a yearning for peace, an inevitable return to calmness and order to attenuate the tumultuous, energy-consuming pursuit of pleasure. It speaks to a universal longing for cessation, rest, and calm.

Take our character Christian, who, like so many of us, has been striving in the societal spectacle’s play of unceasing pleasure-seeking. Amid the unending pursuits, Christian might sense an undercurrent of weariness, a subtle longing for tranquillity. This longing echoes the death instinct in the sense that it is an undertone from within, a yearning for respite from the relentless race. It is not just a morbid wish for quite literal death, but rather a desire for peace, a pause, a moment of stillness amid the unending movement.

Yet our current societal narrative often misconstrues this instinct, casting it as something explicitly negative or depressive. The societal spectacle views the death instinct as an enemy of action, a bane of productivity, an opponent to the ceaseless twenty-four-seven action society demands. It is viewed warily as a counterforce to the pseudo-pleasure principle, and simultaneously an opponent to The Good Life narrative. Again, this is a simple portrayal too easily trapping individuals like Christian into believing that the longing for quiet and rest is an anomaly, something to suppress or something to be denied. One can almost hear the laughter and derision in phrases like, ‘Have another coffee’ or ‘Pull your socks up.’

What if we started to acknowledge and honour this instinct instead? What if we began to perceive it not as a disruptive force, but as the natural balancing mechanism is could be? This instinct, this innate desire for rest and tranquillity, could serve as a natural counterbalance to our continuous pursuit of pleasure and success. It could remind us that we are not just beings who strive and seek pleasure but also those who need rest and repose.

Suppose we allowed the death instinct to play its part in our narratives. In that case, our societal spectacle may start to look quite different. Instead of a precarious race, life could begin to feel like a balanced dance.

Instead of perpetual motion, we could find rhythms of action and rest, striving and being, pleasure-seeking and peace-finding. Instead of chasing after happiness, we could experience it in its fullest sense—as a balance of pleasure and peace, of movement and stillness, of children laughing and quiet moments on boats enjoying drinks.

Individuals like Christian may find a deeper fulfilment in this reimagined societal spectacle. Freed from the oppressive narrative of relentless pursuit, they could find space to breathe, rest, and just be. They could re/discover a relation to their selves.

As we entertain this reverie towards redefining the un/happiness narratives, remember, it is within our power to change the societal spectacle by changing our selves. The script of our societal narrative is not set in stone, it is not a prison, but rather, it is a living document, open to revisions and additions. By acknowledging the interplay of the pleasure principle, the reality principle, and the death instinct proper, we can create a more balanced, realistic, and fulfilling narrative.

Can one imagine a society that embraces these principles not as opposing forces, but as integral parts of a harmonious whole? A society where the pursuit of pleasure, the acceptance of reality, and the respect for tranquillity coexist, shaping a comprehensive narrative of un/happiness? Such a society could co-create a stage where individuals are no longer just actors in a precarious race but become mindful dancers, appreciating every step, pause, and rhythm of life’s dance.

Can we aspire to be the scriptwriters of such a societal narrative? Can we endeavour to create a world where happiness is not a mythical endpoint, but an approach to a path unknown—a dance of pleasure and peace, of aspiration and acceptance, of action and tranquillity? In redefining what it is to be happy or unhappy in this manner, we may yet bring the societal spectacle to a harmonious crescendo that resonates with human existence’s complex and beautiful relation to rationality and irrationality alike.

And yet, as we look forward towards this idealist illusion, this silly naïve dream, a surprising revelation awaits. What if, all this while, we were dancing in circles, entranced by the societal spectacle, only to realise we have been our dance choreographers all along? What if, in the quest for a balanced understanding of happiness, we discover that the script has always been in our hands?

Imagine our character, Christian, at the edge of a precipice. He looks back to the path he has travelled from—a path filled with relentless pursuit of pleasure, punctuated by moments of reality checking, and a persistent longing for peace and rest. He looks forward to the yet unwritten script—a dance of equilibrium, a harmonious narrative of pleasure, reality, and equipoise. And in that moment, Christian realises he has always been at the helm. He has been the choreographer, the agent of his dance, the gardener to his garden, the playwright of his life’s script. The societal spectacle, the grand narrative of The Good Life in which he has diligently played a part, is of his own making.

This realisation serves as a jolt, a kink in the tale. It is a moment of epiphany for Christian.

It is a revelation that to some degree permits him freedom from societal expectations, liberating him to compose his dance or rewrite his script. The turn brings forth a fresh perspective or a new layer of depth to his and our understanding of the necessity for reducing unhappiness. It is a compelling reminder that the power to redefine un/happiness lies nowhere else but within us.

So let us return to our first inquiry about happiness and unhappiness. Suppose we have not learned anything from this short archaeology. In that case, these human states are not isolated phenomena to be pursued or avoided. Rather, they are the weft and warp of lived experience. That they exist in need of balance, shaped and influenced by the pleasure and reality principles, and the death instinct may be nothing more than grist for someone else’s mill.

But most crucially the realisation that we are the agents that may choose our narratives may be compelling.

And so, our sketch concludes not with answers but with a revelation for some and a proposition for others; happiness, unhappiness, they are part of the dance of life; a dance whose rhythm, pace, and choreography are ours to decide. A reflective life may not come about by uncompromisingly chasing happiness nor scrupulously avoiding unhappiness. Is it plausible that composing our dance, writing our script, or finding our rhythm is conceivable or impossible? And that the pleasure principle, the reality principle, and the death instinct proper, may just be a means to learn dance steps, and when the dance floor is ours—and all along has been ours—to safely explore? Thoughts like these, not my thoughts, may yet enliven your travails.

by Paul Wadey M.Res M.Sc MBACP (Accred.)

The moral right of the author has been asserted.