Sigmund Freud and His Interpretation of the Principles of Repetition

In Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud claims that when children repeat unpleasant situations. And experiences in a game, it is the same like life events of neurotics. Who reproduce experience of displeasure in different situations. In this way Freud refers to relationships between people that follow the same pattern. While transferring relationships in the clinical practice of psychoanalysis, which is the so-called manifestations of neurosis of fate. In all these cases Freud is talking about the constant return, the repetition of the same event.

Freud discovered that all situations of constant repetitions are united by the tendency of obsessive repetition. Which goes beyond the principle of pleasure. This is an obsessive repetition that has more coercive force than the pleasure principle that has been relegated to it. Thus, a painful and anxious situation will be repeated in the mind of a person again and again, sometimes subsequently incarnating in various forms and playing out in certain life circumstances.

So, all repetitions follow the same goal, which is to return to the previous state of things. For example, birds migrations are manifestations of a tendency to repeat. Freud comes to the conclusion that life manifests itself as a disturbance of peace, which was inherent in the state of inanimate nature. Lifelessness is the earliest state of life. Emerging from an inanimate state, life goes a long and returns to a state of lifelessness.

However, according to the Freud’s principle of obtaining maximum pleasure. Total functioning of the human psyche has a reverse side. Firstly, satisfaction occurs only within the framework of the psyche itself, without going beyond its limits. Secondly, it is accompanied unforeseen sufferings, as a person has a need for pleasure only when he suffers from his absence. Otherwise he does not need this pleasure. That is how Freud comes to the idea that in the human psyche, along with the pleasure principle, such a self-organizing principle is formed, the functional activity of which is consistent not only with the human needs, but also with the conditions of external reality. This new Freud’s principle, the reality principle, is a kind of opposing force to the pleasure principle, which makes appropriate adjustments to the flow of mental processes.

The Freud’s reality principle goes beyond the pleasure principle and suggests that for a person it is more important what is real, even if it is unpleasant, rather than what provides pleasure. Just like a person striving for pleasure is guided by the desire to enjoy and avoid displeasure, so he, who adheres to the reality principle, is guided by the search for benefits and ways to insure him from harm. On one hand, Freud was far from the thought that the reality principle eliminates any possibility of a person receiving pleasure while incomplete pleasure is eliminated in order to provide him/her with more reliable, albeit delayed satisfaction. On the other hand, Freud’s reality principle is nothing more than a modification of the pleasure principle, the program action of which retains its significance for the functional activity of a person.

Based on relationship between the reality principle and the pleasure principle, Freud interprets accordingly the emergence of conflict between the conscious and the unconscious as the psychic apparatus is not always able to reconcile the activity as it is guided by the pleasure principle, while obeying the reality principle. Because the pleasure principle is dominant in the sphere of unconscious drives, it often takes precedence over the reality principle, which inevitably leads to intrapsychic conflicts.

Thus, the structural-functional analysis of an individual’s personality led Freud to recognize the tragedy of human existence as we always have a psychic battle from the moment of birth through the whole life time between the consciousness and the unconscious, between mind and passions.

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