“These processes strive to gain pleasure our psychic activity draws back from any action that might arouse unpleasure (repression).
Thus we are presented with the task of studying the development of the relationship of neurotics – and mankind in general – to reality, and so of assimilating the psychological significance of the real outside world into the framework of our theories.” The Pleasure Principleĭepending on the translation, Freud’s theory focuses on how “lust” or “unlust” manifests in our day to day thinking processes. Actually, though, every neurotic does the same thing with some fragment of reality. The most extreme type of this turning away from reality is exhibited in certain cases of hallucinatory psychosis where the patient attempts to deny the event that has triggered his insanity. The neurotic turns away from reality because he finds either the whole or parts of it unbearable. Freud’s contribution found that “every neurosis has an effect…of forcing the patient out of real life, of alienating him from reality.
By the time Freud was reaching 1910, certain patterns were emerging from his patients, and with competing contributions from his followers, especially Carl Jung, there was some pressure to provide a heuristic, or a method of investigation to solve these psychological problems.
