OF PLEASURE/DISPLEASURE
Freudism means teaching of Sigmund Freud in the form in which it was created by him in the period from 1900 to 1938 and implies the classical (orthodox) psychoanalysis, in contrast to the neo-Freudism, analytical psychology of Jung and individual psychology of Adler.
I. Babel wrote: “… we are born to enjoy the work, fight and love.”…
Undoubtedly he absorbed all the theories of pleasure, dominating from the mid–20th century to the present day, as the basis of mental world of the man. According to these theories, “the element of the male inner world is an eternal pursuit of pleasure, which he derives from the fight-war, labor and sex. And if the first two the man rejects sooner or later by this or that reason, he is trying to prolong sex by all imaginable and unimaginable ways, beyond time and space. That is why sexuality is more known as the “basic instinct” and not because it serves the instinct of reproduction.
Eric Fromm called researchers first of all to define the terms. Let us follow his wise advice. Without going into the intricacies of psychoanalysis (psychoanalysis requires more careful study), we note that, according to the traditional Freud’s approach, deriving pleasure underlies the psychic world. The explanatory dictionary defines “PLEASURE” as a feeling of joy and contentment from pleasant sensations; enjoyment of the pleasure of meeting, of a trip, work; finding pleasure in reading books; having pleasure of seeing somebody, being engaged in something; pleasing somebody with a conversation, walk; being happy to listen to music, doing something for fun …; and finally live happily, carefree, just for fun.
One may not accept the latter because it is unnatural to man’s mental world; his elements are perpetual search for adventures, comprehension of new, solving or inventing simple or complex puzzles of life. Only in the whirlpool of life the majority of men tear the flowers of pleasure. The aphorism: “Every woman should be a mystery” is a wonderful gift to all women ever invented by man for all times and for all. Women try to comply with a “mystery”, and men are always in search of this “mystery” clue. Dali grotesquely portrayed this mystery of woman.
Salvador Dali, The infinite mystery (1938).
None of psychological terminological dictionaries contains an explanation of the concept “pleasure”, though “pleasure” refers to the category of psychological terms. It is most likely the result of evaluation work of the brain, which occurs after receiving information and its reflection in the form of sensation.
Sensation (Empfmdung) is a psychological function to comprehend the immediate reality through the sense organs. French psychologists call it “la fonction du reel” (a reality function), which is a set of knowledge of external factors obtained through the senses function. “The sensation does not tell me what it is, but only indicates that there is something”. The sensation, as an elementary initial phenomenon of cognition, is something definitely given, not subjected to rational laws, as opposed to thinking or feeling. Physiological sensitivity, which appears upon stroking the skin, is an elementary pleasure.
The presence of skin sensitivity is a genetic factor included into the human genetic program, which can be pleasant, because it does not cause muscle tension, but relaxes it. It can be added – a sensation is an initial change of homeostasis, the local “first wave” of the brain activity, excitement of mental element of the awakening brain. The ability to sense is the need, built into the genetic program, which is necessary for activation of the brain. The vital activity of the brain can be judged only due to a wave nature of the irritation sensation recorded by electroencephalogram.
Feeling – the second level of cognition – is the ability of a living being to perceive the amount of mental and physical sensations, to respond to external stimuli; it is the inner excitement of the whole mental ocean, in which a person lives and able to respond to life’s impressions: can experience the elation, the rush. Feeling is a psychological function, which informs the subject about the value of certain things for him, about their importance. The feeling above all is a process that takes place between the EGO and some given content, moreover, a process that gives the content a certain value in the sense of accepting or rejecting it (“pleasure” or “displeasure”). But at the same time, the feeling is also a process, which besides the specific content of consciousness as an amount of sensations of the moment, may originate in isolation, as the mood. In this case, there is a causal relationship with the earlier consciousness contents or association with the unconscious contents. However, the mood – be it general or only partial feeling – is an evidence of evaluation of the whole state of consciousness (pleasant or unpleasant) available at the moment, rather than evaluation of not specified, single content of consciousness. Therefore, the feeling is above all is quite a subjective process, which can be in all respects independent of external stimulation, though it is attached to every sensation. Even the “indifferent” sensation has “sensual coloring”, namely the coloring of indifference, which again expresses the well-known estimate.
Therefore the feeling is also a kind of judgment, which is different, however, from an intellectual judgment. Evaluation with the help of feeling covers all content of consciousness, whatever kind it may be. If the intensity of feeling is increased, there appears affect, accompanied with noticeable bodily innervations – it is already a storm. The feeling is different from the affect – it does not cause appreciable bodily innervations, i.e. causes no more and no less innervations than a normal thinking process. The sensations, all the more, feelings realize that part of the genetic program, that essentially important unit of it, which evaluates the incoming information of pleasant-unpleasant, “pleasure-displeasure”.
The concept “pleasure” belongs to psychoanalysis, according to which the activity of the mental apparatus begins with an unpleasant sensation (the principle of displeasure), which is automatically regulated by the principle of pleasure. The principle of displeasure/pleasure was understood in classical psychoanalysis as an initial concept, setting the program of mental functioning and based on the innate human unconscious desire to avoid displeasure and achieve pleasure. Freud, realizing lack of knowledge in physiology, neurophysiology, has come to the conclusion that pleasure is somehow connected with the decrease, reduction of the amount of irritations, while dissatisfaction – with their increase, and the mental apparatus serves the purpose of release from irritations coming in from outside and from within. He assumed that on the basis of the facts that prompted to accept the domination of the pleasure principle in mental life, we could talk about the internal tendency of the mental apparatus to keep the quantity of excitation in it is as low as possible, at a constant level. In accordance with this assumption, he expressed the idea of the need to take into account that in the mental life there also existed the principle of constancy (homeostasis), of which, strictly speaking, the pleasure principle was derived.
A newborn baby perceives the surrounding world as a flow of rapidly changing sensations. The bulk of the flow passes a baby because of underdeveloped receptors corresponding to these modalities. Immediately after the birth, skin and pain sensitivities in infants are the most advanced. Perhaps this is due to the fact that in the course of phylogeny, these sensitivities are the oldest. It is through them that a baby gets the first unpleasant sensations, which as the first irritants violate homeostasis, along with hunger and physiological needs. These irritants are the cause of the vibrating (oscillating) activity of the developing brain, which automatically switches the reflexes. Reflex motor activity eliminates the cause of displeasure, changing it to pleasure. A baby is experiencing the feeling of pleasure, first of all, from the pleasant tactile sensations. The baby is born with a pretty impressive collection of tactile reception. Even before birth, it felt the warmth of mother’s hands, touched cheeks with fingers, felt the movement of amniotic fluid as vibration sensations. The little one not merely heard these vibrations but felt by the whole body. A new world prepared a lot of tactile surprises for the baby. Kiss of mother is the first of them, the warmth of her skin – the second. There are so many further discoveries that the count is lost. A newborn baby comes into the world, keeping in stock a large set of behaviors based on the unconditioned reflexes. Most of them are vital for