This is a challenging process for me—to write impulsively—but I guess I just have allow myself to be driven by my instincts…pleasure/unpleasure? Life or Death? Not quite sure yet, I guess I’ll find out in the end whether I’ve delayed unpleasure through repression…
We must be patient and wait for other means and opportunities for investigation. We must hold ourselves too in readiness to abandon the path we have followed for a time, if it should seem to lead to no good result. Only such ‘true believers’ as expect from science a substitute for the creed they have relinquished will take it amiss if the investigator develops his views further or even transforms them.
Sigmund Freud’s Project for a Scientific Psychology and Beyond the Pleasure Principle are definitely works that benefit from a comparative reading. In these writings, Freud is working through his intuitions to come up with answers as to what drives the individual and components of his/her physiology are at work in these processes.
In The Project, Freud’s intention is, as the title obviously indicates, to develop a “scientific psychology”—to situate psychology as a natural science—by examining what happens inside the mind/nervous system and by articulating the “quantitative” aspects (“states”) of the “specifiable material particles”. As any authoritative science requires, Freud develops a massive set of terms and theorems (many with scientifically appropriate abbreviations and Greek symbols) that emerge sequentially from his logical deductions (extracted from his clinical observations and borrowed from other sciences) in an equation oriented fashion—root-tree thought manifest indeed.
There are some foundational assumptions that I think are useful to understand where he takes The Project, most fundamentally the idea that the mind/thought/the individual/the nervous system/all living things seek balance or homeostasis—a desire, or impulse to return to a resting state. The measurable units that are this process’ operative elements are the neurons (“the ultimate unit of the nervous system”) and they function to according to the principle of neuronal inertia where the balance they gravitate towards is a state of rest through discharge. Their reflex action is a flight from anything that excites the system. With increasing complexity of an organism the neurones must not only respond to external stimulation, but also to eternally present internal stimuli: hunger, respiration, sexuality—instincts. This secondary function of the nervous system is where Freud locates his psychology, in which the system has had to develop mechanisms to deal with these “exigencies of life” and bring them to a normal state.
(at this point, 40minutes in, I realize that I am only summarizing…Jack Kerouac is much better at this than I…and 400 words in, I haven’t said my own thoughts about all this, so I’ll try again.)
Ok, from what I read, Freud is creating this science as a means to create a legitimate approach for dealing with psychological behaviours that deviate from an ideal-type normal individual. He probably wants to deal with the critics of his field, but also because it appears that he is a real believer of science, to develop the knowledge about the systems at work in order to have justifiable, effective methods of helping people be “normal”. The fact that he derives his science of normal, universal human psychology from observations of “excessively intense ideas” (hysteria and obsession) is odd—perhaps this is a misreading on my part, but it seems that this idea of intensity or quantitative characteristics that break through thresholds of the neurones is built not from core to the periphery as his logic generally follows, instead the norm is derived from the deviant. In trying to map out his science, I find his style lends him to turning dead ends into cases for another explanation or for another new term—for example, if permeable or impermeable neurones cannot fully account for perceptual quality in consciousness, then there must be something else, (aha!) a system of perceptual neurons. Not that there’s anything wrong with it, it fits with the scientific method. I still have to figure out why this bothers me.
Anyways…
I think I need to restart. I need to slice into these writings of Freud, excise the critical concepts that are critical, interesting, and hopefully connected or thematic in some way. This next attempt at taking on The Project definitely also has a keen eye on Beyond the Pleasure Principle; What is it in the earlier piece (and his other work) that Freud feels a scientific urgency to go beyond in the later?
Freud’s theoretical, hypothetical lab rat is an ideal-type individual. His clinical observations of individuals with “excessively intense ideas” form the basis of his quantitative scale—along which his scientific psychology is mapped out. This piece sets out to prove the drives shaping human behaviour, to triangulate the object of study between: forces in the world external to the individual that can effect “neuronal” activity, the functioning of component parts of the system—primarily the outcomes of translation between external stimuli and internal instincts (exigencies of life)—, and scientific principles governing the nervous system. This triangulation allows Freud to project an experimental model or system to put this rat through.
“Mental events” are regulated in the secondary functions of the nervous system, according to Freud’s explanation of the relationship between the system’s anatomy and the principles it attempts to orient its normal state to. The neurones that comprise the nervous system whether they turned towards the external or internal are governed principles of inertia or constancy—that like all matter, neurones have a desired resting state that they are always tending towards or trying to maintain. In trying to achieve respective states, neurones discharge or give-off; with regards to endogenous stimuli, the aim is to satisfy the exigencies by accumulating a constant level of quantity. The differentiation between the neurones essentially determines the pathways excitations travel along.
Here, furthermore, we have a glimpse of a trend which may perhaps govern the construction of the nervous system out of several systems: an ever-increasing keeping-off of Qn from the neurones. Thus the structure of the nervous system would serve the purpose of discharging it. When the system is reaches its limits, unable to efficiently function according to this, pathological phenomena are the manifest failures.
Within the differentiations that regulate the phenomena, we find important elements of the mind—memory, perception, consciousness, ego, identity, etc. –that are developed in the individual by life experience.
