Freud's is first and foremost a theory built from first principles. His protracted search for those principles asks no less than what we are fundamentally and which principles of human mental function are sufficiently basic to extend to all human striving. His early psychological conception, presented first in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), finds its most succinct expression in his brief “Formulations on two principles in mental functioning” (1911). That essay, amended by a few extracts from The Interpretation of Dreams, furnishes a good point of departure for an exploration of the genesis of his views.

Freud presents an argument in two parts. First he develops his two principles, the first and more elemental of which, the pleasure principle, holds that we seek in all our doings to avoid pain and, where we can, to cultivate pleasure. Accomplishing that aim does not, however, automatically entail an adaptation to reality; indeed the shortest and most easily attained routes to pleasure do not take reality into account at all and may thus ultimately fail. Therefore, our ability to satisfy our needs mandates a modification of our striving for pleasure, in the form of our accession to the reality principle, and a major complication of our mental process to accommodate the modification. The second portion of Freud's argument describes that accommodation.

THE PRINCIPLES

Asked to identify the most elemental principle that governs human mental life, most people might offer one of the following: acting in the interest of survival; acting to gain control; trying to maintain self-esteem; inviting the approbation of others; trying to be happy. Yet we take risks, some of them life-threatening, such as bungee-jumping, smoking cigarettes, walking tightropes. And we act to lose control, through drugs or alcohol, for instance. We take actions that undermine our self-image: we lie, cheat, or take the easy way out and thereby incur the wrath, rather than the approbation, of others. We suffer, sometimes intentionally, by reading tragedies and horror stories, for example, or by sabotaging our chances to attain something we want.