Pleasure Principle

Definition

A principle governing human psychological functioning, whereby unpleasure drives psychological and behavioral activity.

Introduction

Freud called this the “unpleasure principle” for years (Strachey 1966). He was always clear that the preponderant driver of subjective experience and of motor action was unpleasure.

“Sensations of a pleasurable nature have not anything inherently impelling about them, whereas unpleasurable ones have it in the highest degree. The latter impel towards change, towards discharge, and that is why we interpret unpleasure as implying a heightening and pleasure a lowering of energetic cathexis…Let us call what becomes conscious as pleasure and unpleasure a quantitative and qualitative ‘something’…This ‘something’ behaves like a repressed impulse. It can exert driving force without the ego noticing the compulsion. Not until there is resistance to the compulsion, a hold-up in the discharge-reaction, does the ‘something’ at once become conscious as...