In the Project, Freud sees the psyche as a system designed to discharge psychic energy that is transmitted through neurones. Energy bombards the psyche from both inside and out – through endogamous forces and external stimuli. At this point in his thought, Freud believes that the aim of psychic life involves returning to a zero level of excitation, an aim that he later aligns with the pleasure principle. By warding off excitation, the psychic process free the psyche from unpleasure and return it to a state of satisfaction. 53
🙂 – Freud of 1895 Project focused on warding off excitation from external stimuli, too much excitation leads to unpleasure, less excitation more satisfaction
Once Freud conceived of the death drive in 1920, his conception of satisfaction underwent a fundamental shift. Whereas in the vision of the Project and his other pre-1920 work (which views the psyche in terms of the pleasure principle) satisfaction is a state tha the psyche arrives at through the discharge of excitation, after the discovery of the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle satisfaction will consist in the movement of the drive itself, not in the aim that it attains. Nonetheless, what remains constant in these two different economic modes is the absolute psychic primacy of satisfaction. The psyche strives above all to sustain its satisfaction, and it is successful at doing so.
🙂 – pre 1920 Freud said satisfaction = discharge of excitation : post 1920 in Beyond satisfaction = movement of the drive itself
– what is common or constant to both is psychic primacy of satisfaction.
Satisfaction occurs in the operations of the psyche because, as Freud sees it in 1895, the discharge of excitation always occurs. Though there are infinite differences among individual subjects, we can say that all subjects are satisfied subjects insofar as they partake in the process of discharging excitation. For every subject, this process finds a way to occur successfully, even if it encounters a circuitous path in the psyche. Individual difference manifests itself in different psychic paths, but not in the fundamental fact of discharging excitation. 53-54
That is, what the psyche does in universal, but how the psyche goes about doing this varies in each particular case. The universality of what the psyche does allows Freud to recognize that the economy of the psyche produces satisfaction for every subject, even if the subject is unaware of its own satisfaction.
This remains true when Freud turns from the 1895 model of the psyche to the later one centered on the death drive, though in the later theory satisfaction derives from the drive’s constant force rather than from a discharge of excitation. The drive provides an inescapable satisfaction of never letting up.
🙂 – Mcgowan says here that Freud breaks from 1895 Project discharge of excitation : opts for 1920 drive’s constant force provides satisfaction and satisfaction of death drive is constant repetition
The satisfaction that the death drive produces stems from its circular structure: rather than trying to attain satisfaction through an external aim, the drive produces that satisfaction through the process of the repeated movement itself. … The aim of the psychoanalyst – the analyst’s desire – must be to remove the detours that the analysand has placed along the path of the drive in order to allow the analysand to take up completely her or his position in the drive. 55
In Seminar XI, Lacan lays out the situation confronting the analyst: “What we have before us in analysis is a system in which everything turns out all right, and which attains its own sort of satisfaction. If we interfere in this, it is only in so far as we think that there are other ways, shorter ones for example.”
In submitting to analysis, the analysand submits, albeit unknowingly, to this desire for shortening or economizing the path of the drive. This shortening is the analytic cure, and Freud first comes to understand it as such in the 1895 Project where he emphasizes the costs of psychic detours that the subject erects to the flow of psychic energy. 55