Reality Principle

the ego learns that it must inevitably go without immediate satisfaction, postpone gratification, learn to endure a degree of pain, and altogether renounce certain sources of pleasure. Thus trained, the ego becomes ‘reasonable,’ is no longer controlled by the pleasure-principle, but follows the REALITY-PRINCIPLE, which at bottom also seeks pleasure— although a delayed and diminished pleasure

Freud’s canonical formulation defines the reality principle as a modification of the pleasure principle whereby the ego accepts deferred and diminished gratification under the compulsion of necessity.

Freud, Sigmund, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, 1917thesis

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It is generally understood that the reality principle involves the individual in anger and reactive destruction, but my thesis is that the destruction plays its part in making the reality, placing the object outside the self.

Winnicott revises the standard account by arguing that destruction is not merely a consequence of reality-confrontation but its generative mechanism, actively constituting the object as external.

Winnicott, D W, Playing and Reality, 1971thesis

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To associate the unconscious only with the pleasure principle, as opposed to the reality principle, is proof of a depreciating tendency and corresponds to a conscious defense mechanism.

Neumann argues that Freud’s allocation of the unconscious to the pleasure principle misrepresents instinctual life, which in fact commands a reality-orientation far superior to nascent consciousness.

Neumann, Erich, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, 2019thesis

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under the continual tutelage of the discriminative, masculine spirit, ever searching for laws and principles, the ‘reality principle’ comes to be represented by men.

Neumann embeds the reality principle within a gendered developmental schema, identifying it with the emergence of discriminative, masculine ego-consciousness wresting itself from the maternal unconscious.

Neumann, Erich, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, 2019thesis

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every apparently rigorous and irreducible opposition (for example the opposition of the secondary to the primary) comes to be qualified, at one moment

Derrida’s analysis of différance in Freud implies that the reality principle/pleasure principle opposition is itself a provisional deferral within a general economy, not a stable structural binary.

Derrida, Jacques, Margins of Philosophy, 1982supporting

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all this activity of thought merely constitutes about path to wish-fulfilment which has been made necessary by experience. Thought is after all nothing but a substitute for a hallucinatory wish;

The Interpretation of Dreams anticipates the reality principle’s logic by showing that secondary-process thought is a detour imposed on wish-fulfilment by the constraints of external reality.

Freud, Sigmund, The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900supporting

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