Beyond the reality principle - ecological conception of sanity

Sierra, March-April, 1993 by Theodore Roszak

In one of his late, speculative essays, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Sigmund Freud asked as ambitious a question as any psychiatrist can raise: what is the place of the psyche in the universe? His answer was wholly despairing. For Freud, the doctrinaire materialist, life and mind were freakish events in an infinite and unfeeling cosmos subject to the tyrannical rule of entropy. "The attributes of life," said Freud,"were at some time evoked in inanimate matter by the action of a force of whose nature we can form no conception .... The tension which then arose in what had hitherto been an inanimate substance endeavored to cancel itself out. In this way the first instinct came into being: the instinct to return to the inanimate state."

In Freud's time, the newly discovered second law of thermodynamics had attained cult status as the final answer to the riddle of the universe. For many fin de siecle intellectuals, entropic doom became irrefutable proof of the futility of life. Human consciousness was a transient, unaccountable accident destined for annihilation; ultimately, every chemical process in the universe would succumb to the great and final "heat death" and return to its "naturally" lifeless condition. After that, for all eternity, there would be nothing at all except the measureless waste of space sparsely littered with the wandering cinders of long-expired stars. Firmly under the spell of the inexorable second law, Freud could see no better destiny for life than merciful extinction. A "death instinct" lay at the foundations of the psyche, summoning consciousness back to the tranquility of "the inanimate state." "Nature," Freud was convinced, "is eternally remote. She destroys us--coldly, cruelly, relentlessly"

Freud's bleak vision of nature continues to haunt mainstream psychiatric thought. It is a sort of negative presence, unmentioned but always in the background: the image of a hostile cosmos that has no congenial relationship to human consciousness. Modern psychiatry's decision to ignore the natural environment and minister to the psyche entirely within a personal or social frame of reference derives in large measure from the cosmological paradigm it inherits from Freud.

Of course, Freud's psychiatric authority is not what it used to be: there is very little in his work that has not been vigorously challenged, if not savagely attacked, over the past century. But few modern therapists would question the definition of sanity offered in this passage from Civilization and Its Discontents, one of his most famous essays:

Normally, there is nothing of which we are more certain than the feeling of our self, of our own ego. This ego appears as something autonomous and unitary, marked off distinctly from everything else .... An infant at the breast does not as yet distinguish his ego from the external world as the source of the sensations flowing in upon him .... One comes to learn a procedure by which, through a deliberate direction of one's sensory activities and through suitable muscular action, one can differentiate between what is internal--what belongs to the ego--and what is external--what emanates from the outer world. In this way one takes the first step towards the introduction of the reality principle which is to dominate future development.

While none of us could get through the day without making some common-sense discrimination between the world Out There and the world In Here, Freud reached his conclusions along lines that have had profound consequences for psychiatric theory.. His context here is a discussion of the "oceanic feeling." This is the name he gave to the infant's sense that it and the world flow together in a single, unbounded identity. Freud believed that, while this quasi-mystical experience of union with the external world is appropriate for the baby in its mother's arms, it is neurotic if it survives into adult life. Where does madness begin? For Freud, it was with any mental state in which "the boundary line between the ego and the external world becomes uncertain or in which it is drawn incorrectly." He could never have guessed that a day would come when this seemingly obvious distinction between the self and the world would be viewed as a serious environmental issue by a new breed of ecologically concerned psychologist.

IN ESTABLISHING THE BOUNDARY between self and not-self, Freud used a loaded phrase: the "reality principle." The sane are in touch with reality, the crazy are not. The principle commands less respect now than it did in Freud's day. Confabulating with madness became a favorite psychedelic sport of the 1960s; the main purpose of every "acid test" was to expand consciousness in ways that blurred all the official boundaries. But some who have questioned Freud's reality principle since then have had more than fun and games in mind. In his groundbreaking book Nature and Madness (1982), environmental philosopher Paul Shepard suggested that Freud's rule-of-thumb dichotomy between the objective and the subjective may actually be one of the deep roots of our ecological crisis. Far from being the basis for sanity, it may represent a psychic trauma that has distorted the more balanced relationship between human beings and their natural habitat that Shepard believes existed in pre-civilized times. Our increasing objectification of nature, he argues, may be a liability of civilization that has deepened with every technological development since the invention of agriculture.