The concept of functional pleasure: Should it be abandoned?

Abstract

The authors investigate the relationship between the concept of functional pleasure as defined by Fenichel and a number of other psychoanalytic concepts. Considered in the light of this concept, the pleasure–unpleasure principle as defined by Freud is to be distinguished in terms of a pleasure principle and a principle of avoiding unpleasure. These are then reunified in the sense of an unpleasure–functional pleasure principle, to which the substitutive formations of the repressed are subjected. It is argued that, in the realization of substitutive formations of repressed genital–sexual instinctual wishes, the intentional erogenous pleasure changes into a functional pleasure, in which a successful defence finds its experiential expression.

Keywords:

• Pleasure
• unpleasure
• functional pleasure

Notes

¹Fenichel (1934a, p. 307) terms this pleasure, “pleasure in anxiety.”

²Freud (1920, p. 17) gives another example: “If the doctor looks down the child's throat or carries out some small operations on him, we may be quite sure that that these frightening experiences will be the subject of the next game; but we must not in that connection overlook the fact that there is a yield of pleasure from another source. As the child passes over from the passivity of the experience to the activity of the game, he hands on the disagreeable experience to one of his playmates and in this way revenges himself on a substitute.”

³Referring to a child's omnipotence due to its excretory productions, this term was probably first used by Abraham (1923, p. 404).

⁴Sexualisation here refers to ego functions which have taken on an unconscious sexual meaning (e.g. Coen, 1981; Krystal, 1981), as in, for example, the sexualized thinking of neurotic patients.

⁵Of course, a new symptom formation can also appear, for example in the form of impotence or frigidity, instead of a new substitutive formation.