(2004).

Psychoanalysis and History, 6:5-21

Articles
Some Utilitarian Influences in Freud's Early Writings
Aner Govrin, Ph.D.
Abstract
The author argues that (1) the utilitarian ideas of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart
Mill were an important source for Freud's early metapsychology and (2) the two
theories are radically different in many aspects. The facts that link Freud with the
British utilitarian school are described in the first part. These include Freud's
translation of three of Mill's essays, a course Freud took on utilitarianism as a student
and a book written by Mill which Freud cited and held in his library. By stripping
Freud's language of its biological connotations the author claims in the second part
that utilitarianism ideas are ubiquitous in Freud's early thought especially in his
pleasure principle and in the hedonistic side of the human psyche. The third part
describes how Freudian theory breaks with utilitarianism along three lines: the quality
of pleasure, conflict and irrationality. These breaks are demonstrated through concepts
such as the quantity-quality dilemma, constancy principle, repression, conflict and
hallucination. Although there is a strong basic philosophical affinity (certainly with
regard to human motivation) between Freudian thought and utilitarianism the theories
should not be compared on the same level.

In A short account of psychoanalysis Freud (1924a) writes:

Psychoanalysis may be said to have been born with the twentieth century But, as
may well be supposed, it did not drop from the skies ready-made. It had its startingpoint in older ideas, which it developed further; it sprang from earlier suggestions,
which it elaborated. Any history of it must therefore begin with an account of the
influences which determined its origin and should not overlook the times and
circumstances that preceded its creation. (p. 191)
In this paper I centre on older ideas that were elaborated further by Freudthe
utilitarian vision of mankind supported by authors like Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832)
and John Stuart Mill (1806-1873). I believe this is a rather overlooked source of
influence on Freud's metapsychology. It is usually thought that positivistic thought,
German idealism and contemporary neo-Kantian scientific theory were the major
philosophical sources for Freud's understanding of the human mind (e.g. Gay 1988;
Ricoeur 1970; Sulloway 1979). Although British utilitarianism entered Freud's
writings in his regulatory principles of mental functioning, especially in relation to the
pleasure principle, it was never acknowledged by Freud nor by his interpreters as an
important source.

Only very recently, the ideas of John Stuart Mill (Bentham's pupil and editor) are
mentioned as a possible source for Freud's work (Molnar 1999; Ricaud 1999).
Moreover, there is apparently only one source that connects Freud to utilitarianism
(Watson 1958).
As I shall show, Freud was familiar with Bentham's and Mill's idea that avoiding pain
and seeking pleasure are the two most dominant motivational forces in human life.
Interestingly, while Freud did not mention these utilitarian influences, he eagerly
acknowledged another source of the
-5pleasure principle. It was Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801-1887), a pioneer in
experimental psychology and the founder of psychophysics, who took all the credit
(see Sulloway 1979; Schur 1966). Freud's predilection can be seen as related to his
well-known disinclination to acknowledge philosophical sources:
Even when I have moved away from observation, I have carefully avoided any
contact with philosophy proper. This avoidance has been greatly facilitated by
constitutional incapacity. I was always open to the ideas of G.T. Fechner and have
followed that thinker upon many important points. (Freud 1925, p. 59)
When once asked how much philosophy he had read, Freud replied: Very little. As a
young man I felt a strong attraction towards speculation and ruthlessly checked it
(Jones 1953, p. 29).
Perhaps the antagonism Freud expressed towards philosophy and his admiration for
Fechner's psychophysics were part of Freud's reluctance to allow psychoanalysis to
slip into vitalism, mentalism, or even occultismphilosophies that view the mind as a
non-material entity (see a conversation between Freud and Jung cited by Jung 1963,
pp. 150-1). But the influence of utilitarian philosophy on Freud's writings together
with the other philosophical influences that have been proposed such as Nietzsche,
Brentano, Schopenhauer (Robertson 2001; Domenj 2001; Sulloway 1979) shows
that philosophy remained a dominant tradition behind Freud's many fundamental
insights.
But the puzzling thing about Freud and utilitarianism is not merely their
unacknowledged resemblance but also their sharp differences. How could it be that
two theories based on the same principlenamely, that seeking pleasure and avoiding
pain should be regarded as the primary motivation of mankindare profoundly
different from each other? And why Freud is after all not utilitarian despite his
emphasis on the pleasure principle?
The present paper progresses through four main points. First, I describe facts that
prove Freud was familiar with the British utilitarian-empirical school. Second, by
stripping Freud's language from its biological connotations I will demonstrate how
utilitarianism is ubiquitous in Freud's early thinking, especially in Freud's pleasure
principle. I shall argue that Bentham's and Mill's ideas found their way into Freud's
metapsychology and idiom and indirectly caused Freud's regulatory principles. In the
third part I will define three aspects that sharply distinguish Freud from utilitarianism:

the quality of pleasure, conflict and irrationality. These aspects will be demonstrated
through different central concepts in Freudian thoughtquality-quantity, the
constancy principle, repression, and hallucination.
The paper then uses two main methodologies: a historical approach and an
archaeological one, in the sense debated by Foucault and Hacking (1986). In its
historical perspective it describes chains of factual associations that connect Freud
with utilitarianism. But it also tries, in Hacking's words, to understand the conditions
of possibility for ideas (p. 30) and to tell a story
-6about the web of specific sentences that were uttered, and a theory of what made it
possible for those sentences to be uttered (p. 31).

An Important Source of Influence

Let us begin by stating a few facts that might connect Freud to Bentham and Mill. In
1879, when Freud was called up for his year's military service, he translated four
essays by John Stuart Mill (Jones 1953). These essays were translated for Theodor
Gomperz, the editor of Mill's collected writings in German. Jones tells us that it was
Brentano who gave Gomperz Freud's name. Gomperz needed a new translator
because of the unexpected death of his former translator, Eduard Wessel. One of the
essays Freud translated, according to Jones, was Mill on John Grote's elaborate fourvolume study of Plato (Jones 1953, p. 56). In this essay Mill extensively refers to
Bentham's utilitarianism. So Freud must have known about Bentham's philosophy.
But this was not the first time Freud had read about these British philosophers. In
1874, when he was 18, he writes to his friend Eduard Silberstein that on Friday he
regularly attends Brentano's lectures on the utilitarian principle. Freud referred to
Brentano's course on Mill's Utilitarianism published in 1863. This text described
Bentham's and Mill's utilitarian philosophy.
Freud's decision to translate the word pleasure in Mill's (1886) essay on Plato as the
German word Lust is also a hint to his future association between pleasure and the
sexual drives, an association that was perhaps evolved at that time. Actually, Freud's
Lustprinzip should be translated more accurately as the principle of desire and
delight and not as in Strachey's translation pleasure principle (Ornston 1986). While
the utilitarians meant by pleasure any positive affect, Freud's Lust was much more
active and sexual. Perhaps then Lustprinzip was an interpretation based on the
centrality Freud gave to the sexual instincts and not a mere translation of a wellknown concept.
Contrary to our thesis, Jones (1953) dismisses the possibility that Mill's essay had any
influence on Freud's writings:
This was the only work, original or translation, he ever published that had no
connection with his scientific interests, and, although the content of the book probably
appealed to him, his main motive was undoubtedly to kill time and, incidentally, earn
a little money. (p. 55)

It is hard to know if Jones is relying on Freud himself or just repeating his own lack of
appreciation of philosophy which he expressed many times (see, for example, his
discussion on the Project (Jones 1953, p. 384).

Bentham, Mill and Freud

In his best-known work in English, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and
Legislation (1789), Bentham begins with his basic utilitarian claim: Nature has
placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign
-7masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as
well as to determine what we shall do (p. 125). The Fragment starts with the famous
formula, declared as an axiom, that it is the greatest happiness of the greatest
number that is the measure of right and wrong (1789, p. 1).
According to Bentham, the way to judge between alternative courses of action is to
consider the consequences of each, in terms of the pleasure and pain of all the people
affected. Utilitarianism is a general theory about which actions and institutions are
instrumentally desirable; and the idea is that they are so in view of their promotion of
actual expectable happiness, or utility. Utility is therefore to be understood in terms of
happiness. Among his catalogue of pleasures Bentham listed the pleasure of sense
and part of this is the pleasure of sexual sense (p. 156).
Bentham's chief study was planning how there could be a good system of government
and law; that is, how laws could be created so that people being as they actually are
(seeking their own pleasure) might nevertheless do what they ought (seek the greatest
happiness of the members of the community). The essential aim of Bentham's attempt
to produce an exhaustive analysis of pains and pleasures was to lay out before the
legislator the factors that determined the conduct of human beings, and the possible
means of influencing it (Dinwiddy 1989). Bentham devoted great efforts to refining
the calculus of pain and pleasure and working out their implication for legal reforms.
Bentham believed the values of pain and pleasure could be measured according to
their intensity, duration, certainty or uncertainty, propinquity or remoteness, fecundity
and purity. He also believed that gratification as such is always good, and that, while
it may often be necessary to withhold some desires, this is only to ensure that other
desires may be gratified. Mill adopted Bentham's conception of utilitarianism with
some variations. He thought that Bentham's conception of the good was too narrow
and perceived pleasure as complex mental experiences rather then sensations.
Contrary to Bentham, Mill takes the quality of happiness as well as its quantity to be
productive of its value (Donner 1998).
Note the similarity between Bentham and Mill's utilitarian principles and the
following Freudian characterization of the reality principle:

Just as the pleasure-ego can do nothing but wish, work for a yield of pleasure, and
avoid unpleasure, so the reality-ego need do nothing but strive for what is useful and
guard itself against damage. (Freud 191, p. 223, italics mine)
Freud perceived the reality principle not as a new and different phase in life but
merely as a better way to achieve pleasurable goals. Contrary to the ego
psychologist's claim that the reality principle contains free and neutralized aspects
(Hartmann 1939), Freud thought that the pleasure principle remained superior through
the entire life. The correspondence between
-8Freud and Jones (Paskauskas 1993) demonstrates this point. In 1911 after the
publication of Formulations on the two principles of mental functioning, Jones
(26/11/1911) writes to Freud:
I was puzzled by the sharp opposition of the two (the pleasure and reality principles).
I had conceived of the desire for reality as being essentially merely a more effective
method of obtaining gratification than the hallucinatory method. Do I understand you
to mean that it was so originally, having come into existence for this purpose, but that
later on it acquires a meaning of its ownthe search for reality being an aim or
principle in itself, quite apart from the greater power thus won procuring
gratification? Or does it continue to serve the latter in a more roundabout way? In
other words isn't the reality principle constantly a form of sublimation, or do the two
principles become secondarily entirely divorced from each other? (Jones 1953, p.
121)
And Freud answers (14/1/1912):
Your question about the relation of the R. Prinzip to the L. Prinzip is answered in the
paper itself in agreement to what you yourself suppose. The Reality Pr. is only
continuing the work of the L.P. in a more effectual way, gratification being the aim of
both and their opposition only a secondary fact. (Jones 1953, p. 125)

Sir William Hamilton's Pleasure

Principle
Freud not only translated some of Mill's essays, but also kept in his library An
Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy (Mill 1865). Sir William Hamilton
was an exponent of the Scottish philosophy of common sense. Unlike the
empiricists he thought that there are certain powers and beliefs natural to the mind
that can neither be doubted nor justified. Mill took Hamilton to be the leading
opponent to his own empiricism and therefore subjected his views to a severe
criticism. What may interest us here is that in this book Hamilton's views about
pleasure and pain are very similar in their content and idiom to Freud's pleasureunpleasure principle. We know that Freud read Hamilton's book because he cites it in
On Aphasia (Freud 1891, p. 78). According to Hamilton: Pleasure is a reflex of the
spontaneous and unimpeded exertion of a power of whose energy we are conscious.

Pain, a reflex of the overstrained or repressed exertion of such a power (Mill 1865, p.
480). In another paragraph Hamilton's principle seems very close to Freud's
terminology about the constancy principle. According to Hamilton:
A feeling of pleasure is experienced, when any power is consciously exercised in a
suitable manner. That is, when we are neither, on the one hand, conscious of any
restraint upon the energy which it is disposed spontaneously to put forth, nor, on the
other, conscious of any effort in it to put forth an amount of energy greater either in
degree or in continuance, than what it is disposed freely to exert. In other words, we
feel positive pleasure, in proportion as our powers are exercised, but not overexercised; we feel positive pain, in proportion as they are compelled either not to
operate, or to operate too much. (p. 482)
Hamilton is actually postulating a kind of equilibrium that can be upset: the free
energy of the power tends to put forth maximally. It can either put
-9forth in a less amount or in a greater amount. Pleasure is experienced when the power
is put forth in the exact proper limit, a suitable manner. Freud's concepts of pain and
pleasure have more resemblance to Hamilton's than to Bentham's and Mill's ideas.
Hamilton postulates an intrinsic factor, inside the personality, which has to be
balanced, a formulation that is missing in the philosophy of Bentham and Mill.
Freud might then have been influenced by Mill's polemic with Hamilton somewhere
before 1891 in his choice of most of the terminology concerning the pleasure
principle, including concepts like stability, pleasure, pain, energy, reflex, power,
stimulation, amount, quantity, proportion and intensity. Note that Hamilton's
principles (as they are depicted by Mill) are almost similar to Fechner's constancy
principle which Freud cites in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud 1920):
Every psycho-physical motion rising above the threshold of consciousness is attended
by pleasure in proportion as, beyond a certain limit, it approximates to complete
stability, and is attended by unpleasure in proportion as, beyond a certain limit, it
deviates from complete stability. (pp. 8-9)
It seems then that Freud's assumption that the pleasure principle is directed towards
keeping the quantity of excitation low (p. 9) is congruent with these two plausible
sources.
A paragraph in Civilization and Its Discontents (Freud 1930) offers an important clue
about the development of the conceptualization of the pleasure principle. We read:
One can hardly be wrong in concluding that the idea of life having a purpose stands
and falls with the religious system. We will therefore turn to the less ambitious
question of what men themselves show by their behaviour to be the purpose and
intention of their lives. What do they demand of life and wish to achieve in it? The
answer to this can hardly be in doubt. They strive after happiness; they want to
become happy and to remain so. This endeavour has two sides, a positive and a

negative aim. It aims, on the one hand, at an absence of pain and unpleasure, and, on
the other, of the experiencing of strong feelings of pleasure. (p. 76)
Freud wrote a great deal about pleasure, satisfaction of instincts, and stimulus
discharge but it is hard to find even a handful of pointers about happiness in his
writings. And this is the only text where Freud places the two conceptspleasure and
happinesstogether. Happiness is a much more abstract and philosophical term,
quite estranged from Freud's physical and economic metaphors. This conjunction
between the two conceptspleasure principle and happinesssuggests a vision of
the pleasure-unpleasure principle as functioning beyond tension reduction and closer
to Mill's and Bentham's utilitarian ideas.
Perhaps the two theses of Freud's formulations on the pleasure principlepleasure as
a reduction of tension and the unelaborated idea that pleasure is happiness correspond
to two different sources that influenced Freud.
- 10 Could it be that Freud's pleasure principle in its broader sense, that of happiness,
expresses Mill's and Bentham's unrecognized influence on Freud?
We can find a clue to this idea in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud 1920) in
which Freud mentioned that philosophy and psychology were both major sources of
influence on his pleasure principle. Although Fechner was the only source he
mentioned, perhaps he was not the only one Freud had on his mind. Freud writes:
It is of no concern to us in this connection to enquire how far, with this hypothesis of
the pleasure principle, we have approached or adopted any particular, historically
established, philosophical system Priority and originality are not among the aims
that psycho-analytic work sets itself. (p. 7)

Freud's Break with Utilitarianism

The study of the utilitarian sources in Freud's thought highlights also how far Freud
departed from Bentham's and Mill's ideas. Even though some authors (Smith 1977;
Schur 1966) emphasized that the concepts pleasure and pain were used by Freud
differently at different times, and hence have an ambiguity of meanings, Freudian
thought involves two radical modifications of pleasure and pain: (a) while
utilitarianism centres only on conscious behaviour, for Freud pleasure and pain are not
always conscious; (b) while in utilitarian thinking pain and pleasure oppose and
cancel each other, Freud argued that every pain contains in itself the possibility of a
feeling of pleasure (Freud 1905, p. 159, in a footnote added in 1924).
Three lines of breakthroughs can depict the radical difference between Freud and
utilitarianism: the quality of pleasure, conflict and rationality. This can be seen mainly
in the analyses of the quantity-quality problem and the concepts of conflict, repression
and hallucination.

The Quality of Pleasure

Do Freud and Bentham mean the same thing in their discussion about pleasure?
Should pleasure be described in quantity terms or in quality terms? Is pleasure a
sensation? Is it cumulative? Does it depend on internal factors or external factors? Is it
inside or outside?
Some of the answers to these questions can be found in the quantity-quality dilemma
and the constancy principle.

The Quantity-Quality Problem

It is remarkable how economic formulations were central in Freud's day. The
quantity-quality question, for example, bothered almost everyone from the Empiricist
tradition including Freud, the Helmholtz school of medicine, Fechner, Herbart and
Exner (Sulloway 1979). This question evoked so much interest because it reflects the
intermediate zone between psychology and materialism. Many scholars, including
Freud, thought that, if only
- 11 psychological processes (which can be described only in quality terms) can be
described by mechanistic and molecular explanation (quantity terms), then
psychology would have a firm ground in physiology. It is interesting to see the
solutions Bentham, Mill and Freud proposed to the quantity-quality question.
Bentham and Mill, like Freud, perceived pain and pleasure in quantity and economical
terms. If different actions can be measured quantitatively then it is possible to decide
which brings the maximum utility. They saw pain and pleasure as a linear,
homogeneous one-dimensional factor. Bentham, for example, in his hedonic calculus
tried to weigh pleasures against each other. For Bentham a unit of pleasure is the
minimum state of sensibility that can be distinguished from indifference. Bentham's
hedonic calculus ignores the quality, as distinct from the quantity, of pleasure. Unlike
Mill, Bentham did not acknowledge that there are higher and lower pleasures. If this
is acknowledged, the utilitarian premise that pleasure is the only good would be
contradicted since, in this case, the higher pleasures have an element of value other
than the mere quantity of pleasure that the lower pleasures lacks. This contradicts
Bentham's aim to put utilitarian philosophy under one principle.
Mill broadens Bentham's calculus by insisting on qualitative differences in pleasures,
so that an intellectual or spiritual pleasure is not just quantitatively equivalent to a
large number of physical pleasures. But how can one judge the difference of quality of
two pleasures? Mill answers: On a question which is the best worth having of two
pleasures, or which of two modes of existence is the most grateful to the feelings,
apart from its moral attributes and from its consequences, the judgement of those who
are qualified by knowledge of both, or, if they differ, that of the majority among them,
must be admitted as final (Mill 1979, p. 213).

Mill means by quality a kind of normative property (Donner 1998). Therefore he

retains, in fact, a monistic view of utilitarianism. To Bentham's utilitarianism he
simply adds one further property, quality, as a normative property. One way to
describe Mill's and Bentham's concepts of pleasure and pain is to compare them with
two different attitudes towards money. For Bentham pleasure adds coins to the
person's pocket while pain subtracts them. The most pleasurable act or experience is
that which gives the person the largest amount of coins. Mill adds to this calculus the
fact that there are also different kinds of coins: gold, silver and metal. It is the
majority of the people that decide which experience or act is gold, silver or metal and
what is the price in coins of each experience (normative property). These claims were
revolutionary at their time because not only do they describe a new psychology of
people but they also made it a theory of ethics.
In A project for a scientific psychology (Freud 1950), Freud struggles with a similar
quantity-quality dilemma expressed through neurology
- 12 idioms. For him the problem of acknowledging qualities is that quality is not exactly a
unit that can be measured by science because science recognizes only quantities (p.
309). In the Project Freud overcomes the quality-quantity problem by concluding
that it is the system of perceptual neurons that gives rise to the various qualities. The
qualities are basically conscious sensations that come about only where quantities are
so far as possible excluded (p. 309). However, later on, in The economic problem of
masochism (Freud 1924b) Freud came to the conclusion that the economic point of
view was pressed into carrying much more than its fair share of explanatory weight:
Pleasure and unpleasure, therefore, cannot be referred to an increase or decrease of a
quantity (), although they obviously have a great deal to do with that factor. It
appears that they depend, not on this quantitative factor, but on some characteristic of
it which we can only describe as a qualitative one. If we were able to say what this
qualitative characteristic is, we should be much further advanced in psychology. (p.
160)

The Constancy Principle

The constancy principle is mentioned in the Project that was written six years after
Freud had translated Mill's essays. Although the Project owes much to the tradition
of Herbart and Fechner, we can see in it one of the basic tenets of Freud's early
thought regarding happiness, pleasure and pain. Behind the Project's neurological
terminology we hear Freud's specifications of what happiness is, or what brings utility
to people. We can put his main thesis in a quasi-utilitarian equation: The main factor
that counts in deciding what act (or state of mind) maximizes utility and happiness is
the stability and peacefulness of the psychological system. Therefore the psychical
apparatus will endeavour to strive for minimum excitation.
In the Project Freud calls this principle principle of inertia which is the First
Principle Theorem. According to this principle, if the psychical apparatus is charged
with a quantity of excitation, from an external or endogenous stimulus, it will

immediately strive to get rid of it by discharging itself. The discharge, according to

this principle, is proportional to the charge. Freud also called this principle Zero
Principle since zero represents the baseline initial position of the system. This is of
course identical to what we know as the principle of homeostasis. Both the pleasure
principle and the unpleasure principle aimed at gaining homeostasis. The unpleasure
principle, the first that Freud introduced (1900, Ch. VII), regulates the elimination of
a disturbance of the equilibrium which is equated with unpleasure. The psychical
system is directed towards keeping itself so far as possible free from stimuli (Freud
1900, p. 565). The pleasure principle regulates the need to recreate by action or by
fantasy any situation which has created the experience of satisfaction through the
elimination of drive tension. For Freud then one of the main things that brings
pleasure
- 13 is satiation, a state of mind that appears after a drive has been satisfied. It is not clear,
however, if by pleasure Freud meant an experiential affective component, a
subjective experience, or did he use pleasure only as an economic formulation (for
different opinions, see Loewald 1971, p. 114; Smith 1977).
Although the neuron hypothesis was not alien to Mill (Mill claimed that it is
chemical combination that stands behind the process in which association is created
in the mind), Freud's conception of the regulatory principle is different from British
utilitarianism.
First, Freud's description of the human subject is different from the utilitarian one.
Contrary to Bentham's and Mill's rational and conscious subject, Freud's
metapsychology in his Project contains no subject. There is no actual person who
can be happy or who can feel pain, who can choose between alternatives (even if they
are unconscious), or who can even have different states of minds. All we have here
are complexities of the neuronal events (Freud 1895, p. 292) and the principles that
govern them. As Jones indicates, in his editor's introduction (p. 290), the Project is
ostensibly a neurological document. In the Project the emphasis is on the
environmental impact upon the organism and the organism's reaction to it. The
instincts are only shadowy entities, with scarcely even a name. What was later
regarded as the pleasure principle is here regarded solely as an inhibiting
mechanism.
Another difference between Freud and utilitarianism lies in the specific content that
brings pleasure. For Mill and Bentham every person craves for more happiness and
pleasure. In contrast, according to Freud's regulatory principle every person seeks to
find constancy and avoid unsatisfied needs. For Freud people are not seeking to gain
more and more sex, money, love or anything that might satisfy them. Rather they
want to reduce the tension stemming from their instinctual needs. Hedonistic
behaviour is therefore not an aim by itself but a way to satisfy demanding needs.
Another radical difference lies in the types of pleasure and their intensity. For
Bentham and Mill pleasures are ordinary things in daily life: eating a good meal,
reading a book, walking in beautiful countryside. The quantity of pleasures of a
complex action, like walking in beautiful countryside, can be aggregated (the

beautiful view plus the pleasant weather) while those involving pain (minus the
tiredness from the walk) should be subtracted. A decision of whether to perform one
action or an alternative one is the result of this calculus. Freud's pleasures are very
different. They are dramatic, intense, wild, sexual, and can sometimes be very
tormenting. They can govern the person's entire life. They usually have a subjective
meaning, which others do not share. Moreover, behind daily occurrences in ordinary
life hide unconscious and intense instinctual drives. Daily pleasures almost always
represent instinctual and unconscious pleasures from conflicting sources.
- 14 -

Conflict
For Bentham and Mill a sole agent that strives to gain pleasure and avoid pain
represents the person. Thus, there should be no internal conflict in human life; just a
relatively simple decision of which of two or more actions brings more pleasure and
avoids more pain. In contrast, Freud's mind is a complex network of structures that
includes wishes and drives with contradictory needs and conflicting mental agents.
This means that the psyche as a system has different parts or structures (i.e. id, ego
and superego, Cs/Ucs), and that each of these structures has its own interest. Freud
emphasized both in the Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1917) and in a 1919
footnote appended to The Interpretation of Dreams (1900, pp. 580-1) about the fairytale and the three wishes that, if we want to understand a wish fulfilment, we must
always ask: Who is experiencing pleasure?
In many cases, as in the case of a joke, a dream or a neurotic symptom, the utility of
one part of the personality contradicts the utility of other parts of the personality. The
stability that the psychical apparatus aims for is not only in reducing tension from
inner or external stimulus but also in solving the conflicts of the different interests.
Therefore, in order to understand what mental states, feelings and actions are
instrumentally desirable for people, what promotes their actual happiness, or utility,
we must first answer some important questions. What will be the benefit of the action
that brings utility to one structure of the personality? Which structure of the
personality will pay the price for fulfilling the utility of the other structure? And what
conditions are necessary for the psyche, as a whole system, to be capable of deciding
which of its structures will gain utility?
In particular, there is an inherent antagonism between the utility of the sexual drives
and the utility of the ego drives:
We have discovered that every instinct tries to make itself effective by activating ideas
that are in keeping with its aims. These instincts are not always compatible with one
another; their interest often comes into conflict. Opposition between ideas is only an
expression of struggles between the various instincts. From the point of view of our
attempted explanation, an especially important part is played by the undeniable
opposition between the instincts which subserve sexuality, the attainment of sexual
pleasure, and those other instincts, which have as their aim the self-preservation of the
individualthe ego instincts. (Freud 1910a, pp. 213-14)

The conflict between the two parts stems from the fact that both have the same organs
at their disposal. For example:
The mouth serves for kissing as well as for eating and communication by speech; the
eyes perceive not only alterations in the external world which are important for the
preservation of life, but also characteristics of objects which lead to their being chosen
as objects of lovetheir charm. (p. 216)
So a satisfaction of one interest or pleasure might cause pleasure in one place and
unpleasure in another (Freud 1915, p. 147).
- 15 The result of the conflict is that one group of interests (or ideas, or instincts) pushes
the other group to the unconscious:
Psychoanalysis traces mental life back to an interplay between forces that favour
or inhibit one another. If in any instance one group of ideas remains in the
unconscious, psychoanalysis maintains that the isolation and state of
unconsciousness of this group of ideas have been caused by an active opposition on
the part of the other groups. The process owing to which it has met with this fate is
known as repression. (Freud 1910a, p. 213)
Repression has an important role in bringing a relief from intrapsychic conflict and
pain. Repression helps the person to direct his state of mind toward a specific
interest that its fulfilment might bring satisfaction and diminish the pressure from
the antagonistic side. Repression is a constitutive mechanism that helps to decide
and to follow that decision in a less painful way. The repressed content is not just a
particular instance of some wishful but forbidden impulse but rather a whole modality
of desire.
The rational decision that Bentham and Mill prescribe between two modes of action,
in accordance with the ability of that action to bring more pleasure or to avoid pain,
was turned by Freud into an unconscious one. Thus, if Bentham and Mill were mostly
interested in working out in detail the means by which utilitarianism could be
achieved in society, Freud was interested in finding out the complicated mechanisms
inside each person that lie behind the psychology of utilitarianism.

Irrationality and Hallucination

For Bentham and Mill people are basically rational beings and do what they think is
good for them. It is the rationality of the behaviour of seeking pleasure and avoiding
pain that justifies turning this behaviour into a philosophy of ethics. In contrast, Freud
demonstrated again and again that the yearning to gain pleasure and to avoid pain
often leads to a breaking with reality causing irrational and pathological behaviour.
The concept of hallucination in Freud's Formulations on the two principles of mental
functioning (Freud 1911) demonstrates this point.

In hallucination the paradigm is once again that of drives' satisfaction. After the baby
has felt an experience of satiety from drinking his mother's milk he will tend to
hallucinate this experience. Here we can see that the need-satisfaction paradigm is so
strong that the person does not always need real objects. Momentary pleasure can be
gained through mere hallucination. In Freud's thinking, but not in utilitarianism, one
can achieve pleasure through fantasy and not just through an action. Of course, in
such a situation real satisfaction did not occur and the infant learns how to distinguish
such hallucinatory perceptions from a real fulfilment and to avoid them in the future.
But in some pathological cases hallucination remains the main aim to achieve
satisfaction or to avoid pain. Indeed, pathological behaviour is a
- 16 special case in which the need for satisfaction and avoidance of pain is superior to any
other motivation and brings to a distortion of reality:
{In the case of amentia psychosis} the ego breaks off its relation to reality; it
withdraws the cathexis from the systems of perception With this turning away
from reality, reality-testing is got rid of, the wishful phantasies are able to press
forward into the system, and they are there regarded as a better reality. (Freud 1917, p.
233)
Here lies another important break between Freud and British utilitarianism. Freud,
unlike Bentham and Mill, postulates a difference between happiness and utility on the
one hand and seeking pleasure and avoiding pain on the other. In hallucination, for
example, the need to gain a momentary pleasure brings the patient to a detachment
from reality that might make him miserable. In neurosis the need to avoid pain is so
strong that the patient prefers to have symptoms and be unhappy than to confront the
pain that arises from awareness of his sexual or aggressive wishes. As Freud (1910a)
writes:
We see that human beings fall ill when, as a result of external obstacles or of an
internal lack of adaptation, the satisfaction of their erotic needs in reality is frustrated.
We see that they then take flight into illness in order that by its help they may find
satisfaction to take the place of what has been frustrated we find that the
withdrawal from reality is the main purpose of the illness but also the main damage
caused by it. (p. 49)
From a utilitarian point of view the psychotic and the neurotic made rational choices
because more pain would be experienced without their symptoms. Had they not
distorted reality perhaps they would have been exposed to tremendous painful
experiences. Nevertheless, the pathological choice of the patient involves a gross
distortion of reality and therefore it is against his utility. In the case of the psychotic it
includes a withdrawal of the cathexis from perception. As for neurosis it
serves no useful purpose whatever, since it uses up forces which would have been
more profitably employed in dealing rationally with the dangerous situation. (Freud
1923a, p. 104)

Freud shows then the irrationality of the hedonic calculus in the psychical apparatus.
The pressures of gaining pleasure and avoiding pain in the short run are so great that
long-term utility is being neglected and must be put aside. But why would a person be
so irrational and turn against himself? One of Freud's explanations is that it happens
in cases where the hedonistic side of the person is blocked by the moral demand put
by society. It is the civilized standards internalized in each person that block the way
to sexual pleasure. Freud (1910b) noted that not all the energy from the instincts could
be sublimated exchanging the sexual aim for another socially accepted one. He
blames society for blocking the satisfaction of sexual needs and by that creating
neurosis:
- 17 A certain portion of the repressed libidinal impulses has a claim to direct satisfaction
and ought to find it in life. Our civilized standards make life too difficult for the
majority of human organizations. Those standards consequently encourage the retreat
from reality and the generating of neuroses, without achieving any surplus of cultural
gain by this excess of sexual repression. {We should not} forget that the satisfaction
of the individual happiness cannot be erased from among the aims of our civilization.
(p. 54)

Utilitarianism and Freudian Thought

I hope I have proved by now that it is wrong to put Freudian thought and
utilitarianism on the same level. Utilitarianism is a value theory. It concerns the
assessment of human life because it wants to bring change in the quality of life.
Schacht (1991) argued that in the nineteenth century philosophy ceased to be
fundamentally metaphysical and took an anthropological turna turn that was
political, social and cultural. For nineteenth-century philosophers issues pertaining to
the quality of human life became centralissues not so much matters of what we can
know as of what we can (and can best) become. And, for the nineteenth-century
philosophers, issues could not be considered in abstraction from considerations of
historical nature, taking into account what human beings collectively have become.
That is exactly the point where Freud and utilitarianism meet. They both have a theory
of the psychology of human nature and they both emphasize the centrality of the
pleasure principle. But they theorize from very different perspectives. While for
Bentham and Mill the pleasure principle is an important resource for ethics, Freudian
psychology is much richer in its psychological scope. Liberated from the need to find
ethical solutions to human problems Freud does not hesitate to explore psychological
dimensions which Bentham and Mill would not have dreamed of treading. Whereas
Freud is much more interested in exploring the actual human being with all its
richness and contradictions Bentham and Mill support their value theory on a
psychology of an abstract man, which is supposed to apply to all cases. In this sense,
the relations between the two can be compared to Marx's critique of the Feuerbach
theses. Feuerbach's sensualism and communalism were an important source for Karl
Marx's development of an anthropological humanism. But Feuerbach, as Marx
claimed in Theses on Feuerbach (Engels & Marx 1998), mystifies the realm of pure
ideas. He never arrives at really existing, active men but stops at the abstraction man.
Just like Freud and utilitarianism, Marx's writings are not only different from

Feuerbach. They are the landmarks of breakthrough and novelty that define new
streams of thought. Of course we must remember that utilitarianism is not less popular
and familiar than Freud and that it was once considered to be a very challenging and
revolutionary ethic.
Freud departs from utilitarianism also in his rhetoric and the manner in which he deals
with issues. This difference resembles a gap between
- 18 Nietzche and other philosophers (Schacht 1983). This is why Freud's theory is much
more Nietzschean then it is Benthamian. Bentham and Mill approach human nature a
priori, attempting to ascertain self-evident first principles from which conclusions
with respect to them may be deduced or inferred. Such a procedure may issue in a
logically rigorous system; but as Schacht (1983) pointed out in non-Nietzschean
philosophies neither the appearance of self-evidence of the first principles selected
nor the logical rigour with which consequences are inferred from them establishes that
the system is anything more than a description of a possible world (p. 12). Freud, on
the other hand, like Nietzche, is interested in a broad range of forms of human activity
and experience, from the social and the religious to the artistic and the scientific. His
interest and curiosity are heightened when he finds that the rules he himself
discovered do not hold at any time and in any case. Following Schacht's (1983)
description of Nietzsche it is interesting to compare Freud with a lawyer who takes on
difficult cases with no quick or easy resolution. Just as a courtroom verdict can be
appealed, a case made by a philosopher can always be reconsidered. That is why
Freud (1920) is free to write in Beyond the Pleasure Principle:
It is incorrect to talk of the dominance of the pleasure principle over the course of
mental processes. If such dominance existed, the immense majority of our mental
processes would have to be accompanied by pleasure or lead to pleasure, whereas
universal experience completely contradicts any such conclusion. The most that can
be said, therefore, is that there exists in the mind a strong tendency towards the
pleasure principle, but that that tendency is opposed by certain other forces or
circumstances, so that the final outcome cannot always be in harmony with the
tendency towards pleasure. (pp. 9-10)
While Freud wanted to create a discipline that aims at understanding people with all
their contradictory aspects, Bentham and Mill wanted to create a rational ethical
philosophy that by its nature cannot tolerate contradictions, irrationality and
incongruity. Freud (1923b) made it clear which of the two systems he prefers:
Psycho-analysis is not, like philosophies, a system starting out from a few sharply
defined basic concepts, seeking to grasp the whole universe with the help of these
and, once it is completed, having no room for fresh discoveries or better
understanding. On the contrary, it keeps close to the facts in its field of study, seeks to
solve the immediate problems of observation, gropes its way forward by the help of
experience, is always incomplete and always ready to correct or modify its theories.
(pp. 253-4)

Acknowledgements
I deeply thank Prof. Beatriz Priel, Dr Jose Brunner and Dr Eran Rolnik for their
helpful remarks and close attention to the reading of this text. I also thank Michael
Molnar for his assistance in exploring Freud's translation of Mill's essays.
- 19 -

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- 21 -

Article Citation [Who Cited This?]

Govrin, A. (2004). Some Utilitarian Influences in Freud's Early Writings.
Psychoanal. Hist., 6:5-21