But I did offer an alternative. My point was that the dialectical approach alone cannot sufficiently account for repression (related to this is how Freud’s understanding of the reality principle and the pleasure principle is likewise insufficient).
There are innumerable drives and unconscious factors involved in something like repression, as well as environmental factors as well: genetics, family rearing, one’s society and cultural customs. Does a male or female repress more based on a divergence from expected or desired reality as opposed to actual reality? Does one’s family and values he was raised with affect his propensity to instinctively repress his urges for pleasure (e.g. what is the role of personality, common values or intellect)? And what social outlets exist for this repressed energy, and how does the existence of these potential outlets (sports, video games/media, religion, crime, leisure, drugs, sex, etc) affect the initial impulse and need to repress?
In terms of the unconscious we have to reconcile with cognitive dissonance - if we understand repression dialectically in terms of Freud’s reality (R) and pleasure (P) principles, then is it merely the apperception and implicit awareness of this disconnect that drives repression, or is a more conscious dissonance involved here which would put repression in both the conscious and unconscious camps, as well as both the cognitive and emotional? Freud’s R and P span this sort of awareness, but in terms of actually describing what is going on in the mind or biological brain they are vague concepts, their ability to describe is limited as a result. Thus we must (as was another of my initial points here) take a closer and more critical look at the terms involved here:
First, R as the idea that there exists a set of demands and conditions upon one’s existence, and these can be known by man through various ways. How are these known? It seems irrelevant to Freud. That they exist to be summed up under one ‘principle’ is enough for him. Are our perceptions of these demands and conditions accurate? Once again this seems not to matter much. Freud can form a R based solely on the idea of the simple and irrefutable fact that the environment has limitations built into it. As with much of Freud, this is not some grand realisation, but common sense and also quite obvious from the start. Yet if we are to understand repression then the relationship between R and P needs to be outlined in greater detail, else we are just speculating and making things up (which is of course what Freud did much of the time). Without an understanding of how the apperception of environmental demands and conditions impacts influences man’s expectations and psyche we cannot know how it interacts with P. For example, to illustrate this point: John desires a new car, as his current car is almost broken down. He realises that he does not have very much money at the moment. How does he guage his desire for a new car (his pleasure) as it relates to the reality of the possibility for purchasing a new car? Does he wait a while to save more money to thus better satisfy his pleasure with a better car? Or does he give in and buy a sufficient but cheaper car, giving him sooner pleasure but at the expense of the strength or amount of the pleasure itself? And which truly represents a repression, if any? If indeed this is the meaning of repression, the practical and forced limitation of P, then repression amounts to nothing more than R itself and thus the entire dialectical synthesis breaks down into self-reference and circularity.
Next, this of course leads us into analysing P a bit more. How do we simply take Freud at his word that “pleasure” is the motivating factor? If we isolate P without R first, we see how P is the result of one’s internal biological needs, psychological desires, impulses and instincts and conditionings - all of these can come together to generate the type of pleasure that we seek. Does John want a red sportscar or a black SUV? Does he want a small compact or a economical hybrid? Does he value speed more than gas mileage, flashy looks over long-term reliability? He might look at his own experiences to understand where these more specific desires come from - we can be sure that they do come from somewhere, but in terms of P itself they are somewhat irrelevant; however they become very relevant when we posit P in the presence of R: R places restrictions on P and thus forces John to actualise his nuances of pleasure, weighing one desire against another. If an economical car conforms to R more than a flashy car, but his desire (pleasure) for a flashy car exceeds that for an economical car, how does he reconcile this? In what method does he place this reconciliation? And certainly we can see how different individuals, based on their values, character, impulsiveness, personality, intellect and reasoning ability can arrive at different means and results from such an reconciliation? And what about how one’s culture and social rules and norms impacts all of these personal factors involved here?
So we see how P in terms of R is a tricky subject for John, as it is for anyone - R imposes real restrictions on P that must be reconciled somehow. And as Freud would have us believe, if P is not satisfied as much as it possibly can be then repression results - but one problem with this is that P can never be maximized when it is bound to R. Thus repression is seen by Freud as an inevitability - but is it really? Are we all and always repressing ourselves on a deeper level, merely because our P is not maximized to the highest possible extent? That seems foolish because it implies that R acts on P but that P cannot change as a result of this - P can change, and indeed does change, based on R. Given numerous interactions with one’s environment P moves to conform to R over time. P changes, and so we can see that the ‘P in terms of R = repression’ is simplistic in that it does not account for the possibiliy that P can decrease to diminish repression, to the point where potentially P = R! and thus repression ceases (understand ‘=’ here as only representing the alignment of P and R to a degree sufficient to fail to cause the generation of repression). When our desires (pleasures) are brought into more direct alignment with the possibilities presented to us by our reality, repression fades as there is no longer any need for repression to be generated at all. So the dialectic here focuses only on synthesising R and P first, and then synthesising repression and R, but this comes at the expense of realising that repression can drop to zero, or near-zero.
Another factor the dialectic here does not take into account is that the synthesis of P with repression itself can result not only in more repression of an unconscious type, but also in the reduction of P itself - P can change based on R, but what about based on repression? Of course P will change in the presence of repression, as the same psychological compensating mechanisms of homeostasis and reaction which generate repression to begin with in order to maintain P are at work in subsequently reducing P in the presence of an otherwise irreducible repression (if R cannot be changed and repression cannot be mitigated by other means, P will tend to change itself).
Perhaps you begin to see what I mean here? Freud cannot possibly account for all of these subtleties. Even the simple case of “John wants a new car” cannot be handled by a dialectical synthesis, not without a complete generalising and ignorance of the true factors involved in John’s decision, and the relationships these factors play with each other. . . the dialectic ignores the quality or type of relations between R and P (because it is ignorant of what constitutes R and P in themselves, and also of what these constitutive factors subsequently constitute in relation to each other), and thus is doomed to misunderstand these relations.
Absent this more detailed and critical attempt to understand R, P and repression, Freud’s dialectical synthesis of ‘P, R = repression’ amounts to nothing more than a completely obvious common sense, and has almost no explanatory or descriptive power at all - in otherwords it is all but useless.