ABSTRACT
The Reality Principle still retains the central feature of the Pleasure Principle-namely, seeking maximal pleasure and a minimum of necessary discomfort. Even the most highly sublimated, aim-inhibited activities still retain some degree of sensory pleasure. The ability to foresee unpleasure in the future is a highly significant and useful development in improving adaptation to reality, but its ultimate aim is still to secure pleasure and to avoid pain. The counter-cathexis comes afterward, like a "flying buttress" on a Gothic cathedral, to bolster and support the main wall, which is decathexis. Freud compared Consciousness with an eye, or a photographic plate, placed at the ocular of a telescope. The Unconscious is the true psychic reality. Psychoanalytic therapy enlarges the area of the Preconscious in certain sectors over that of the Unconscious. The process of analysis, in which expansion of the Preconscious is opposed by emotional resistances, can occur only at the cost of some suffering in the form of anxiety.
