ABSTRACT
The point is not to rule in favor of either story, but to bring out their mythological status. Freud’s hypothesis is based not on the observation of infantile development, but on the analysis of adult neurotic patients. He is working backwards from his own clinical experience. Adult neurotics never display a pure culture of the pleasure principle or a pure culture of the reality principle. Neurotic behavior and imaginative activity are always conflicted. And Freud wants to see these conflicts as the outcome – or synthesis – of conflicting principles. In this way he purports to provide an analysis of the psyche.4 The heuristic value of his myth of the origins of the mind is that one can supposedly see each of these principles at work in isolation. Thus one can get a clearer idea of what each principle is. In actual human reality, one never sees these principles at work on their own.
