Thought may be defined in general as mental activity, conscious or unconscious, based on the various modes of representation, including the most archaic. More narrowly, the meaning of thought may be confined to ideational activity, dependent on the faculty of judgment and on the faculty that brings into conjunction images of things and images of words. The discussion here will be restricted to the narrower conception of thought as ideational activity, but always bear in mind that the narrower meaning is deeply rooted in the more general one.
Freud approached ideational thought from three different angles, which did not necessarily overlap. The first was the "psychological" approach, as outlined in the "Project for a Scientific Psychology" (1950c [1895]) and further developed in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a), "Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning" (1911b), and "Negation" (1925h). In this perspective, Freud analyzed the thought process in relation to perception, language, memory traces, and action, for which, in Freud's view, thought was a substitute. The second approach, a "genetic" one, was a response, in essence, to the question of the origins of thought as a search for knowledge. This line of enquiry was concerned primarily with the child's urge to find things out and sought the libidinal origins of this drive and the circumstances that set it in motion. The four main Freudian works pertinent here are Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d), "On the Sexual Theories of Children" (1908c), the case history of "little Hans" (1909b), and the analysis of Leonardo da Vinci (1910c), which situate thought activity relative to the instinctual realm and describe the various fates for which thoughts may be destined: inhibition, obsessive intellectualization, or sublimation. Freud's third approach to thought was an original way of looking, not at the actual activity of thought, but at what is expected of it. This was the "anthropological" approach, to be found notably in Totem and Taboo (1912-1913a), which developed the concepts of magical thought and animistic thought in relation to thought activity during childhood and in pathology.
In the "Project for a Scientific Psychology" (1950c [1895]), Freud argued that thought processes are provoked by dissonance between a memory imprinted by a wish and a cathexis that seems to belong to the wish. When the two do not coincide, a biological signal triggers thought; when they do, another signal terminates such activity and precipitates a discharge (action). Sixteen years later, in "Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning" (1911b), Freud proposed a similar account of the act of judgment, which "had to decide whether a given idea was true or false—that is, whether it was in agreement with reality or not—the decision being determined by making a comparison with the memory-traces of reality" (p. 221). Already in the "Project for a Scientific Psychology," he had stressed that it was possible for judgment to have no objective beyond itself, such as mnemonic activity, which is self-sufficient, or the examination of new perceptual elements. In Freud's theory, the role of judgment is in fact circumscribed both by recollection and by investigation.
In "Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning," Freud defined thought as an activity that enabled the psychic apparatus to postpone discharge (action) when it would be inappropriate, and that brought together the impressions left by objects ("presentations") and their linguistic designators (words). Freud also set off a "species of thought-activity . . . kept free from reality-testing and . . . subordinated to the pleasure principle alone," namely fantasizing, which began with children's play and survived in daydreams (1911b, p. 222). Here Freud was broadening the concept of thought in a way also met with in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a), where Freud divided the notion of "dream-thoughts" into "essential dream-thoughts" (the dream itself, uncensored) and "latent dream thoughts." The latter comprise the much broader set of thoughts originating in the multiple channels linking the latent to the manifest and of associations arising from contiguity and resemblance and produced during the work of interpretation. Even though an intellectual activity, such as calculation or deduction, may appear in a dream, "an act of judgment in a dream is only a repetition of some prototype in the dream-thoughts," a repetition that may be "so neatly employed that to begin with it may give the impression of independent intellectual activity in the dream" (1900a, p. 459).
Whereas the psychological approach offered a description of thought activity, the genetic approach raised an entirely different question: What makes us think? The question calls for identifying causes sufficient to account for the large quantities of libidinal energy devoted to thought activity. Freud posited an "instinct for knowledge or research" (1905d, p. 194). This independent and atypical instinct was not bound to any erogenous zone but drew pleasure from other so-called component instincts, namely the instinct to see and the instinct for mastery. Freud needed the difficult concept of sublimation here to explain this diversion of the instinct's aim and the change of its object. As early as the "Project for a Scientific Psychology" (1950c [1895]), Freud had pointed up the importance of the visual function for understanding. He stressed it even more in his essay on Leonardo da Vinci, who famously observed that the eyes are "the window to the soul." Freud's logical progression from the desire to look (Schaulust) to the instinct for knowledge (Wisstrieb) was based primarily on the fact that the wish to see was not satisfied with contemplating or even scrutinizing, but strove to compare. The perception of difference and the comparison of several variants of what is recognized as the same thing are steps toward the abstraction that enables us to think and classify.
According to Freud, the instinct for knowledge is awakened when children become interested in birth—a practical interest aimed at coping with the arrival of younger siblings (1908c). This curiosity, not satisfied by the parents' answers, leads the child to engage in intense theorizing and to devise answers, sometimes the classical ones, sometimes not, to unanswered questions. This theorizing is associated with masturbation and, like it, remains unfulfilled. Freud considered this lack of fulfillment as one of the sources of intellectual inhibition.
In his write-up of the case of "little Hans" (1909b), his write-up of the case of the "Wolf Man" (1918b [1914]), and his analysis of Leonardo da Vinci (1910c), Freud explores the fate of this instinct for knowledge, which may either fall prey to inhibition, in tandem with a violent surge of sexual repression, or overcome inhibitory forces and re-emerge from the depths of the unconscious in the form of an obsessive thought. Or again, in the "rarest and most perfect" cases, the instinct may escape both fates: "The libido evades the fate of repression by being sublimated from the very beginning into curiosity and by becoming attached to the powerful instinct for research as a reinforcement" (1910c, p. 80).
Melanie Klein continued this line of investigation by developing the notion of an epistemophilic instinct, a very early curiosity concerning the inside of the mother's body and the babies presumably found there. Beginning with a consideration of the sadistic and destructive dimension of this curiosity, she pointed out that one of the sources of intellectual inhibition was the inability to obtain clarity of thought because of anxiety over what might be found (Klein, 1931).
After its fashion, Freud's third approach to thought, the anthropological approach, also addressed the question of the origin of the human desire to know. Freud felt that primitive thought was characterized by a belief in the "omnipotence of thoughts," a term that he had originally used in connection with an obsessional neurotic, the "Rat Man" (1909d, pp. 233-235), and that denoted an overestimation of the power of thought, resulting in things being erased by their representations. In such cases, intellectual processes are strongly sexualized, and this formed the basis of the belief in the omnipotence of ideas, which led primitive man to attempt to control the world with magic (1912-1913a, p. 89).
But if Freud believed that the question of the origin of life sparked the instinct for knowledge in children, by contrast, "the survivors' position in relation to the dead first caused primitive man to reflect" (1912-1913a, p. 93). He added, however, that this was not a purely intellectual problem, but rather an emotional conflict that had to be resolved. For children, just as for primitive humans, Freud thus rejected the notion of a primary need for causality; practical ends always predominate: "It is not to be supposed that men were inspired to create their first system of the universe by pure speculative curiosity. The practical need for controlling the world around them must have played its part" (1912-1913a, p. 78).
Whether Freud is concerned with the connection between the thought of the obsessive neurotic and that of primitive people, or with how the philosopher resembles the schizophrenic in mistaking words for things, his wide-ranging reflections on thought and its origins raise a multitude of issues, including that of psychoanalytic thought itself. For, as Freud himself wrote, "When we think in abstractions, there is a danger that we may neglect the relations of words to unconscious thing-presentations, and it must be confessed that the expression and content of our philosophizing then begins to acquire an unwelcome resemblance to the mode of operation of schizophrenics" (1915e, p. 204).
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—SOPHIEDE MIJOLLA-MELLOR
