MDSA01H3 Study Guide - Final Guide: Richard Rorty, Stanley Fish, Crowd Surfing
Document Summary
Sigmund freud attempts to understand the physic structure of the mind, Psychoanalytic scholars explore how media texts reflect human mental drives toward unity, pleasure, and desire. Sigmund freud notions of individual subjectivity, identity, and consciousness are born out of an essential opposition between what he called the pleasure principle and the reality principle. The pleasure principle is the uncontrollable human drive to satisfy desire, or an appetite for something that promises enjoyment, satisfaction, and pleasure in its attainment. Commonly recognized desires include yearnings for sex, power, or food. The reality principle represents the constant curbing of desire according to possibility, law, or social convention. As infants we are driven by the pure, uncontrolled gratification of desire, but we learn to control that drive as we grow older and integrate into society. Psychoanalytic theory posits that the human psyche is born out of the tense relationship between the pleasure and reality principles.
