Sigmund Freud so influenced psychological thinking that a summary of theoretical viewpoints in the field of psychology of learning is incomplete without reference to him. However, it is not easy to extract a coherent theory of learning from Freud's writing, for while he was interested in individual development and the reeducation that goes on in psychotherapy, the problems he worked on were not those with which learning theorists have been chiefly concerned (Hilgard & Bower, 1975, p. 347).
Hedonistic theories--stating that man seeks pleasure and avoids pain--are among the oldest interpretations of human conduct. There is no doubt that learning is controlled by way of reward and punishment. Freud's pleasure principle is in accord with these facts, and his interpretation of the pleasure principle represents one of the first points of correspondence between his views and those of learning theorists. The corresponding principle in contemporary learning theory is the law of effect or reinforcement theory. The broad conception, common to both psychoanalysis and learning theory, is that a need state is a state of high tension. What controls the direction of movement is a tendency to restore some equilibrium, thus reducing tension. Freud talked about a return to a constant quiescent state, which the physiologists, after Cannon, refer to homeostasis. The principle goes back to Claude Bernard, but it is also shared by Freud and the learning theorists (Hilgard & Bower, 1975, p. 348).
The important aspect of Freud's tension reduction theory that is less well represented in the law of effect is the basic principle that an aroused need that remains unsatisfied produces a fantasy of the goal-object that could satisfy the need. The first area of correspondence, then, between learning theories and psychoanalysis is the family resemblance between the tension reduction interpretation of the law of effect (reinforcement theory in one of its...