FEUD’S THEORIES OF PLEASURE have ‘been criticized more per-

sistently, and perhaps with more justification, than any other F segment of his metapsychology. In a representative statement, Szasz maintains that Freud’s account of unpleasurable affects is more mature than his theory of pleasure, because the former have been explained in terms of “ego functions, signals, and communi-cations, ” whereas “our understanding of pleasure has remained rooted in physiological and id-oriented concepts ” (1957, pp. 206-207). Although this criticism has some validity when it is applied to the systematized assertions of early psychoanalytic theory, it is not entirely accurate to state that the psychoanalytic conception of pleasure “has remained rooted ” in Freud’s early speculations. Not only did Freud himself offer compelling theories to account for the various manifestations of the experience of pleasure, but the psychoanalytic ego and id psychologists also have supple-mented and provided a balance for Freud’s views with theoretical-ly consistent conceptualizations of pleasure, often derived from unsystematized suggestions made by Freud himself. The main contention of criticisms of the psychoanalytic theory of pleasure is that it explains only entropic or homeostatic pleasure (tension reduction) and cannot account for “effectance ” or “self-actualizing ” pleasure (tension maintenance or increase). We shall attempt to demonstrate that the phenomenon of effectance or “stimulatory ” pleasure constitutes no contradiction of the theory, but can be explained within the conceptual framework proposed by Rapaport and Gill (1959), according to which psychoanalyti