Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings

by Sigmund Freud

On the Introduction of Narcissism/Remembering, Repeating and Working Through/Beyond the Pleasure Principle/The Ego and the Id/Inhibition, Symptom and Fear

In Freud’s view we are driven by the desire for pleasure, as well as by the desire to avoid pain. But the pursuit of pleasure has never been a simple thing. Pleasure can be a form of fear, a form of memory and a way of avoiding reality. Above all, as these essays show with remarkable eloquence, pleasure is a way in which we repeat ourselves.

The essays collected in this volume explore, in Freud’s uniquely subtle and accessible style, the puzzles of pleasure and morality – the enigmas of human development.

Genres: Psychology, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Nonfiction, Theory, Classics, Essays

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1920

About the author

Dr. Sigismund Freud (later changed to Sigmund) was a neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, who created an entirely new approach to the understanding of the human personality. He is regarded as one of the most influential—and controversial—minds of the 20th century.

In 1873, Freud began to study medicine at the University of Vienna. After graduating, he worked at the Vienna General Hospital. He collaborated with Josef Breuer in treating hysteria by the recall of painful experiences under hypnosis. In 1885, Freud went to Paris as a student of the neurologist Jean Charcot. On his return to Vienna the following year, Freud set up in private practice, specialising in nervous and brain disorders. The same year he married Martha Bernays, with whom he had six children.

Freud developed the theory that humans have an unconscious in which sexual and aggressive impulses are in perpetual conflict for supremacy with the defences against them. In 1897, he began an intensive analysis of himself. In 1900, his major work 'The Interpretation of Dreams' was published in which Freud analysed dreams in terms of unconscious desires and experiences.

In 1902, Freud was appointed Professor of Neuropathology at the University of Vienna, a post he held until 1938. Although the medical establishment disagreed with many of his theories, a group of pupils and followers began to gather around Freud. In 1910, the International Psychoanalytic Association was founded with Carl Jung, a close associate of Freud's, as the president. Jung later broke with Freud and developed his own theories.

After World War One, Freud spent less time in clinical observation and concentrated on the application of his theories to history, art, literature and anthropology. In 1923, he published 'The Ego and the Id', which suggested a new structural model of the mind, divided into the 'id, the 'ego' and the 'superego'.

In 1933, the Nazis publicly burnt a number of Freud's books. In 1938, shortly after the Nazis annexed Austria, Freud left Vienna for London with his wife and daughter Anna.

Freud had been diagnosed with cancer of the jaw in 1923, and underwent more than 30 operations. He died of cancer on 23 September 1939.

Reviews

[Fergus, Weaver of Autistic Webs · Rating 4 out of 5]

My good friend and co-philosophe on GR, Alex, has written a very fine heuristic study of this book which I can’t emulate, but to which I will add my two-cent addendum.

Freud says, if I understand his meaning aright, that we are born impossible narcissists - and that’ll we’ll do anything in this life to keep pleasing ourselves.

If this means six straight hours of TV and a few beers in a quiet corner after work, so be it!

And if we don’t like something, we will punish it for failing to give us pleasure by playing a childhood game of isolating it - away from our private play area.

Punishing, as we ourselves were disciplined when young. So we put a hex on those who cross us, figuratively speaking.

Does all this translate into maturity? Not on your life, Freud says. But it’s the hallmark of our original narcissistic neuroses.

And it’s gotta stop.

How?

Well, that’s where Freud is foisted on his own petard.

For he calls in his own dark deus ex machina - the Grim god Thanatos, or Death. Those of you who know your scientific laws know it as Entropy.

We may not like it when entropy starts to seize us in mid-age, but speaking as a guy in his Seventies, it’s unavoidable reality. So the Reality Principle fixes Narcissism’s wagon pretty handily.

And disables it. How many evil-minded old witches are pleased to hear their wall mirrors telling them Snow White is now fairer by far than they are?

Not many.

Entropy is final, though. And lights all poor witches the way to dusty death. But in isolated ideal form, it re-enacts the voice of an adult telling us to grow up!

I think by now we’re beginning to find out why the Death Principle is a sad sorta cure for Narcissism... and why Freud later judged this book as a non-starter.

So as psychology perhaps it fails. Plus, it hurts.

But - hold on - Christians like the great writer John Donne saw in Death the sure antidote for the ills of the world. As a release from all our present sorrows. Death does not delude.

And St Antony, using conviction and remorse as his personal Reality Principle, succeeded in trashing his noisy personal devils under its aegis.

So maybe Freud WAS onto something, but couldn’t muster up the faith to draw positive conclusions from it.

Perhaps he was only half-remembering the distant childhood words, ‘he who lays down his life shall take it up again!’

And, for me, no words ring truer.

I’ll be 75 in a smidgen of colder weather, and care much less about the rest of my life in our decaying and viral world than I do for the upcoming, infinitely more radiant and refreshing one.

Remember Dylan Thomas?

And Death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one...
Though lovers be lost, love shall not -
And Death shall have no dominion.

[لونا · Rating 4 out of 5]

أبدأ قراءتي للكتاب بما ختم به "فرويد" كتابه، وهي أبيات شعرية من مقامات الحريري التي نقلها "مستشرق" للغة الألمانية:-

تعارَجْتُ لا رَغبَةً في العرَجْ .. .. ولكِنْ لأقْرَعَ بابَ الفرَجْ
وأُلْقيَ حبْلي على غارِبي .. .. وأسلُكَ مسْلَكَ مَن قد مرَجْ
فإنْ لامَني القومُ قلتُ اعذِروا .. .. فليسَ على أعْرَجٍ من حرَجْ


لمست في ختام كتابه نوع من "التلطيف" لعرضه الشيق، المثير والخارج عن المألوف كالعادة .. .. يقول أيضاً:-

فلقد يسأل سائل إلى أي حد وصل اقتناعي أنا بصحة الفروض التي ذهبت إليها في الصفحات السالفة. وعن هذا أجيب باني أنا نفسي غير مقتنع، وأني لا أعمل على إغراء غيري من الناس بالإيمان بتلك النظريات. أو بعبارة أدق، إني لا أدري إلى أي حد يبلغ يقيني منها

فهو يقول أنها نظرية تستوجب ذلك "الحياد العقلي" اللازم للتحرر من الأفكار السابقة والأهواء العميقة في النفس التي قد تؤثر على مسار التأملات

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ما فوق مبدأ اللذة، هذا هو عنوان الكتاب لكن ما هو هذا الشيء الذي فوق مبدأ اللذة؟! .. إنه الجنون المطلق يا من تقرأ هذه السطور ولفهم ما يرمي له "فرويد" يجب تسطير بعض الأشياء أولا

1- قسّم "فرويد" الكيان النفسي للإنسان لثلاثة أقسام:- الهوى، الأنا و والأنا الأعلى أو المثالي .. .. باختصار شديد أحب ألخص هاتي الأقسام الثلاثة بجمل بسيطة
يكمن تشبيه الهوى (اللاشعور) بالفرس، فهو يمثل الجزء الحيواني، الشهواني، الأناني من الذات وإن ما يكبحه هو الفارس المتمثل هنا في الأنا (الشعور) التي تعبر عن القيم والأخلاق التي تتحكم في الهوى وتجعله يتماشى مع الواقع وقيم المجتمع المحيط والأنا الأعلى هو ببساطة شديدة ضمير الشخص

2- كما هو معروف "فرويد" هو سيد اللاشعور، عندما يتم ذكر هذه الكلمة دائماً ما يخطر ببالي ساحة حرب وصراعات شديدة بحكم أن "فرويد" دائماً يوضح ويشرح ويستنتج نظرياته نتيجة تعامله مع مرضى نفسيين .. .. اللاشعور هدفه هو تحقيق وإشباع لذة ولكن "الأنا" دائما يقف بالمرصاد له ويحدث ما يمكن التعبير عنه بالكلمة الشهيرة "الكبت" ولهذا دائماً هذان القطبان في صراع دائم والمتنفس الوحيد للهوى أو "اللاشعور" هو الأحلام وقد أفرد "فرويد" لهذه النظرية كتاب شيق بعنوان تفسير الأحلام

3- الأحلام هي مرآة اللاشعور كما أسلفنا وهدفها هو إشباع الدوافع المكبوتة، وكل إشباع هو لذة

لاحظ "فرويد" ظاهرة غريبة تحدث (للمرضى) وخصواً الجنود الذين يعانون من عصاب الصدمة بعد رجوعهم من الحرب وهو "تكرار" الأحداث المؤلمة التي حدثت معهم سابقاً في أحلامهم، وتساءل "فرويد" أية لذة ممكن أن تنتج عن تكرار هذه الأحداث المؤلمة في الأحلام، وكان الإجابة هو وجود دافع غريزي قوي يؤدي لهذا التكرار الإجباري وهو إجابة ماذا يوجد فوق مبدأ اللذة؟ والإجابة هي غريزة الموت



قسَّم "فرويد" الغرائز إلى نوعين غرائز الحياة والحب (سمَّاها أيضاً بإيروس) أي غرائز المحافظة على الحياة .. .. وغرائز الموت التي تهدف للهدم وإنهاء الحياة، وهذه الغرائز عندما توجد في أشخاص غير أسوياء فإنها تتجه للخارج في صورة عدوان وتدمير للنفس والغير وهو ما وجده تفسير منطقي لظاهرة السادية والماسوشية


شرح "فرويد" غريزة الموت وربطها ببعض نظريات علم الأحياء، وجازف في افتراضه أن "مبدأ اللذة " غريزة الحياة من الممكن أن تكون أيضاً في خدمة غريزة الموت ولكنه يقول أنه مجرد فرض بحاجة للصبر والتطور العلمي لإثباته أو دحضه

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القراءة "لفرويد" على المستوى الشخصي ليست بالأمر السهل فالتركيز أمر مهم جداً أثناء قراءة للفهم، يتكلم عن أمور تثير العجب لأنه فكَّر فيها بهذه الطريقة واستنتجها، ويتكلم عن أمور أخرى تجعلني أُشَكِّك في سلامة عقله أي أنها قراءة تجبر على التفاعل .. .. بالمجمل القراءة له ممتعة ومتعبة للدماغ وهو أمر سليم جداً لأني وإن لم أوافقه في عرضه فإنه وبدون قصد منه ساهم في حصولي على جلسة تمارين مكثفة ومجانية "ماديا" على مستوى الدماغ التي من الممكن أن تساهم في الوقاية من الخرف في يوم من الأيام .. .. فتحية لهذا المجنون

[Goatboy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Behold one of Freud’s most over-determined navels. A piece of thought, exploration and theory that is yet to be pinned down and is a fertile seed to many theorists who came after and attempted to corral this confused yet beguiling psychical mechanism into their own works. A fount of seemingly never-ending creative inspiration for others.

While also being a frustrating 78 page read…

Been trying to come up with a review for this one for weeks and kept hitting some wall that I would be hard pressed not to attribute to some function of the pleasure principle / reality principle / death drive / jouissance.

Overtime / bonus chapter enjoyment through experience.

I know, I am rambling…
But this work doesn’t need to be summarized here.
My only desire is to express its effect on me…
As if one could say, “My *only* desire”…

It seems that every time I read Freud my brain is forced to read him on 4 or more parallel tracks that range over “what he’s trying to say” and “how he sometimes gets bogged down in trying to explain everything physiologically” yet “how even when that feels wrong there’s always still something interesting there so you have to parse it in real time” to “considering everything within the psychological and cultural context within which he was writing” yet still “separating that from the universal truths that he would still be living” while all the while being reminded of “what an amazing and brilliant explorer of a completely new realm” he was.

I’m reminded of Jacques Cousteau only if Jacques Cousteau had also basically DISCOVERED OCEANS before anyone else had thought to notice them.

Here’s the thing for me. Reading Freud is clearly frustrating because he was obviously on to something extraordinary and yet since he was the first one there he had to figure out from scratch how to even conceptualize, label and order it. I agree with others I’ve read that posit word choice might have been his biggest enemy. Pleasure principle. Reality principle. Death drive. Not only might these have been named better, but Freud himself often seemed mercurial in how he used his terms and would shift their meanings over time. I’m perfectly fine with Freud modifying and revising his concepts and theory over the years. But when that seems to happen within the limited pages of a short work it can be a bit difficult to lock on to a clear intended meaning.

Maybe that’s why his writings - and this work in particular - seem so ripe for interpretation and exploration...

I read BtPP right before reading Alenka Zupancic’s What IS Sex? (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3...) and I have to say it was a damn good match. Or maybe much of Lacanian studies revolve around this singular process/mechanism so that's not so surprising? I've now just started reading Seminar VII, and it’s with some feeling that the extension of this core theory will be expanded further.

Even with all the frustration and confusion it’s hard not to walk away from this book knowing in your gut that Freud was on to something. The words shift, the causes are many and over-determined, and yet the psychical actions that he describes feel too true and familiar to deny. Desire for homeostasis, judging future actions against some knowledge of possible pleasure or pain (comfort or discomfort), compulsive repetition (often of “seemingly” un-pleasureable acts), a basic obsession with and avoidance of the impossibility of existing, of being conscious yet cut off by a loss/gap back in a past you can’t remember yet always feel on the back of your shoulder. A desire to be inanimate if only to stop the desire machine…

This is the tool box for much that would follow...

[Salah · Rating 4 out of 5]

بالرغم من قلة عدد صفحاته، إلا أن هذا الكتاب فيه من الدسم ما يجعل استيعابه بعد القراءة الأولى مستحيلاً. ففرويد في هذا الكتاب كان قد أكمل بلورة تصوره عن النفس وتقسيمها من حيث الوعي واللاوعي، ومن حيث الغرائز (هو، أنا، أنا عليا) وأيها قع في الوعي وأيها في اللاوعي. ثم عكف فرويد على تحليل الغرائز حتى وصل إلى أبسط أشكالها، فاقترح وجود نوعين من الغرائز الاساسية: الغرائز الحياة(الغرائز الجنسية أو الليبيدو) وغرائز الموت. وقد شرع في هذا الكتاب في شرح ما يعتبر غريزة جنسية وما يعتبر م غرائز الموت، وتلك الاخيرة احتاج أن يبرهن على وجودها بشكل بيولوجي حيث شكك علماء بيولوجيون في وجود غرائز للموت في الأحياء الدقيقة. وعندها بدأ فرويد يبحث عن منشأ هذه الغرائز وبداة وجودها وظهورها. حتى وصل به الأمر إلى التفكير في اللحظة التي تحولت فيه المادة البيولوجية إلى مادة حية. كما يشير فرويد هنا إلى مبدأ يفوق مبدأ اللذه الذي اقترح�� كمحرك أساسي للكائن الحي في تصرفاته، هذا المبدأ بحسب ما سماه فرويد هو إجبار التكرار، فيقول فرويد أن الكائن الحي مفطور على التكرار، وهو الإطار الذي تدور فه الغرائز الأساسية، فهو يولد، يشبع الغرائز الج��سية، عن طريقها يتكاثر ويتوالد، ثم يموت بالغريزة. ويستشهد فرويد على فرضيته لمراقبته لسلوك الأطفال الذين يحبون تكرار الألعاب والقصص بحذافيرها دون تغيير أو تعديل، ودون ا يصبهم الملل أيضاً.
إ محاولة تلخي افكار هذا الكتاب في مراجعة واحدة هو من ضروب الوهم، لذاستحتاج هذه المراجعة غلى الكثير م الغضافة بعد القراءة الثانية في المستقبل القريب.

[عماد العتيلي · Rating 4 out of 5]

‎‫‏‬‬‬‬‬‬‬

“Many of us will also find it hard to abandon our belief that in man himself there dwells an impulse towards perfection, which has brought him to his present heights of intellectual prowess and ethical sublimation, and from which it might be expected that his development into superman will be ensured. But I do not believe in the existence of such an inner impulse, and I see no way of preserving this pleasing illusion. The development of man up to now does not seem to me to need any explanation differing from that of animal development, and the restless striving towards further perfection which may be observed in a minority of human beings is easily explicable as the result of that repression of instinct upon which what is most valuable in human culture is built.”.

It’s been a very long time since I’ve read a good book!
For my amazement, I enjoyed every page! And I loved the scientific method Freud used to explain and view his theory. I think, maybe, the death drive is one of the most important theories in psychology because it explains so many things in the human behavior.



This is, truly, a book worth reading.

[شمس · Rating 4 out of 5]

What now follows is speculation, often quite extravagant speculation, which readers will regard or disregard according to their own particular standpoint. For the rest, it is an attempt to follow an idea right through to its logical conclusion, undertaken out of sheer curiosity as to where this will lead. —Beyond the Pleasure Principle
__________
We love one or other of the following:
1) Narcissistic Type:
⠀⠀⠀⠀a) What we ourselves are
⠀⠀⠀⠀b) What we ourselves were
⠀⠀⠀⠀c) What we would like to become
⠀⠀⠀⠀d) A person who was once part of our own self

2) Imitative Type:
⠀⠀⠀⠀a) The woman who feeds us
⠀⠀⠀⠀b) The man who protects us
⠀⠀⠀⠀And the many surrogates who take their place..

—On the Introduction of Narcissism

__________
This volume collects the following works by Freud:
• On the Introduction of Narcissism
• Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through
• Beyond the Pleaure Principle
• The Ego and the Id
• Inhibition, Symptom, and Fear
__________
More interesting theories from Freud.

This volume contains some of Freud's key, central ideas including his proposition of the Id, Ego, and Super-Ego; and the Conscious, Pre-Conscious, and Unconscious systems.

These are all sprinkled (as is seeming frequent) with some brief apologia, just to ensure you're taking some of his ideas with a grain of salt (as he did himself).

Let us go back for a moment and ask whether all these speculations are not perhaps entirely baseless.

__________
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
In psychoanalytic theory we assume without further ado that the evolution of psychic processes is automatically regulated by the pleasure principle; that is to say, we believe that these processes are invariably triggered by an unpleasurable tension, and then follow a path such that their ultimate outcome represents a diminution of this tension, and hence a propensity to avoid unpleasure or to generate pleasure.

Consciousness is not the only distinctive characteristic that we are disposed to ascribe to the processes in this system. We are basing ourselves on the evidence har garnered in our psychoanalytic experience when we postulate that all excitation processes occurring in the other systems leave lasting traces within them which form the basis of memory—residual memories, in other words, that have nothing to do with consciousness. These traces are often the strongest and most enduring when the process that brought them into being never entered consciousness at all.

While this may not be an absolutely binding consideration, it may none the less lead us to the supposition that it is not possible within a given system for something both to enter consciousness and also to leave a memory trace. We would accordingly be able to argue that excitation processes d indeed enter consciousness within the Cs system, but leave no lasting trace there; and that all the traces of these processes that memory depends upon arise in the proximate inner systems to which the excitations migrate. It is in precisely these terms that I conceived the diagram included in the speculative section of my Interpretation of Dreams in 1900. When one conceders how little we know from other soures about the origins of consciousness, one is bound to give at least some credence to the proposition that ‘consciousness arises instead of a memory trace’.

But perhaps the belief that death has its own intrinsic logic is simply one of those illusions we have created for ourselves in order to be able to ‘bear the heavy burden of existence’. It is certainly not primal: the idea of ’natural death’ is alien to primitive peoples, who attribute every death that occurs amongst them to the influence of an enemy or an evil spirit. To investigate this belief, therefore, let us turn without further ado to biological science.
__________
The Ego and the Id

If I were able to imagine very last person with an interest in psychology reading this essay, then I should not be one whit surprised to find a number of those readers calling a halt right now and refusing to read another word—for here at once is the first shibboleth of psychoanalysis. To most people whose education is grounded in philosophy, the idea of a psychic realm that is not also a conscious one is so incomprehensible as to seem an absurdity easily refuted by plain, straightforward logic.

For one thing, we see clear evidence that even subtle and complex intellectual tasks that normally demand sustained and strenuous thought can also be carried out pre-consciously, without entering consciousness at all. There is not doubt whatever that such cases occur; they happen during sleep, for example, and are evidenced buy the fact that on waking up, the person concerned immediately knows the answer to a difficult mathematical or other problem that they had vainly struggled to solve the day before.

[Morgan Blackledge · Rating 5 out of 5]

OMG

I’m guessing that Freud was still doing hella coke when he wrote this.

It’s kind of a hot mess.

I can’t say I enjoyed reading it.

Anyway.

Freud defined the Pleasure Principle as the instinctive drive to seek pleasure and avoid pain.

Freud thought of this as the basic motivational drive of the ID, which was Freuds construct referring to the more animalistic or primitive aspects of human nature.

Beyond the Pleasure Principle is Freuds attempt to identify other analogous principles of motivation.

Freud describes human motivation as emerging from two opposing drives:

1. Eros, which is typified by sexuality, creativity, and connection and reproduction, and 2. Thanatos, which is typified by the aggression, compulsion, and self-destruction.

Freud defines repartition compulsion as the drive to repeat a behavior or recreate an event over and over again, even when its not pleasurable.

For example, people who have been exposed to early life abuse and trauma sometimes recreate similar circumstances in their lives and reenact similar dynamics in their adult relationships.

They are ostensibly in search of a different ‘better’ outcome, refered to as a corrective experience in the parlance of psychodynamic psychotherapy.

These unconsciously sought corrective experiences are typically very elusive.

And that can mean getting unconsciously lured into increasingly destructive behaviors and dangerous situations where the traumatic event is likely to happen again and again.

It may take good therapy to identify and deconstruct these issues, so that the individual can finally have the needed corrective experiences in a healthy, more conscious, less driven form.

As I previously mentioned, the text is kind of tweaker, but those are the big takeaways (by my accounting anyway).

I think the text has immense historical value, but not a lot of therapeutic use value or validity by today’s standards.

I’m giving the text 5 stars because it’s a classic, and it feels dumb and pretentious to give it less than that. 

But unless you’re interested in the history of psychology, or really into Freud, you can probably skip reading this source text, and rely on commentary and secondary sources for the important ideas.

[سُندُس عَبدُاللَّه · Rating 4 out of 5]

الكتاب مما يعرض أواخر ما توصل إليه فرويد، فيمثل أهم تصوراته النهائية في التحليل النفسي وسد فجوات بعض الأسئلة والرد على بعض المعترضين، وتغيير أسس مركزية هامة ويُفهم منه الأفكار التي تشتهر بشكل سطحي وساذج عنه من كيفيات انبعاثها.
-التقييم لقوة الكتاب في فهم أسس نظريات فرويد، وليس للنظريات ذاتها.-

[Johnny · Rating 4 out of 5]

When you've read so much of an author, you sometimes experience a weird auto-hypnosis that makes you believe you've read the bulk of the author's corpus. So it is with yours truly and Sigmund Freud. Some years back, I hacked through his papers on hysteria and Interpretation of Dreams, thinking that I had mastered the "essential Freud." I was (and am) more taken with Jung, but one must occasionally return to the font.

Much of the Freud I had read previously seemed to confirm the opinion of those who believe him to have been sexually obsessed to the point of becoming myopic, redundant, and irrelevant. Until I read Beyond the Pleasure Principle, I was prone to think so. In this book, however, I found a jewel of wisdom that shall forever transform my view of Freud. He may have been sexually obsessed and he may even have, erroneously in my opinion, taken a different tack than William James on a similar issue, but this particular principle I am going to recount seems to me both valid and important.

Freud perceived that, given any organic process, the initiation of action is the result of unsettled tension. He posited that the organism would strive, one way or another, to resolve that tension according to two complementary ideals: avoidance of pain and production of pleasure. That position has come to be known as the Pleasure Principle.

The important concept in the present work under description (though I confess that I read this in my Great Books volume of Freud rather than one of the separate editions available elsewhere) is that observation that what may be pain for one system may be pleasure for another. So, how does one reconcile the so-called Pleasure Principle to that fact?

Freud draws from the research of J. Breuer and observes that, even on the embryonic level, there is a tension between the protective systems that preserve the integrity of the organism from excessive external stimuli which would change and destroy it and the receptive system that accepts a certain portion of this external stimuli and is excited positively by it (p. 647 in my volume). In the human thought process, the former protects the consciousness from overload and provides assurance of continuing "personality." The latter provides pleasure and pain.

Thereby, Freud is able to define instinct in the following way: "According to this, an instinct would be a tendency innate in living organic matter, impelling it towards the reinstatement of an earlier condition, ..." (p. 651). One's instinct, then, would be to resist change and to conserve existence. Ironically, Freud goes on to suggest that this very urge of preservation becomes a "death instinct" and that the only counter, open to the stimulation that causes further development, is the "sex instinct."

While I was amused at this oversimplification, I was also struck at the wisdom which showed both our basic organisms and our thought process itself in constant tension between conservation and development. If over-stimulation is a threat, so is under-stimulation. To me, this explained that great publishing philosophy espoused by my old mentor, Jonathan Lane (great Ziff-Davis publisher). Lane said that "Magazines must be a mixture of comfort and surprise." Now, I realize that all of life needs to follow this delicate recipe, and I have at least one pyschological concept with which to demonstrate that recipe.

[Alex Obrigewitsch · Rating 3 out of 5]

In and of itself, as an offering of psychoanalytic work, this book is contradictorily of great influence, both positively and negatively, as well as being of little interest to read.

As a speculative work which discloses differing verctors for the hermeneutic application of psychoanalytic theory, this work is of much greater interest (and perhaps value). The play of the Fort/Da and the death drives offer a diverse possibility for utilisation.

If the death drives are at play beyond simply the functioning of psychic life (which I take to be in line with Freud's drive theory, bringing it even closer in line with that of Nietzsche), then might not the entirety of the cosmos be playing a grand game of Fort/Da, the anterior death of inorganicity alienating itself from itself, becoming life, only so that it can die, and so experience the intensity of its own collapse back into itself? Repetition automatism at play in the movement of life and death - a cosmic cycling which enacts neither negentropy nor entropy, for that matter, but simply an expression of the greatest intensity, the most profound affect, through the recycling of life in its repetitional return unto death.

We see this cosmic cycling repeated on a mythical strata in Merhige's film Begotten, in which God (the negative yet creative void or excess, the lapse in being which reiterates the role of death) becomes a corpse, dies, so as to produce life. A kenotic manifestation of the Hegelian Aufhebung, death emptying its emptiness or negating its negativity so as to produce something, or being. The death of God connotes the emergence of life, which is born and created only to decay and to die, and return unto nothing the glory of God due unto Him. The sending and the return, the play of death and life, all entwined in the movement from debasement to transfiguration - a disruption and displacement of the hierarchical ordering of high and low. A chaosmos rather than a cosmos, then?

*
These remain but speculations, speculative fictions, which does not mean that they fail to speak to "reality," to the urgency of our situation. Take them or leave them as you will - left here are but abandoned words, belonging to no one. They will have forsaken me so long ago, before they were ever written, ever thought, ever uttered. They will never have been mine - I have only sent them forth, into play; they return nothing to me, only returning me unto that which ever awaits upon the line of this repetitional return - death, anonymous and dis-appropriating.

[Mr. · Rating 5 out of 5]

This little book is indubitable proof of the breadth and depth of Freud's thinking. It is a fascinating and multi-faceted read, containing elements of psychoanalysis, philosophy, poetry, biology, and the literary theory. You will not believe how quickly Freud is able to move from topic to topic and the absurd range within which he is able to speculate. This is also an extraordinarily challenging read, it requires patience and many re-readings. Freud discusses the compulsion to repeat, transference neurosis, life and death drives, and a number of other cognitive and behavioral topics.Here is a curious quote I adore: "In the last resort, what has left its mark on the development of organisms must be the history of the earth we live in and its relation to the sun" (pg. 45).

Beyond the Pleasure Principle is a seminal component of his expansive corpus, and should be standard reading for psychologists.

[Michael A. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've heard the ideas in this book (repetition compulsion, fort/da game, death drive...) discussed often, and this is the first time I've read the text myself. One thing that caught me by surprise (but shouldn't have) is how he grounds all of this stuff in the science of his day. For example, he deduces the existence of the death drive in part from August Weismann's germ plasm theory. Freud himself is hedging his bet here, admitting that to speculate disconnected from empirical findings is a risk in and of itself. But the speculative moments in Freud are often the most fun, engaging, and thought-provoking parts of his texts. This is no exception!

[Omar Kassem · Rating 2 out of 5]

بالرغم من عدد صفحاته القليلة إلا ان هذا الكتاب ثقيل الوطأة ، وربما كانت الترجمة هي السبب ، ولكنه بنفس الوقت كتاب مفصلي في مرحلة تطور فكرة فرويد حول مبدأ اللذة..

ماهو ذلك السر العجيب في انجذابنا نحو الشخصيات الشريرة ، المدمرة لنفسها ، والمتعبة لمن حولها ، لدرجة أحيانًا يصل هذا الانجذاب إلى حد الهوس ، ألا يمكن ان نعتبر هذا الاعجاب نزوعاً من الغريزة البشرية نحو الموت والتدمير ؟!

اللذّة عند فرويد ببساطة هي حالة نستخدمها لتبديد الشعور بالالم وهدم كل ما يطرأ علينا من مشاعر سلبية ، فهي محاولة للعودة نحو حالة الاستقرار والسكون...

[Mounir · Rating 3 out of 5]

من الكتب المحورية في التحليل النفسي, ويعتبر محطة مهمة في نظريات فرويد التي كان يطورها باستمرار
وينتمي هذا الكتاب لجانب من إكتشافات واستبصارات التحليل النفسي التي كان لها أثر كبير في العلوم الإنسانية, مثله في ذلك مثل "الطوطم والتابو" و" موسى والتوحيد". هو كتاب صعب لكنه جدير بالقراءة

[Aung Sett Kyaw Min · Rating 2 out of 5]

Freud concludes, even if tentatively, that the urge in life to return to the inorganic state, the so called "death instinct" which supposedly accounts for the compulsion to repeat traumatic experiences (in one's dreams, for example) does not really contradict the pleasure principle and in fact might even be appropriated by the latter for its own ends (primary masochism).

[Nora W · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although it’s a pain to read (yes, even though it’s short) and you could easily find a summary online, I definitely recommend reading the primary source, as Freud’s ideas have been misinterpreted in such a way that even popular culture has altered the interpretation of his theories.
Freud’s notion of the Death drive is especially a tricky one, as it does not actually refer to the desire for death, or the supposed Thanatos, as it has been termed, but rather a desire to a primordial inorganic state, in order to maintain a low level of excitation. Whoever simply Googles the term, will get the wrong idea completely. I have to add that Freud is highly speculative about his theories himself, so don’t expect a well-rounded theory that explains in detail how traumatic neurosis or the Death drive for that matter, manifest itself in practice. What you get is a sort of stream of consciousness about the workings of the mind that is subjected to trauma.
As I’ve mentioned, not an easy read, but once you get the gist, it’s really a great insight into the psychoanalytics of trauma.

[André · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Beyond the pleasure principle" is an unusual and ambiguous piece of work. Freud presents an intriguing and controversy work. In this essay, it's presented Freud's ideas about life/sexual drive instincts (Eros) and the "death drive" concept as the main notions that conduct Human life.
Eros is the analogy for sexual desires, harmony and pleasurable feelings, whereas the "Death drive" represents the deep urge for self-destruction, aggression and unpleasurable feelings. Freud describes these two opposing drives and goes beyond the simple pleasure principle that drives Human behaviour. Furthermore, he explains all these terms in a clinical and speculative perspective.
Throughout the book, it's conveyed relevant topics about Human nature - such as Biological basis for repetition compulsion, Masochism as a clinical manifestation, Independence from the pleasure principle, Child's play and Repetition compulsion. Moreover, it's highlighted the importance of the libido within pleasurable feelings.
Freud, in this essay, blasts thought-provoking thoughts, including the "Death Drive" concept. It's not an easy term to diggest. Therefore, it can be confusing and misinterpreted. It's undoubtedly true that Humanity has some sort of inertia for chaos and destruction, including on a personal level. Nonetheless, it's a vague term that lays more question than answers.
It's interesting that Freud appeals to other scholar subjects like Biology and Philosophy to try to answer his main concepts of the Human Mind.
However, Freud's work has an intrinsically Historical value, which is an important factor that must be taken into account for any enthusiast of the Psychotherapy field.
This is definitely a book that lays confusing thoughts, but it's a challenge that makes any reader question the roots of the Human condition.

rating:3,5/5 stars

[Jared]

FREUD WAITS TILL PAGE 78 TO DROP THIS NUGGET "it may be asked whether how far I am myself convinced of the truth of the hypothesis that I have set out on these pages. My answer would be that I am not convinced myself; that I do not seek to persuade other people to believe in them. Or, more precisely, that I do not know how far I believe in them." SO WHY DID YOU FUCKING WRITE THE BOOK FREUD

[Adam]

Approaching its centennial, maybe this work will someday outgrow the misunderstandings promulgated by its adherents. The infamous "death drive" is not Thanatos contra Eros; it is not the romantic yearning to die or a particular person's suicidal tendencies. What it IS is... cautiously broached here. Expect Freud to be Freud: brilliant "speculations" laden with caveats, followed by long droning sections attempting to prove his Scientific mettle is sturdier than your ma's kettle.

[Adriana Scarpin · Rating 4 out of 5]

De tudo que Freud escreveu creio que a teoria das pulsões é a mais válida, o que diferencia o seu escrito para o artigo da Spielrein são suas analogias biológicas, enquanto ela fez um recorte mitológico. Menos mal que Freud cita Destruction as the Cause of Coming Into Being numa nota de rodapé. Rá!

[Miguel Teles · Rating 4 out of 5]

Being a late redesign of his metapsychological theory, this work is probably not the best primer to Freud’s thoughts and works on the mind (I’ve been warned). This made me have to recur to some external sources to fully grasp all his previous theories. With the help of that external sourcing it did give me a good synthesis or understanding of his main thoughts regarding the economy of the mind (through the pleasure principle), its topography (the id, ego and superego) and its dynamic process.

Beyond this most known first model of his theory of human motivation and behavior - the dualism between the pleasure instinct and the instinct for self-preservation, of which struggle many psychopathological states subdue - this work reframes it all by presenting a different dualism - the one between a death instinct and a life (pleasure) instinct. Thanatos and Eros. Love and Hate. Affection and Agression.

Despite its poetic and dramatic aesthetics, my main problem with this reframed theory is the speculative, highly inductive and arguable path Freud took (based on some empirical observations) to arrive at it. Some of its assumptions seem somehow dated or arguable regarding many neurobiological findings of today. Freud himself admits the speculative nature of his thought and explicitly states he wished for more experimental data regarding the neurophysiological ways of the mind he so eagerly wants to understand.

That being said, it was an enormous pleasure to read Freud and this particular work. The richness of his thought and clinical work is still today noticeable in many fields of knowledge, from health to basic human understanding. He writes beautifully and he must have been a marvelous mind to cross paths with.

In the end, it was after all a good primer (although an arduous one) to Freud and his Psychoanalysis and it definitely left me with the desire to know more.

[John Pistelli · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this famously transitional work of 1920, Freud sets out to explain the prevalence of psychic activity that can't obviously be attributed to the organism's inclination to reduce tension, the reduction of which produces pleasure. After all, as a clinician, he was seeing neurotic and hysterical patients--very tense people. So, via a speculative tour of psychoanalytic theory circa 1920 as well as of early-20th-century biology, Freud arrives at the provisional conclusion that there are two drives or instincts operating in organisms: one that seeks to restore the equilibrium of inorganic life, to get back to the peace before birth, which is the death drive; and one that seeks to carry life forward, to bind life up, to make more life, which is the life instinct, or Eros.

He allows in the book that he is echoing Schopenhauer on will (death-drive) and representation (life-drive), and the translator's introduction draws Nietzsche into it (presumably, Apollo = Eros and Dionysus = Thanatos). But Freud's emphases are rather different from those of the earlier philosophers, both of whom conferred a kind of Gothic glamor on the Dionysian will-to-nothingness underlying organic existence; Freud--less reactionary but more conservative, you might say--is on the side of life; he seems to see neurosis as the death-drive's desperate end-run around Eros, the defeat of the capacity for love on the way back to the placid equilibrium of the rocks and stones and trees. This, the romance with death, is the sickness that needs to be cured in the eyes of Father Freud, the last Abrahamic patriarch, the last priest of Apollo, our last defender, albeit disguised as mere scientist, of Hebraic and Hellenic idealism both. Toward the end of the book, he asserts:

Our views have from the very first been dualistic, and to-day they are even more definitely dualistic than before--now that we describe the opposition as being, not between ego instincts and sexual instincts but between life instincts and death instincts.

And after that, he nearly exclaims:

The pleasure principle seems actively to serve the death instincts.

This is, incidentally, a jargon-heavy book, a scientist's labor full of qualification and hesitations and humble assurances, not a work of Schopenhauerean lucidity or Nietzschean excitement--you will have to go well beyond the pleasure principle to read it! What if Eros in literature manifests as difficulty? Maybe there's something to be guilty about in guilty-pleasure reading after all.

[Eran · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoy reading Freud. One one page he'll give a persona anecdote he noticed, about a baby playing a game of throwing a ball and going to retrieve it. On the next page, he takes uses this anecdote as clear evidence for a psychological theory of how our minds work. Then, he falters, questions himself and back tracks. His style is funny to read. You know that he's certain of what he's saying, but he back peddles to make sure you're with him. He lays down the breadcrumbs and once you've followed the trail and eaten them up, he questions whether he's mislead you.

In this book, he develops a new principle in human nature: the death instinct. His earlier work on the pleasure principle showed that we repress things to avoid unpleasure. Here he takes it a bit further, suggesting that our earlier attempts at sexual pleasure were unsuccessful (children don't get to have sex with their nannies) and so later in life we repeat this form of frustration ("I suck at my job, I can't do anything right"). We are compelled to repeat this frustration over and over. Whereas the pleasure principle is a drive towards the prolongation of life, this more primitive instinct is one towards death. These instincts are seen in repetitions seeking to restore earlier states of being. Children love watching the same movie over and over again, hoping to return to the pleasure of the first viewing. Adults might get stuck in the same self-destructive habits, hoping for a return to how things were.

I highly recommend this book, for his ideas and style. Freud's ideas have become ingrained in our society and it's good to read the original and understand where they came from.

[أمَل · Rating 4 out of 5]

كالعادة أسلوب فرويد - ولا أعلم أهو أسلوبه أم نتيجة الترجمة- ثقيل :)
أستغرقت مدة طويلة في قرائته رغم قلة صفحاته، مزامنة مع كتابهِ الآخر "الحلم وتأويله" حيث الكتاب الثاني أتى مفصلّاً لزعمهِ هنا أن الأحلام وسائل للإشباع، وكنتيجة، فكل إشباع يؤدي إلى لذة.
فلنسميِه : كتاب "نظرية الغرائز"، حيث أن الفكرة الكلية التي أراد فرويد إيصالها هو أن جميع الظواهر النفسية صادرة عن غرائز، وهذهِ الغرائز، باختلاف أنواعها، تعمل وفق مفهوم أو مبدأ اللذة، والألم هو نتيجة توتر حاصل، وفي إزالته أو ذهابه حدوث اللذة، وعمل الدافع الغريزي هو خفض التوتر وإزالته..
..
من الأشياء الغريبة التي ذكرها هو " غريزة الموت" التي تهدف إلى الهدم والتفكيك وإنهاء الحياة، ويقابلها غريزة الحب والحياة.. وأن المازوخية والسادية نموذج لغرائز الهدم....!!
دسم حقيقةً، قد أعدّه أفضل كتب فرويد التي قرأتها حتى الآن، الذي طالما اتخذ مبدأ اللذة أساساً يُفسّر بهِ الظواهر النفسية والأمراض العصبية
***
هل يسيطر مبدأ اللذة على اتجاهات العلميات النفسية؟ وهل تلك العمليات مصحوبة بها أو مؤدية إليها؟ وما هوالألم؟
إجابة هذهِ التساؤلات وأخرى . . هي فحوى الكتاب..

#Re-READ

[Eileen]

my head hurts

[sean · Rating 5 out of 5]

Once again I am saying that this is one of the most beautiful things ever written and I'll say it my favorite book. Stayed up all night reading really really slowly and with a hyperactive pencil and was offered a genuinely beautiful emotional experience.

Though this is the third time reading this I think my understanding Freud and this book maybe a little bit more going into it allowed me to focus on reading at the line level and it was the first time I really appreciated the poetry of like almost each individual line. I don't think I can afford to give like a rigorous reading here rn—saving that for the word doc—but like... idk.

But... my biggest takeaways here are:

1. The ambivalence Freud felt in writing this book and the apparent emotional valence this text had for him. What I am mostly interested in in this book is the regressive model of desire as it relates to time. The drive always reaching backwards towards nonbeing as it is pushed tirelessly forward by the compounding "ever complicated détours always has reminded me of Benjamin's "angel of history," staring backwards but being pushed into "the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward." I felt this time, though, that Freud himself is that angel of history. Not a chapter goes by without him qualifying that the work here is "speculative" or "extreme," and he even states "I am not convinced myself." He is, at this point, twenty years beyond what he believes is his magnum opus, dealing with the death of his daughter, already suffering from an early version of the cancer that will eventually kill him, and is finding that psychoanalysis is not exempt from the destruction occasioned by WWI—the catalyst for so many movements in thought toward the absurd. In the really difficult passage describing the evolution of his theory of the drive(s), the difficulties that arise exponentially out of previous models and false dichotomies put forth by him can be understood as the piling debris pushing him toward writing this insane fucking book.

2. Freud is not a philosopher. Like definitely not. I usually tend to roll my eyes when people (perhaps instructors in my master's program...) make the argument that Freud was himself just a scientist that wanted to write scientific work as a defense of "neuropsychoanalysis" or whatever. Obviously "neuropsychoanalysis" is bullshit but like... Freud definitely wanted to be a simple little scientist. I know that he read a certain number of philosophers with varying degrees of certainty throughout his life (Aristotle, Plato, Kant, Schopenhauer, especially) but like I feel that every time one of those names comes up in his work I get less convinced that he read anything seriously at all—though, I know, the myth of Aristophanes from the Symposium is actually recounted correctly here, unlike in the Three Essays. The awesome part of this is that I totally agree that this is like "the first work of theory"—multidimensional, interdisciplinary, speculative, literary—but the other big upshot of this is that he doesn't even really read his own work very seriously as philosophy. Obviously there is just one drive—what is here called "the death drive," the "eternal return," the angrily grasping backwards at a past no longer attainable. That Eros and the death drive are the two competing "titans" he claims they are here and especially in Civilization and Its Discontents that define the struggle of history is an atrocious read on his part. Rather, I feel like it's the progression of time itself—moving the subject away from their desire, acting as the space between them and their desire (objet a, i think, but also I'm still unsure that I understand Lacan...)—brushing up against the will of the backwards facing drive.

3. The line by which this book initally seduced me comes on page 22 of the shitty dover thrift editions version that has the silhouette of a naked hot girl on the cover because some intern grossly misunderstood the title "beyond the pleasure principle." This line is that where Kant's time and space as "necessary forms of thought" is invoked in order to speculate that time itself is connected to (as a perception of) the periodicity of the reality-testing of the Pcpt.-Cs. system that provides the shield against external stimulus. After a period of doubt, I am glad to say that my re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-reading of the line "this mode of functioning may perhaps constitute another way of providing a shield against stimuli" re-convinced me that he is asserting here that linear time is constructed as only a perception of the tiny samples of reality taken by the sense organs, and that time exists in this manner as a means of portion control for the psyche. Two days ago I thought I had to abandon this line of thought in my thesis but now I don't think I do but that's awesome. However, understanding that we have no sense of all of what time could possibly be like upends everything. I think this might be why he says "I know that these remarks must sound very obscure, but I must limit myself to these hints." It seems very likely that the evaluation of the metapsychology of time that he urges here would result in yet another work that would force a complete reevaluation of psychoanalysis as a whole. What does it mean that desire always seeks a return to the past if the past exists only in the consciousness and cannot be extended to either the unconscious or external reality? How can the timeless unconscious be affected by experience? Why don't the irruptions of the unconscious (in neurosis, dreams, slips, jokes, etc) ever offer insight into the future? Is there a censor between the and the that works specifically to defend our perception of time? How can dreams not be prophetic? How can the pleasure principle exist unconsciously at all if it seeks to retain an earlier state of things?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!? the evaluation of this would be such a titanic fucking blow to everything he ever thought, right???

4. There are a few pinholes in here where we can see Freud, ever so briefly, theorize the sacred. In the same edition on p. 32 he writes that life was "evoked in inanimate matter by the action of a force whose nature we can form no conception. It may perhaps have been a process similar in type to that which later caused the development of consciousness..." (my italics). This comes up again two (big) pages later, where he phrases the common aphorism "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" as the germ-cells' repetition of "the performance to which they owe their existence" through normal development and death. Though "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" is usually an embodied celebration of the theory of evolution in human development, this claim is dubious when discussing simple germ-cells—what performance could the first forms of life possibly be recapitulating save for creation itself??? Though Freud really really famously hated religion—I think he says its like the shared neurosis or something of the people in The Future of an Illusion, it is evident here that there is still an unimaginable, unknown spark at the beginning of time which our existences still contain and repeat in some way... maybe...

Obviously I have a lot more thoughts but like... I will be returning to this soon enough. <3

Edit 6/15/2025: somehow i only just realized that he actually just like... doesn't go beyond the pleasure principle...

[Lina]

Hm…Taip…Čia turėtų rastis mano nuomonė ar įspūdis apie šią Froido knygą. Tai štai…Ji būtų tokia…
……………
….
..
Labai sunku man kalbėti apie kūrinį (tiksliau tris Froido kūrinius), kurie parašyti prieš šimtą metų ir be abejo turėjo ir vis dar turi didžiulę reikšmę ir įtaką šiandienos psichoanalizei ir psichologijai. Prisipažinsiu, labai daug dalykų nesupratau. Gal kai kurios sąvokos buvo neaiškios (gėda būtų, kai ne vienerius metus jas studijavau 🙈), gal šimtmečio senumo kalba su savo savitumais. Nors, pripažinkim, ir tie patys froidistiški erosizmai ne kartą verčia purtyti galvą. Jungas ėjo plačiau ir toliau nei tai ir todėl juo labai tikiu. Tuo tarpu Froidas taip pat buvo įžvalgus ir anaiptol ne riboto mąstymo, bet daug kas tiesiog nebelimpa šių dienų kontekste.

Dabar manau, kad siekiant iš esmės suprasti Froidą reikia eiti tuo pačiu keliu kaip ir jis ir pradėti pažintį nuo pirmųjų jo veikalų einant per juos chronologiškai. O tuomet gilintis į jo laiškus su bendraminčiais bei pastarųjų darbus.

Perskaičius šią knygutę (maža jį dydžiu, ne reikšme) atsirado daugiau struktūros ir žinojimo, kas yra ir kaip veikia Ego, Id, superEgo/ ego idealas, kas nutinka, kad žmogui pasireiškia tam tikri psichologiniai sunkumai (neurozės, anot autoriaus), buvau keistai supažindinta su homoseksualumu (taip ir nesupratau, ką pats Froidas apie tai galvoja, bet vartoja sąvoka šalia sutrikimų bei gi tam tikrų Ego veikimų), na ir dar šis bei tas.

Sunku kalbėti apie tokio svorio kūrinį ir juolab jį vertinti, bet jei taip kaip draugas draugui… jei nebūtina, neskaityk…arba pradėk nuo paprastesnės, labiau apibendrintos teorijos, nes sunku bus suprast, nu…

[Griffin Duffey]

Say anything you want about Freud, the man modeled a radical openness to being wrong and changing his views over time, which is rare for thinkers of any period.

The first half of this work is very fascinating, and my first encounter of Freud discussing trauma, repetition, compulsion, instinct, and death while also tying it all together with familiar concepts like libido, childhood sexual development, enjoyment, and others.

The second half got much more speculative. He attempted to theorize instinct as a ‘a need to restore an earlier state of things.’ (pg. 51) and found biologically predisposed self-destruction to be a fundamental phenomenon in cellular life processes that could be scaled up to ‘higher-beings’ (i.e. humans.)

I had a worry he would bring up Plato’s Symposium in order to theorize a kind of primordial state of unity towards which we (via our instincts) forever reach towards through sexual union, and in which would be another imbalance which we strive to equalize.

Neither of these things are insane things to think. There’s a bit of a problematic conservative logic to it (particularly in the latter extension of what the drives aim at) but, again, Freud views these musings on biology as nothing to hang your hat on. Overall, it might be the most interesting work of Freud’s I’ve read yet.

[Ivan Herrejon · Rating 5 out of 5]

In "Beyond the Pleasure principle," Freud introduced the concept of the death drive. Up until now, Freud had asserted that most of human behavior could be attributed to the seeking of pleasure, which allows us to live longer and reproduce (an example of this life drive is the pleasure people obtain from eating, sleeping, having sex, etc.). The death principle is the opposite of this. Freud first noticed that this instinct manifested through the compulsion to repeat, especially in one of the three categories of dreams, the first two being wish-fulfillments and anxiety dreams. In the first two categories, Freud still showed that they are able to provide individuals with some form of pleasure. However, the third one, also known as punishment dreams, do not apparently do so. Why do people keep dreaming about things that gave them trauma? Why do people keep dreaming about things that provide them with negative feedback? The answer is that through repetition there is a mastery over the emotional experience and a diminished sensation of emotions. This also happens with pleasurable things such as tolerance of drugs such as when the exact same dose of a drug, after chronic use, produces less of an effect. Or how a joke, after being listened to multiple times is no longer funny.

This means that there is an economic system made out of pleasure and unpleasure tensions. The first example of the pleasure principle being inhibited is with the reality principle (babies cannot cry for a cookie, they have to learn to eat a "proper" meal first, say please, wait until tomorrow because he/she had already ate a few, etc.), which occurs through unpleasurable experiences (the baby's immediate desire to eat the cookie was unfulfilled). "In the course of things it happens again and again that individual instincts (drives) or parts of instincts turn out to be incompatible in their aims or demands with the remaining ones, which are able to combine into the inclusive unity of the ego."Thus, the dynamic system of the drives can be reduced to not a life vs death, but organic vs psychical where ego is the last defense.

Going back to the repetition of trauma in dreams, it appears that there are masochistic trends in the ego. This occurs because the death drive is redirected to the ego. Or in other words, there is a reunification in the ego done by self-deprecation and self-rejection. An example Freud uses to showcase Eros vs Thanatos is of a little kid who created a game in which he throws his toys, the ones that give him pleasure, away over and over again. This repetition gave him the mastery over the feeling produced when an object that gave him pleasure was lost or in his case when his mother left. Of course the feeling of abandonment forms part of the feeling of unpleasure. I found interesting that even though Freud developed many of his theories through clinical experiences with his patients, he wrote "no certain decision can be reached from the analysis of a single case like this."

He mentioned that the patients resistances arise from the ego and that the compulsion to repeat should be attributed to the unconscious repressed. "It seems probable that the compulsion can only express itself after the work of treatment has gone half-way to meet it and has loosened the repression." Therefore, liberation of the repressed produces unpleasure. "Our efforts, on the other hand, are directed towards procuring the toleration of that unpleasure by an appeal to the reality principle." In other words, compulsion to repeat is the manifestation of the power of the repressed.

Some points that I found interesting were that a sense of inferiority is common in neurotics, that they seek to bring interruption into treatment by demonstrating a compulsion to repeat, and that the unconscious is timeless. Moreover, He continued, without challenging it, with the idea that consciousness was attributed by the cortex, which is something that now we know is not true. Freud stated that he was going to introduce biological speculation to support the idea of a drive aimed at destruction. He ended this section by stating that he was not confident he could believe in the hypothesis he provided, which we now know is not true. Nevertheless, the idea of the death drive is accepted in psychoanalytic communities. So the question arises of what are the implications of this drive and what are the dynamics it plays with the pleasure principle.

Well, if the ego is the true and original reservoir of libido, then, narcissism is when an individual retains his libido in his ego and pays none of it out in object cathexes. The same thing happens with the death drive. Masochism is the death drive retained in the ego. "Is it not plausible to suppose that this sadism is in fact a death drive which, under the influence of the narcissistic libido, has been forced away from the ego and has consequently only emerged in relation to the ego?" It seems that both drives are also intertwined: that pleasure only comes about by the destruction of the object such as food that has to be destroyed in order to be enjoyed. Love from the object also equals its destruction.

Freud said "the aim of all life is death."
Schopenhauer stated "while the sexual instinct is the embodiment of the will to live."

[Lauren McDonald · Rating 2 out of 5]

While I found this reading very engaging and intriguing it is also very obviously outdated and it was for a class, therefore I don't want Goodreads recommending me similar books hehe