Mohammadreza’s Reviews > Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings > Status Update

"One of our strongest motives for believing in the existence of death drives is indeed the fact that we have perceived the dominant tendency of the psyche, and perhaps of nervous life in general, to be the constant endeavour–as manifested in the pleasure principle - to reduce inner stimulative tension, to maintain it at a steady level, to resolve it completely (the Nirvana principle, as Barbara Low has called it)."

"As we have already learnt from the research carried out on protista, the coalescence of two individuals without subsequent [cell-]division (i.e. conjugation) has a strengthening and rejuvenating effect on both individuals, assuming that they separate from each other soon afterwards (see above, p. 87; cf. also Lipschütz)."

All the sublimations and reaction-formations and surrogate-formations in the world are never enough to resolve the abiding tension; and the gulf between the level of gratificatory pleasure demanded and the level actually achieved produces that driving force that prevents the individual from resting content with any situation he ever contrives, and instead–as the poet says–he ‘presses ever onward unbridled, untamed.

"Thus arises the paradox that the living organism resists in the most energetic way external influences (‘dangers’) that could help it to take a short cut to its life's goal (to short-circuit the system, as it were);"

"The goal of all life is death, or to express it retrospectively: the inanimate existed before the animate."