Book
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Jenseits des Lustprinzips
The essay in which Freud revised his theory of the drives. He starts from facts the pleasure principle does not account for: the dreams of the traumatic neuroses, including the war neuroses, which keep returning the patient to the accident; a small child’s game of throwing away a reel so that it is “gone” (fort) and pulling it back with a joyful “there” (da); and the patient in analysis who, instead of remembering the repressed, repeats it in the transference. From these he infers a compulsion to repeat that seems more original, more elementary and more drive-like than the pleasure principle. Trauma is described as excitation strong enough to break through the mind’s protective shield against stimuli, leaving it the task of binding the incoming quantities. Freud then proposes that the drives are conservative, striving to restore an earlier state, so that “the aim of all life is death”, and he sets death drives against the life or sexual drives, the libido he identifies with the Eros of the poets and philosophers. Biological findings on natural death and on the immortality of protists neither confirm nor remove the hypothesis, and he holds to the distinction between death drives and life drives, adding that the pleasure principle seems to serve the death drives. A footnote acknowledges that Sabina Spielrein had anticipated a good part of this speculation.
Main ideas
- Traumatic dreams, the child’s fort–da game and repetition in the transference point to a compulsion to repeat beyond the pleasure principle.
- Trauma is a breach of the protective shield against stimuli, which puts the pleasure principle out of action and sets the mind the task of binding excitation.
- Drives are conservative and strive to restore an earlier state; hence “the aim of all life is death”.
- Death drives are set against the life or sexual drives, the libido that Freud identifies with Eros, which holds living things together.
- Biology neither confirms nor refutes the death drives, and Freud keeps the dualism of death drives and life drives.
- The pleasure principle seems to serve the death drives.
- Freud acknowledges that Spielrein’s 1912 paper had anticipated part of the speculation.
What it shows
- 1912
Sabina Spielrein introduced Destruction as the cause of coming into being
Spielrein set out the thesis in Die Destruktion als Ursache des Werdens (1912), concluding that the reproductive drive consists, psychologically as well, of two antagonistic components, and that becoming is the result of destruction.
- 1920
Sabina Spielrein influenced Sigmund Freud
In a footnote to Jenseits des Lustprinzips (1920) Freud wrote that Spielrein had anticipated a good part of his speculation on the death drives in her 1912 paper, which called the sadistic component of the sexual drive “destructive”, though he found the paper not entirely clear.
- 1920
Sigmund Freud introduced Death drive
Freud put forward the death drives in Jenseits des Lustprinzips (1920), setting them against the life drives and suggesting that the pleasure principle itself seems to serve them.
- 1920
Death drive diverges from Destruction as the cause of coming into being
Freud acknowledged that Spielrein had anticipated part of his speculation, but where she placed destruction inside the reproductive drive, as one of its two antagonistic components, he set the death drives apart from and against the life or sexual drives.
- 1920
Sigmund Freud introduced Life drive
In Jenseits des Lustprinzips Freud gathers the sexual drives and the drives of self-preservation into the life drives, Eros, which strive to combine living substance into ever larger unities, and sets them against the death drives. Das Ich und das Es builds the second drive theory on this pair.
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- 1911
Reality principle derives from Pleasure principle
Freud presents the reality principle not as a rival to the pleasure principle but as its modification: it gives up a momentary pleasure, uncertain in its results, only to secure a later and surer one. Beyond the Pleasure Principle repeats that the reality principle replaces the pleasure principle under the ego's drives of self-preservation without abandoning its aim.
- 1920
Life drive opposes Death drive
Freud's second drive theory is a dualism: Eros binds living substance into ever greater unities, while the death drive tends to undo connections and lead back to the inorganic. All of life, he writes in 1930, is the interplay and struggle of the two, which are usually found fused.