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WorkSigmund Freud

Beyond the Pleasure Principle

Shell-shocked soldiers and a child's game with a reel lead Freud to propose a drive towards death.

by Sigmund Freud109 passages held

  • German, the original language
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Original title
Jenseits des Lustprinzips
First published
(aged 64)
Original language
German

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Overview

The First World War sent home soldiers whose nights returned them, again and again, to the moment that had broken them, and who woke in fresh terror. For Sigmund Freud, who had built his theory of dreams on the claim that every dream fulfils a wish, these were the hardest cases to explain, and this book starts from them. Beside them he sets a game he watched a boy of eighteen months play: the child threw a wooden reel on a string over the edge of his curtained cot, so that it vanished, with a long, drawn-out o sound that the adults took for the German fort, "gone", and then pulled it back with a joyful da, "there". The child, Freud suggests, was staging his mother's going away, and he played the painful first half far more often than the happy return. Patients in analysis do the same, repeating old hurts instead of remembering them. From these cases Freud infers a compulsion to repeat that is older than the pursuit of pleasure, and then takes a step he labels speculation: every living thing carries a drive to return to the inanimate state it came from, a drive towards death, against which the sexual drives keep renewing life. He found support in the biologist August Weismann's division of living matter into a part that dies and a part that is passed on. The Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag published the book in 1920. Early that year Freud's daughter Sophie had died, and in July he asked his Berlin colleague Max Eitingon to bear witness that the book had been half finished while she was alive and well. His biographer Ernest Jones later called it the only one of Freud's books that his followers largely failed to accept.

Key concepts

What is the pleasure principle?

The pleasure principle is the rule that mental life is steered by avoiding unpleasure and gaining pleasure. Freud ties unpleasure to a rise in excitement within the mind and pleasure to its lowering, following the physicist Fechner's idea that the mind tends to keep its excitement as low or as constant as possible. The book asks whether anything in mental life works beyond, or before, that rule.

What is the compulsion to repeat?

It is an urge to repeat experiences, including painful ones that never brought any pleasure, as if under a fate. Freud finds it in traumatic dreams, children's games and the way patients relive the past in treatment instead of remembering it. Because such repetition does not serve the pleasure principle, he concludes that it is more primitive and more elementary than that principle.

What does Freud mean by binding excitement?

Binding means turning freely flowing excitement into a quiet, held form that the mind can manage. Before the pleasure principle can work at all, incoming excitement has to be bound. When a trauma floods the mind with more than it can bind, everything else is put aside until the flood is mastered, and repetition, Freud suggests, may be the mind's late attempt at this work.

What is Eros in this book?

Eros is Freud's name for the drives that bind living things together and keep life going: sexuality in the widest sense, including the love of self that holds an organism's own cells together. He says his libido coincides with the Eros of poets and philosophers. Opposed to Eros he sets the death drive, which leads living matter back towards the lifeless.

What is the Nirvana principle?

It is the tendency of mental life to reduce, keep constant or abolish inner tension, a phrase Freud takes from the analyst Barbara Low. He sees it expressed in the pleasure principle itself, and calls it one of his strongest reasons for believing in death drives, since a mind that strives for zero tension is striving, in the end, for stillness.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Repeating What Hurt

Why would a mind built to seek pleasure keep returning to pain? Freud gathers the cases his own theory could not explain and lets them force a new idea.

Soldiers' nightmares bring back the catastrophe, which hardly fits the claim that every dream fulfils a wish. A toddler stages his mother's leaving with a reel on a string, playing the loss more often than the return. Children replay a frightening visit to the doctor on a playmate; patients relive old hurts with the analyst instead of remembering them. Some of this can be read as an attempt to master an experience suffered passively. What remains, Freud argues, is a compulsion to repeat older than the pleasure principle.

  • repetition compulsion
  • repetition
  • trauma
  • child's play
  • dreams
  • mastery
  • neurosis
  • memory
  • pleasure and pain

Enter a dialogue

A Drive Towards Death

What if the deepest urge of living matter is to stop living? Freud follows his speculation step by step, and says plainly that it is speculation.

If a drive is an urge to restore an earlier state, and the lifeless came before the living, then the aim of all life is death, reached by the organism's own path. Even the drives that preserve the self, Freud suggests, only guard that private route. Against them stand the sexual drives, which join cells and renew life, and he names them Eros. He looks for support in Weismann's mortal body and immortal germ plasm, in experiments on single-celled creatures, and in Aristophanes' myth in Plato's Symposium.

  • death drive
  • life drive
  • life and death drives
  • drive theory
  • organism
  • evolution
  • reproduction
  • immortality
  • self-preservation
  • speculation
  • scientific method

Enter a dialogue

The Shield Against the World

What is a trauma, physically speaking? Freud builds a small model of a living thing and imagines what happens when the world breaks in.

Picture the simplest organism as a tiny bubble of living matter; its outer layer, battered by stimuli, dies off into a protective crust and lets through only small samples of the world. Protection, Freud argues, matters more to a living thing than perception. A trauma is a breach of this shield by more excitement than the mind can bind. Fright strikes where no anxiety had prepared the system, which is why a simultaneous physical wound, drawing the energy elsewhere, tends to prevent a traumatic neurosis.

  • consciousness
  • perception
  • psychic energy
  • trauma
  • organism

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held
109
distinct concepts
168
by passages held, corpus-wide
#487

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “psychic energy” and “psychoanalysis”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 21 pairings. 86 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
psychic energypsychoanalysis8
pleasure principlepsychic energy6
pleasure principlerepetition compulsion6
psychoanalysisrepetition compulsion6
psychoanalysistrauma6
pleasure principlepsychoanalysis5
death drivesexuality4
psychic energytrauma4
pleasure principletrauma3
repetition compulsionsexuality3
death drivedrive theory2
death drivepleasure principle2
drive theorypleasure principle2
drive theoryrepetition compulsion2
repetition compulsiontrauma2
death drivepsychic energy1
death driverepetition compulsion1
drive theorypsychoanalysis1
drive theorysexuality1
psychic energyrepetition compulsion1
psychoanalysissexuality1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1900 The Interpretation of Dreams (Die Traumdeutung)

    Begun from his own dreams in the 1890s and enlarged in edition after edition, this is where Freud sets out the method of interpretation that his later books apply to slips of the tongue, jokes and myths.

     DE
  2. 1901 The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens)

    The dream book's method carried into waking life; its slips and forgettings became the opening part of the lectures Freud later gave to beginners in Vienna.

     DE
  3. 1905 Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewußten)

    Freud's only book-length study of comedy, and the one most built from borrowed material: puns, anecdotes and Jewish jokes, each taken apart in turn.

     DE
  4. 1907 Frühe Schriften zu Religion und Dichtung

    Two early excursions from the clinic, gathered here in one volume: the seed of Freud's later books on religion, and his short account of where a writer's stories come from.

     DE
  5. 1910 Zur Theorie des Unbewußten

    Four theoretical papers written between 1910 and 1915 and gathered here in one volume, on the road from the dream book to the metapsychological essays of 1915 — the last of the four is one of those essays.

     DE
  6. 1913 Spätere Schriften zu Dichtung und Mythos

    Two essays from 1913 and 1917, gathered here in one volume, that show Freud the reader of Shakespeare and Goethe: the dream-book method applied to a stage motif and to the first page of a famous autobiography.

     DE
  7. 1913 Totem and Taboo (Totem und Tabu)

    The first of Freud's books on society and religion, where he moves from the patient to the human species; Group Psychology, The Future of an Illusion and his last book, on Moses, all build on its story of the murdered father.

     DE
  8. 1914 On Narcissism: An Introduction (Zur Einführung des Narzißmus)

    A short essay written as Jung was breaking with Freud, and the hinge between his early theory of the drives and the later picture of ego and super-ego.

     DE
  9. 1915 Instincts and their Vicissitudes (Triebe und Triebschicksale)

    The paper that opens Freud's 1915 theoretical series by defining its basic term; the companion essays on repression and on the unconscious build on it.

     DE
  10. 1915 Schriften aus dem Weltkrieg

    Freud's direct responses to the First World War, gathered in one volume on this site: a long essay of 1915 on disillusionment and death, and a short one of 1916 on transience and mourning.

     DE
  11. 1915 The Unconscious (Das Unbewußte)

    Freud's fullest account of what he meant by the unconscious, written in wartime Vienna eight years before The Ego and the Id redrew his map of the mind.

     DE
  12. 1917 Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse)

    Freud's own introduction to his work, and the closest thing he wrote to a textbook: his books on dreams and on everyday slips retold for listeners, then carried on into a general theory of neurosis.

     DE
  13. 1919 The 'Uncanny' (Das Unheimliche)

    A rare venture by Freud into aesthetics, a field he says psychoanalysts seldom feel drawn to, written in 1919 beside the first draft of Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

     DE
  14. 1920 Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Jenseits des Lustprinzips) you are here DE
  15. 1921 Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse)

    The bridge between Freud's speculations on prehistory and his new model of the mind: its chapter on a "grade in the ego" sets out the ego ideal that The Ego and the Id would rename two years later.

     DE
  16. 1923 The Ego and the Id (Das Ich und das Es)

    The book in which Freud's later model of the mind takes its final shape; the essays and books that follow it, on anxiety, religion and civilisation, all speak its language of ego, id and super-ego.

     DE
  17. 1924 Späte Schriften zur Ich-Psychologie

    Three short papers of the mid-1920s, gathered here in one volume, in which Freud tests the model of The Ego and the Id on psychosis, on memory and on laughter.

     DE
  18. 1926 Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (Hemmung, Symptom und Angst)

    Written three years after The Ego and the Id, it rebuilds the theory of neurotic symptoms in that book's terms, starting from the difference between a symptom and an inhibition, a restriction the ego places on itself.

     DE
  19. 1927 The Future of an Illusion (Die Zukunft einer Illusion)

    Freud's most direct case against religion, written fourteen years after Totem and Taboo had traced it to the murdered father, and the opening of the late cultural writings that continue in Civilization and Its Discontents.

     DE
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