Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Sigmund Freud
 "Beyond the Pleasure Principle is a difficult text." As Ernest Jones, one of Freud's closest associates and a member of his Inner Ring, put it, "the train of thought [is] by no means easy to follow...and Freud's views on the subject have often been considerably misinterpreted." What have been called the "two distinct frescoes or canti" of Beyond the Pleasure Principle break between sections III and IV. If, as Otto Fenichel remarked, Freud's "new [instinctual] classification has two bases, one speculative, and one clinical", thus far the clinical. In Freud's own words, the second section "is speculation, often far-fetched speculation, which the reader will consider or dismiss according to his individual predilection" - it has been noted that "in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud used that unpromising word "speculations" more than once". Freud begins with "a commonplace then unchallenged in psychoanalytic theory: 'The course of mental events is automatically regulated by the pleasure principle...a strong tendency toward the pleasure principle'". After considering the inevitable presence of unpleasant experiences in the life of the mind, he concludes the book's first section to the effect that the presence of such unpleasant experiences "does not contradict the dominance of the pleasure principle...does not seem to necessitate any far-reaching limitation of the pleasure principle." Freud proceeds to look for "evidence, for the existence of hitherto unsuspected forces 'beyond' the pleasure principle."—in four main areas: children's games, as exemplified in his grandson's famous "fort-da" game; "the recurrent dreams of war neurotics...; the pattern of self-injuring behaviour that can be traced through the lives of certain people ["fate neurosis"]; the tendency of many patients in psycho-analysis to act out over and over again unpleasant experiences of their childhood." From these cases, Freud inferred the existence of motivations beyond the pleasure principle. In the first half of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, "a first phase, the most varied manifestations of repetition, considered as their irreducible quality, are attributed to the essence of drives" in precisely the same way. Building on his 1914 article "Recollecting,Repeating and Working Through", Freud highlights how the "patient cannot remember the whole of what is repressed in him, and...is obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of...remembering it as something belonging to the past:" a "compulsion to repeat." Freud still wanted to examine the relationship between repetition compulsion and the pleasure principle. Although compulsive behaviors evidently satisfied some sort of drive, they were a source of direct unpleasure. Somehow, "no lesson has been learnt from the old experience of these activities having led only to unpleasure. In spite of that, they are repeated, under pressure of a compulsion". Also noting repetitions in the lives of normal people—who appeared to be "pursued by a malignant fate or possessed by some "daemonic" power" Arguing that dreams in which one relives trauma serve a binding function in the mind, connected to repetition compulsion, Freud admits that such dreams are an exception to the rule that the dream is the fulfillment of a wish. Asserting that the first task of the mind is to bind excitations to prevent trauma (so that the pleasure principle does not begin to dominate mental activities until the excitations are bound), he reiterates the clinical fact that for "a person in analysis...the compulsion to repeat the events of his childhood in the transference evidently disregards the pleasure principle in every way". Freud begins to look for analogies repetition compulsion in the "essentially conservative...feature of instinctual life...the lower we go in the animal scale the more stereotyped does instinctual behavior appear". Thereafter "a leap in the text can be noticed when Freud places the compulsion to repeat on an equal footing with 'an urge...to restore an earlier state of things'" - ultimately that of the original inorganic condition. Declaring that "the aim of life is death" and "inanimate things existed before living ones", Freud interprets an organism’s drive to avoid danger only as a way of avoiding a short-circuit to death: the organisms seeks to die in its own way. He thus found his way to his celebrated concept of the death instinct. Thereupon, "Freud plunged into the thickets of speculative modern biology, even into philosophy, in search of corroborative evidence" - looking to "arguments of every kind, frequently borrowed from fields outside of psychoanalytic practice, calling to the rescue biology, philosophy, and mythology". He turned to prewar experiments on protozoa - of perhaps questionable relevance, even if it is not the case that 'his interpretation of the experiments on the successive generations of protozoa contains a fatal flaw'. The most that can perhaps be said is that Freud did not find "any biological argument which contradicts his dualistic conception of instinctual life", but at the same time, "as Jones (1957) points out, 'no biological observation can be found to support the idea of a death instinct, one which contradicts all biological principles'" either. Freud then continued with a reference to "the harbour of Schopenhauer's philosophy"; but in groping for a return to the clinical he admitted that "it looks suspiciously as though we were trying to find a way out of a highly embarrassing situation at any price". Freud eventually decided that he could find a clinical manifestation of the death instinct in the phenomenon of masochism, "hitherto regarded as secondary to sadism...and suggested that there could be a primary masochism, a self-injuring tendency which would be an indication of the death instinct". To then explain the sexual instinct as well in terms of a compulsion to repeat, Freud inserts a myth from Plato that humans are driven to reproduce in order to join together the sexes, which had once existed in single individuals who were both male and female - still "in utter disregard of disciplinary distinctions"; and admits again the speculative nature of his own ideas, "lacking a direct translation of observation into theory....One may have made a lucky hit or one may have gone shamefully astray"'. Nevertheless with the libido or Eros as the life force finally set out on the other side of the repetition compulsion equation, the way was clear for the book's closing "vision of two elemental pugnacious forces in the mind, Eros and Thanatos, locked in eternal battle".