The publication of "Beyond the
Pleasure Principle" in 1920
marked a crucial turning point in Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic theory. Up
until then Freud infamously held that all human action is based on the sexual
drives (the libido or Eros) and the pleasure principle of perusing pleasure
while avoiding pain. In "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" Freud suggested that man is also governed by
a competing instinctual drive: the death drive (or Thanatos, the Greek god of
death).
It was the horrors of
World War 1 which led Freud to hold that inside all of us lies a force which is
aggressive, violent and (also self-) destructive. Life and death, Freud
realized, are two sides of the same coin and therefore their mutual interaction
is at the very core of human existence.
Freud moves from clinical
evidence to support his theory to speculation. in sections 1-3 of "Beyond the
Pleasure Principle" Freud asks if we
can find examples of incidents in which human action moves "beyond the Pleasure
Principle", that is not abiding by
it. He identifies four such cases: children's games, recurring dreams, self
harming and the underlying principle of repetition compulsion (enacting unpleasant
events over and over again). Freud could not account for repetition compulsion under
the premise of the pleasure principle and he therefore concluded that it must
be separate from it.
In sections 4-7 of "Beyond the
Pleasure Principle" Freud speculates
that repetition compulsion is a form or relieving pressure originating in
trauma, granting relief to self destructive forces. He added the example of
masochism which he claims precedes sadism, and not the other way around.
The most inspiring point
in Freud's "Beyond
the Pleasure Principle" is the suggestion
that to the same extent we want live and love we also want to die and destroy.
The dual nature of man was now brought to the forefront of psychoanalysis.
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