Beyond the Pleasure Principle

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Psychoanalysis

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Important figures Alfred Adler Michael Balint Wilfred Bion Nancy Chodorow Erik Erikson Ronald Fairbairn Sándor Ferenczi Anna Freud Sigmund Freud Erich Fromm Harry Guntrip Karen Horney Ernest Jones Carl Jung Melanie Klein Heinz Kohut Jacques Lacan Margaret Mahler Otto Rank Wilhelm Reich Harry Stack Sullivan Susan Sutherland Isaacs Donald Winnicott

Important works The Interpretation of Dreams Beyond the Pleasure Principle Civilization and Its Discontents

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"Beyond the Pleasure Principle" (first published in German in 1920 as Jenseits des Lustprinzips) is an essay by Sigmund Freud. It marked a turning point and a major modification of his previous theoretical approach. Before this essay, Freud was understood to have placed the sexual instinct, Eros, or the libido, centre stage, in explaining the forces which drive us to act. In 1920, going "beyond" the simple pleasure principle, Freud developed his theory of drives, by adding the death instinct, often referred to as "Thanatos," although Freud himself never used this term.

The main importance of the essay resides in the striking picture of human being, struggling between two opposing instincts or drives: Eros working for creativity, harmony, sexual connection, reproduction, and self-preservation; Thanatos for destruction, repetition, aggression, compulsion, and self-destruction.

In sections IV and V, Freud posits that the process of creating living cells binds energy and imbues cells with an imbalance of energy. It is the pressure of matter to return to its original state which gives cells their quality of living. The process is analogous to the creation and exhaustion of a battery. It is this molecular diffusion which can be called a death-wish. The compulsion of the matter in cells to return to a diffuse, inanimate state is extended to the whole living organism. Thus, the psychological death-wish is a manifestation of an underlying physical compulsion that is present in every cell of the organism.

Freud also took the opportunity to state the basic differences, as he saw them, between his approach and that of Carl Jung, and covered the history so far of research into the basic drives (Section VI).

• "The Language of Psycho-Analysis" , Jean Laplanche et J.B. Pontalis, Editeur: W. W. Norton & Company, 1974, ISBN 0-393-01105-4

Literature on Beyond the Pleasure Principle

• Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond.
• Bernard Stiegler, Desire and Knowledge: The Dead Seize the Living

External links

• Jenseits des Lustprinzips at Project Gutenberg (German)

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