Beyond the Pleasure Principle
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| Author | Sigmund Freud |
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| Original title | Jenseits des Lustprinzips |
| Country | Germany |
| Language | German |
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Publication date
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1920 |
Beyond the Pleasure Principle (German: Jenseits des Lustprinzips) is a 1920 essay by Sigmund Freud that marks a major turning point in his theoretical approach. Previously, Freud attributed most human behavior to the sexual instinct (Eros or libido). With this essay, Freud went "beyond" the simple pleasure principle, developing his theory of drives with the addition of the death drive(s) (Todestrieb[e]) (often referred to as "Thanatos").
The essay describes humans as struggling between two opposing drives: Eros, which produces creativity, harmony, sexual connection, reproduction, and self-preservation; and Thanatos, which brings destruction, repetition, aggression, compulsion, and self-destruction.
In sections IV and V, Freud posits that the process of creating living cells binds energy and creates an imbalance. 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. This pressure for molecular diffusion can be called a "death-wish". The compulsion of the matter in cells to return to a diffuse, inanimate state extends to the whole living organism. Thus, the psychological death-wish is a manifestation of an underlying physical compulsion present in every cell.
Freud also stated the basic differences, as he saw them, between his approach and Carl Jung's, and summarized published research into basic drives (Section VI).
"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".
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