Beyond the Pleasure Principle

Overview

Beyond the Pleasure Principle is eighty pages, published in 1920, and it is unlike anything else Freud wrote. It is openly speculative, it changes direction twice, and he stops several times to tell the reader that he is not sure he believes it. At one point he says that what follows is speculation, often far-fetched speculation, to be taken or left according to the reader’s inclination.

The circumstances matter. The war had just ended. Freud was sixty-four, had three sons who had served, and had spent four years in a Vienna short of food and coal. His daughter Sophie died in the influenza pandemic in January 1920, while he was revising the manuscript; he said afterwards that the essay was finished before her death, apparently anticipating the suggestion that grief had produced the death drive.

Two more pieces of context. Freud had been seeing veterans whose symptoms did not fit his existing theory, and his own movement was fragmenting, with Jung and Adler gone and the status of the drives in dispute.

The essay is short and can be read in an evening, and it demands more rereading than its length suggests, because the argument moves from clinical observation into biology and back.

The argument

The problem. Freud restates his position: the mental apparatus tends to keep excitation low or constant, and we experience rises as unpleasure and falls as pleasure. The pleasure principle governs, modified by the reality principle, which postpones satisfaction rather than abandoning it.

Then he assembles the exceptions.

Traumatic dreams. People who have survived a disaster dream about it, repeatedly, and wake in terror. On the wish-fulfilment theory this should not happen, and Freud does not try to absorb it. He concludes instead that in traumatic neurosis the function of dreaming has been disturbed, and that these dreams are attempting something else: to master an excitation retrospectively by generating the anxiety whose absence caused the trauma in the first place.

Children’s play. The most famous pages. Freud watched his grandson Ernst, eighteen months old, a good child who did not cry when his mother left for hours. The boy had a wooden reel on a string. He would throw it over the side of his curtained cot so that it vanished, saying a long drawn-out o-o-o-o, which the family took for the German fort, gone, and then haul it back and greet its reappearance with a delighted da, there. The whole game was the two halves, and he played the first part far more often.

Freud’s reading is that the child was taking an experience he had suffered passively and repeating it in a form he controlled, turning himself from the one abandoned into the one who does the abandoning. Play, on this account, is not pleasure-seeking but mastery.

The transference. The clinical version. Patients in analysis do not recall the repressed material as memory; they act it out, repeating old relationships with the analyst, reproducing the situations that hurt them, including the ones that cannot have been pleasant at the time. Freud calls this the compulsion to repeat, and notes that it appears in people with no neurosis at all, in the form of lives that seem to run through the same disaster again and again, as though pursued by a fate.

The speculation. From here Freud leaves psychology. If there is a compulsion to repeat that operates independently of pleasure, and if it is more primitive than the pleasure principle, what is it?

His answer is that drives are conservative. An instinct is an urge in living matter to restore an earlier state which the organism was forced to abandon. Push that back far enough and the earliest state is not being alive. Therefore the aim of all life is death, and the organism wishes to die in its own way and resists any route to death not its own, which is why it fights off external dangers.

Against this he sets Eros, the drives that bind, combine and preserve, working toward larger unities. The two are mixed in everything. Sadism is the death drive turned outward; masochism is it turned back on the self.

He supports this with biology he half apologises for: single-celled organisms, the germ plasm, Weismann’s distinction between the mortal soma and the potentially immortal germ cells, and a digression into Aristophanes’ speech in the Symposium about the original round beings split in two and forever seeking their halves.

The retreat. The last pages are a series of qualifications. Freud says he cannot tell how far he is convinced, that he has not been carried away by the attraction of his own reasoning, that the value of the whole thing depends on evidence nobody yet has, and that in science one must be prepared to pursue a line of thought and abandon it. He quotes a proverb about limping and says that what one cannot reach flying one must reach limping, and that the scripture says it is no sin to limp.

How to read it

Read Chapters II and III first, on the traumatic dreams and the fort-da game. That is the evidence, it is short, and it is the part that has lasted regardless of what you make of the rest.

Then read the whole thing in order and watch where the argument changes register. It happens at Chapter IV and Freud announces it.

Take the qualifications seriously rather than as modesty. This is a book that repeatedly tells you it may be wrong, and reading it as a confident proclamation of the death drive misses its actual manner.

Separate the three claims. That there is a compulsion to repeat is clinical and widely accepted. That it is more fundamental than the pleasure principle is a theoretical move. That it derives from a universal tendency in living matter to return to the inorganic is biology, and it is the part almost nobody has followed.

Read Civilization and Its Discontents afterwards. The death drive is doing load-bearing work there, as the source of the aggression that culture has to contain, and the later book is where the speculation is put to use.

Know what happened to it. Freud’s own circle largely declined the idea; Ernest Jones, his biographer, thought it a mistake. It survived best in France, where Lacan made a great deal of it, and in literary and cultural theory, and it is essentially absent from empirical psychology.

Questions it raises

• The compulsion to repeat is well evidenced. Does anything force the move from there to a death drive?
• If the aim of all life is death, why does anything struggle to survive? Freud’s answer, that the organism wishes to die in its own way, is either subtle or a rescue.
• The fort-da game: is the child mastering a loss, or simply enjoying a game with an object that comes back?
• Freud says repeatedly that he may be wrong. Does that make the essay more honest, or does it let a speculation enter the literature without paying the usual price?
• Traumatic dreams break the wish-fulfilment theory and Freud lets them. What does it cost a system when its author admits an exception?
• Aggression, in the later work, is the death drive turned outward. Does that explain aggression or rename it?