Beyond the Pleasure Principle.html



Part of a series of articles on Psychoanalysis

Concepts Psychosexual development Psychosocial development Conscious • Preconscious • Unconscious Psychic apparatus Id, ego, and super-ego Libido • Drive Transference • Ego defenses • Resistance Important figures Alfred Adler • Nancy Chodorow • Erik Erikson Ronald Fairbairn • Anna Freud • Sigmund Freud Karen Horney • Ernest Jones Carl Jung • Melanie Klein Heinz Kohut • Jacques Lacan Margaret Mahler • Otto Rank Harry Stack Sullivan Susan Sutherland Isaacs Important works The Interpretation of Dreams Beyond the Pleasure Principle Civilization and Its Discontents Schools of thought Self psychology • Lacanian • Object relations Interpersonal • Relational Ego psychology

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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 processes which cause cell death at a microscopic level might have developed in order to give human beings a death instinct as individuals. This theory has generally been discredited.^{citation needed}

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

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