Beyond the Pleasure Principle () is a 1920 essay by Sigmund Freud. It marks a major turning point in the formulation of his drive theory, where Freud had previously attributed self-preservation in human behavior to the drives of Eros and the regulation of libido, governed by the pleasure principle. Revising this as inconclusive, Freud theorized beyond the pleasure principle, newly considering the death drives (or Thanatos, the Greek personification of death) which refers to the tendency towards destruction and annihilation, often expressed through behaviors such as aggression, repetition compulsion, and self-destructiveness.
Overview
The essay, marking Freud's major revision of his drive theory, elaborates on the struggle between two opposing drives. In the first few sections, Freud describes these as Eros, which produces creativity, harmony, sexual connection, reproduction, and self-preservation; and the "death drives" (what some call "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 is referred to as 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, which Freud directly corresponds to the death drives.
Freud also states the basic differences, as he saw them, between his approach and Carl Jung's, and summarizes published research into basic drives in Section VI to establish his revisions.
Analysis and synopsis
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".
Clinical evidence (sections I–III) Freud begins with "a commonplace then unchallenged in psychoanalytic theory: 'The course of mental events is automatically regulated by the pleasure principle ... a strong tendency toward the pleasure principle. After considering the inevitable presence of unpleasant experiences in the life of the mind, he concludes the book's first section to the effect that the presence of such unpleasant experiences "does not contradict the dominance of the pleasure principle ... does not seem to necessitate any far-reaching limitation of the pleasure principle."
Exceptions to the pleasure principle
Freud proceeds to look for "evidence, for the existence of hitherto unsuspected forces 'beyond' the pleasure principle." He found exceptions to the universal power of the pleasure principle—"situations ... with which the pleasure principle cannot cope adequately"—in four main areas: children's games, as exemplified in his grandson's famous "fort-da" game; "the recurrent dreams of war neurotics ...; the pattern of self-injuring behaviour that can be traced through the lives of certain people ["fate neurosis"]; the tendency of many patients in psycho-analysis to act out over and over again unpleasant experiences of their childhood."
Repetition compulsion
From these cases, Freud inferred the existence of motivations beyond the pleasure principle. Freud already felt in 1919 that he could safely postulate "the principle of a repetition compulsion in the unconscious mind, based upon instinctual activity and probably inherent in the very nature of the instincts—a principle powerful enough to overrule the pleasure-principle". In the first half of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, "a first phase, the most varied manifestations of repetition, considered as their irreducible quality, are attributed to the essence of drives" in precisely the same way.
Building on his 1914 article "Recollecting, Repeating and Working Through", Freud highlights how the "patient cannot remember the whole of what is repressed in him, and ... is obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of ... remembering it as something belonging to the past:" a "compulsion to repeat."