Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (Penguin) by Sigmund Freud
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Overview: Sigmund Freud’s "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" is a key text, not only for psychologists, or literary theorists, but anyone who thinks about why our minds work the way they do. If your mind is open to extreme possibilities, give this text a read. It is short, barely 75 pages, but give yourself time to pore over and make notes, as Freud moves very quickly.
In "Beyond the Pleasure Principle," Freud seeks to discover the causes and effects of our drives. To this end, he begins with the pleasure principle, which basically holds that the job of our ‘mental apparatus’ is to lower tension and move us towards pleasure and stability. Working against the pleasure principle are our baser instincts, which must be repressed by a vigilant brain. The pleasure principle can also be interrupted by the reality principle, which operates in moments when basic life functions are threatened – to wit, when maintaining life is more important than pleasure.
Genre: General
Examining the pleasure principle, Freud looks at scenarios which may shed light on mental processes that seem to challenge it. These include repetition compulsion, wherein adults seem to fixate and reenact moments of trauma. Seeking a more primal cause for repetition instinct, Freud analyses children’s games. Interestingly, the further Freud regresses, the more speculative and intense he gets – from childhood, Freud talks about the brain itself, moving back to simple multicellular organisms, unicellular organisms, and ultimately inorganic matter – all the time looking for an explanation of the origin of instincts themselves.
Freud’s queries on instinct and repetition compulsion lead him to the darkest possible places – the revelation of the death instinct. Freud posits that the repetition compulsion manifests itself in all conscious beings in the desire to return to the earliest state, total inactivity. The remainder of his treatise is spent developing the conditions of the death instinct, and trying to find a way out of this shocking thesis. Taking up Hesiodic Eros as symbolic of the life instinct, Freud attempts to argue out of the seemingly inescapable conclusion.
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