36 pages • 1 hour read
Sigmund FreudBeyond the Pleasure Principle
Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 1920A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaSections 2-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Section 2 Summary
Freud believes that by examining how the mind responds to the trauma of external danger, psychoanalysts can gain insight into how the mind processes and internalizes other types of traumas. World War I helped to shape an understanding of the impact of traumatic events, removing the former clinical assumption that symptoms were related to nervous disorders. Freud suggests that when humans experience traumatic events, they first react in one of three ways: fright, fear, or anxiety. Each has its own definition and relation to danger. Freud proposes that when humans do not experience a wound during the event, they are more likely to develop psychological effects.
Dreams play a key role in uncovering the working of the unconscious mind and the impact of trauma. Freud suggests that when humans are in states of neuroses, they repetitively engage in their traumatic experiences in their dreams. Although their nights are filled with the repetitive images of their trauma, their days are filled with avoidance.
Freud relates the repetitive engagement with trauma to the repetitive nature of children’s play. He critiques theories about children’s play that ignore the role of the pleasure principle. Play has an economic advantage; children select play based on the amount of pleasure they will receive from it. The psychoanalyst recalls working with a boy of one and a half who repeatedly would throw his toys away from himself so that someone would have to pick them up and return them. Freud noted the pleasure the boy received when someone would retrieve the item. The boy was engaging in a game that brought pleasure through disappearance and return.
Freud explains that displeasure was a necessary part of the pleasure of the game, which sheds new light on how pleasure and unpleasure interact with one another.
Section 3 Summary
Freud’s 25 years as a psychoanalyst led him to understand that the initial work of the field was not enough. In its early days, psychoanalysis focused on making the unconscious conscious by interpreting a patient’s dreams and narratives, then sharing those interpretations with the patient. However, Freud explains that this does not go far enough to provide therapy for the patient. Since an individual’s unconscious desires and traumas are hidden within the unconscious, the patient is unable to access or communicate what is inherently unknowable. Trauma causes the patient to engage with the experience repeatedly in the present instead of remembering it as something belonging to the past. The psychoanalyst must work diligently to bring unconscious trauma into consciousness while avoiding repetition.
To break the cycle of the compulsion to repeat, Freud suggests it is important to remember that the id has no interest in keeping repression hidden. Resistance during treatment belongs to the ego. As the ego regulates the needs of the superego with the pleasure principle housed in the id, it repeats the trauma for the same reason that the boy throws the toy away so that it can be returned. Unpleasure is an important part of pleasure—a concept that Freud uses to hint that a new theory must lie beyond the pleasure principle.
Sections 2-3 Analysis
Sections 2-3 explore Freud’s clinical observations as evidence for his foundational theories and the need for their expansion. After establishing the pleasure principle as a given, he seeks evidence that other forces may be driving human motivation and behavior. These sections offer several examples of how The Moderation of Pleasure and Reality plays an important role in the human psyche. Freud encompasses his ideas about the construction of the psyche as having three parts—id, ego, and superego—as part of an ongoing conflict between external reality and internal pleasure-seeking and innate drive. The concept of psychic moderation through the management of psychic energy is important to establish Freud’s argument for how trauma becomes internalized and manifests through repetitive compulsion.
World War I is one example that Freud uses to bring clarity to how Trauma and the Unconscious connect to one another. After the war, medical practitioners were faced with former soldiers who had the compulsion to repeat and other neuroses. Physicians soon realized that the experiences of patients that they had earlier dismissed as “nervous conditions” were traumatic responses. Freud theorizes that humans internalize trauma, especially when there is not an external manifestation of a danger—such as a physical wound.
In these sections, Freud establishes the compulsion to repeat as a potential trauma response. One of the major pieces of evidence that Freud provides in this section is the act of a child playing. Many parents are familiar with a common child’s game of repeatedly throwing something on the ground for a parent to pick up and return to the child. Freud breaks down several arguments for this common form of play, but he does not offer a definitive answer for it. Instead, he uses the example to remind his readers of the compulsion to repeat, hinting that this may also relate to trauma and pleasure.
During his clinical work with patients, he found that many individuals repeat traumas in their dreams. Freud realized humans tend to live in trauma as a present experience. Since a person cannot access their own unconscious, they have no way of bringing their traumas forward to the conscious part of the mind. Freud points to the ego and the superego as the source of resistance to bringing forward hidden trauma and desires that live in the unconscious. Since the ego moderates the superego and the id to maintain social security while seeking pleasure, Freud suggests that it can overcorrect, creating repression. It is the work of the psychoanalyst to help uncover the repressed traumas housed in the id.
By establishing psychology as a field of treatment rather than just diagnosis, the essay has profound implications for the field’s future development. Several ideas that Freud presents offer insight into later development in the field of psychology. His analysis of soldiers from World War I and their internalized experiences of trauma helped to pave the way for new medical research into Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. The reactions to external danger that Freud outlines—fright, fear, and anxiety—connect to modern concepts about stress response. Furthermore, Freud’s relation of the compulsion to repeat to trauma connects to contemporary research on how trauma manifests in a person’s life.
Freud’s essay shifts after the first three sections into Freud’s new ideas about the death drive and life drive as contributors to The Compulsion for Life and Death that direct human experience. The first sections thus offer a foundation of his assumptions and clinical observations as evidence for a need to expand his initial theory.
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By Sigmund Freud
