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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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The Moderation of Pleasure and Reality
As Freud moves outward from his early work on the pleasure principle and the role of the libido in human motivation, he becomes increasingly convinced that the inherent drive of the psyche is that of equilibrium. He explores this first by showing how the pleasure principle and the reality principle strike a balance in the human psyche, leading to the moderation of pleasure and reality.
The pleasure principle, in which the libido functions, is housed in the id, or the unconscious. Freud’s early works showed how children and adults were driven to seek pleasure and avoid pain. However, pleasure-seeking often stands in contrast with the superego, which adheres to social expectations, norms, and systems of morality. Therefore, the ego must seek balance between the superego and the id by repressing desires and delaying gratification. It is the work of the psyche to maintain this balance:
The facts which have caused us to believe in the dominance of the pleasure principle in mental life also find expression in the hypothesis that the mental apparatus endeavours to keep the quantity of excitation present in it as low as possible or at least to keep it constant. (8)
In other words, the psyche must keep the pleasure principle from taking over and causing an imbalance.
Freud argues that neuroses occur when the ego acts too robustly, driving desire deep into the unconscious, where it is unable to escape. He relates all these concepts to his notion of psychic economy, the management of psychic energy in the mind. Freud proposes that the mind must allocate energy toward both pleasure-seeking and managing and processing external stimuli. When the energy is distributed unevenly, neuroses can arise. Furthermore, traumatic experiences during which an individual exhibits no outward manifestation of the experience can become internalized, trapping psychic energy in a cycle of excess and imbalance. This state of excess leads to a compulsion toward repetition, as though the trauma were still taking place in the present instead of belonging exclusively to the past.
Freud proposes that psychoanalysis has an important responsibility to bring the repressed desires and traumas of the id forward into consciousness. However, the ego does not want this to happen and will go to great lengths to keep traumas hidden, especially if these elements seem to contradict the needs and expectations of social life. Dream interpretation, talk therapy, and symbol interpretation can lead to uncovering what lies within the unconscious and help to return a patient to equilibrium.
The Compulsion for Life and Death
In Freud’s early works, he emphasized the role of libido and pleasure principle over all other motivation drives. In the first three sections of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the psychoanalyst establishes the pleasure principle as a pillar for understanding the human psyche. However, he struggles with the issue that humans seem to repetitively engage in behaviors that have little to nothing to do with pleasure-seeking. The final four sections of his essay thus offer a speculative exploration of the possibility of other internal drives beyond the pleasure principle, which may also impact human behavior and motivation. In addition to the reality principle, Freud argues that humans are motivated by innate compulsions for life and death, which he calls Eros and Thanatos.
Eros, named after the Greek god of love, represents the innate drive of all living things toward creation, reproduction, and love. Freud asserts that the pleasure principle and libido are important parts of the life drive and that sexual libido represents one of the greatest manifestations of the pleasure principle. As Freud examines the drive toward life and its impact on human behavior, he recognizes that humans often engage in unpleasurable experiences. This causes him to speculate whether his theory of the life drive has a dual opposite—a drive toward death and destruction.
Freud calls the drive toward death and destruction Thanatos, named after the Greek god of death. Just as humans are compelled to seek pleasure, they are also motivated to enact violence. The psychoanalyst considers how Thanatos might impact the cycle of human history and its propensity toward war and death. The juxtaposition of these two drives creates tension as the individual navigates both a desire to create and destroy: “The tension which then arose in what had hitherto been an inanimate substance endeavoured to cancel itself out” (38).
Just as Freud championed balance and equilibrium in the relationship between the pleasure principle and the reality principle, he also advocates for stability between the life and death drives. He proposes that both are part of the same system which seeks immortality and a return to a previous state of being. Within the death drive, the innate drive toward a previous state represents inorganic matter and the inherent desire to return to nothingness. The life drive represents the simultaneous desire for reproduction, achieving immortality through the continuation of the species. For this reason, pleasure is tied to both life and death, propelling the individual toward both.
Trauma and the Unconscious
Freud’s early understanding of the pleasure principle in his psychoanalytic theory highlights the role it plays in a human’s desire to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. According to this principle, the libido motivates individuals to seek satisfaction through meaningful relationships and pleasurable experiences. When desires stand in contrast to the superego and the reality principle, the ego suppresses them into the unconscious, where they remain hidden from conscious awareness. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud expands his understanding of the pleasure principle to address the issue of trauma and the unconscious.
As Freud worked with patients who had experienced psychological distress, he found that the pleasure principle was being thwarted by something else. Patients who exhibited behaviors in contrast to the pleasure principle—such as the repetitive reenactments of trauma in dreams by veterans of World War I—seemed to suggest that another force was hindering the work of the pleasure principle. Freud asserts that this other force is trauma and that it engages in a similar process to the repression of desire.
This model shows how unconscious desires manifest indirectly. Dreams or subconscious slips of the tongue both represent how the workings of the unconscious emerge into consciousness without prompting. Both the unconscious and conscious play important roles in the psyche in processing external stimuli, creating memory, and finding equilibrium. When the external stimulus presents a danger, an individual responds in a variety of ways. Freud argues that when the danger does not produce an external manifestation of the trauma, it is internalized. It breaches the protective boundaries of the mind by causing a state of psychic shock, trapping psychic energy in the mind without escape. Since the psyche is always seeking equilibrium, it seeks to do something with the traumatic excess energy. Freud suggests that anxiety creates a cyclical loop for the energy to be repetitively processed.
The compulsion to repeat is one way in which the mind deals with extra psychic energy. Freud therefore argues that nightmares and other repetitive behaviors of individuals with neurotic conditions are the manifestations of this trapped energy. Freud defines repetitive compulsion as the unconscious drive to repeat past experiences. Trauma solidifies the experience of danger in the present, never allowing the individual to move beyond it.
Freud’s work with trauma thus leads him to consider how the death drive may play a part in combatting and engaging the pleasure principle. Freud’s work with trauma and his assertion that treatment requires bringing the unconscious into the conscious through dream interpretation and talk therapy created a framework for future psychoanalysis and studies of conditions like Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
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