Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud, Dufresne, 2011)

Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud, Dufresne, 2011)

Beyond the Pleasure Principle is Freud's most philosophical and speculative work, exploring profound questions of life and death, pleasure and pain. In it Freud introduces the fundamental concepts of the "repetition compulsion" and the "death drive," according to which a perverse, repetitive, self-destructive impulse opposes and even trumps the creative drive, or Eros. The work is one of Freud's most intensely debated, and raises important questions that have been discussed by philosophers and psychoanalysts since its first publication in 1920.

The text is presented here in a contemporary new translation by Gregory C. Richter. Appendices trace the work's antecedents and the many responses to it, including texts by Plato, Friedrich Nietzsche, Melanie Klein, Herbert Marcuse, Jacques Derrida, and Judith Butler, among many others.

"As a dynamic-energetic model of narrative plot, Beyond the Pleasure Principle gives an image of how the nonnarratable existence is stimulated into the condition of narratability, to enter a state of deviance and detour (ambition, quest, the pose of a mask) in which it is maintained for a certain time, through an at least minimally complex extravagance, before returning to the quiescence of the nonnarratable." -Peter Brooks

p.52 Gustav Fechner... In so far as conscious impulses always relate to pleasure or unpleasure, pleasure or unpleasure can also be conceived as psychophysically related to states of stability and instability. On this basis is founded a hypothesis I shall develop in more detail elsewhere - the hypothesis that every psychophysical motion surmounting the threshold of consciousness is linked with pleasure to the degree that, beyond a certain limit, it approaches total stability, and that it is linked with unpleasure to the degree that, beyond a certain limit, it deviates from total stability; between the two limits... there exists a certain area of perceptual indifference.

p.53 this aim we have ascribed to the mental apparatus can be classified as a special case of Fechner's principle of the tendency toward stability, to which he relates feelings of pleasure and unpleasure.

p.53 Fechner's comment... "... that the tendency toward an aim still does not mean the aim is reached; the aim can be reached only in approximations ..."

p.75-76 we are now on the track of a universal characteristic of drives... In this view, a drive is an urge inherent in living organic matter for the restoration of an earlier state - one that a living being has had to give up under the influence of external disturbing forces; it is a kind of organic elasticity, or, in a manner of speaking, the expression of the inertia in organic life.

p.90 Given the present obscurity in the theory of drives, it would be inadvisable to reject any idea that promises to enlighten.

p.93 [a hypothesis or theory originating from Plato which Freud is going to discuss] derives a drive from the need to restore an earlier state.

p.98 The pleasure principle, then, is a tendency serving a function whose task is to render the mental apparatus completely free of excitation, or to keep the amount of excitation in it constant or as low as possible.

p.99 What one cannot fly to one must limp to. ... The Scripture says that limping is no sin.

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