Beyond the Pleasure Principle: A Speculative Essay on Freud

Beyond the Pleasure Principle,1 published in 1920, is an altogether extraordinary work that, with its amazing twists and turns, is by no means easy to follow or to comprehend. In viewing his essay in frankly speculative terms, Freud undertakes to advance his theory of psychoanalysis into new domains of the mental processes, while having no intention of giving up his earlier findings. We shall find, however, that his claim to go not only threatens but even compromises and ultimately undermines, if not his earlier insights into the depths of the human psyche, at least the speculative principles in terms of how they are formulated.

The extraordinary thing is that, while Freud presupposes his work of the previous twenty-five years in writing Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the essay puts in jeopardy not merely the conceptual coherence but even the validity of that prior work. Freud now finds that the dualism between the pleasure principle and the reality principle, in terms of which he had come to understand the opposition between the two categories of instincts fundamental to the mental processes, the sexual instincts and the ego instincts, and succinctly articulated in his paper of 1911, “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning,” cannot account for newly discerned perturbations of mind that he categorizes under “the compulsion to repeat.”

To explain these new disturbances Freud proposes what he frankly acknowledges to be an “often far-fetched speculation which the reader will consider or dismiss according to his individual predilection” (1920, p. 295). He shows that the reason he is compelled to propose a new speculative framework for psychoanalysis is that the pleasure principle, as he formulates it in the opening sentence of Beyond the Pleasure Principle —“the course taken by mental events is automatically regulated by the pleasure principle”—is no longer adequate (p. 275). Indeed, Freud is quick to point out t