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Certain of its many admiring reviewers recommend The White Hotel to psychiatrists and psychoanalysts because it contains a case history of a therapy and features Sigmund Freud among the main characters. A recommendation of this sort, based on the assumption that a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst will naturally want to read fiction about a patient and particularly about Freud, usually turns me away. In this case, I succumbed because a few close friends, knowing of this antipathy, continued to press my reading the book. I discovered a far more compelling reason for the book's interest to this professional group, that has received much less notice. In effect, Thomas has produced a novelization of Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle (S.E., 18). I am surprised that so little attention has been paid to the structuring of The White Hotel on Beyond the Pleasure Principle because on several occasions in the book Thomas makes this aim explicit.
Beyond the Pleasure Principle is one of the metapsychological works of Freud that are known, even among professionals in the field, for a key idea—in this instance, the dualistic life-and-death instinct theory. More complex arguments presented are given less attention, in large measure probably because the metapsychological speculations of Freud seem morbid, related more to philosophy than to psychology, and, indeed, appear to conflict with clinical theory. Freud shared those concerns. Calling Beyond the Pleasure Principle radical, farfetched, and speculative, he was occasionally and uncharacteristically apologetic when describing its departure from theory rooted directly in clinical material. Contrary to his usual style, and of most interest for this discussion, he offered no clinical examples to illuminate his points.