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The epigraph for this book is from Oscar Wilde: ‘In the world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it’. Of these, the latter is the more tragic. Oedipus gets what he wants, he does not renounce his instincts, so according to Freud's theory of civilization and its discontents, Oedipus should be a happy and non-neurotic man. This is, of course, not the case. The true tragedy is that the removal of inhibitions does not release the subject into enjoyment or jouissance. The fulfillment of unconscious desires is instead repulsive and terrifying. The foundational myth of psychoanalysis captures the uniquely human bind: desires are enjoyed only in so far as they are not realized.
The project here is to develop a metapsychological concept of drive (Trieb) that shows how the structural organization of drives inhibits our living out the drives and getting what we want. It is an ambitious project. The author, a philosopher and candidate in full clinical training, likens what he calls his critique of pure enjoyment to Kant's critique of pure reason and claims that, as Kant's Copernican revolution liberated philosophy from pursuing false problems and unanswerable