You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
What prompted Freud to restrict the hegemony of the pleasure principle, which had so enlarged the comprehension of human phenomena? Philosophers long before him had agreed on the importance of the search for pleasure. The ethical question was: what pleasures were worthy for humans, and what pain should be endured for the good of a worthy pleasure? As we know, Freud used five sources of evidence connected with the repetition compulsion: traumatic neuroses, dreams, infantile play, transference neuroses, and fate neuroses. In regard to the pleasure principle he transformed a neurological description—in terms of discharge—to a psychological description: that wishes, derived from drives, aim for a behavior adapted to satisfaction.
The author explores what he considers to be the problems with Freud's thinking in regard to the pleasure principle, the repetition compulsion, and the death instinct. He believes that theoretical problems are indeed created by abandoning the Freudian hypothesis of the death instinct. For instance, it becomes necessary to find alternative explanations of the severity of conscience to those offered by Freud in 1923. Similarly, we change our understanding of Kleinian ideas about the schizoparanoid position. All this serves as prologue, however, to a clinical proposition: the thesis that whatever their genesis, fate neuroses are only a form of borderline neurosis: they share problems in reality testing and impulsivity.
Three detailed clinical examples illustrate this thesis. In the first, compulsive acts that seem manifestations of a fate neurosis are explained through unconscious