The Pleasure Principle is Not Enough

The crowning achievement of Freud's work is the metatheory of Eros and Thanatos, a dualistic account of the human instincts which offers profound insights into both the individual human being and his complex socio-historical life in civilization. This mature version of Freud's thinking grew out of a less adequate monistic perspective based on the notion of the pleasure principle. Each has quite different implications for understanding the human mind, the nature of existing social restrictions on human instincts, and the prospects for social change. A major contradiction in Freud's work is that while he adopted the Eros-Thanatos perspective, he never self-consciously drew out its full importance for evaluating the state of civilization and the instincts. Instead, his final conclusions on civilization are still deeply informed by his earlier pleasure-principle perspective, and Civilization and Its Discontents is an unstable combination of the two perspectives. His social theory, in short, is logically incomplete. In this paper I shall try to show the limits of the earlier monistic perspective and to develop the implications of Freud's later dualism for self and society.

Since the difference in the two perspectives as well as the dynamism of the later one depends on the antithesis of Eros and the pleasure principle, I first shall show that they are indeed very different concepts. There is a marked tendency in discussing Freud to use the two terms interchangeably to express the basic sexual nature of the human being. Marcuse, for example, asserts early in his work on Freud that Eros operates under the pleasure principle and then proceeds to confuse the two terms utterly.13a