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My discussion could actually have ended at this point if we were concerned only with the pleasure and unpleasure principles. If, however, we seek clarification of the various concepts of superordinated regulatory principles formulated by Freud, we must examine at least some of the new concepts introduced by him in 1920.
Beyond the Pleasure Principle is a tour de force in which Freud first conceptualized aggression—encountered in all its ramifications in his daily work with patients, in dreams, in his observations of the oedipus complex—as a separate instinctual drive, thereby introducing the dual-instinct theory. However, this work also contains a series of speculations which have been haunting psychoanalytic literature since 1920, and have become the source of endless controversy as well as the topic of many panel discussions. I neither contemplate reviewing here all the literature on the death-instinct theory, nor do I consider this to be necessary. My discussion will be limited (and even this limited goal is far from easy) to the following points:
I shall attempt to explain within the framework of the unpleasure-pleasure principles certain phenomena which Freud designated as “beyond the pleasure principle.”
I shall therefore dispute the necessity for postulating a
Nirvana principle. Above all, however, I shall question the assumption according to which the repetition compulsion is assigned the role of regulatory principle overriding all the others (unpleasure, pleasure, reality principles).
In the Postscript to his Autobiographical Study, added in 1935, Freud said:
I have never ceased my analytic work nor my writing…. But I myself find that a significant change has come about. Threads which in the course of my development had become intertangled have now begun to separate; interests which I had acquired in the later part of my life have receded, while the older and original ones become prominent once more…. My interest, after making a lifelong detour through the nat