Chapter XII. Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Group Psychology (The Ego-Ideal)

This chapter brings us to the very verge of ‘The Ego and the Id’ and the Structural Theory, which represents such an immense change in the conceptual tools with which psychoanalysts can try to understand and organize the clinical phenomena. In order to understand the importance of this change it is essential to see in what way Freud was in difficulty, both clinically and conceptually, and how he was struggling to find a way out of it. ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ and ‘Group Psychology’ each in their own way attempt to solve the problem. Freud always, as he himself says, attempts to take the citadel by storm; and each of these papers endeavours to do everything at once. The first attempts to solve the problem by taking the Libido Theory and, as it were, standing it up on its ear: as if a change simply in the nature of the duality of instincts (giving them different names and a different type of significance) would solve everything. The second attempts the solution by establishing a concept of the ego ideal, which later of course in ‘The Ego and the Id’ turns into that of the super-ego. And both go some distance to enrich the conceptual tools with which he worked, as I now hope to explain.

In order to do this one has first to realize the nature of his trouble, and the kind of clinical phenomena for which his theoretical tools provided no help in comprehending or organizing. The main problem is that of mental pain, with which he had never had a satisfactory way of dealing conceptually, primarily because he was anchored to the neurophysiological conception of mental pain as a quantitative rather than a qualitative matter, as something having a quasi-physical significance, but no meaning. From the ‘Project’ onward, he has always thought of mental pain as unpleasure, and anchored it to such conceptions as Fechner's ‘constancy principle’ (later called the Nirvana principle), and other quasi-neuro-physiological conceptions, which reduced the aim of mental life to somethin