Talk:Beyond the Pleasure Principle

Revision of Synopsis 1
A question has arisen over my revision of the original BTPP synopsis, whether I have cut too much out, particularly from Section six (see my talk page, current week). Going back to WikiProject Books/Non-fiction article, I wonder if a new approach to the synopsis relying more on secondary citable sources and within a still shorter word-frame (as suggested there) might not be better? Feedback welcomedJacobisq (talk) 10:18, 5 August 2010 (UTC)

Draft Replacement for Section 3
' Beyond the Pleasure Principle is a difficult text'. As Ernest Jones, one of Freud's closest associates and a member of his Inner Ring, put it, 'the train of thought [is] by no means easy to follow...and Freud's views on the subject have often been considerably misinterpreted'. Freud begins with 'a commonplace then unchallenged in psychoanalytic theory: "The course of mental events is automatically regulated by the pleasure principle...a strong tendency toward the pleasure principle"'. Freud then proceeded to look for 'evidence, for the existence of hitherto unsuspected forces "beyond" the pleasure principle'. He found potential problems for the dominance of the pleasure principle - 'situations...with which the pleasure principle cannot cope adequately' - in four main areas: children's games, as exemplified in his grandson's famous "fort-da" game; 'the recurrent dreams of war neurotics...; the pattern of self-injuring behaviour that can be traced through the lives of certain people ["fate neurosis"]; the tendency of many patients in psycho-analysis to act out over and over again unpleasant experiences of their childhood'.

Jones considered that 'it would not be hard in all these cases to discover some other motive for these repetitions, and indeed Freud himself suggested some'. Nevertheless, on the basis of such evidence, Freud had already felt in 1919 that he could safely postulate 'the principle of a repetition compulsion in the unconscious mind, based upon instinctual activity and probably inherent in the very nature of the instincts - a principle powerful enough to overule the pleasure-principle', as he had then written in "The Uncanny". In the first half of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, ' a first phase, the most varied manifestations of repetition, considered as their irreducible quality, are attributed to the essence of drives ' in precisely the same way.

The 'two distinct frescoes or canti ' of the work break thereafter between sections III and IV. If, as Otto Fenichel remarked, Freud's 'new [instinctual] classification has two bases, one speculative, and one clinical', thus far the clinical. In Freud's own words, 'What follows is speculation, often far-fetched speculation, which the reader will consider or dismiss according to his individual predilection' : it has been noted that 'in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud used that unpromising word "speculations" more than once'.

Freud initially looked for support for his new concept of the repetition compulsion in the 'essentially conservative...feature of instinctual life...the lower we go in the animal scale the more stereotyped does instinctual behavior appear'. Thereafter 'a leap in the text can be noticed when Freud places the compulsion to repeat on an equal footing with "an urge...to restore an earlier state of things"' - ultinmately that of the original inorganic condition. He thus found his way to his celebrated concept of the death instinct.

Thereupon, 'Freud plunged into the thickets of speculative modern biology, even into philosophy, in search of corroborative evidence' - looking to 'arguments of every kind, frequently borrowed from fields outside of psychoanalytic practice, calling to the rescue biology, philosophy, and mythology' .. He turned to prewar experiments on protozoa - of perhaps questionable relevance, even if it is not the case that 'his interpretation of the experiments on the successive generations of protozoa contains a fatal flaw'. The most that can perhaps be said is that Freud did not find 'any biological argument which contradicts his dualistic conception of instinctual life', but at the same time, 'as Jones (1957) points out, "no biological observation can be found to support the idea of a death instinct, one which contradicts all biological principles"' either.

Freud then continued with a reference to 'the harbour of Schopenhauer's philosophy'; but groping for a return to the clinical he admitted that 'it looks suspiciously as though we were trying to find a way out of a highly embarassing situation at any price'. Freud eventually decided that he could find a clinical manifestation of the death instinct in the phenomenon of masochism, 'hitherto regarded as secondary to sadism...and suggested that there could be a primary masochism, a self-injuring tendency which would be an indication of the death instinct'.

With the libido or Eros as the life force set out upon the other side of the equation, the way was finally clear for the book's closing 'vision of two elemental pugnacious forces in the mind, Eros and Thanatos, locked in eternal battle' .Jacobisq (talk) 12:34, 18 August 2010 (UTC)