A review by colin_cox
Beyond the Pleasure Principle by Sigmund Freud

5.0

Like so much of Freud's work, Beyond the Pleasure Principle is a text searching for answers to an elusive set of questions that even Freud cannot fully answer. Even if Beyond the Pleasure Principle is, at times, a slog, it is an important text because Beyond the Pleasure Principle marks the moment Freud reconfigures psychoanalysis. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the death drive emerges as the primary motivation for human activity. Instead of theorizing the pleasure principle as that which operates as the primary motivation for human activity, Beyond the Pleasure Principle suggests the pleasure principle feeds the death drive. That is to say, as Todd McGowan suggests, the pleasure principle (a state defined by its lack of excitation or tension) is a bridge to the death drive (a state of heightened or elongated excitation and tension).

Later thinkers like Lacan build and expand the death drive, but Beyond the Pleasure Principle is that necessary step. It moves psychoanalysis into fundamentally different territory.

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If anyone reading this would like a deeper exploration of this text and how psychoanalytic thinkers develop the death drive, consider watching this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=viYtgC5cL0E