After establishing the repetition compulsion as independent from the pleasure principle, Freud sets out to find a biological basis for its existence. This awareness perhaps highlights the holes in his argument in a way that makes it easy to criticise. But in spite of this, Beyond the Pleasure Principle remains an important text. Would you also like to submit a review for this item? You already recently rated this item.
Your rating has been recorded. Write a review Rate this item: 1 2 3 4 5. Preview this item Preview this item. Subjects Pleasure principle Psychology Psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic Theory.
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Coud you kindly advise when the Museum might be open and whether the exhibition relating to Beyond the Pleasure Principle will still be on display Thank you. Alice Rosenbaum. Or in full, we sometimes refuse instant pleasure for sometimes prolonged unpleasure if we believe that it eventually will yield proportionally greater or longer lasting pleasure.
In this sense, masochism may preserve one's future sense of agency during unpleasure, at the expense of one's current sense of unpleasure, and therefore may seem impelling to individuals who believe they are in temporary but inexorably passive situations]. Traumatic dreams repeat the stimulus "to develop the anxiety whose omission was the cause of the neurosis".
A drive must be for something previously experienced. If a germ cell acheieves its potential it leads to immortality through successive reproduction , if a soma cell achieves its potential it leads to programmed mortality through natural cellular senescence.
The unconscious may continuously predict the time of death by measuring the rate of metabolic byproduct buildup over life Before consciousness arrives in childhood, the struggle for pleasure was more intense but more hindered by being in passive situation. I'm starting to believe that the popular yet unsubstantiated vilification of Freud may relate to the clear decrease in, and apathy toward, original ideas or thinkers in the 21st century.
May 18, qwe rated it really liked it. Freud makes use of a Very non-formal prose, which is sort of an eccentric move for a psychologist. Indeed, some may find this to be a pleasure or a pain to read.
Given that the theory of instincts was covered by Freud in some earlier works, it was no surprise to find him covering some old ground here. Although I am sure that the pleasure principle is well known, basically it is the suggestion that people have an instinctive urge toward experiencing pleasure and shielding themselves from pain.
Of course, any book by Freud would not be complete without touching upon the subject of dreams, and he Indeed, some may find this to be a pleasure or a pain to read.
Of course, any book by Freud would not be complete without touching upon the subject of dreams, and he does not disappoint in this short book which is really an essay. His theory of dreams and its relation to traumatic experiences is touched upon, although I was not too into the examples he gave based on war related trauma. However, it was his take on non-war related trauma which interested me more - neuroses are chiefly brought about by surprise or fright!
It would seem to me that Freud is preoccupied with trauma, which is not surprising as this book was written not long after World War One. A distinction drawn on the basis of dissimilarity, compared to the pleasure principle, is how Freud sees it that one regains control by virtue of reliving or repeating unpleasant events, which what the child was supposedly doing with the toy he was repeatedly throwing away and retrieving.
I did not fully subscribe to the biological theory of the death drive, which Freud postulates by virtue of how the psyche impulsively repeats traumatic events. In short, the book is saying something else which I fully subscribe to, and that is: we can take something negative and turn it into something positive! It is all about control of the situation. We have to weigh up benefit and loss. Then we have the overflowing desire within us, and that, at times, unpleasant acts can give rise to pleasant results.
By all means, read it in a different light, but I always look to pull the positive out of a situation, and although this book did not tick all of my boxes I still found something of value within it.
Apr 24, Woke rated it really liked it Shelves: in-my-library , psychoanalysis , difference-and-repetition-prep-list. Too many of Freud's characteristic digressions to make this short book a breezy read. He does, eventually, get to the end, albeit in a roundabout and elliptical fashion -- kind of like the oblique trajectory of the organism as it blindly inches toward its own sought-after oblivion. May 13, M rated it really liked it. True to form, Freud is both keen to remind the reader that it's just a theory and he, of course, knows how absurd it all sounds, etc.
This is the doctor-iconoclast at his speculati "Whatever we cannot achieve on the wing, we have to achieve at a patient limp… Scripture tells us clear enough: it never was a sin to limp. This is the doctor-iconoclast at his speculative best, using only the minimum necessary amount of "evidence" required to justify the utterly preposterous theory in question.
Beyond the Pleasure Principle is ultimately aimed at answering a fairly simple but strange question: 'What compels an organism to repeat? Why does a woman keep marrying men who turn out to be terminally-ill? What's going on? This text sees Freud update the theory of the drives. Far from being the efficient cause of progress and development in an organism, "a drive might accordingly be seen as a powerful tendency inherent in every living organism to restore a prior state, which prior state the organism was compelled to relinquish due to the disruptive influence of external forces Drives are, in fact, essentially conservative forces.
Freud uses the analogy of inertia, but if we're being accurate, it's quite the contrary: inertia keeps the mind at a given level of excitement, prolonging a given mental state. Drives are counterbalancing, frictive forces. Pleasure is when you slam your foot on the breaks. But as Freud says, there is no sense in which trauma flashbacks are pleasurable, not even in the Freudian world of repression and sublimation.
To account for this, Freud embarks upon a line of speculation that terminates in the "discovery" of the death drive. The death drive seeks to return the organism to the ultimate prior state: inorganic matter.
If life ultimately seeks to return to zero, then "the goal of all life is death, or to express it retrospectively: the inanimate existed before the animate". The reliving of trauma is an expression of the death drives' longing for oblivion. It is not that the death drive is behind the pleasure principle.
They contradict each other and their conflict produces complex behaviour. Freud suggests that inorganic matter became living several times, and that it will have succeeded in self-termination several times too.
But it only had to compelled by external factors to keep living once for things to get here. Freud, ever a pessimist, rejects any inherent "perfection drive". Only through repression of the death drive do a minority of exceptional human beings strive towards "progress" and civilisation.
There's a reason that this book is referenced and worked on so much by philosophers and psychologists and other thinkers in the humanities: it's an absolute blast, and as Wittgenstein said, there is a marked attraction in Freud's work, there is always the compelling quality of the mythological about it. In fields where it is not a question of scientific "objectivity", but rather of providing compelling theories, a theory that emphasises the significance and intrigue and erotic power of death can never fail to have adherents.
This is also the power of Schopenhauer, who I was glad to see Freud pay respect to in this text. For my favourite treatment of Freudian Eros-Thanatos, see Lyotard's Libidinal Economy , wherein he questions the possibility of ever determining which drive is in charge at any given time.
The issue with Freud is that when he does not explain too little, he is often eager to explain too much, too eager to segregate the drives. Worth reading despite the exasperating lack of economy typical of Freud, especially in order to avoid the misrepresentations and distortions of this work which have undoubtedly crept into this review, unable as I am to make a coherent whole out of Freud's often confused thoughts just yet.
With Freud, it is worth remembering that you are dealing, foremost, with a brazenly and self-consciously controversial thinker who is above all interested in opening up new fields, not in espousing eternal truths.
Dogmatic adherents to Freudian theory are missing the point, as are those who dismiss his work as "pseudoscientific". Of course it's all nonsense, but who's still naive enough to believe human life has anything to do with truth? NOTES: 1. This is a real example! Apparently it comes from Jung. I couldn't be bothered to look it up or verify it, since that's not really the point. Dec 20, TAB rated it liked it Shelves: austria , non-fiction , s , ebooks , audiobooks , canonical-book-club.
Anyone who thinks this guy is all about sex is sadly half wrong. I mean, yes, sexual desire is a large part of almost all of Freud's work but let's be honest, it is a large part of human existence.
And this being my first foray into Freud, I can't comment on how this compares to his earlier work, but what I can say is to echo my friend Caroline that by relating the clinical experiences that led to his findings, he does a great job of painting a comprehensive picture.
Sexual desire is a large part Anyone who thinks this guy is all about sex is sadly half wrong. Sexual desire is a large part of human existence, but it oscillates constantly between two different realms of the human psyche: those associated with Life or as Plato put it, Spirit, or as the Chinese put it, Yin and conversely those associated with Death or Body or Yang, following those other two 'sophies.
I have long been a fan on these former takes on the dichotomy of life, so I am more than eager to welcome Freud and his research into my wheelhouse. While I will spend more time considering his conclusions, it is his clinical research that he relates that left the most immediate impression on me especially as a new father feverishly reading baby and development books trying to figure out how to raise this thing in a proper human being.
Turns out I should have saved my money and just gone to the public domain of Freud to find all the child rearing advice I needed. His work as well with trauma victims from World War I is especially relevant today though it leaves me wondering if he figured all this shit out in , then why does it only seem so recent that PTSD is recognized as something that needs to be treated?
Answers lead to questions but that is the beauty of analysis and Freud is a legit OG no matter what his detractors who have never read him say. Feb 01, Tg rated it it was amazing Recommended to Tg by: Fergus. I know people find Freud controversial, but much of what he says seems true to life, Many people including myself in my younger years are anxious and angry not knowing why. He breaks down all the inner struggle between all the different "Intra-Psychic " Energies.
He outlines how our "Ego" fights against our subconscious to maintain control, and an energy balance. He describes how the conscious mind wants to keep the energy level the same. Excitations both internal and external are combatted by the s I know people find Freud controversial, but much of what he says seems true to life, Many people including myself in my younger years are anxious and angry not knowing why.
Excitations both internal and external are combatted by the system to keep things in a quiescent state. This is not always good, because we need an elevation of tension to break new grounds and move to a higher level.
Like Dr. Jung and Dr. Milton Erickson , I believe the fundamental problem of our time is a lack of appreciation of the Divine. Jung calls it like the ancient civilization the " loss of a soul" On a parallel note Dr. Sidney Rosan commented that Dr. Erickson gave him a metaphor that stayed with him to this day.
He was walking along a meadow, and the phrase "Did you realize every blade of grass is a different shade of green?
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