Beyond the Pleasure Principle

In March 1919, Freud wrote a letter indicating he was working on a new draft marking a major shift in his psychological theories. The psychoanalyst believed he was working on something that would push his theories toward a deeper and more meaningful level. This short essay by Sigmund Freud took more than a year to write. Before this work, Freud’s theories focused on the pleasure principle’s role in driving human behavior. He hypothesized that humans were driven by an instinctual desire to seek out pleasure and avoid pain. His 1899 The Interpretation of Dreams explores this theory. Freud saw a connection between the pleasure principle and libido: He defined libido as an instinctual energy that was ruled by the pleasure principle.

Freud enveloped these ideas in his construction of the psyche as being made of the id, ego, and superego. The libido is housed in the id, the unconscious part of the psyche that is driven by this energy. Freud equated sexual drive to hunger and the will to power; all are part of an instinct for pleasure. The id is at odds with the superego—the portion of the psyche that upholds social and moral standards while controlling impulse. The ego acts as a moderator between the two, finding ways to satiate the libido while satisfying the needs of the superego. An individual is constantly being pulled between a drive for pleasure and the pressures and expectations of an external reality, with the ego maintaining balance. Freud believed that mental illness, or “neurosis,” occurred when a person’s ego was forced to work too hard to control these contrasting parts of the psyche. He proposed that the work of psychoanalysis was to bring the hidden desires of the unconscious to the forefront of consciousness.

Freud’s focus on the pleasure principle and the libido was controversial. His close friend, Carl Gustav Jung, whom Freud believed would one day act as the successor of his intellectual and theoretical work, felt Freud was too singularly focused on libido and that he failed to consider the complexity of the human psyche. He detailed his criticism in his autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections. After his break with Jung, Freud began to think more broadly about motivation and instinct. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud expands drive theory to encompass the death drive—another instinct that compels humans toward destruction and death. He theorizes that just as every human is pulled between a desire for pleasure and the external reality, each person is also pulled between a life and death force.

The essay marks a dark shift in Freud’s work, a change that may have been brought on by the sudden death of his daughter Sophie. He shows a shadow side to his earlier theories. The compulsion to repeat, which Freud identified in children, is expanded in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. He argues that humans have a compulsion to repeat trauma and pain. Freud’s ideas in this essay acknowledge and incorporate new forces into his understanding of drive, including trauma and self-destruction. The battle between these two sides—what Freud calls Eros and Thanatos—creates the rich, complex, and often disheartening tapestry of human experience.