On Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle

Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle constitutes a major landmark and a real turning point in the evolution of psychoanalytic theory. Pushing aside the primacy of the tension-discharge-gratification model of mental dynamics, this work introduced the notion of a "daemonic force" within all human beings that slowly but insistently seeks psychic inactivity, inertia, and death. Politely dismissed by some as a pseudo-biological speculation and rapturously espoused by others as a bold conceptual advance, "death instinct" became a stepping stone to the latter conceptualizations of mind's attacks on itself, negative narcissism, addiction to near-death, and the utter destruction of meaning in some clinical situations. The concept also served as a bridge between the quintessentially Western psychoanalysis and the Eastern perspectives on life and death. These diverse and rich connotations of the proposal are elucidated in On Freud's "Beyond the Pleasure Principle". Other consequences of Freud's 1920 paper - namely, the marginalization of ego instincts and the "upgrading" of aggression in the scheme of things - are also addressed.

Contemporary Freud , Editors and Contributors , Introduction , Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920g) , Discussion of Beyond the Pleasure Principle , Jenseits and Beyond: Teaching Freud’s Late Work , Life and Death in Freudian Metapsychology: A Reappraisal of the Second Instinctual Dualism , An Unusual Manifestation of Repetition Compulsion in Traumatized Patients , The Dream in Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Beyond , Does the Death-Instinct-Based Theory of Aggression Hold Up? , The Concept of the Death Drive: A Clinical Perspective , Addiction to Near-Death , Manifestations of the Death Instinct in the Consulting Room , A Hindu Reading of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle , The Trauma of Lost Love in Psychoanalysis , Epilogue

Salman Akhtar