Beyond the Pleasure Principle

This new Dover Thrift edition contains the standard James Strachey English translation of Freud's Jenseits des Lustprinzips: Beyond the Pleasure Principle. It is perfect for students on a tight budget wanting a copy they can mark up with their own notes, or for anyone interested in just reading the text. There is no introduction, very little extra information, and it won't win any prizes for cover design, but as a functional reading copy there is little to criticise; especially at the very reasonable price.

Freud's work in Beyond the Pleasure Principle makes for some fascinating reading. It is perhaps his most controversial work; one that is difficult to get to grips with ideologically, and to follow through the twists and turns of his reasoning, but certainly one that is worth the effort.

The pleasure principle is, as its name would suggest, the drive to seek pleasure and to avoid pain. In this work, Freud seeks to discover and explain drives that move beyond this principle, and which escape its supposedly universal power. These drives are the repetition compulsion, and the death instinct.

Repetition Compulsion ("fort/da" game)- the idea that repressed trauma is repeated as contemporary experience rather than remembered as a past event eg. recurring dreams

Death Instinct (masochism)- the idea that the repetition compulsion is somehow connected to the urge to return to an earlier state; an inorganic state. This idea brings about the famous phrase that "the aim of life is death." To allow for the death instinct, Freud claims that any action taken to avoid danger is simply a way of avoiding a short-circuit to death, that organisms seek to die in their own way.

While the text is highly speculative and scientifically flawed, it remains relevant to much study in the humanities, and one that many writers are still responding to. (For a particular example, J.G. Ballard's Crash relies on many of Freud's ideas, and is well placed to be read alongside this work.). In many ways, Beyond the Pleasure Principle is as interesting to study for its flaws as for its merits, with Freud's particular writing style being very much open to analysis. Most importantly though, it is a book that will be on a lot of university reading lists, one that people will be forced to read, and this edition is more than fit for purpose.