Beyond the Pleasure Principle

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) was an Austrian psychoanalyst who is considered to be the founder of modern psychology. In 1881, he became a Doctor of Medicine after completing his program at the University of Vienna. However, it was not until 1885 that the young doctor began to turn his attention toward psychoanalysis. While on a three-month fellowship in Paris, Freud visited a hypnotist who inspired him to bring hypnosis back to his own clinical practice.

Freud’s focus on therapeutic techniques was a shift from his contemporaries, who sought to categorize and name mental conditions rather than understand how to treat them. He used the techniques of free association and dream interpretation to engage his patients in uncovering the repressed desires and traumas residing in the unconscious. His work led him to develop a theory of the psyche containing three parts: id, ego, and superego. In his early work, Freud emphasized the role of the libido in driving human behavior toward pleasure-seeking. After setting up a private practice in Vienna, Freud worked with patients to interpret their dreams and uncover the repressed drives of the unconscious. He recorded his findings in The Interpretation of Dreams.

Freud’s theories and ideas have had a pervasive effect on Western culture, the arts, and the medical field. His theories, including the construction of the psyche, Oedipal conflict, repression, and dream interpretation, are used to understand literature, history, and film. Artist Salvador Dali credited Freud with inspiring his surrealist paintings, such as The Persistence of Memory. Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho draws upon Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex.

Some biographers theorize that the development of the death drive in Freud’s theory might have been influenced by the sudden death of his daughter. While Freud was working on Beyond the Pleasure Principle, his fifth child Sophie, who was living in Hamburg, Germany, with her three children and husband, died from Spanish Flu. Sophie was considered a favorite of her mother and father. Freud, who was unable to make it to Hamburg in time to see his daughter, struggled with the loss. In a letter to a friend in 1928, Freud explained that the loss of Sophie and one of her children three years later had caused him to feel “tired of life permanently” (“Sophie Halberstadt-Freud.” Freud Museum London). One week after Sophie’s death, Freud referenced the “death drive” in a letter for the first time, an idea that would become an important pillar in his theoretical work in the future.

Beyond the Pleasure Principle marks an important shift in Freud’s canon of work. He moves beyond a singular focus on pleasure-seeking as the major internal drive of the id, instead arguing that humans have an innate compulsion toward death and destruction. The themes of his work are important to the development of his later, more expansive theories in Civilization and Its Discontents. Considered to be one of his most controversial texts, Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle has had a profound effect on Western philosophy, literature, and medicine.