Beyond the Pleasure Principle

Front Cover
Broadview Press, Mar 2, 2011 - Psychology - 400 pages

Beyond the Pleasure Principle is Freud’s most philosophical and speculative work, exploring profound questions of life and death, pleasure and pain. In it Freud introduces the fundamental concepts of the “repetition compulsion” and the “death drive,” according to which a perverse, repetitive, self-destructive impulse opposes and even trumps the creative drive, or Eros. The work is one of Freud’s most intensely debated, and raises important questions that have been discussed by philosophers and psychoanalysts since its first publication in 1920.

The text is presented here in a contemporary new translation by Gregory C. Richter. Appendices trace the work’s antecedents and the many responses to it, including texts by Plato, Friedrich Nietzsche, Melanie Klein, Herbert Marcuse, Jacques Derrida, and Judith Butler, among many others.

 

Selected pages

Contents

Acknowledgements
9
A Brief Chronology
31
Translators Note
37
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
49
Other Works bySigmund Freud
101
Antecedents andContinental Responses to Beyondthe Pleasure Principle
139
Select Bibliography
377
Index
389
Copyright

Common terms and phrases

aggression analysis anxiety aristophanes becomes beginning biological body without organs called cathexis civilization concept conflict conscience consciousness culture death drive death drive theory death instinct desexualization desire destructive drive detour dialectic discourse dominance dreams dualism ego drives Empedocles energy Eros erotic excitation existence experience expression external world fact Ferenczi final force fort/da Freud Freudian function gratification human hypothesis idea impulses individual interpretation libidinal libido living substance masochism means mental apparatus metapsychological myth narcissism narcissistic nature negation neurosis nirvana object Oedipus Oedipus complex opposition organism original pain perhaps philosophical Plato play pleasure principle possible primal produced psychical psychoanalysis psychology question reality principle relation repeat repetition compulsion repression result sadism Sándor Ferenczi scientific seems sense of guilt sex drives sexual speculation Strachey Strachey's striving structure sublimation super-ego tendency term thanatos things thought tion trans translation unconscious unpleasure words writing

About the author (2011)

Todd Dufresne is Professor of Philosophy and founding Director of the Advanced Institute for Globalization & Culture at Lakehead University. He is the author of five books, including Tales From the Freudian Crypt: The Death Drive in Text and Context (Stanford University Press) and Killing Freud (Continuum).

Gregory C. Richter is Professor of German and Linguistics at Truman State University. His translations include The Incest Theme in Literature and Legend by Otto Rank and Inside Psychoanalysis: The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank (both The Johns Hopkins University Press).

Bibliographic information

TitleBeyond the Pleasure Principle
Broadview editions
AuthorSigmund Freud
EditorTodd Dufresne
Translated byGregory C. Richter
Editionreprint
PublisherBroadview Press, 2011
ISBN1551119943, 9781551119946
Length400 pages
Subjects ›  › 

Philosophy / Movements / Critical Theory
Psychology / Psychotherapy / Psychoanalysis
  
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