Beyond the Pleasure Principle

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Part of a series of articles on Psychoanalysis

Constructs Psychosexual development Psychosocial development Conscious • Preconscious • Unconscious Psychic Apparatus Id, ego, and super-ego Libido • Drive Transference • Sublimation • Resistance Important figures Sigmund Freud • Carl Jung Alfred Adler • Otto Rank Anna Freud • Margaret Mahler Karen Horney • Jacques Lacan Ronald Fairbairn • Melanie Klein Harry Stack Sullivan Erik Erikson • Nancy Chodorow Susan Sutherland Isaacs Ernest Jones • Heinz Kohut Important works The Interpretation of Dreams Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" Civilization and Its Discontents Schools of thought Self psychology • Lacanian Analytical psychology • Object relations Interpersonal • Relational Ego psychology
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"Beyond the Pleasure Principle" (first published in German in 1920 as Jenseits des Lustprinzips) is an essay by Sigmund Freud. It marked a turning point and a major modification of his previous theoretical approach. Before this essay, Freud was understood to have placed the sexual instinct, Eros, or the libido, centre stage, in explaining the forces which drive us to act. In 1920, going "beyond" the simple pleasure principle, Freud developed his theory of drives, by adding the death instinct, often referred to as "Thanatos," although Freud himself never used this term.

The main importance of the essay resides in the striking picture of human being, struggling between two opposing instincts or drives: Eros working for creativity, harmony, sexual connection, reproduction, and self-preservation; Thanatos for destruction, repetition, aggression, compulsion, and self-destruction.

In sections IV and V Freud posits that the processes which cause cell death at a microscopic level might have developed in order to give human beings a death instinct as individuals. This theory has generally been discredited.^{[citation needed]}

Freud also took the opportunity to state the basic differences, as he saw them, between his approach and that of Carl Jung, and covered the history so far of research into the basic drives (Section VI).