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A review by morgan_blackledge
Beyond the Pleasure Principle by Sigmund Freud
5.0
OMG
I’m guessing that Freud was still doing hella coke when he wrote this.
It’s kind of a hot mess.
I can’t say I enjoyed reading it.
Anyway.
Freud defined the Pleasure Principle as the instinctive drive to seek pleasure and avoid pain.
Freud thought of this as the basic motivational drive of the ID, which was Freuds construct referring to the more animalistic or primitive aspects of human nature.
Beyond the Pleasure Principle is Freuds attempt to identify other analogous principles of motivation.
Freud describes human motivation as emerging from two opposing drives:
1. Eros, which is typified by sexuality, creativity, and connection and reproduction, and 2. Thanatos, which is typified by the aggression, compulsion, and self-destruction.
Freud defines repartition compulsion as the drive to repeat a behavior or recreate an event over and over again, even when its not pleasurable.
For example, people who have been exposed to early life abuse and trauma sometimes recreate similar circumstances in their lives and reenact similar dynamics in their adult relationships.
They are ostensibly in search of a different ‘better’ outcome, refered to as a corrective experience in the parlance of psychodynamic psychotherapy.
These unconsciously sought corrective experiences are typically very elusive.
And that can mean getting unconsciously lured into increasingly destructive behaviors and dangerous situations where the traumatic event is likely to happen again and again.
It may take good therapy to identify and deconstruct these issues, so that the individual can finally have the needed corrective experiences in a healthy, more conscious, less driven form.
As I previously mentioned, the text is kind of tweaker, but those are the big takeaways (by my accounting anyway).
I think the text has immense historical value, but not a lot of therapeutic use value or validity by today’s standards.
I’m giving the text 5 stars because it’s a classic, and it feels dumb and pretentious to give it less than that.
But unless you’re interested in the history of psychology, or really into Freud, you can probably skip reading this source text, and rely on commentary and secondary sources for the important ideas.
I’m guessing that Freud was still doing hella coke when he wrote this.
It’s kind of a hot mess.
I can’t say I enjoyed reading it.
Anyway.
Freud defined the Pleasure Principle as the instinctive drive to seek pleasure and avoid pain.
Freud thought of this as the basic motivational drive of the ID, which was Freuds construct referring to the more animalistic or primitive aspects of human nature.
Beyond the Pleasure Principle is Freuds attempt to identify other analogous principles of motivation.
Freud describes human motivation as emerging from two opposing drives:
1. Eros, which is typified by sexuality, creativity, and connection and reproduction, and 2. Thanatos, which is typified by the aggression, compulsion, and self-destruction.
Freud defines repartition compulsion as the drive to repeat a behavior or recreate an event over and over again, even when its not pleasurable.
For example, people who have been exposed to early life abuse and trauma sometimes recreate similar circumstances in their lives and reenact similar dynamics in their adult relationships.
They are ostensibly in search of a different ‘better’ outcome, refered to as a corrective experience in the parlance of psychodynamic psychotherapy.
These unconsciously sought corrective experiences are typically very elusive.
And that can mean getting unconsciously lured into increasingly destructive behaviors and dangerous situations where the traumatic event is likely to happen again and again.
It may take good therapy to identify and deconstruct these issues, so that the individual can finally have the needed corrective experiences in a healthy, more conscious, less driven form.
As I previously mentioned, the text is kind of tweaker, but those are the big takeaways (by my accounting anyway).
I think the text has immense historical value, but not a lot of therapeutic use value or validity by today’s standards.
I’m giving the text 5 stars because it’s a classic, and it feels dumb and pretentious to give it less than that.
But unless you’re interested in the history of psychology, or really into Freud, you can probably skip reading this source text, and rely on commentary and secondary sources for the important ideas.