Beyond the Pleasure Principle

by Sigmund Freud, James Strachey, Peter Gay

Overview

In 1915 at the University of Vienna 60-year-old Sigmund Freud delivered these lectures on psychoanalysis, pointing to the interplay of unconscious and conscious forces within individual psyches.

In reasoned progression he outlined core psychoanalytic concepts, such as repression, free association and libido. Of the various English translations of Freud's major works to appear in his lifetime, only one was authorized by Freud himself: The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud under the general editorship of James Strachey.

Freud approved the overall editorial plan, specific renderings of key words and phrases, and the addition of valuable notes, from bibliographical and explanatory. Many of the translations were done by Strachey himself; the rest were prepared under his supervision. The result was to place the Standard Edition in a position of unquestioned supremacy over all other existing versions.Newly designed in a uniform format, each new paperback in the Standard Edition opens with a biographical essay on Freud's life and work —along with a note on the individual volume—by Peter Gay, Sterling Professor of History at Yale.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393007695
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	04/17/1990
Series:	Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud
Edition description:	The Standard Edition
Pages:	144
Sales rank:	145,521
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 7.80(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) is one of the twentieth century's greatest minds and the founder of the psychoanalytic school of psychology. His many works include The Ego and the Id; An Outline of Psycho-Analysis; Inhibitions; Symptoms and Anxiety; New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis; Civilization and Its Discontent, and others.

Peter Gay (1923—2015) was the author of more than twenty-five books, including the National Book Award winner The Enlightenment, the best-selling Weimar Culture, and the widely translated Freud: A Life for Our Time.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction
Sigmund Freud: A Brief Chronology
Translator’s Note

Beyond the Pleasure Principle

Appendix A: Other Works by Sigmund Freud

1. From “The Uncanny” (1919)
2. From The Ego and the Id (1923)
3. From “The Economic Problem of Masochism” (1924)
4. From “A Note about the ‘Mystic Writing Pad’” (1926)
5. From Civilization and Its Discontents (1930)
6. From “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” (1937)

Appendix B: Antecedents and Continental Responses to Beyond the Pleasure Principle

1. From Empedocles, Love and Strife (ca. 420 BCE )
2. From Plato, Aristophanes’ Discourse on Love (ca. 385 BCE )
3. From Arthur Schopenhauer, Death is the Résumé of Life (1892)
4. From Friedrich Nietzsche, Repetition, Pleasure, and Pain (1882, 1886, posthumous)
5. From Walter Benjamin, Shock and the Creative Process (1939)
6. From Jacques Lacan, Death, Desire, and Freud’s Radical Turn (1954-55)
7. From Melanie Klein, On the Development of Mental Functioning (1958)
8. From Norman O. Brown, Instinctual Dialectics against Instinctual Dualism (1959)
9. From Norman O. Brown, On Death, Time, and Eternity from Hegel to Freud (1959)
10. From Paul Ricoeur, Superego and Culture: A Hermeneutic Interpretation (1965)
11. From Paul Ricoeur, Open Questions: On Negation, Pleasure, Reality (1965)
12. From Gilles Deleuze, Sadism, Masochism, and the Death Instinct (1967)
13. From Jacques Derrida, Freud’s Mystic Writing Pad (1967)
14. From Herbert Marcuse, “A Decisive Correction”: Non-Repressive Progress and Freud’s Instinct Theory (1970)
15. From Jean Laplanche, Economic Paradox of the Death Drive (1970)
16. From Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, First Positive Task of Schizoanalysis (1972)
17. From Erich Fromm, A Humanist Response to the Death Instinct Theory (1973)
18. From Rodolphe Gasché, Scientific Discourse in the Light of Metapsychological Speculation (1974)
19. From Jean Baudrillard, The Metaphor of the Death Drive and Its Counter-Finality (1976)
20. From J.-B. Pontalis, The Work of Death (1976)
21. From Samuel Weber, Freud, Aristophanes, and the Phantastic Hypothesis (1979)
22. From Jacques Derrida, “A Kind of Discourse on Method”: Freud’s Performative Writing (1980)
23. From Judith Butler, The Pleasures of Repetition: A Phenomenological Perspective (1987)
24. From Todd Dufresne, “The Possibility of Happiness”: Absolute Narcissism and the Problem of Sociality (2000)
25. From Slavoj Žižek, Paradox of the Freudian Death Drive (2006)

Select Bibliography

Index

Editorial Reviews

The collection of writings gathered here cover a great breadth and demonstrate quite clearly the importance of the ideas proposed in Freud’s Beyond.” — Metapsychology

“Todd Dufresne’s book sets a new standard for critical editions of Freud. In addition to the lucid new English translation by Gregory C. Richter, there is a splendidly informative introduction, related excerpts from Freud’s other works, and a provocative appendix of critical essays, including contributions from Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Marcuse, Derrida, and Zizek, that challenge and destabilize this ‘metaphysical’ essay of Freud’s middle period. The pleasures of the text are rich and complex; in it we see Freud, as Dufresne aptly notes, moving ‘beyond psychoanalysis, in philosophy’—a journey of joyful intellectual homecoming.” — Mark Kingwell, Professor of Philosophy, University of Toronto

“Freud’s strange and conceptually adventurous Beyond the Pleasure Principle carves out a wholly original space between philosophy, psychology, and biology—a space we still find difficult to occupy, but one that opens up a range of challenging theoretical ideas from which we can continue to learn. In this new edition, Todd Dufresne expertly re-introduces us to a book that has spawned many important philosophical responses and interventions over the past half-century and reminds us why it is such a key book in Freud’s oeuvre. Gregory C. Richter’s superb new translation and Dufresne’s fantastic choice of both older theories on which Freud draws and newer thinkers who draw on Freud make this a book that anyone interested in contemporary philosophy and critical theory should add to their libraries and their classrooms.” — Imre Szeman, Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies, University of Alberta

From the Publisher

"Freud's strange and conceptually adventurous Beyond the Pleasure Principle carves out a wholly original space between philosophy, psychology, and biology — a space we still find difficult to occupy, but one that opens up a range of challenging theoretical ideas from which we can continue to learn. In this new edition, Todd Dufresne expertly re-introduces us to a book that has spawned many important philosophical responses and interventions over the past half-century and reminds us why it is such a key book in Freud's oeuvre. Gregory C. Richter's superb new translation and Dufresne's fantastic choice of both older theories on which Freud draws and newer thinkers who draw on Freud make this a book that anyone interested in contemporary philosophy and critical theory should add to their libraries and their classrooms."

Imre Szeman

"Todd Dufresne's book sets a new standard for critical editions of Freud. In addition to the lucid new English translation by Gregory C. Richter, there is a splendidly informative introduction, related excerpts from Freud's other works, and a provocative appendix of critical essays, including contributions from Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Marcuse, Derrida, and Zizek, that challenge and destabilize this 'metaphysical' essay of Freud's middle period. The pleasures of the text are rich and complex; in it we see Freud, as Dufresne aptly notes, moving 'beyond psychoanalysis, in philosophy' — a journey of joyful intellectual homecoming."

Mark Kingwell University of Toronto