Beyond the Pleasure Principle Revisited

This book revisits Freud’s monumental work of 1920, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which has had a profound impact on psychoanalytic conceptualisation and practice over the last one hundred years.

Two central aspects of Freud’s text are explored through detailed clinical case studies. Part One addresses the ongoing controversy regarding our understanding of states of internal deathliness, inertia and paralysis. Does Freud’s concept of the death drive come to the rescue, providing us with a readily usable clinical map? Or does the concept lead us astray, blinding us to the part played by catastrophic early object relations? In Part Two, we see how the new paradigm inaugurated by Beyond the Pleasure Principle plays out in contemporary clinical practice. The session is now understood to be a live dramatic encounter in which the drives may be bound, trauma may be figured and the unrepresented may acquire a symbolic form. Part Three explores the complex and troubling relationship between Freud’s psychoanalytic theory-making and his radical imagination.

The book will be of great interest to psychoanalytic clinicians, academic students of psychoanalysis and those interested in the history of ideas in the twentieth century.