Beyond the Pleasure Principle

I've never really read a lot of Freud.  I remember a few interesting things from college that he wrote late in his career, like Civilization and Its Discontents, and Moses and Monotheism.  These are probably not representative of his work though, since they really fall more into the domain of speculative cultural history than psychology.  I always imagined delving further into his purely psycho-analytic work would be not only a long project (the guy was ridiculously prolific) but also one that only had a historical interest, like reading about the history of chemistry or electro-magenetism or something -- why bother learning about the groping origins of a science when you know that so much of it has already been du-bunked and re-conceived by future generations?

As a result, I was pleasantly surprised by Beyond the Pleasure Principle.  It is of more than historical interest.  Whether this is mainly because Freud was so far ahead of his time or because psychology hasn't gotten that far as a science in the past hundred years is something we could discuss at length.  Freud struck me as surprisingly modern in his mechanistic, almost fluid dynamic conception of how the mind works.  He talks about problems of 'binding', discharge, approach to equilibrium, etc ... which are not that far off what seems to be the latest rage in cognitive neuroscience, Friston's free energy principle.  That's pretty impressive for a guy that could know next to nothing concrete about the brain and had to infer everything from people griping about their moms.  

The other thing I found oddly modern about Freud was his abundance of caution.  He has an interesting (occasionally maddening) sort of garden-of-the-forking-paths writing style.  He begins with some clinical observation, carries it forward into a broader hypothesis, combines it with another observation that could lead in several directions, advances a ways down one of those, doubles back and looks a bit at the initial course of the other ... you're never quite sure what he really thinks because he's never quite sure either.  But the reasons for each of these turns are marked and clearly evaluated for how speculative he considers them to be.  You really end up watching the process of his thinking unfold.  This struck me as a very modern and scientific way of proceeding.  It contrasted with my image of him as the guru of psycho-analysis famous for insisting on his grand theories of the Oedipal Complex and such.

But what of his actual ideas, you ask?  What exactly does he think is beyond the pleasure principle?  The Death Instinct -- a living thing's compulsion to repeat an earlier state of inorganic matter.  He infers this instinct from both theoretical considerations, as well as clinical observations like the dreams of PTSD patients and the way children often play by repeating what was originally an unpleasant situation.  The Death Instinct is meant to account for why we feel compelled to repeat something unpleasant. 

I know that a longing to be inorganic sounds looney on the surface of it; unfortunately, a short description of what that means won't do it justice and the long one I just wrote in my notes filled up 5 pages and will bore you to death. 😶  The basic idea is less nuts than it sounds at first.  The real question at stake is who the instincts belong to.   With Freud's distinctions between the unconscious and the conscious, or the Ego and the Id (which actually translates "das Es", literally "the It") to whom the instincts belong is a non-trivial question.  Short version: it's not necessarily "your" unconscious, "your" It, whereas it is, by definition, your ego.   He tentatively concludes that before you can go around pursing pleasure and avoiding pain, the free floating excitation of pleasure in general has to be "bound" as your pleasure, and that this binding takes place through the circumscription of a nervous system that seeks to maintain itself as near to equilibrium as possible.  Equilibrium, for organic things, is another name for death, hence the name.  

For those masochists among you, my colleagues at FPiPE will soon be spending more time deep in the weeds with Beyond the Pleasure Principle. I read it only to improve my understanding of Deleuze's theory of repetition.  So stay tuned for that and in any case don't judge the usefulness of Freud's ideas just from the tragically brief description here.