Beyond the Pleasure Principle Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THE NEW PENGUIN FREUD GENERAL EDITOR: ADAM PHILLIPS

  Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings

  Sigmund Freud was born in 1856 in Moravia; between the ages of four and eighty-two his home was in Vienna: in 1938 Hitler's invasion of Austria forced him to seek asylum in London, where he died in the following year. His career began with several years of brilliant work on the anatomy and physiology of the nervous system. He was almost thirty when, after a period of study under Charcot in Paris, his interests first turned to psychology; and after ten years of clinical work in Vienna (at first in collaboration with Breuer, an older colleague) he invented what was to become psychoanalysis. This began simply as a method of treating neurotic patients through talking, but it quickly grew into an accumulation of knowledge about the workings of the mind in general. Freud was thus able to demonstrate the development of the sexual instinct in childhood and, largely on the basis of an examination of dreams, arrived at his fundamental discovery of the unconscious forces that influence our everyday thoughts and actions. Freud's life was uneventful, but his ideas have shaped not only many specialist disciplines, but also the whole intellectual climate of the twentieth century.

  John Reddick was born in 1940 and educated at Oxford University. He has held lectureships at Edinburgh and Cambridge universities and chairs at Sydney University and Liverpool. His publications include The Danzig Trilogy of Günter Grass (1974) and Georg Büchner: The Shattered Whole (1994), which won the J. G. Robertson Prize. John Reddick also translated Georg Büchner's The Complete Plays, Lenz and Other Writings for Penguin (1993).

  Mark Edmundson is Professor of English at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Towards Reading Freud (1992), Literature against Philosophy, Plato to Derrida (1995), Nightmare on Main Street (1997) and Teacher (a memoir) (2002). He is a contributing editor for Raritan and Harper's Magazine.

  Adam Phillips was formerly Principal Child Psychotherapist at Charing Cross Hospital in London. He is the author of several books on psychoanalysis including On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored, Darwin's Worms, Promises, Promises and Houdini's Box.

  SIGMUND FREUD

  Beyond the Pleasure Principle

  and Other Writings

  Translated by John Reddick

  with an Introduction by Mark Edmundson

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  ‘Zur Einführung des Narzissmus’ first published 1914 in Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse ‘Weitere Ratschläge zur Technik der Psychoanalyse: II. Erinnern, Wiederholen und Durcharbeiten’ first published 1914 (Leipzig) in Internationale Zeitschrift für ärztliche Psychoanalyse, 2 (6)

  Jenseits des Lustprinzips first published 1920 (Leipzig, Vienna and Zurich: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag)

  Das Ich und das Es first published 1923 (Leipzig, Vienna and Zurich: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag)

  Hemmung, Symptom und Angst first published 1926 (Leipzig, Vienna and Zurich: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag)

  Sigmund Freud's German texts collected in Gesammelte Werke (1940–52)

  Copyright © Imago Publishing Co. Ltd, London, 1940, 1946, 1948

  This translation published in Penguin Classics 2003

  5

  Translation and editorial matter copyright © John Reddick, 2003

  Introduction copyright © Mark Edmundson, 2003

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the translator and the author of the Introduction have been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-193166-1

  Contents

  Introduction by Mark Edmundson

  Translator's Preface

  On the Introduction of Narcissism

  Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through

  Beyond the Pleasure Principle

  The Ego and the Id

  Inhibition, Symptom, and Fear

  Notes

  Introduction

  Freud in Love

  Sigmund Freud is Western culture's laureate of unhappy love. He is our prose-poet of the heart's endless desire to break. The heart breaks time and again and, Freud insists, it is prone to do so in the same fashion. Freud, as the works gathered in this volume demonstrate, put the idea of erotic repetition at the centre of his thought. He believed that we are all inclined – many of us are doomed – to repeat, and what we repeat is disaster, erotic disaster and political disaster as well. We fall in love not only with ‘sexual objects’ (as Freud charmingly calls them) but, individually and collectively, with power. Though badly in need of sane and measured authority, we swoon before the authoritarian. For most people, there is not much to be done about these sad tendencies. Through experience, Freud believed, most of us learn nothing, unless it is to repeat our own worst experiences.

  Life, from Freud's perspective, frequently circles from romance to disillusionment, then does so again and again. We seek perfect love, perfect truth, perfect protection. We believe that we once had those things (though we never did) and we continually sight them, glowing, on the far side of a noisy room or dispensing truth from a banner-draped stage, Klieg- or torch-lights flaring. We are drawn into the golden circle, abase ourselves, submit, and for a while enjoy an extraordinary sense of well-being. It is as though we have attained a long-sought completion. We never feel so strongly as then, in the midst of love, that we live in the present. (Though the truth is that in love, more than at any other time, we are dwelling in the past.) But soon our idealizations dissolve, the honey-glow disappears, and we're tolled back, as Keats has it, to our sole selves. We find ourselves then disillusioned, void of life (illusion, whatever its pitfalls, is to Freud the great energizer), and waiting for the next irresistible falsehood, the next narcissistic ploy, to come along. For once the period of disillusion – or mourning – is over, Freud says in a memorable phrase, we pursue the next ‘object’ the way a starving man pursues bread.

  Perfect love and perfect authority are not available to mortals. Yet to write that sentence now, to think that usefully demystifying thought, will not save one from losing everything in a futile quest for sublime love, sublime authority. In fact, the ability to articulate this Freudian wisdom may induce us to lower our guards, making ruin all the more likely. As soon as we feel that we have finally learned Freud's lessons, we are ripe for another fall.

  Among his detractors, Freud is known as an erotic reductionist. He takes the worlds of love and power, with their marvellous iridescent shades, and swabs them with his dun-coloured brush. But perhaps Freud is not so mu
ch a reductionist as he is someone who brilliantly exposes the state of the psyche when it is at its most minimal and besieged. Maybe Freud is not, strictly speaking, a reductionist but someone who aptly describes us when we are at our most reduced.

  Happy men and women (the enchanted, mystified ones, Freud would generally say) look at the psychoanalytic account of love and sneer. It's all too simple, too cut and dried. But in times of crisis, erotic or political, they may return to Freud's purgatorial map for a stark overview of the terrain, and some hints about how to traverse it. Yet Freud's map, even at its best, can only lead one to equanimity – to irony, detachment, poise. Philip Rieff in The Mind of the Moralist (University of Chicago Press, 1979) suggests that there is something Eastern in the Freudian ethos. The quest for equanimity through psychoanalysis is akin to Buddhist attempts to attain relative calm through yoga and meditation. The way to live beyond delusion, for Freud, is to achieve sceptical distance from one's desires – though without ever suppressing them.

  Can we ask for more than this? Is it possible to conceive of love and power in ways that, while taking Freud's strictures seriously, still propel us past the ethics of irony and renunciation that Freud overall commends?

  I think so. Though, to be sure, there are risks in such a quest: as Freud always insisted, the better is often the enemy of the good. Freud derided civilization for asking too much of people. In general he thought that the middle classes were victimized by their own attempts to live beyond their psyches' means. Despite such prudent warnings, I want to turn to Shakespeare, from whom Freud learned a great deal but perhaps not enough, to describe some possibilities for renewal that pass beyond Freud, but that also contain some of his harshest wisdom about power, love and the compulsion to repeat.

  The simplicity at the core of Freud's thoughts about power and Eros is scandalous. But then, simple, abrupt diagnosis is part of the psychoanalytic ethos. In psychoanalysis, the road to humility often runs through repeated humiliation. The neurotic believes that she is special: no one has ever felt precisely this way before. No one has ever suffered like this. But Freud insists that neuroses don't individualize us. On the contrary, they rob us of whatever singularity we may possess. Therapy, then, becomes an encounter with the distinct possibility that whoever you are, whatever you've achieved, you've become no more than a cliché, a walking tired and tiring figure of speech: anally retentive, orally fixated, Oedipally tied. Perhaps the fear of being a lifelong solecism incarnate helps jolt patients into recovery. They don't want to be an embodied diagnosis, the realization of some array of principles gleaned from a textbook, so they rebel and begin to change.

  In any event, Freud's diagnosis of collective humanity is simple and potentially humbling. To a Freudian mind, all the stories of Eden, Nirvana, the Blessed Fields, Valhalla and the rest reduce to one primary experience, the experience of blissful union that most of us have just after we enter the world. We come into life absurdly unfit for it. We're small, shivering and afraid, squalling at our fate, swimming in phantasmagoria, drawn forth from time to time by a flashing or familiar object, only to sink back into primal flow. One baby in the room, says Emerson, makes a dozen more of the adults in attendance, who bend to the child's every whim. There is probably no perfume more disarming than the infant's natural scent. It's fortunate that Emerson is right. Human babies need all the fawning and protection that they can get.

  In only a few weeks, the calf that was tottering unsteadily beside its mother is running through the pasture. The human infant, born the same day, has learned to raise its head and fix a stare for five or so seconds, not much more. In a decade's time many other mammals have run through the course of their lives. We are relatively defenceless still. Dickens shocked his huge audience, as Blake did his much smaller one, by depicting wretched children, ten or eleven years old, marooned in the midst of city life. The Artful Dodger, Oliver, and Blake's chimney sweepers, are little more than babes making their way through a slag-heap world. We stay too short a time in the womb and we are mere children for a very long time after that – Freud would say most of us remain children to the end. To the experienced psychoanalyst, there are very few grown-ups.

  In the early period of deep dependency a rich inner life begins: the child's complex human character starts to take shape. The infant – etymologically, the one who cannot speak – lives in a world of images and desires, great pleasures (he is, potentially, a polymorphous pervert) and body-wrenching wants. Giant figures, godlike in their power (as proportionately grand as the figures on the movie screen that bring these grown-up demi-gods themselves back to thrilling infancy) loom over the child, capable, it seems, of satisfying all wants. Where they are, dressed out in their full potency, is Eden, a world of perfection. Filled up with mother's milk the baby experiences a blissful satisfaction that will be a standard for all requited love to come. In the father's voice, the child senses a power that unerringly protects and guides. That voice will return later in life with every experience of what the eighteenth century called the sublime – in Wagner and Beethoven, say, thunderously assertive, as though they were rendering the thoughts of Jove and, too, in the voice of every plausible purveyor of Truth, each subject (as Lacan has it) who is supposed to know.

  But gaps open up too. Mother is distracted and looks away; father fails some elementary test. And into the gap between desire and delivery come fantasy, wish, yearning, and resentment as well. So like all paradises, this one is eventually lost. But to Freud, the psyche is profoundly conservative. He says over and over that we will never willingly give up a satisfying libidinal position once we have inhabited it. If we lose such a position, we will strive to restore it in dreams, in fantasy, through neurosis, or – with every semblance of probity - in what appears to be well-ordered adult life. We regress where and when we can, and what we regress to is the dream of perfect authority and love. We do so again and again, for reality, even the best-made reality, is too poor for our hopes. In his attempt to surrender unconditionally to the primal dream, the opium-eater is the prototype of all humanity.

  Love, says the narrator of Céline's Journey to the End of the Night, is a poodle's chance of attaining the infinite – ‘and frankly I have my pride’. Freud would concur in the general denigration of love, I suppose, but he would doubt that much of anyone, even the rancid Céline, could always sustain his pride in the face of Eros. Perhaps Freud's most unpleasant remark on love comes in his paper on the transference. ‘It is true’, Freud writes there, ‘that the love [that the patient develops for the therapist] consists of new editions of old traits and that it repeats infantile reactions. There is no such state which does not reproduce infantile prototypes. It is precisely from this infantile determination that it receives its compulsive character, verging as it does on the pathological. Transference-love has perhaps a degree less of freedom than the love which appears in ordinary life and is called normal; it displays its dependence on the infantile pattern more clearly and is less adaptable and capable of modification; but that is all, and not what is essential.’ (‘Observations on Transference Love’, Standard Edition, vol. XII, p. 168).

  So the obsessive love that arises in therapy is a little bit madder than the love that arises in everyday life, but not very much. In saying so, Freud seeks to explain a peculiar situation that occurs all the time in experience, but that we often take in our stride. The fact that people of all sorts do the most bizarre and unexpected things for love, that they live in a haze, abase themselves, act in outlandish ways, is something we simply accept as normal. In The Symposium, Plato's great dialogue on love, it's suggested that someone who has fallen in love is really little different from one who has fallen physically ill.

  Freud sees this domesticated madness and does what he can to explain it. He says that when we fall in love, all of the infantile fantasies about power and pleasure are reactivated. They have been dormant, but they have never died, and they are resurrected, a little like the horror-movie spooks who rise up
when their burial ground is accidentally disturbed. The old wishes come once again to the fore and they dominate life. Love is pathology, at least romantic love. Married love, which takes place under the reign of that sour deity, the Reality Principle, is far less interesting to Freud. So Freud would disabuse us of our erotic illusions and make us more sober, or at least capable of some measure of irony at the point when we are once again about to drown ourselves in Eros.

  An effective, flexible super-ego (assuming that such a thing exists) is, one might hypothesize, the source of whatever ironic vision we can apply to our own experience. Super-ego irony entails distance, detachment, a sceptical sense that we are not so different from anyone else, that we are as ripe for humiliation as the next person. And, more than that, such irony suggests the possibility that we are, despite protestations, not so different from our former selves: that we are likely to behave as disastrously in the present as we have in the past.

  In love, the reigning super-ego suffers usurpation. In love, Freud says in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), the lover puts the beloved in the place of the Over-I. The lover becomes the standard for judgement. What the beloved finds admirable, or interesting, or just noteworthy, is splendid behaviour. Like being drunk, which also suspends the super-ego, at least until the next morning when it can assert itself with redoubled force (the great essay on the psychology of the hangover is yet to be written), being in love lets us displace our own internal monarch and put a lord of temporary, blissful misrule on the throne. Alas, when we remember our various erotic abasements, it is through the unforgiving agency of the true super-ego, the one based on harsh parental prototypes, which has retaken the seat and glares bitterly at the past. Love, too, has its morning after. (Sometimes it lasts for years.) But for a while, ludicrously, absurdly, exaltingly, we feel free.