Beyond the Pleasure Principle

by Sigmund Freud

  Our love for Falstaff is inseparable from the fact that he would deliver us from the regressive super-ego which compels life to take place under the aegis of outworn authority and the easy inversion of that authority. Under the role of the standard super-ego we dream of uniting ourselves with a great sublime form – the father, or the metaphysical truth, or the state – and basking there for all time. Our love for Rosalind is inseparable from her attempt to deliver us from an id which would make life take place in the realm of pure wish-fulfilment. Tempted by the oceanic feeling, we dream of perfect immersion, for the easy erotic bliss of the maternal sublime. Falstaff and Rosalind might help save us from these urges, but they would not do so by taking us to the world of ironic stoicism that Freud commends. The realm that they open up is the realm of imagination. It is a place of plenty and pleasure, where we are anything but perfect, but where we enact perpetual enriching change – what Emerson thought of as the shooting of the gulf, the darting to an aim, the making and breaking of circles. Through the exercise of imagination, we may find an alternative to a more secure state of being in which everything is past and there is nothing new.

  If we read with an open heart and mind, despite whatever socialization we have had, art can – if only for short stretches – remove us from the harsh reductions that Freud eventually took all too much relish in describing. Unable to defeat them grandly enough, being allowed only the provisional victories of therapy, Freud cast his lot with what he took to be the forces of fate, hoping to share its awful power. Shakespeare teaches us that we need not join him in this surrender.

  Mark Edmundson, 2003

  Translator's Preface

  It is a curious and remarkable fact that Sigmund Freud's ideas have entered and conditioned modern consciousness not in their original German form, but mainly through English translations, most notably those enshrined in the Standard Edition, under the general editorship of James Strachey, and the ever jealous guardianship of the Institute of Psycho-Analysis. This circumstance would be enough in itself to justify new English versions even if the Standard Edition were flawless, since no translation, however good, can ever render the shapes and shades of an original text in all their subtlety; but in fact the Standard Edition is deeply, systematically flawed, making new translations all the more imperative. Take the opening paragraph of the Narcissism essay, for instance, which in the Standard Edition reads as follows:

  ON NARCISSISM: AN INTRODUCTION

  I

  The term narcissism is derived from clinical description and was chosen by Paul Näcke in 1899 to denote the attitude of a person who treats his own body in the same way in which the body of a sexual object is ordinarily treated – who looks at it, that is to say, strokes it and fondles it till he obtains complete satisfaction through these activities. Developed to this degree, narcissism has the significance of a perversion that has absorbed the whole of the subject's sexual life, and it will consequently exhibit the characteristics which we expect to meet with in the study of all perversions.

  If this were handed in by a student as a translation exercise, it would end up covered in red pencil, with everything from light squiggles to heavy underlinings and multiple exclamation marks, for it is so full of slips and shifts and omissions as to be a travesty of Freud's original. At the less serious end of the spectrum, ‘attitude’ would merit at least a squiggle: Freud's word is Verhalten, ‘behaviour’; so, too would ‘developed to this degree’: Freud's in dieser Ausbildung simply means ‘in this form’ or, more loosely, ‘in this sense’; the phrase ‘has the significance of’ would also elicit a tut-tut and a squiggle, since the German translates quite simply as ‘means’ or ‘signifies’ (the second sentence would thus more crisply and more correctly begin ‘Narcissism in this form means…’). We can also cavil at ‘absorbed’, as it loses the force of Freud's graphic metaphor aufgesogen, which in this context means ‘sucked up’ or ‘swallowed up’; while ‘exhibit[s] the characteristics’ is an unduly loose rendering of words that more strictly mean ‘is subject to the expectations…’ (unterliegt den Erwartungen). A more serious distortion lurks in the words ‘a person who treats his own body in the same way in which the body of a sexual object is ordinarily treated’: what Freud's German unambiguously says is that the narcissist (in Näcke's sense of the term) treats his own body in the same way in which he – the narcissist himself – might treat that of any other sexual object.

  Whilst none of these infelicities makes much difference on its own, their cumulative effect is to alter the whole tone and thrust of the passage (and we find similar shifts if we take almost any paragraph in Freud's original German and compare it with the translation offered in the Standard Edition). They are as nothing, however, by the side of the two quite startling mistranslations that reveal themselves in these few lines. One of them is in fact much worse than a mistranslation – it is a flagrant case of bowdlerization. No one reading the first sentence of the Standard Edition could possibly divine that in Freud's original the narcissist is said to stroke and caress and gaze at his own body mit sexuellem Wohlgefallen, ‘with sexual pleasure’: this oh-so-explicit phrase is quite simply – excised and thus another bit of Freud's characteristic oomph and colour is obliterated. Much more serious, however, is the garbled title: the wording ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’ is a grave misrepresentation of Freud's heading Zur Einführung des Narzissmus, which unarguably refers to the introduction of narcissism, and not to any kind of introduction to narcissism. This may conceivably have been ignorance on the part of the Standard Edition translators (they commonly misunderstand Freud's German) - but it is much more likely to have been a case of deliberate spin: Freud's choice of words clearly reflects the newness of his narcissism theory and a concomitant sense that it therefore needs a good deal of explaining; the Standard Edition (mis-)title, however, implies that the theory is soundly established, and that the novice reader is about to be introduced to it, rather as a first-year undergraduate might be introduced to macro-economics or human anatomy. The agenda here (and elsewhere) is clear, and not a little pernicious: Freud's writing is to be presented not as a hot and sweaty struggle with intractable and often crazily daring ideas, but as a cut-and-dried corpus of unchallengeable dogma.

  This agenda is what also underlies the gravest and most pervasive defect of the Standard Edition, and that is its wilfully turgid and often obfuscatory style. Even the very best-educated English-speakers are likely to reach for their dictionary in the face of ‘the thaumaturgical power of words’, for example, whereas any German-speaking child of eight or nine would readily understand Freud's own plain-speaking description of the magical power of words: ‘die Zauberkraft des Wortes’. Freud is often said to be a great prose-writer, but while this is plainly a nonsense if we compare his prose with that of Goethe or Nietzsche or Grass, he certainly writes with unmistakable verve and punch, particularly in the derring-do period when he was boldly carving out his more radical ideas – the period so powerfully reflected in this volume. The Standard Edition fed Freud through a kind of voice-synthesizer to make him sound like a droning academic; one of the main aspirations of this present translation is to render not only his meanings, but also the mercurial flavour of his style, so that his sometimes combative, sometimes diffident, sometimes solemn, sometimes mischievous voice can be clearly heard in all its registers.

  It has to be admitted, however, that while it is easy enough to criticize other people's translations, it is far from easy to make one's own – especially in the case of Freud, whose particular patterns of thought and language are sometimes hard even to construe, let alone render into satisfactory English. But the very fact that Freud's ideas have permeated world culture chiefly through the medium of the Standard Edition and the English terminology there enshrined, adds a whole extra dimension of difficulty: on page after page the re-translator faces the challenge of whether to retain or reject the old, often dubious, but now universally accepted terms invented by the earlier transla
tors. In some cases the decision was easy: ‘anaclitic’, for instance, is a preposterous neologism founded on plain ignorance of Freud's German (Anlehnung), and was rejected with relish and relief; ‘frustration’ was likewise rejected as a startlingly inept misrendering of the important term Versagung (‘refusal’ is used instead). It was easy, too, to discard ‘instinct’ and ‘satisfaction’ as translations of Trieb and Befriedigung, and to use ‘drive’ and ‘gratification’ in their place. Other terms, however, often provoked months of head-scratching. In the end, ‘(super-) ego’ and ‘id’ – latinisms quite devoid of the earthy punch of Freud's (Über-)Ich and Es – were reluctantly retained, for want of any practicable alternatives; so too, with even greater reluctance, was Strachey's opaque and ugly word ‘cathexis’, together with the associated verb ‘cathect’: other translators in the new Penguin Freud Library have opted for plain-English alternatives to these rebarbative inventions, but all such alternatives seemed to me to have misleading connotations. In general, specific terms of Freud's are consistently translated (thus for instance Abfuhr is always rendered as ‘release’, in preference to ‘discharge’ as used in the ‘Standard Translation’), but in some cases his vocabulary renders any such laudable consistency impossible. A particularly fascinating instance of this is Freud's word Instanz, a metaphor he deploys again and again to describe the various processes of surveillance, admonition, censorship, control to which, in his view, every human psyche is enduringly subject. Borrowing the term from the forbidding realms of the law (where it is a standard term for ‘court’, ‘tribunal’ etc.), Freud applies it to the whole panoply of – literally – forbidding forces that bear upon individuals almost from the moment of their birth, firstly from without in the persons of their parents and, in due course, their teachers and the larger community, then from within in the form of internalized control mechanisms – chiefly hypostasized by Freud in the ‘pleasure principle’ and, above all, the ‘super-ego’. The sheer frequency of the word Instanz turns it into an integrative and (discomfitingly) evocative cypher in Freud's original texts – but this distinctive effect cannot be reproduced in English, which simply has no equivalent word or concept, so that we are forced to use a whole gamut of different makeshift terms, from ‘parental voice’ (Elterninstanz) through to ‘entity’, ‘agency’, ‘matrix’, ‘arbiter’ – and numerous others besides. (One wonders whether Freud could ever have arrived at his vision-cum-analysis of the human psyche if he had been born and brought up in, say, France or England, since it so clearly derives – like the poetic visions of Franz Kafka – from a specifically Austro-German matrix of notions and assumptions.)

  Various traps and chicanes await the translator of texts from an earlier age. One of these is the lure of anachronisms. In general this particular lure has been resisted throughout the present volume – though it has to be admitted that the alert reader might find a handful of words and idioms that were not yet current in English in the period when Freud wrote the relevant essays (no prizes for their discovery…). Another inveterate problem, rendered all the more acute by the prevailing fashion for political correctness, is that of gendered language. Sharing as he did the premises and predilections of his age, Freud's perspective is of course overwhelmingly phallo-centric. In general, this perspective has been faithfully transferred into English (to do anything else would be to practise a modern form of bowdlerism). Furthermore, it has been applied by extension to those situations where the rules of German grammar required Freud to use the neuter – most conspicuously in references to children, the noun Kind in German being neuter (das Kind). In such contexts grammatically neuter pronouns and possessive adjectives are assumed to refer to males unless there is specific evidence to the contrary.

  Finally, a word on dictionaries. One of the major disadvantages suffered by earlier translators of Freud was that they didn't have at their disposal the plethora of excellent German–English dictionaries now available. Chief amongst these is the multi-volume set produced in the 1960s and early 1970s under the wonderful editorship of Trevor Jones at Jesus College, Cambridge – though if the assiduous reader spots weaknesses in my translation of German words begin with S through to Z, then they should please direct their brickbats at Oxford University Press, who have signally failed to publish the missing volume(s) ! On the other hand, the OUP certainly deserve the warmest possible plaudits for their Oxford English Dictionary: no one could wish for a better resource than this matchless work, and having plundered its riches several times daily for many months, I happily close by offering grateful obeisance to what is surely one of the mightiest achievements of English culture.

  On the Introduction of Narcissism1

  I

  ‘Narcissism’ originated as a term of clinical description, having been chosen by Paul Näcke in 1899 to define that form of behaviour whereby an individual treats his own body in the same way in which he might treat that of any other sexual object, by looking at it, stroking it and caressing it with sexual pleasure2 until by these acts he achieves full gratification. In this formulation the term ‘narcissism’ means a perversion that has swallowed up the entire sexual life of the individual, and consequently entails the same expectations that we would bring to the study of any other perversion.

  Psychoanalysts were then struck in the course of their observations by the fact that individual elements of narcissistic behaviour are encountered in many people suffering from other disorders, for instance – according to Sadger – in homosexuals, and finally the supposition inescapably presented itself that a form of libido lodgement3 definable as narcissism may occur on a far larger scale, and may well be able to lay claim to a role in the normal sexual development of human beings.4 The difficulties encountered in the psychoanalytical treatment of neurotics led to the same supposition, for it looked as if just such a narcissistic pattern of behaviour on their part was one of the factors limiting their amenability to influence. One might say that narcissism in this sense is not a perversion, but the libidinal correlative of the egoism of the self-preservation instinct, an element of which is rightly attributed to every living creature.

  Compelling grounds for entertaining the notion of a primary and normal form of narcissism arose when the attempt was made to apply the libido theory to our understanding of dementia praecox (Kraepelin) or schizophrenia (Bleuler). Those suffering from this condition, for whom I have proposed the term paraphrenics, display two fundamental characteristics: megalomania, and withdrawal of interest from the external world (people and things). The latter development makes them unamenable to psychoanalysis, it makes them incurable no matter how hard we try. The paraphrenic's withdrawal from the external world, however, needs to be more precisely characterized. The hysteric and the obsessional neurotic likewise abandon their relationship to reality, assuming their illness develops to that point. But analysis shows that they by no means forsake their erotic relationship to people and things. They hold fast to it in their imagination, on the one hand replacing or mingling real objects with imaginary ones drawn from their memory, whilst on the other not initiating in respect of those objects any of the motor activities needed for the attainment of their goals. For this condition of the libido alone, and for no other, should one use the term indiscriminately applied by Jung, namely introversion of the libido. With the paraphrenic, however, the position is quite different. He really does seem to have withdrawn his libido from the people and things of the external world without replacing them with any others in his imagination. In cases where he does so replace them, this appears to be a secondary process, and to form part of an attempt at recovery that seeks to lead the libido back to the object world.5

  The question then arises as to the subsequent fate of the libido in schizophrenia once it has been withdrawn from objects. The megalomania characteristic of this condition points the way. We can assume that it arose at the expense of object-libido. The libido, having been withdrawn from the external world, is channelled into the ego, giving rise to a
form of behaviour that we can call narcissism. However, the megalomania itself is not a new entity, but, as we know, only a magnified and more distinct form of a pre-existing state. This in turn leads us to think that the form of narcissism that arises as a result of the incorporation of object-cathexes6 is a secondary one that develops on top of a primary one rendered obscure by a variety of different influences.

  Let me stress once again that I am not seeking here either to resolve or further to complicate the schizophrenia problem, but am merely bringing together what has already been said in other contexts, in order to justify introducing the concept of narcissism.

  A third factor contributing to this, in my view legitimate, extension of the libido theory arises from our observations and interpretations of the inner life of children and primitive peoples. In the latter we find traits which, if they were to occur individually, could be classed as megalomania: an overestimation of the power of their wishes and psychic acts – the ‘omnipotence of thoughts’; a belief in the magical power7 of words; a technique for dealing with the external world, namely ‘magic’, which appears as the logical application of these megalomaniac premisses.8 We expect to encounter an entirely analogous attitude to the external world in the child of our own day and age, whose development is far less clear to us.9 We thus find the notion taking shape in our mind that it was the ego that originally underwent libido-cathexis;10 some of this libido is later transferred to objects, but essentially it stays put, and relates to the object-cathexes rather as the body of an amoeba relates to the pseudopodia that it sends forth. This aspect of libido lodgement inevitably remained hidden from us to begin with, given the symptom-based nature of our researches. The only things apparent to us were the emanations of this libido, namely object-cathexes, which can be sent forth and then retracted again. We can also discern what in broad tens we can call an antagonism between the ego-libido and the object-libido – the more replete the one becomes, the more the other is depleted. The highest phase of development achievable by the latter appears to us to be the state of being in love, which presents itself to us as an abandonment by the individual of his own personality in favour of an object-cathexis, and which has its antithesis in the paranoiac's fantasy (or self-perception) regarding the ‘end of the world’.11 What we ultimately conclude regarding the differentiation of psychic energies is that initially, in the state of narcissism, they remain clustered together, and hence undifferentiable in terms of our crude analysis, and that only the supervention of object-cathexis makes it possible to differentiate sexual energy, the libido, from the energy of the ego drives.