Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings

by Sigmund Freud

  21. Cf. the apt remarks of C. G. Jung in his essay ‘Die Bedeutung des Vaters für das Schicksal des Einzelnen’ [‘The Significance of the Father in the Destiny of the Individual’] (1909).

  22. [This sentence is faithful to the original in its less than perfect clarity and logic!]

  23. [Pcpt represents the ‘perceptual system’, first proposed by Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900).]

  24. This is based entirely on J[osef] Breuer's discussion of the topic in the theoretical section of Studien über Hysterie [Studies on Hysteria; Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer], 1895.

  25. [See The Interpretation of Dreams (in the Penguin Freud Library, vol. 4, p. 687).]

  26. [Bahnung (without inverted commas in Freud's original). The verb bahnen (cognate with English ‘bane’ in its etymological sense of ‘strike’ or ‘wound’) means ‘to strike a path through (snow, the jungle, a press of people, etc.)’. The Standard Edition bizarrely renders the word as ‘facilitation’.]

  27. [gebunden. The verb binden (past participle gebunden) is a key term in Freud's theory of the psyche – but it is not clear precisely how he visualized the metaphor, and it is therefore difficult to render it in English with any certainty; ‘annex’ seems the likeliest equivalent, and is generally used throughout this volume (the Standard Edition opts for ‘bind’ and ‘attach’). It is notable that in the course of the essay Freud twice feels obliged to enclose the word in inverted commas, suggesting that he himself did not regard the concept as either self-evident or self-explanatory.]

  28. Studien über Hysterie [Studies on Hysteria], by Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud (1895).

  29. Cf. “Triebe and Triebschicksale’ [‘Drives and Their Fates’] (1915).

  30. [Angstbereitschaft – literally ‘fear-preparedness’.]

  31. [Angstträume.]

  32. Introduction to Zur Psychoanalyse der Kriegsneurosen [Psycho-analysis and the War Neuroses] (1919) [see above, note 8].

  33. Cf. Chapter VII, ‘The Psychology of Dream Processes’, in my Interpretation of Dreams.

  34. [Freud's grammar is quite often slapdash, but in the case of this parenthesis it is garbled to the point of complete obscurity. The translation is therefore conjectural, and has been derived by reference to the penultimate sentence of Chapter II (see also the associated note concerning Freud's use of ‘modify’).]

  35. [This phrase directly renders Freud's mercifully unambiguous German (zeigen… den dämonischen Charakter); the Standard Edition, however, bowdlerizes this into ‘give the appearance of some “daemonic” force at work’. See also below, note 37.]

  36. [Wunschphantasie – yet another example, like ‘dream-work’ (Traumarbeit) in the second paragraph of this chapter, of Freud's zest for creating new words by shunting together two seemingly ill-assorted ones.]

  37. [The Standard Edition offers another revealing bowdlerization here: Freud uses the plain, no-nonsense words dieser dämonische Zwang – but James Strachey felt obliged to render the phrase as ‘this compulsion with its hint of possession by some “daemonic” power’.]

  38. I have no doubt that similar suppositions as to the nature of ‘drives’ have already been expressed on numerous occasions.

  39. [Addition 1925:] The reader is asked to bear in mind that what follows is the elaboration of an extreme line of thought, which will be qualified and amended later on when the sex drives are taken into consideration.

  40. [Partialtrieb. The Standard Edition routinely renders the Partial-element of this term as ‘component…’, but there is no good reason to depart from the straightforward translation ‘partial…’ (cf. such standard technical terms as Partialbruch, Partialdruck – ‘partial fraction’, ‘partial pressure’).]

  41. [The phrase ‘these guardians of life’ presumably refers back to ‘the drives’ – but this is left unclear by Freud.]

  42. [Addition 1923:] And yet it is to these alone that we can attribute an inner tendency towards ‘progress’ and higher development! (See below).

  43. [Addition 1925:] It should be clear from the whole context that the term ‘ego drives’ is intended here only as a provisional one that harks back to the original nomenclature of psychoanalysis.

  44. Ferenczi arrived at the same potential interpretation, but via a different route: ‘If we follow this line of thought to its logical conclusion, we must accustom ourselves to the idea that a tendency to stasis or regression also prevails in organic life, while the tendency to development, adaptation etc. is aroused only by external stimuli.’ (Entwicklungsstufen des Wirklichkeits-sinnes [Stages in the Development of the Sense of Reality], 1913, p. 137).

  45. [See below, pp. 92ff.]

  46. [Freud is quoting from Schiller's dire tragedy, The Bride of Messina (I, 8).]

  47. Weismann (1884) [August Weismann, Über Leben und Tod (On Life and Death)].

  48. Weismann (1882, p. 38) [August Weismann, Über die Dauer des Lebens (On the Duration of Life)].

  49. Weismann (1884, p. 84).

  50. Weismann (1882, p. 33).

  51. Weismann (1884, pp. 84ff.).

  52. Cf. Max Hartmann (1906) [Tod und Fortpflanzung (Death and Reproduction)], Alex[ander] Lipschütz (1914) [Warum wir sterben (Why We Die)], Franz Doflein (1919) [Das Problem des Todes und der Unsterblichkeit bei den Pflanzen und Tieren (The Problem of Death and Immortality in Plants and Animals)].

  53. Hartmann (1906, p. 29).

  54. For this and what follows, cf. Lipschütz (1914, pp. 26 and 52ff.).

  55. Über die anscheinende Absichtlichkeit im Schicksale des Einzelnen [On Apparent Intentionality in the Destiny of the Individual].

  56. [These two sentences were added by Freud in 1921.]

  57. [See On the Introduction of Narcissism, above, pp. 24f.]

  58. [See On the Introduction of Narcissism, note 10, and The Ego and the Id, note 45.]

  59. On the Introduction of Narcissism (1914).

  60. [See above, On the Introduction of Narcissism, note 20.]

  61. [See above, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, note 1.]

  62. [See above, pp. 79 and 91.]

  63. [This sentence and the one preceding it were added by Freud in 1921.]

  64. [Although he does not say so, Freud clearly means ego drives here.]

  65. Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie [Three Essays on Sexual Theory], from the first edition onwards (1905).

  66. Cf. Sexualtheorie [Sexual Theory] and ‘Triebe und Triebschicksale’ [‘Drives and Their Fates’] (1915).

  67. These speculations have been anticipated to a very considerable extent by Sabina Spielrein in a paper that is rich in substance and ideas but not, to my mind, entirely lucid. Her term for the sadistic component of the sexual drive is ‘destructive’ (1912). Using yet another approach, A[ugust] Stärcke (1914) identified the libido concept itself with the theoretically supposable biological concept of an impulsion to death. (Cf. also Rank, 1907.) All these efforts, like those in the present text, bear witness to the urgent need to bring to the theory of drives the clarity that has so far proved elusive.

  68. Lipschütz (1914).

  69. [Barbara Low, Psycho-Analysis, London and New York, 1920, p. 75.]

  70. [See above, p. 87.]

  71. However, Weismann (1892) denies this advantage too: ‘Fertilization does not by any means signify a rejuvenation or renewal of life; it would not be in the least necessary for the continuation of life; it is solely and simply a device for enabling two different heredity streams to merge.’ But he does consider increased variability in the organism to be an outcome of such merging.

  72. [Plato, The Symposium, translated by Christopher Gill (London, Penguin, 1999), pp. 22–4.] [Addition 1921:] I am indebted to Professor Heinrich Gomperz (Vienna) for the following suggestions regarding the origins of Plato's myth, which are reproduced here partly in his own words:

  I should like to point out that essentially the same theory already occurs in the Upanishads. For in the Brihad-aranyaka Upanishad, I,4,3
, where the emergence of the world from the Atman (the self or ego) is described, we read: ‘He, verily, had no delight. Therefore he who is alone has no delight. He desired a second. He became as large as a woman and a man in close embrace. He caused that self to fall into two parts. From that arose husband and wife. Therefore, as Yājñvalkya used to say, this (body) is one half of oneself, like one of the two halves of a split pea. Therefore this space is filled by a wife’ [trans. by S. Radhakrishnan, The Principal Upanishads, London, 1953, p. 164]. The Brihad-aranyaka Upanishad is the oldest of all the upanishads, and no competent scholar is likely to date it later than c. 800BC. As to the question whether Plato could possibly have drawn on these Indian ideas, even if only indirectly: contrary to current opinion I should not want to dismiss the idea completely, given that in the case of the metempsychosis theory, too, such a possibility cannot really be disputed. If there were indeed such a link, mediated in the first instance by the Pythagoreans, it would scarcely detract from the significance of the congruity of ideas, since if any such story had somehow percolated through to Plato from the oriental tradition, he would not have made it his own, let alone given it such a prominent role, if it had not seemed to him replete with truth.

  In his essay Menschen und Weltenwerden [The Coming into Being of Man and World] (1913), K[onrat] Ziegler systematically explores the history of this particular notion prior to Plato, and traces it back to Babylonian conceptions.

  73. We would like to add a few words here in order to clarify our nomenclature, which has undergone a certain degree of evolution in the course of this discussion. We derived our knowledge of ‘sexual drives’ from their relationship to the sexes and to the reproductive function. We still retained this term when the findings of psychoanalysis obliged us to recognize that their relationship to reproduction was more slender than we had supposed. With our postulation of narcissistic libido and our extension of the libido concept to the individual cell, the sexual drive transformed itself in our scheme of things into Eros, the force that seeks to push the various parts of living matter into direct association with each other and then keep them together, and the sexual drives – to use the common appellation – appeared to be the portion of this Eros that is turned towards the object. We then speculated that this Eros was active from the beginning of life, and, as the ‘life drive’, pitted itself against the ‘death drive’, which came into being when the inorganic became animate. We sought to solve the riddle of life by supposing these two drives, and supposing them to have been locked in battle with each other right from the very beginning. [Addition 1921:] The changes undergone by the concept of the ‘ego drives’ are perhaps less clear. Originally we used this term for all those drives about which we knew nothing except that their direction made them distinguishable from the sexual drives directed at the object; and we represented the ego drives as being in opposition to the sexual drives, the manifestation of which is the libido. Later we began to analyse the ego, and realized that one part of the ego drives, too, is libidinal in nature, having taken the ego itself as its object. These narcissistic self-preservation drives therefore now had to be reckoned as belonging to the libidinal sexual drives. The opposition between ego drives and sexual drives changed into an opposition between ego drives and object drives, both libidinal in nature. This, however, was replaced by a new opposition between libidinal (ego and object) drives and others that may be posited in the ego, and which are perhaps evincible in the destruction drives. In the course of our speculations, this opposition changes into the antithesis of life drives (Eros) and death drives.

  74. [See above, pp. 46–7.]

  The Ego and the Id

  1. [See above, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Chapter VI, end of third last paragraph.]

  2. [See below, note 6.]

  3. [Freud's neologism here is bewusstseinsfähig – a word that perfectly exemplifies the terminological difficulties that are posed by almost all his attempts to convey his theories of the ‘conscious’ and ‘unconscious’, and which are particularly abundant in these opening paragraphs of The Ego and the Id. Quite apart from any translation problems, the German itself is intrinsically problematic, for the bewusstsein component of the word is used in a wholly idiosyncratic way: in normal usage it can only be a noun (English ‘consciousness’), but in Freud's neologism it is a verb + predicate (literally: ‘to be conscious’, or ‘being conscious’); indeed, at the very beginning of the paragraph he actually writes it as two separate words: ‘Bewusst sein ist…’ It seems highly likely that this idiosyncratic meaning is also intended by Freud in his chapter title, ‘Bewusstsein and Unbewusstes’ – a formulation that in any case can only be paraphrased, not translated. Lurking here is a fundamental problem inherent in any translation of Freud's writings, namely the fact that English ‘conscious’ and ‘unconscious’ are ill-fitting and often misleading substitutes for the German words bewusst/unbewusst, since the two languages arrive at their concepts from opposite directions, so to speak: ‘conscious’ (from Latin conscius, ‘knowing’) refers essentially to the person doing the knowing, whereas ‘bewusst’ (originally a past participle meaning ‘known’) refers essentially to the thing that is known. In practice, ‘conscious’ and ‘unconscious’ often work well enough, partly because of the pervasive influence of Freud himself, and partly because English has long used the words as transferred epithets (‘it was a conscious act’, elliptical for ‘an act of which the perpetrator was conscious’). But there are many cases where ‘conscious’ doesn't really work at all – not least at the beginning of the fourth paragraph here: the Standard Edition renders ‘Bewusst sein ist…’ as ‘“Being conscious” is…’, but the phrase ‘being conscious’ can only be read as referring to a person in whom there is consciousness, whereas Freud clearly means the thing of which there is consciousness, as the next sentence demonstrates beyond question when it remarks that any given psychic element ‘is conscious for no great length of time’ (‘nicht dauernd bewusst ist’).]

  4. [Vorstellungen – a word much used by Freud, but almost always impossible to translate with precision: a Vorstellung is ‘something that is present to the mind’, and the word thus covers a broad spectrum of meanings from ‘pure idea’ to ‘mental picture’. ‘Notion’ fits tolerably well in contexts such as this present one, but should be understood in a very loose sense. Freud often uses it in association or direct combination with Inhalt – an even more teasing word (see below, Inhibition, Symptom, and Fear, note 21); and as if this weren't enough, he also confronts us with Wortvorstellung: see below, note 17.]

  5. [das Verdrangte. See above, Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through, note 9.]

  6. [Freud clearly means the word ‘descriptive’ (deskriptiv) in a special sense, defined thus in the OED: ‘concerned with, or signifying, observable things or qualities, or what is the case rather than what ought to be or might or must be’.]

  7. [OED: ‘Psychoid… A name variously given to vital forces that appear to direct the functions and reflex actions of the living body.’ The word was coined by Hans Driesch (1867–1941), initially an experimental zoologist, but subsequently a professor of philosophy and an ardent proponent of vitalism. Driesch is clearly one of the band of ‘philosophers’ that Freud repeatedly alludes to in these opening paragraphs of his essay.]

  8. [Freud is presumably tilting at vitalism here, a philosophy that had flourished in the early to mid-nineteenth century, and then gained fresh impetus through the teachings of Driesch around the beginning of the twentieth.]

  9. In respect of the argument so far, see also ‘Bemerkungen über den Begriff des Unbewussten’ [‘A Note on the Unconscious in Psycho-Analysis’] (1912). A recent development in the critique of the unconscious merits attention at this point. Some researchers who are not averse to acknowledging the facts of psychoanalysis, but are unwilling to accept the unconscious, resolve their dilemma by resorting to the undisputed fact that consciousness too – as a phenomenon – displays a wide range of dif
ferent degrees of intensity or distinctness. There are processes that are vividly, starkly, palpably conscious, but we also experience others that are only faintly, even barely perceptibly conscious – and according to these researchers it is precisely these faintest of conscious processes for which psychoanalysis seeks to use the supposedly inappropriate term ‘unconscious’, whereas these processes too, so they claim, are conscious or ‘within consciousness’, and capable of being made wholly and powerfully conscious if sufficient attention is paid to them.

  In so far as reasoned arguments carry any weight in the determination of a question such as this, which depends so heavily on convention or emotion, the following remarks are pertinent here:

  The emphasis on the varying degrees of distinctness appertaining to consciousness carries no conviction whatever, and is no whit more cogent than such analogous propositions as these: ‘There are countless gradations of brightness, from the harshest, most dazzling light through to the merest glimmer, hence there is no such thing as darkness’; or ‘There are varying degrees of vitality, hence there is no such thing as death’. In some way or other these propositions might indeed be deeply meaningful, but in practical terms they are useless, as becomes instantly apparent if one seeks to draw particular conclusions from them, such as ‘… therefore therefore there is no need to turn any lights on’, or ‘… therefore all organisms are immortal’. Furthermore, all one achieves by subsuming the imperceptible under the conscious is to undermine the one direct and certain fact that we possess regarding the psychic realm. The notion of a consciousness of which one is not at all conscious certainly seems to me far more absurd than the notion of an unconscious element within the psyche. Finally, in thus attempting to equate the unnoticed with the unconscious, people clearly failed to take account of the dynamic circumstances, which decisively influenced the psychoanalytical viewpoint. For in the process, two facts are ignored – first, that focusing sufficient attention on an unnoticed element of this – sort is very difficult and requires enormous effort; second, that even when this has been achieved, the previously unnoticed element is still not acknowledged by the conscious mind, indeed is often regarded by the latter as wholly alien and antithetical, and rejected out of hand. Repudiation of the ‘unconscious’ in favour of the ‘scarcely noticed’ or the ‘unnoticed’ thus turns out after all to be cousin to the prejudice that unshakeably regards the psychical as being altogether identical with the conscious.