Books like Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings

What now follows is speculation, often quite extravagant speculation, which readers will regard or disregard according to their own particular standpoint. For the rest, it is an attempt to follow an idea right through to its logical conclusion, undertaken out of sheer curiosity as to where this will lead. —Beyond the Pleasure Principle__________We love one or other of the following:1) Narcissistic Type:⠀⠀⠀⠀a) What we ourselves are⠀⠀⠀⠀b) What we ourselves were⠀⠀⠀⠀c) What we would like to become⠀⠀⠀⠀d) A person who was once part of our own self2) Imitative Type:⠀⠀⠀⠀a) The woman who feeds us⠀⠀⠀⠀b) The man who protects us⠀⠀⠀⠀And the many surrogates who take their place..—On the Introduction of Narcissism__________This volume collects the following works by Freud:• On the Introduction of Narcissism• Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through• Beyond the Pleaure Principle• The Ego and the Id• Inhibition, Symptom, and Fear__________More interesting theories from Freud.This volume contains some of Freud's key, central ideas including his proposition of the Id, Ego, and Super-Ego; and the Conscious, Pre-Conscious, and Unconscious systems.These are all sprinkled (as is seeming frequent) with some brief apologia, just to ensure you're taking some of his ideas with a grain of salt (as he did himself).\ Let us go back for a moment and ask whether all these speculations are not perhaps entirely baseless.\ __________Beyond the Pleasure PrincipleIn psychoanalytic theory we assume without further ado that the evolution of psychic processes is automatically regulated by the pleasure principle; that is to say, we believe that these processes are invariably triggered by an unpleasurable tension, and then follow a path such that their ultimate outcome represents a diminution of this tension, and hence a propensity to avoid unpleasure or to generate pleasure.Consciousness is not the only distinctive characteristic that we are disposed to ascribe to the processes in this system. We are basing ourselves on the evidence har garnered in our psychoanalytic experience when we postulate that all excitation processes occurring in the other systems leave lasting traces within them which form the basis of memory—residual memories, in other words, that have nothing to do with consciousness. These traces are often the strongest and most enduring when the process that brought them into being never entered consciousness at all.While this may not be an absolutely binding consideration, it may none the less lead us to the supposition that it is not possible within a given system for something both to enter consciousness and also to leave a memory trace. We would accordingly be able to argue that excitation processes d indeed enter consciousness within the Cs system, but leave no lasting trace there; and that all the traces of these processes that memory depends upon arise in the proximate inner systems to which the excitations migrate. It is in precisely these terms that I conceived the diagram included in the speculative section of my Interpretation of Dreams in 1900. When one conceders how little we know from other soures about the origins of consciousness, one is bound to give at least some credence to the proposition that ‘consciousness arises instead of a memory trace’.But perhaps the belief that death has its own intrinsic logic is simply one of those illusions we have created for ourselves in order to be able to ‘bear the heavy burden of existence’. It is certainly not primal: the idea of ’natural death’ is alien to primitive peoples, who attribute every death that occurs amongst them to the influence of an enemy or an evil spirit. To investigate this belief, therefore, let us turn without further ado to biological science.__________The Ego and the IdIf I were able to imagine very last person with an interest in psychology reading this essay, then I should not be one whit surprised to find a number of those readers calling a halt right now and refusing to read another word—for here at once is the first shibboleth of psychoanalysis. To most people whose education is grounded in philosophy, the idea of a psychic realm that is not also a conscious one is so incomprehensible as to seem an absurdity easily refuted by plain, straightforward logic.For one thing, we see clear evidence that even subtle and complex intellectual tasks that normally demand sustained and strenuous thought can also be carried out pre-consciously, without entering consciousness at all. There is not doubt whatever that such cases occur; they happen during sleep, for example, and are evidenced buy the fact that on waking up, the person concerned immediately knows the answer to a difficult mathematical or other problem that they had vainly struggled to solve the day before.