The Third Step in Drive Theory: On the genesis of Beyond the Pleasure Principle

Abstract

The author compares the two manuscript versions of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, composed in April/May 1919 and by August 1920 respectively, with each other and with the printed editions. In the first version the idea that all drives are urging to death is already present; however the term ‘death drive’ is not. Here, Freud attempted to take account of the clinical observation that in traumatic neurosis unpleasurable experiences are repeated and that there is a kind of compulsive repetition that is inaccessible to analysis. On the other hand he extended his perspective far into biology. Already in the first version Freud withdrew the notion that all drives urge to death, restricting this urge to self-preservative drives. The second manuscript version of BPP represents a further stage of reflection – primarily in the sixth chapter that was inserted into the older text. The author highlights that Freud now gave up the idea of the first version that self-preservative drives are urging to death and ascribed this urge to a special group of drives: the ‘death drives’. As their counterpart only at this point did he introduce Eros, which encompassed both the sexual and the self-preservative drives. The concept of Eros enabled him to come to terms with phenomena of union, whether at the level of cells, organisms or human beings, including sexual reproduction, which had resisted accommodation to his notion of autoerotic infantile sexuality. It is a main finding of this paper that the process of theoretical reflection, leading to several changes of concept, is reflected in the printed text as we know it.