Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings

by Sigmund Freud

  3. [Freud's term Unterbringung der Libido (in other contexts Libidounter-bringung) is a metaphor that cannot be adequately replicated in English. The relevant verb (unterbringen) means ‘house’, ‘accommodate’, ‘find an appropriate niche for’. The Standard Edition has ‘allocation’, but this suggests something quite different from Freud's original.]

  4. Otto Rank (1911) [‘Ein Beitrag zum Narzissismus’ (‘A Contribution on Narcissism’)].

  5. Regarding these propositions, cf. the discussion of the ‘end of the world’ in the analysis of Senate President Schreber (1911); cf. also Abraham (1908) [Freud deals with the Schreber case in ‘Psychoanalytic Remarks on an Autobiographically Described Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)’; an English version of Abraham's treatise may be found in K. Abraham, Selected Papers (London 1927; New York 1953), Ch. 11].

  6. [‘Cathexis’ is an ugly and opaque term – coined by James Strachey – that has nothing of the apparent simplicity of Freud's metaphor Besetzung. Unfortunately, however, Freud's word has no direct or uncontentious equivalent in English, and Strachey's well-established hellenism is therefore reluctantly retained throughout this present volume (together with the associated verb ‘cathect’).]

  7. [The obfuscatory tendencies of the Standard Edition are epitomized by the fact that it renders Freud's Zauberkraft – a word that any child would instantly understand – as ‘thaumaturgic force’!]

  8. See the relevant sections of my book Totem und Tabu [Totem and Taboo] (1912–13). [See Chapter III.]

  9. See Ferenczi (1913) [Sándor Ferenczi, ‘Entwicklungsstufen des Wirklich-keitssinnes’ (‘Stages in the Development of the Sense of Reality’, First Contributions to Psycho-Analysis, London, 1952, Ch. VIII)].

  10. [See also Beyond the Pleasure Principle, below, p. 91. This idea will be revised later on, once Freud has evolved the notion of the ‘id’; see The Ego and the Id, below, p. 121, and the corresponding note 45. The Standard Edition carries a lengthy Appendix by the editors on the ‘considerable difficulty’ attaching to this particular metaphor of Freud's.]

  11. There are two mechanisms involved in this ‘end of the world’ scenario: when the entire libido-cathexis streams out onto the love-object, and when it all floods back into the ego.

  12. [Cf. OED: ‘The germ-plasm is the essential part of the germ-cell, and determines the nature of the individual that arises from it’ (sample quotation dated 1890).]

  13. [The first two German editions of the essay printed ersterwählte – the first hypothesis chosen – whereas subsequent editions printed ersterwähnte – the first hypothesis mentioned. The Standard Edition opts for the original version – but there seems little logic in this, given that Freud did indeed ‘mention’ this hypothesis just a few paragraphs earlier.]

  14. [This curious term is Freud's own (psychisches Interesse).]

  15. [Freud is referring to Ferenczi's review of Jung's Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (published in English under the title Psychology of the Unconscious).]

  16. [Freud's term is Realfunktion, derived from Pierre Janet's la fonction du réel.]

  17. [Freud gives this phrase in English.]

  18. [Positionen. This is a recurrent term of Freud's in connection with the libido, especially with regard to the loci that it comes to occupy as a result of cathexis.]

  19. [Ichveranderung. See also below, The Ego and the Id, note 43.]

  20. [See the Longman Dictionary of Psychology and Psychiatry, ed. Robert M. Goldenson, New York and London, 1985: ‘actual neurosis – a neurosis which, according to Freud, stems from current sexual frustrations, such as coitus interruptus, forced abstinence, or incomplete gratification, as contrasted with psychoneurosis, which stems from experiences in infancy or childhood. The term was applied primarily to anxiety neurosis, hypochondriasis, and neurasthenia, but is rarely used today.’ See also the final paragraph of Chapter IV of Inhibition, Symptom, and Fear below.]

  21. [Angstneurose. The long-established term ‘anxiety neurosis’ is reluctantly retained here but it should be noted that Angst means ‘fear’, and is normally used in precisely that sense by Freud. See also below, Inhibition, Symptom, and Fear, note 3.]

  22. Cf. ‘Über neurotische Erkrankungstypen’ (1912) [‘Types of Onset of Neurosis’].

  23. [Freud's important but challenging term is Versagung, from the verb versagen, itself cognate with English ‘forsake’ – one now-obsolete meaning of which is ‘To decline or refuse (something offered)’ (OED). What he means by the term is rather more clearly shown by the opening sentences of ‘Die am Erfolge scheitern’ (‘Those who Founder on Success’): ‘Our work in psychoanalysis has presented us with the following proposition: People incur neurotic illness as a result of refusal. What is meant by this is that their libidinal desires are refused gratification’ – i.e. by the savagely censorious entity within that oversees their every thought and deed. See also the penultimate sentence of this present essay: ‘We can thus more readily understand the fact that paranoia is frequently caused by the ego being wounded, by gratification being refused within the domain of the ego-ideal.’ The Standard Edition routinely and astonishingly mistranslates the term as ‘frustration’.]

  24. [The voice here is God's; the lines are from Heine's Neue Gedichte (‘Schöpfungslieder’, vii).]

  25. [‘Release’ is used throughout this volume to render Freud's important but not readily translatable metaphor Abfuhr (the Standard Edition prefers ‘discharge’).]

  26. [Konversion. See also below, Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through, note 3.]

  27. [Freud's term – used here for the first time in his œuvre – is Anlehnungs-typus. Alas, it cannot be rendered directly into English, and so ‘imitative type’ is necessarily an approximate rather than a precise translation (as are the two immediately preceding instances of ‘imitate’, both rendering words derived from the verb sich anlehnen). However, this is a considerable improvement on the Standard Edition, which goes seriously awry when it translates Freud's term as ‘the “anaclitic” or “attachment” type’. ‘Anaclitic’ is a specially concocted word – but concocted on the basis of a startling misunderstanding of the German expression sich anlehnen an, as the footnote in the Standard Edition makes embarrassingly clear: the expression does not imply ‘attach’ or ‘attachment’; it simply means that A ‘is modelled on,’ ‘is based on’, ‘follows the example of’ B; thus one might typically say that Beethoven's early symphonies lehnen sich an the mature work of Mozart, or that Freud's theories lehnen sich an the ideas and visions of nineteenth-century German literature (in the Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis: New Series Freud himself notes that the term ‘id’ (das Es) was devised on the model of Nietzsche's linguistic practice – in Anlehnung an den Sprachgebrauch bei Nietzsche).]

  28. [Freud's German is somewhat ambiguous; his wording is such that it could be understood to mean ‘who have partly relinquished their own narcissism'’ (this is the interpretation preferred by the Standard Edition).]

  29. [Freud cites the phrase in English, and is probably quoting the title of a painting exhibited in the Royal Academy, which depicted a baby being wheeled grandly across a busy London street while two policemen hold up the traffic.]

  30. [sein aktuelles Ich.]

  31. [Idealbildung. Freud is particularly fond of creating compound nouns ending in -bildung, the gerund of the verb bilden, ‘to form’ (cognate with English ‘build’), e.g. Reaktionsbildung, Symptombildung, Traumbildung.]

  32. [Freud's word is Instanz – a cardinal term in his vocabulary, but one that has no direct linguistic or indeed cultural equivalent in English, with the result that a number of different renderings are deployed in this present translation to match the relevant context. The key feature of the word is that it implies some kind of judicial or quasi-judicial authority making judgements about what is permissible and impermissible, acceptable and unacceptable – and doing so very often in implacably harsh and even sadistic terms involving ‘guilt�
�, ‘condemnation’, ‘punishment’ etc. This vision of the human ‘psyche as a domain under constant surveillance by draconian but shadowy forces is fascinatingly similar to that of Freud's fellow Jew and Austro-Hungarian near-contemporary, Franz Kafka.]

  33. Merely by way of conjecture I would add that the development and consolidation of this all-scrutinizing entity might also embrace the ultimate emergence of (subjective) memory and of the phenomenon whereby time holds no validity for unconscious processes.

  34. [Having thus far used abstract nouns (Instanz, Zensur) to convey the policing of the psyche, Freud gives the process a far sharper edge here by suddenly personifying it (Zensor).]

  35. I cannot here resolve the issue whether the differentiation of this censorial entity from the rest of the ego is capable of providing a psychological substantiation of the philosophical distinction between consciousness and self-consciousness.

  36. [Selbstgefühl. The Standard Edition bizarrely renders this as ‘self-regarding attitude’. For useful definitions and examples of ‘self-feeling’ as a technical term current in nineteenth and early twentieth-century thinking, see OED.]

  37. [Ichgerecht. The Standard Edition has ‘ego-syntonic’, but this is misleading as well as obfuscatory given that the term Syntonie (‘syntony’) was not introduced into psychiatry (by Eugen Bleuler) until 1925 – more than a decade after Freud's Narcissism essay.]

  38. [Objektbefriedigungen. This is one of Freud's more brutalist compounds. As the ensuing paragraphs make clear, it is elliptical for ‘gratifications pertaining to objects’.]

  39. [Zensor. See above, note 34.]

  40. [On the face of it, Freud's German (Perversionen wiederherzustellen) means ‘restore’ or ‘reinstate’ the individual's perversions (the Standard Edition duly translates it in this sense); but it is more plausibly an elliptical usage highlighting love's benignly restorative effect on the individuals themselves (wiederherstellen is a standard expression for ‘restore to health’).]

  41. [Massenpsychologie. In the Standard Edition this term is routinely translated as ‘group psychology’.]

  42. [In Inhibition, Symptom, and Fear Freud will draw an important distinction between ‘consciential fear’ and ‘social fear’; see below, Inhibition, Symptom, and Fear, note 56.]

  43. [Umbildung.]

  Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through

  1. [Abreagieren. The term, together with the attendant therapeutic concept, was introduced by Freud and Breuer in their Studien über Hysterie (Studies on Hysteria, 1895). ‘Abreaction’ is defined in the OED as follows: ‘The liberation by revival and expression of the emotion associated with forgotten or repressed ideas of the event that first caused it. Hence “abreact”, to eliminate by abreaction’. In Inhibition, Symptom, and Fear (published twelve years after Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through), Freud was to comment that he had long since ‘abandoned the abreaction theory’ (see below, p. 219).]

  2. [This paragraph and the three that follow – all printed in smaller type than the rest of the text when first published in 1914 – amount to an extended parenthesis, interpolated between two paragraphs that essentially belong together.]

  3. [Konversionshysterien. ‘Conversion’ in Freud's sense is defined in the OED as ‘The symbolic manifestation in physical symptoms of a psychic conflict’; the OED entry also includes the following quotation from Freud's disciple Ernest Jones: ‘The energy finds an outlet in some somatic manifestation, a process Freud terms “conversion”.’]

  4. [Deckerinnerungen. The deck- element of the neologism means ‘cover’, ‘conceal’.]

  5. [Kindheitsamnesie. ‘Childhood amnesia’ in Freud's sense is amnesia concerning childhood – not amnesia during childhood.]

  6. [‘Relationary processes’ is more a guess than a translation. Freud's neologism is Beziehungsvorgänge – and there is no clue as to which of the various meanings of the word Beziehung he had in mind. The Standard Edition offers ‘processes of reference’.]

  7. [‘Thought-connections’ is also a guess – all the wilder for the fact that in itemizing the various ‘psychic processes’, Freud chooses a word (Zusammen-hänge) that cannot by any stretch of the imagination be used to describe a ‘process’…]

  8. [Freud is referring to the case of the ‘Wolf-man’; see below, Inhibition, Symptom, and Fear, note 20.]

  9. [aus den Quellen seines Verdrängten. Freud's key term das Verdrangte is not easy to render in English: the direct translation is ‘the repressed’, but substantivized past participles tend in English to refer to people, not to things or to abstracts (‘the damned’, ‘the defeated’, ‘the oppressed’ etc.). The traditional ‘techno’-translations of Freud have long since established ‘the repressed’ as the English jargon-word, but in many contexts the term would not be readily comprehensible to the non-specialist reader, and is therefore generally avoided in this present volume.]

  10. [Dämmerzustände.]

  11. [Here – as also in the penultimate sentence of the preceding paragraph, and on numerous other occasions throughout these essays – Freud uses the term Motiv. The Standard Edition routinely translates this as ‘motive’ but this is potentially misleading: whereas ‘motive commonly refers to the purpose of an act, i.e. the end result envisaged by its perpetrator (‘the killer's motive was money’), Motiv in Freud's usage almost invariably seems to be a quasi-scientific, not to say mechanistic term meaning ‘motive force’, thus relating to the generation of an act or event, not to any supposed aim or purpose. See also Inhibition, Symptom, and Fear, Ch. IX, and the corresponding note 57.]

  12. [The inverted commas are Freud's.]

  Beyond the Pleasure Principle

  1. [The terms ‘economic’, ‘dynamic’ and ‘topical’ are all used by Freud in a special sense within the context of his ‘metapsychological’ system. Cf. the opening paragraphs of Chapters II and IV of The Unconscious.]

  2. [See below, note 27.]

  3. [The ‘reality principle’ – one of Freud's central notions – may be defined as ‘the regulatory mechanism that represents the demands of the external world, and requires us to forgo or modify gratification or postpone it to a more appropriate time. In contrast to the pleasure principle, which… represents the id or instinctual impulses, the reality principle represents the ego, which controls our impulses and enables us to deal rationally and effectively with the situations of life.’ (The Longman Dictionary of Psychology and Psychiatry).]

  4. [Organisation. See below, The Ego and the Id, note 10.]

  5. [Addition 1925:] The essence of the matter is presumably that pleasure and unpleasure, being conscious sensations, are tied to the ego. [See the first few paragraphs of Chapter II of Inhibition, Symptom, and Fear – which Freud wrote in the same year in which he added this footnote.]

  6. [Freud uses the word modifizieren, and clearly intends the less common meaning that occurs in both languages, and which in the case of English ‘modify’ is defined thus in the OED: To alter in the direction of moderation or lenity; to make less severe, rigorous, or decided; to qualify, tone down, moderate’.]

  7. [First World War.]

  8. Cf. Zur Psychoanalyse der Kriegsneurosen [Psycho-Analysis and the War Neuroses]. With contributions by Ferenczi, Abraham, Simmel and E. Jones (1919). [Freud wrote the Introduction to this volume.]

  9. [The original words are respectively Schreck, Furcht and Angst. The distinctions that Freud draws are lexically somewhat specious – particularly the purported distinction between Furcht and Angst – and this speciousness is duly reflected in the translation. See also Inhibition, Symptom, and Fear, Chapter XI, Addendum B: ‘Fear: Supplementary Remarks’.]

  10. [‘fixate… to cause (a person) to react automatically to stimuli in terms which relate to a previous strong emotional experience; to establish (a response) in this way.’ (OED).]

  11. [The final clause of this sentence (from ‘or’ to ‘ego’) was added by Freud in 1921.]

  12. This interpret
ation was then fully confirmed by a further observation. One day when the child's mother had been absent for many hours, she was greeted on her return with the announcement ‘Bebi o-o-o-o!’, which at first remained incomprehensible. It soon turned out, however, that while on his own for this long period of time the child had found a way of making himself disappear. He had discovered his reflection in the full-length mirror reaching almost to the floor, and had then crouched down so that his reflection was ‘gone’.

  13. When the child was five and three-quarters his mother died. Now that she was really and truly ‘gone’ (o-o-o), the boy showed no signs of grief. However, a second child had been born in the meantime, provoking the most intense jealousy in him.

  14. Cf. ‘Eine Kindheitserinnerung aus Dichtung und Wahrheit’ (1917) [‘A Childhood Recollection from [Goethe's] Dichtung und Wahrheit’].

  15. [See Freud's footnote below, note 20.]

  16. See Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through (1914) [for example pp. 36f. in this volume].

  17. [‘das Verdrängte’; the inverted commas are Freud's.]

  18. [Freud radically altered his view on this matter: see below, The Ego and the Id, note 40. In this context, it might be noted that this phrase (‘especially the part we may term its nucleus’) did not figure at all in the original edition of the essay. The rest of the sentence did appear, but in somewhat different terms: ‘Much of the ego may itself be unconscious, and probably only part of that is covered by the term “pre-conscious”.’]

  19. [Freud will explicitly modify his position in Inhibition, Symptom, and Fear; see Chapter XI, Section A, Sub-section (a): ‘Resistance and counter-cathexis.’]

  20. [Addition 1923:] I have made the point elsewhere that the compulsion to repeat is aided here by the ‘suggestion effect’ in psychoanalytic therapy, that is, by that amenability to the physician that has its roots deep in the patient's unconscious parent-complex. [Compare ‘Remarks on the Theory and Practice of Dream-Interpretation’ (1923), Chapters VII and (especially) VIII.]