Beyond the Pleasure Principle

Reflections upon the clinical practice

Abstract

Sigmund Freud’s proposal of a death drive represents a crucial theoretical
approach to aim at understanding some of the difficulties that we might encounter in clinical
practice. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud postulates a repetition compulsion
that can be identified as death drive, a repetition that acts in the persistence to engrave
something, as an attempt to symbolize a probable trauma.
He realizes that something does not meet the pleasure principle, examines the repetitive
dreams in traumatic neurosis –which contradict this principle–, and asks himself
why is there an exception. There exists a replacing function, that of the pleasure
principle, but there also exists a repetitive function. What does this mean from the
perspective of the pleasure principle, the inexhaustibility of this reproduction? It is from
these questions that we will try to develop this paper, defining our practice as scope and
starting point for consideration.