![]() ![]() He approaches the problem by critiquing the analysts of his day who practice a psychotherapeutic psychoanalysis on a theoretical misapprehension that, Lacan believes, Freud writes Beyond the Pleasure Principle in order to correct: that the unconscious is simply the negative of the ego. Are not these three vicissitudes very different things that imply different conceptualisations of a governing principle of psychic life? Moreover, Freud seems to present “the effort to reduce, to keep constant, or to remove internal tension” as both an expression of, and a beyond of, the pleasure principle, which raises the question: what could Freud mean by a ‘beyond’ of the pleasure principle?įor Lacan the matter is simple. Yet the trend of the internal energy in a system to fall to zero-point is scarcely comparable with the peculiar tendency of living organisms to maintain an equilibrium with their surroundings at a constant (and possibly very high) level” (Laplanche and Pontalis, p.343). As Laplanche and Pontalis note, “Freud evidently looks upon “the effort to reduce, to keep constant or to remove internal tension due to stimuli” as manifestations of a single principle. However, looking at the passage above from Beyond the Pleasure Principle there is a clear lack of theoretical refinement on Freud’s part. Lacan notices that “it is remarkable to see how, in the writings of an author like Hartmann, the three terms – principle of constancy, pleasure principle, Nirvana principle – are totally identified, as if… it were always the same thing he was talking about” (p.64). “The dominating tendency of mental life, and perhaps of nervous life in general, is the effort to reduce, to keep constant or to remove internal tension due to stimuli (the ‘Nirvana principle’, to borrow a term from Barbara Low) – a tendency which finds expression in the pleasure principle and our recognition of that fact is one of our strongest reasons for believing in the existence of death instincts” (Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, SE XVIII, p.55 – 56). How, for example, to decide one way or the other on the basis of the following extract from Beyond the Pleasure Principle: In their masterful work, The Language of Psychoanalysis, Laplanche and Pontalis ask the simple question: what is the pleasure principle? The difference in debate hinges on whether Freud is positing a principle of constancy – that there is a certain amount of energy which has to be kept at a minimum or at least constant level – or a principle by which the organism seeks to divest itself of excitation, the logical horizon of which could just as well be death, which would actually take us beyond the pleasure principle. His range here encompasses a two periods of Freud’s work, from the early Project for Scientific Psychology (as it is named in the Standard Edition), to Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Lacan uses this session to question the place of the pleasure principle in Freud’s work, where the idea comes from, and where it is left after 1920 with the publication by Freud of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Lacan opens the seminar announcing that he is going to be talking about the ‘compulsion to repeat’, Wiederholungszwang. (All quotations refer to The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954 -1955, Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by Sylvana Tomaselli, with notes by John Forrester, WW Norton: 1991) ![]() Seminar II – The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of PsychoanalysisĬhapter VI – Freud, Hegel and the machine ![]()
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