Beyond the Pleasure Principle

The reel on a string: the fort-da game

The observation at the centre of the book is domestic. Freud lived for some weeks under the same roof as a boy of eighteen months and his parents, and noticed that the child, otherwise placid and good, had a habit of throwing his toys into corners and under the bed. As he threw them he made a long drawn-out sound, o-o-o-oh, which his mother and Freud agreed meant fort, the German for gone. Freud realised the child was playing at making things be gone.

Then he saw the complete game. The boy had a wooden reel with a string wound round it. He would throw the reel over the edge of his curtained cot so that it vanished, say his o-o-o-oh, then pull it back by the string and greet it with a joyful da, there. Freud's reading is that the child had let his mother leave the room for hours without complaint, and was staging her going and coming back with a toy he could control. The game turned an experience he had suffered into one he directed. Freud notes that the going, the unpleasant half, was played far more often than the return.

The passage has been read more than anything else in the book, partly because of what stands behind it. The boy was Ernst Halberstadt, born in March 1914, and the mother was Freud's daughter Sophie, who died in January 1920 while the book was being finished. Freud added a footnote in the 1921 edition recording that the child, now really without his mother, showed no grief for her. He offers the game only as evidence about repetition, and refuses to let the reader decide from it alone that repetition is beyond pleasure, since the child might simply be mastering the situation or taking revenge on the mother.

War dreams and the patient who repeats

The first evidence Freud offers is not from a child but from the war. Men who had survived shell explosions and railway accidents kept dreaming of the moment of the accident, waking each time in fresh fright. On the wish theory of The Interpretation of Dreams that made no sense: no wish is fulfilled by reliving a shell burst. Freud had defended the wish theory for twenty years. Here he concedes that these dreams are an exception and sets out to explain what they are doing instead.

The third section brings the same pattern into the consulting room. Patients, Freud writes, do not remember their forgotten past as a memory; they repeat it as a present experience, and they repeat it in their dealings with the analyst. The child's love that ended in rejection is lived again as rejection by the doctor. He then widens the frame to people outside treatment whose lives seem to follow a fate, the friend betrayed by every friend in turn, the woman who nurses three husbands to their deaths. All of this he gathers under one name, the compulsion to repeat, and says it looks more primitive and more instinctual than the pleasure it overrides.

The vesicle and its shield

In the fourth section Freud announces that what follows is speculation, often far-fetched, which each reader may accept or ignore. He then asks the reader to imagine the simplest living thing as a small bubble, a vesicle, exposed on all sides to stimulation. Its outer layer, he suggests, has been so battered that it has died and hardened, and now serves as a shield through which only a fraction of the outside world's energy can pass. Consciousness, on this picture, sits at that surface.

Trauma is then defined by the picture: an excitation strong enough to break through the shield. Freud describes the mind's response as an emergency, with energy summoned from everywhere to bind the flood that has poured in, and every other activity impoverished meanwhile. The soldier's recurring dream is that binding work, done after the fact, again and again, because there was no time for fright to prepare the shield when the shell came. On this reading the dream is not fulfilling a wish but trying to catch up. The section is where the book's biology is most speculative and where readers most often lose patience; Freud says as much himself.

The goal of all life is death

The fifth section draws the conclusion the earlier ones have been circling. If an instinct is a push to restore an earlier condition, Freud argues, then instincts are conservative, and the condition they want to restore is the one before life began. He writes, in C. J. M. Hubback's rendering, that the goal of all life is death, and that the inanimate was there before the animate. The detours a living creature takes on the way, its whole biography, are on this account the organism's insistence on dying only in its own fashion.

Freud then has to explain why anything stays alive at all, and the answer is the sexual instincts, which he now gathers under the name Eros, the force that holds living matter together and makes more of it. The sixth section goes looking for support in the biology of the day, in August Weismann's distinction between mortal body and immortal germ-plasm, and does not find much. The section ends with Plato's story from the Symposium of the original double humans cut in two by Zeus, each half searching for the other, offered half seriously as a myth of what Eros wants. Later analysts split on the whole construction. Freud kept it, and built The Ego and the Id and Civilization and Its Discontents on it.