Something Was Lost in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle: A Ferenczian Reading*

Abstract

Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) brought a lot of new possibilities to psychoanalytic theory, but also a series of losses. While I recognize the importance of the death drive as a metapsychological construct, I argue that the first thing that went missing with the arrival of this groundbreaking Freudian text is the theorization of the ego instincts or the self-preservative drives. Freud never articulated some plausible inheritors of the ego instincts. I follow the Budapest School, and especially the voice of Sándor Ferenczi, for addressing this loss. The second thing that went missing after Beyond the Pleasure Principle is our openness in thinking through repetition. With the seductive formulation of the "daemonic" repetition in this 1920 text, our theoretical imagination around repetition seems to have been affected. I draw on the work of Sándor Ferenczi for exploring new forms of repetition. Finally, I offer a Ferenczian re-reading of the Freudian Nachträglichkeit, which I see as crucial in the process of pluralizing our thinking on repetition.

Nachträglichkeit and après-coup in the psychological scientific literature: A systematic review and future perspectives.

“…N/AC seems crucial to the metapsychological understanding of psychic temporality as it relates to the process of mental organization over time (Fohn & Heenen-Wolff, 2011), where later experiences can “retranscribe” former ones. From a metapsychological point of view, N/AC refers to the temporal logic that rules the psychic domain, where we can find “a system of ‘scenes’, a kind of psychic scenography emerging through the interaction effects between different moments in time” (Soreanu, 2017, p. 233).…”

“…As to the first domain-the metapsychological significance of N/AC-various contributions (i.e., Baranger et al, 1988;Groarke, 2021;Hinton, 2015;Sodré, 2005;Soreanu, 2017;Thomä & Cheshire, 1991) shed light on the complexity of the subjective constitution of psychic temporality, which appears as a multiple process that goes backward while moving forward. It is worth mentioning here Laplanche's (2006Laplanche's ( , 2017 book Problematiques VI: L'après-coup, where the author-explicitly referring to Freud's seduction theory-further elaborated on the concept of Hilflosigkeit (i.e., helplessness), putting forward a dialectical model of retroactivity, whereby the individual de-and retranslates significant life moments retrospectively signifying them (Browning, 2018).…”

Importance of methodological considerations in documenting psychological trauma

“…The milestone Freudian publications, namely, ‘Interpretation of dreams ’ (1900) and ‘Beyond the pleasure principle ’ (1920), shed unprecedented light on the internalization of psychological trauma and its elaboration, although not everyone—perhaps even less his contemporaries—shared Freud’s opinions[ 10 , 11 ].…”

Second Special Issue: Heritage of a Psychoanalytic Mind. Ferenczi International Conference in Toronto*

“…Frankel goes on developing Ferenczi's concept of ''identification with the aggressor'', its necessity for the child and its consequences. Soreanu (2017) raises the issue of what was lost in Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). She discusses the question of the ''Death Drive'' in both Freud's and Ferenczi's approach.…”