Beyond the Pleasure Principle - Paperback

by Sigmund Freud (Author), Todd DuFresne (Editor), Gregory C. Richter (Translator)

Provides a readable new translation and places Freud's controversial late work in the context of the tradition of Continental philosophy.

Back Jacket

Beyond the Pleasure Principle is Freud's most philosophical and speculative work, exploring profound questions of life and death, pleasure and pain. In it Freud introduces the fundamental concepts of the "repetition compulsion" and the "death drive," according to which a perverse, repetitive, self-destructive impulse opposes and even trumps the creative drive, or Eros. The work is one of Freud's most intensely debated, and raises important questions that have been discussed by philosophers and psychoanalysts since its first publication in 1920.

The text is presented here in a contemporary new translation by Gregory C. Richter. Appendices trace the work's antecedents and the many responses to it, including texts by Plato, Friedrich Nietzsche, Melanie Klein, Herbert Marcuse, Jacques Derrida, and Judith Butler, among many others.

Author Biography

Todd Dufresne is Professor of Philosophy and founding Director of the Advanced Institute for Globalization & Culture at Lakehead University. He is the author of five books, including Tales From the Freudian Crypt: The Death Drive in Text and Context (Stanford University Press) and Killing Freud (Continuum).

Gregory C. Richter is Professor of German and Linguistics at Truman State University. His translations include The Incest Theme in Literature and Legend by Otto Rank and Inside Psychoanalysis: The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank (both The Johns Hopkins University Press).