Beyond the Pleasure Principle by Sigmund Freud Read Free Book Online Page A

‘tribunal’ etc.), Freud applies it to the whole panoply of – literally – forbidding forces that bear upon individuals almost from the moment of their birth, firstly from without in the persons of their parents and, in due course, their teachers and the largercommunity, then from within in the form of internalized control mechanisms – chiefly hypostasized by Freud in the ‘pleasure principle’ and, above all, the ‘super-ego’. The sheer frequency of the word
Instanz
turns it into an integrative and (discomfitingly) evocative cypher in Freud's original texts – but this distinctive effect cannot be reproduced in English, which simply has no equivalent word or concept, so that we are forced to use a whole gamut of different makeshift terms, from ‘parental voice’ (
Elterninstanz
) through to ‘entity’, ‘agency’, ‘matrix’, ‘arbiter’ – and numerous others besides. (One wonders whether Freud could ever have arrived at his vision-cum-analysis of the human psyche if he had been born and brought up in, say, France or England, since it so clearly derives – like the poetic visions of Franz Kafka – from a specifically Austro-German matrix of notions and assumptions.)
    Various traps and chicanes await the translator of texts from an earlier age. One of these is the lure of anachronisms. In general this particular lure has been resisted throughout the present volume – though it has to be admitted that the alert reader might find a handful of words and idioms that were not yet current in English in the period when Freud wrote the relevant essays (no prizes for their discovery…). Another inveterate problem, rendered all the more acute by the prevailing fashion for political correctness, is that of gendered language. Sharing as he did the premises and predilections of his age, Freud's perspective is of course overwhelmingly phallo-centric. In general, this perspective has been faithfully transferred into English (to do anything else would be to practise a modern form of bowdlerism). Furthermore, it has been applied by extension to those situations where the rules of German grammar required Freud to use the neuter – most conspicuously in references to children, the noun
Kind
in German being neuter (
das Kind
). In such contexts grammatically neuter pronouns and possessive adjectives are assumed to refer to males unless there is specific evidence to the contrary.
    Finally, a word on dictionaries. One of the major disadvantages suffered by earlier translators of Freud was that they didn't have at their disposal the plethora of excellent German–English dictionariesnow available. Chief amongst these is the multi-volume set produced in the 1960s and early 1970s under the wonderful editorship of Trevor Jones at Jesus College, Cambridge – though if the assiduous reader spots weaknesses in my translation of German words begin with S through to Z, then they should please direct their brickbats at Oxford University Press, who have signally failed to publish the missing volume(s) ! On the other hand, the OUP certainly deserve the warmest possible plaudits for their
Oxford English Dictionary
: no one could wish for a better resource than this matchless work, and having plundered its riches several times daily for many months, I happily close by offering grateful obeisance to what is surely one of the mightiest achievements of English culture.

II
    Any
direct
study of narcissism seems to me to be prevented by a number of special difficulties. The principal means of approaching the matter is likely to remain the analysis of paraphrenias. Just as the transference neuroses have enabled us to trace the libidinal drive-impulses, so, too, dementia praecox and paranoia will afford us insight into the psychology of the ego. Once again, our understanding of the normal in all its seeming simplicity has to be derived from the pathological with all its warped and coarsened features. All the same, a few other paths to a