Beyond the Pleasure Principle has always been recognized as a key text in Freudian metapsychology. Key concepts such as the death and life drives, repetition, pleasure and trauma, have found their way in the writings of many contemporary philosophers and are widely discussed today.
This project aims to offer a reading and analysis of Beyond the Pleasure Principle
It takes its starting point in the two main versions of the text (1919 and 1920) which aims to think through the implications for psychoanalytic theory, philosophical anthropology and metaphysics of Freud’s often contested conceptuality and the various patho-analytic/bio-analytic perspectives on life Freud develops in the text.