Freud speculates that this action had less to do with setting up the joyful experience of recapturing the toy, and more to do with the child’s attempt to regain control over a situation that he found unpleasant (in this case, the frequent departures of his mother). Freud then turns to a discussion of children’s games, focusing in particular on the actions of a young boy who repeatedly threw his toys away from him while attempting to say fort ("gone") and da ("there"). If anything, he says, trauma patients tend to avoid thinking about their trauma during their waking hours instead, Freud argues that the function of dreaming itself is disrupted by traumatic experiences. Freud believes this has little to do with their minds being occupied with the traumatic events.
However, this seems to be contradicted by the experiences of those with traumatic neuroses, in which their dreams frequently place them back in the traumatic event which they experienced. In his first book, The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud postulated that dreams are wish-fulfillments, enabling the mind to resolve internal conflicts (in accordance with the pleasure principle). Freud then turns to a discussion of his theory of dreams and its relation to traumatic experiences. Additionally, Freud notes two important characteristics of ordinary, non-war-related traumatic neuroses: that they are primarily caused by surprise or fright (which Freud distinguishes from fear, which is related to a specific object, and anxiety, which is an expectation of danger rather than a reaction to it) and that a wound or other physical trauma simultaneously inflicted typically prevents the development of neuroses. The traditional belief was that traumatic neuroses were the result of physical injuries, a belief that Freud feels has finally been put to rest. Section II opens with an analysis of the trauma experienced by veterans of the First World War. Freud ends the opening chapter of the work by announcing his intent to examine the mind’s reaction to external danger, which he describes as the mental perception of displeasure. One such drive is the reality principle, which according to Freud, is a result from the ego’s impulse towards self-preservation and, in effect, forces pleasure to be postponed or attained in a roundabout way.
If it were, he argues, then most mental processes would result in pleasure or be accompanied by it but because of various other instincts, one can only say that there is a general tendency towards the experience of pleasure that is often in conflict with other drives. Freud does not dispute the existence of a pleasure principle, but does take issue with the idea that the pleasure principle is the dominant mental drive. In the first section of the work, Freud begins by addressing the concept of the pleasure principle itself, which is the idea that humanity possesses an instinctual drive toward experiencing pleasure and shielding itself from pain. Freud’s movement towards this new conception of his drive theory would continue in his later work The Ego and the Id in 1923. The importance of the work lies in its revision of Freud’s earlier theory of instincts, positing that in addition to the libido, there exists a competing death instinct. Beyond the Pleasure Principle ( Jenseits des Lustprinzips) is a 1920 work by Sigmund Freud.
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