Beyond the Pleasure Principle

After the First World War Freud met a puzzle his theory could not explain: soldiers who relived their trauma in nightmares, and patients who repeated painful experiences instead of avoiding them. In this short book of 1920 he describes his grandson's game of throwing away a toy and pulling it back, and proposes a second basic drive alongside the drive for life and pleasure: a drive toward death.

The idea of the death drive was controversial even among Freud's followers, but it changed his whole theory and influenced philosophy and literature for decades. It is a speculative book, and Freud says so himself, which makes it one of his most adventurous.

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) grew up in Vienna in a Jewish family and trained as a neurologist. After studying hypnosis with the famous Charcot in Paris, he began listening to his patients talk freely about their dreams and memories, and developed from this practice a new theory of the mind and a new kind of treatment: psychoanalysis.

From his consulting room at Berggasse 19 he published The Interpretation of Dreams and a stream of books that changed psychology, literature and everyday language. In 1938, after the Nazis took over Austria, he fled to London, where he died the following year. A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis is the best place to begin.