INTRODUCTION

In my essay, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, published in 1920,[1] I began the discussion of a train of thought, my personal attitude towards which, as I mentioned there, might be described as a sort of benevolent curiosity; in the following pages this train of thought is developed further. I have taken up those ideas and brought them into connection with various facts observed in psycho-analysis and have endeavoured to draw fresh conclusions from the combination; in the present work, however, no further contributions are levied from biology, and it consequently stands in a closer relation to psycho-analysis than does Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The thoughts contained in it are synthetic rather than speculative in character and their aim appears to be an ambitious one. I am aware, however, that they do not go beyond the baldest outlines and I am perfectly content to recognize their limitations in this respect.

At the same time, the train of thought touches upon things not hitherto dealt with in the work psycho-analysis has done, and it cannot avoid concerning itself with a number of theories propounded by non-analysts or by former analysts on their retreat from analysis. I am as a rule always ready to acknowledge my debts to other workers, but on this occasion I feel myself under no such obligation. If there are certain things to which hitherto psycho-analysis has not given adequate consideration, that is not because it has overlooked their effects or wished to deny their significance, but because it pursues a particular path which had not yet carried it so far. And, moreover, now that these things have at last been overtaken, they appear to psycho-analysis in a different shape from that in which they appear to the other people.

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