Beyond The Pleasure Principle - Critical Reception

Critical Reception

Beyond the Pleasure Principle may be Freud's most controversial text. Jacques Lacan, a self-styled Freudian, called it "this extraordinary text of Freud's, unbelievably ambiguous, almost confused". One of Freud's most sympathetic biographers wrote that "Beyond the Pleasure Principle is a difficult text....the reassuring intimacy with clinical experience that marks most of Freud's papers, even at their most theoretical, seems faint here, almost absent." He went on to quote Freud's personal physician: "Max Schur, whom no one can accuse of reading Freud unsympathetically, said flatly: 'We can only assume that Freud's conclusions...are an example of ad hoc reasoning to prove a preformed hypothesis...throughout Beyond the Pleasure Principle '".

Ernest Jones concluded that "This book is further noteworthy in being the only one of Freud's which has received little acceptance on the part of his followers". Many of Freud's colleagues and students rejected the theories proposed in Beyond the Pleasure Principle because the idea of an instinct towards death seemed strange.