Benjamin Cuthrell’s Reviews > Beyond the Pleasure Principle > Status Update

Only believers, who demand that shall be a substitute for the catechism they have given up, will blame an investigator for developing or even transforming his views.

This tallies well with the hypothesis that the life process of the individual leads for internal reasons to an evolution of chemical tensions, that is to say, to death, razz union with the living substance of a different individual increases those tensions, introducing what may be described as fresh fatal differences which must then be lived

(Some biological arguments that are a bit beyond me as far as the true need for their presence but Freud seems to want them there to analogize and validate his death drive concept which he argues is essential/ fundamental; he also cites Schopenhauer and Schiller to help drive it home)

Excitations leave memory traces in lower levels of thought but not the con

The feelings of pleasure and unpleasure predominate over all external stimuli. And secondly, a particular way is adopted of dealing with any internal excitations which produce too great an increase of unpleasure: there is a tendency to treat them as though they were acting, not from the inside, but from the outside

The ratio between what is remembered and what is reproduced varies from case to case. (…) (The physician) must get him to re-experience some portion of his forgotten life, but must see to it, on the other hand, that the patient retain some degree of aloofness, which will enable him, in spite of everything, to recognize that what appears to be reality is in fact only a reflection of a forgotten past.

Anyone who accepts it as something self evident that their dream should put them back at night into the situation that caused him to fall ill has misunderstood the nature of dreams. It would be more in harmony with their nature if they showed the patient pictures from his healthy past or of the cure for which he hopes.

The pleasure principle is a key concept undergirding how we behave and motivating our choices.
Yet, there are cases where we aren’t strictly governed by it ( the reality principle which I take to be about deferring pleasure for later to survive but unsure).
various drives are suppressed in service of primary needs and drives but they get loose/cause displeasure; still we do them. Its like something is beyond…..