Beyond the Pleasure Principle is Freud’s most philosophical and speculative work, exploring profound questions of life and death, pleasure and pain. In it Freud introduces the fundamental concepts of the “repetition compulsion” and the “death drive,” according to which a perverse, repetitive, self-destructive impulse opposes and even trumps the creative drive, or Eros. The work is one of Freud’s most intensely debated, and raises important questions that have been discussed by philosophers and psychoanalysts since its first publication in 1920.

The text is presented here in a contemporary new translation by Gregory C. Richter. Appendices trace the work’s antecedents and the many responses to it, including texts by Plato, Friedrich Nietzsche, Melanie Klein, Herbert Marcuse, Jacques Derrida, and Judith Butler, among many others.

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Todd Dufresne is professor of philosophy at Lakehead University and author of The Late Sigmund Freud: Or, The Last Word on Psychoanalysis, Society, and All the Riddles of Life.

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“The collection of writings gathered here cover a great breadth and demonstrate quite clearly the importance of the ideas proposed in Freud’s Beyond.” — Metapsychology

“Todd Dufresne’s book sets a new standard for critical editions of Freud. In addition to the lucid new English translation by Gregory C. Richter, there is a splendidly informative introduction, related excerpts from Freud’s other works, and a provocative appendix of critical essays, including contributions from Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Marcuse, Derrida, and Zizek, that challenge and destabilize this ‘metaphysical’ essay of Freud’s middle period. The pleasures of the text are rich and complex; in it we see Freud, as Dufresne aptly notes, moving ‘beyond psychoanalysis, in philosophy’—a journey of joyful intellectual homecoming.” — Mark Kingwell, Professor of Philosophy, University of Toronto

“Freud’s strange and conceptually adventurous Beyond the Pleasure Principle carves out a wholly original space between philosophy, psychology, and biology—a space we still find difficult to occupy, but one that opens up a range of challenging theoretical ideas from which we can continue to learn. In this new edition, Todd Dufresne expertly re-introduces us to a book that has spawned many important philosophical responses and interventions over the past half-century and reminds us why it is such a key book in Freud’s oeuvre. Gregory C. Richter’s superb new translation and Dufresne’s fantastic choice of both older theories on which Freud draws and newer thinkers who draw on Freud make this a book that anyone interested in contemporary philosophy and critical theory should add to their libraries and their classrooms.” — Imre Szeman, Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies, University of Alberta