Sigmund Freud's "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" was published in 1920 and systematically introduced important psychoanalytical notions like the death drive and compulsive repetition for the first time. The work is contentious, and has provoked controversies and positions, which prior to the text did not exist. One hundred years later, we have produced a three-part audio series (in German) that gets to the bottom of the work itself, its controversies, and its interpretations.
In the first part of the series, long-time IPU professor and now Senior Professor Elfriede Löchel gives a lecture, which offers an interpretation of reading the book. She suggests that the text should be understood as a predecessor to deconstructivism and uses this interpretation to progress through the seven chapters of the work.
Part 2 of our audio series is a conversation between Udo Hock and Samuel Bayer. Hock is a psychoanalyst and lecturer at IPU, and Samuel Bayer is a research associate and candidate in analytic psychotherapist training. What makes this converstaion notable is the interaction between two generations of psychoanalysis: Udo Hock has been working with Freud's text for around 30 years and explains his understanding of the work, which is still relevant for psychoanalysis to this day.
The third part of the audio series introduces us to the genesis of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The text originally had an earlier version, which Freud later added to. Ulrike May excitedly tells us about the contradictions in the text, which have arisen because of this, how to explain them, and how to understand the text better if you are familiar with the first version. Ulrike May is a psychoanalyst who works in a private practice in Berlin, and has dealt intensively with Sigmund Freud and his works.