Freud's essay Beyond the pleasure principle (1920) has gone down in history as one of the most important works in psychoanalysis, since his idea of a death drive is presented there for the first time. I have already touched on the concept of the death drive in preceding chapters, and, in accordance with Laplanche's original interpretation, paid attention to the death drive as the most untamed and uncivilized in the libido – as the bottom layer of the libido.

My intention in this chapter is not to go on discussing the death drive as a part of the libido; here, rather, I would like to enlighten another interpretation that Freud's essay awakens. This interpretation has to do with pre-sexual conditions of the unconscious, as discussed in chapter 4. I thus want to underline this thought by means of Freud's ideas presented in Beyond the pleasure principle. I mentioned several psychoanalysts in chapter 4, whose ideas imply that the Freudian unconscious, ruled by the pleasure principle, presupposes another kind of psychical process.

Freud's concept of the death drive has given rise to much controversy and to many different interpretations. It is in fact already possible to discern two diametrically opposite meanings of this concept in his essay. I will in this chapter argue that both these meanings are relevant in describing psychical life, although only one of them actually qualifies as the concept ‘death drive’.