In this brief but important piece Freud makes explicit a change in his conception of pleasure, a change consistent with his recognition, alluded to in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (see Chapter 8 here), that pleasure may arise from an increase, as well as from a decrease, in stimulus. He formalizes his addition of the nirvana principle to the pleasure and reality principles as the basis of our motivation. He goes on to use the dichotomy of the life and death instincts to articulate and explain the differences among them. The springboard for the revision of the theory is Freud's observation of the phenomenon of masochism, which contradicts the pleasure principle as he originally construed it.

THE PROBLEM

The existence of masochism as a human practice raises the question of how, assuming the pleasure principle operates, people can knowingly inflict pain on themselves. After all, the pleasure principle holds that we seek first and foremost to avoid pain and where possible to cultivate pleasure. But Freud avers that masochism does not in fact violate the pleasure principle, because we may sometimes find pleasure even in pain. That we may do so, however, presupposes a conception of pleasure that can accommodate pain.

PLEASURE

Until this point Freud has coupled the pleasure principle with the constancy principle derived from Gustav Fechner. According to the constancy principle, which Freud now calls the nirvana principle to signify the perfection of stasis, organisms strive to keep their level of excitation as low as possible or at least constant. It is because the state of death perfectly realizes the elimination of all excitation, or tension, that Freud originally allied the pleasure principle with death instincts.

But he now adds that pleasures exist that correspond to an increase in tension, the pleasure of sexual foreplay a clear example, and unpleasures that arise from the diminution of tension – boredom perhaps.