traumatic neurosis, including the so-called war neuroses, re-
turn time and again in their dreams to the original disruptive
event, the trauma that has ruined their lives. Instead of avoid-
ing trauma, they seek it out and repeat it in imagination.
Haunted by images of battlefield carnage, mutilation, and
violence, the soldiers of World War I posed a severe test for
Freud’s ideas about the mind as a wishful mechanism. Freud,
as he began writing, recognized this obstacle in the way of his
theory of the psyche. According to Freud, wish fulfillment is
our main psychic strategy: we recast experience so that it gives
us pleasure rather than pain. Dreams, for example, are wish-
fulfillment devices, as Freud triumphantly announced in his
monumentalInterpretation of Dreams( 1899 ).
The mind, according to Freud’s early theory, is a massive
“rewrite” machine, editing out or revising anything unpleas-
ant. Only when reality unavoidably steps in do we reluctantly
agree to negotiate with it. So the baby, Freud says in the Inter-
pretation of Dreams,busily hallucinates satisfaction when its
mother’s breast is temporarily unavailable; the infant’s lips
mime sucking gestures as it smiles with beatific satisfaction.
But eventually the power of wish fulfillment runs out. As the
baby becomes suddenly, ravenously hungry, the allure of the il-
lusory breast fades and real need intrudes. With luck, the
mother’s actual breast comes back in response to her infant’s
wails. Reality proves to be better, after all, than mere fantasy.
Beyond the Pleasure Principletransforms the wish-fulfill-
ment scenario of the Interpretation of Dreams.In the Interpre-
tation,the infant was able to make the mother return as a sup-
plier of nourishment. Renewed crying gets the breast, which is
demonstrably superior to fantasy. In Beyond, by contrast,
Freud describes a way of making the mother return as a source
of symbolic satisfaction rather than an answer to actual need.
Plato, Austin, Nietzsche, Freud 175