12. Freud and the development of the pleasure principle
Through the writing of The Interpretation of Dreams and for several years after, Freud attributed human behavior as driven by the libido, a term which he defined as it is known in modern usage. To Freud, the libido was focused on pleasure. To Freud, the libido went through a series of stages as an individual went through physical and psychological development. Each stage presented different demands on the person, and failure of the libido to adapt to the changes necessary for each stage was the source of pathological traits in adulthood. An improperly adapted individual was, to Freud, an immature individual, fixated on an earlier stage of the libido.
In 1920 Freud published a paper titled Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which broke with his earlier work, and introduced three terms which are most often connected with him, the id, superego, and ego. Freud discarded the term libido as the primary driving force and described the Eros as seeking pleasure and Thanatos – death wish – as the forces of the mind, which are in a constant struggle. Freud used the speculation which he described in his paper to reconstruct his idea of the human psyche. The paper was not received well by colleagues, many of whom considered the idea of a death wish in the psyche to be absurd.