The Nirvana Principle
Late in Beyond the Pleasure Principle a new principle is introduced: The Nirvana principle. This concept is like the death instinct that wants to draw down the organism towards an inorganic state, but with this difference: the Nirvana principle “is the effort to reduce, to keep constant, or to remove internal tension due to stimuli” (BPP, 1961, p 67) Excitation is reduced, not to death and the inanimate, but to mere stasis; hence Nirvana: inward calm. This concept is elaborated further in The Economic Problem of Masochism.
The confusion between the Nirvana principle and the death drive is persistent; George Makari in his history of the early days of psychoanalysis Revolution in Mind finds them to be the same (2008, p 317). This may not be much surprise for Freud himself is conflicted; in these pages (BPP and after) the drives contradict one another left and right—the Nirvana principle oscillates between expressing “the trend of the death instinct” (EPM, 1961, p 160) and being “a tendency which finds expression in the pleasure principle” (BPP, 1961, p 67)—often within the same essay. One might describe this then not so much as confusion, but as restlessness. Makari describes Freud in this period as a heretic “against his own orthodoxy” (2008, p 318). One cannot blame him then for refusing the homeostasis of dogma, no matter the convolutions.
It may be relevant to note that Nietzsche also conflates Buddhism with nihilism in his late book The Will To Power (1967, throughout). Does this indicate a trend? At the very least it reveals a captivating paradox of the time-period. Likewise Laplanche notes that the word Nirvana “evokes a profound link between pleasure and annihilation; this is a link that always remained problematic for Freud” (1973, p 273)
Problematic? Or productive? The benefit of any paradox is that it resists orthodoxy; paradox makes dogma impossible. This paradox is made acute in the concept of masochism: pleasure in pain. Laplanche again: “the paradox of masochism, far from deserving to be circumscribed as a specific ‘perversion,’ should be generalized, linked as it is to the essentially traumatic nature of human sexuality” (1976, p 105).
