Motivation (SparkNotes Psychology Guide Series) Book

Behold one of Freud's most over-determined navels. A piece of thought, exploration and theory that is yet to be pinned down and is a fertile seed to many theorists who came after and attempted to corral this confused yet beguiling psychical mechanism into their own works. A fount of seemingly never-ending creative inspiration for others.

While also being a frustrating 78 page read…

Been trying to come up with a review for this one for weeks and kept hitting some wall that I would be hard pressed not to attribute to some function of the pleasure principle / reality principle / death drive / jouissance.

Overtime / bonus chapter enjoyment through experience.

I know, I am rambling…
But this work doesn't need to be summarized here.
My only desire is to express its effect on me…
As if one could say, "My *only* desire"…

It seems that every time I read Freud my brain is forced to read him on 4 or more parallel tracks that range over "what he's trying to say" and "how he sometimes gets bogged down in trying to explain everything physiologically" yet "how even when that feels wrong there's always still something interesting there so you have to parse it in real time" to "considering everything within the psychological and cultural context within which he was writing" yet still "separating that from the universal truths that he would still be living" while all the while being reminded of "what an amazing and brilliant explorer of a completely new realm" he was.

I'm reminded of Jacques Cousteau only if Jacques Cousteau had also basically DISCOVERED OCEANS before anyone else had thought to notice them.

Here's the thing for me. Reading Freud is clearly frustrating because he was obviously on to something extraordinary and yet since he was the first one there he had to figure out from scratch how to even conceptualize, label and order it. I agree with others I've read that posit word choice might have been his biggest enemy. Pleasure principle. Reality principle. Death drive. Not only might these have been named better, but Freud himself often seemed mercurial in how he used his terms and would shift their meanings over time. I'm perfectly fine with Freud modifying and revising his concepts and theory over the years. But when that seems to happen within the limited pages of a short work it can be a bit difficult to lock on to a clear intended meaning.

Maybe that's why his writings - and this work in particular - seem so ripe for interpretation and exploration...

I read BtPP right before reading Alenka Zupancic's What IS Sex? () and I have to say it was a damn good match. Or maybe much of Lacanian studies revolve around this singular process/mechanism so that's not so surprising? I've now just started reading Seminar VII, and it's with some feeling that the extension of this core theory will be expanded further.

Even with all the frustration and confusion it's hard not to walk away from this book knowing in your gut that Freud was on to something. The words shift, the causes are many and over-determined, and yet the psychical actions that he describes feel too true and familiar to deny. Desire for homeostasis, judging future actions against some knowledge of possible pleasure or pain (comfort or discomfort), compulsive repetition (often of "seemingly" un-pleasureable acts), a basic obsession with and avoidance of the impossibility of existing, of being conscious yet cut off by a loss/gap back in a past you can't remember yet always feel on the back of your shoulder. A desire to be inanimate if only to stop the desire machine…

This is the tool box for much that would follow...