The following discussions continue the lines of thought that were initiated in my work "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" in 1920, to which I personally, as mentioned there, approached with a certain benevolent curiosity. They pick up these thoughts, connect them with various facts of analytical observation, and seek to derive new conclusions from this union, but do not draw new insights from biology and therefore are closer to psychoanalysis than "Beyond." They have more of the character of a synthesis than of speculation and seem to have set themselves a lofty goal. However, I know that they stop at the coarsest points, and I am quite agreeable to this limitation. In doing so, they touch upon matters that have not yet been the subject of psychoanalytic exploration and cannot avoid brushing against some theories that are...