ABSTRACT
In 1920 Sigmund Freud published Beyond the Pleasure Principle. He made it clear that there was something disturbing the pleasure principle, which simply states that accumulation of tension is unpleasant or painful and the reduction of tension or relaxation is agreeable or pleasurable. The problem of pleasure and the question of the death-drive will be explored, as both concepts are crucial for an understanding of the use of drugs and alcohol from a psychoanalytic perspective. Freud said that if analysts treat masturbation as a clinical unit the problem of masturbation becomes insoluble. Freud mentioned the idea of masturbation as a short cut between desire and satisfaction, allowing the subject to bypass the external world, again in a meeting of 18 November 1908. The real cause is the position of the subject, a position in which masturbation can come to function as a detrimental, injurious symptom; a symptom that is not unlike addiction.
