"Beyond the Pleasure Principle" is a landmark text both in Freud's thoughts regarding the knowledge of the functioning of the human psyche and in the methodology of analytic technique, such that it has the potential to become a sufficient analysis.

With this specific text in 1920, Freud highlights the compulsion to repeat as a fundamental function of the instinctual process, thereby revealing the importance of the self-preservation of the psychobiological subject. This role has been taken on behalf of the subject and is consequently characterized as life instincts, the sexual instincts versus the instincts of destruction.

"Beyond the Pleasure Principle," in its time and even many years later, was not understood as it should have been in its essence; rather, it was characterized by some as dark or incomprehensibly biological. However, it is ultimately innovative because it "shifted" psychoanalysis, as well as the analytical methodology of the technique, from the closed framework of a teleological, evolutionary, and static theory and technique into the "world" of the unexpected, primarily recognizing the dominant force of the unconscious ego that seeks dissatisfaction through repetition based on transference.

With this specific text, Freud elucidated the difference between a self-determined psychoanalysis and another, the behavioral or heteronomously determined, which mainly developed in the USA, where the evolutionary view and the meaning of progress are dominant. Issues which have created permanent rifts in psychoanalytic circles.

This specific text highlights the deep contradictions of the human psyche, primarily in its choices, e.g., whether to choose to be analyzed or not, to choose death or the continuation of life.