Thesis Statement Six examples

The compulsion to repeat seems to overpower the pleasure principle, unless the subject finds pleasure in knowing the outcome ahead of time and then
puts himself into situations that will end in a familiar manner; thus gaining pleasure from the familiar no matter how painful it is.--Jerry

Ellmann's notion about the "theatricality" of Freud's conception of Oedipus might be developed into another point: the Oedipus complex can be applied to the interpretation of the fictional text because each literary text is a virtual theatre where the reader peeps at deeds and secrets usually inaccessible to the eyes of an outsider.--Iana

Sigmund Freud, "Beyond the Pleasure Principle"
Though a child may exhibit a compulsion to repeat painful experiences for the ensuing and direct reward of pleasure (as in a game), or for the purpose of moving from passivity to mastery of a dilemma, there prehaps may be another motive in such repetition: by repeating painful experiences, we also engage in a transferrence phenomenae masquerading as "daemon," "fate," or "destiny," which is in fact the manner in
which the ego regulates and acclimates to a consistent internal pressure (the unconscious ego's instinctual impulses against the resisting "I"/ego) that is its own greater satisfaction--we create our own meaning of, and justification for, discomfort as part of our own reality.--Mike

According to Freud, our actions, especially those which we compulsively repeat, all relate to the pleasure principle; even when the first effects of an action are negative or painful, the desire for, and eventual circumstance of a "pleasurable" feeling or situation are at the root of most (all?) actions we take.--Melissa

Freud's "Group Psychology" would have us question the adage that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery: that imitation is, perhaps, an action of hostile fascination, libidinal attraction, or partial identification--an act of shared significance; imitation is far more complex and perhaps violent an operation than mere flattery.--Sean

Lacan's description of the "mirror stage" seems to contradict his assertions that the world of language completely creates the world of things--instead it would seem that the world of language is dependent on images for its existence, since it is an image that gives the child the first notions of itself as a body separate from other parts of reality.--JiM

In Freud's essay, "Beyond the Pleasure Principle," he introduces a young boy and his game of disappearance and return--in that the boy uses a toy as something to make disappear and then return right back again in the sense of sadness and then joy--in one instance, he then examines the effects of emotions in the return of the object one so desires; no direct decision can be made from watching this experience except for personal analysis of the emotional link to what the child might be feeling in the object returning, thus introducing repetition into the idea of return and analyzing how it increases the emotional impact upon the child and displays how the sense of return and longing is adjusted according to repetition and desire for the object.--Molly

Maud Ellman's article redeems psychoanalytic literary criticism because she removes it from the hands of American ego-psychology, and demands that criticism focus on the text, rather than treating textual characters as real people; she also allows for literary ambiguity and examines whole texts as metaphors for our psychic conflicts, rather than using psychoanalytic theory to analyze a text as if such a text was only an author's dream begging for interpretation.--Alli