In the first few sections, Freud describes these as Eros, which produces creativity, harmony, sexual connection, reproduction, and self-preservation; and the "death drives" (what some call "Thanatos"[4]), which brings destruction, repetition, aggression, compulsion, and self-destruction.

Thus, the psychological death-wish is a manifestation of an underlying physical compulsion present in every cell, which Freud directly corresponds to the death drives.

"[9] He found exceptions to the universal power of the pleasure principle—"situations ... with which the pleasure principle cannot cope adequately"[11]—in four main areas: children's games, as exemplified in his grandson's famous "fort-da" game;[12] "the recurrent dreams of war neurotics ...; the pattern of self-injuring behaviour that can be traced through the lives of certain people ["fate neurosis"]; the tendency of many patients in psycho-analysis to act out over and over again unpleasant experiences of their childhood.

[14] In the first half of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, "a first phase, the most varied manifestations of repetition, considered as their irreducible quality, are attributed to the essence of drives"[15] in precisely the same way.

[18] Also noting repetitions in the lives of normal people—who appeared to be "pursued by a malignant fate or possessed by some 'daemonic' power,"[18] likely alluding to the Latin motto errare humanum est, perseverare autem diabolicum ("to err is human, to persist [in committing errors] is of the devil")—Freud concludes that the human psyche includes a compulsion to repeat that is independent of the pleasure principle.

[20] Asserting that the first task of the mind is to bind excitations to prevent trauma (so that the pleasure principle does not begin to dominate mental activities until the excitations are bound), he reiterates the clinical fact that for "a person in analysis ... the compulsion to repeat the events of his childhood in the transference evidently disregards the pleasure principle in every way".

[22] Thereafter "a leap in the text can be noticed when Freud places the compulsion to repeat on an equal footing with 'an urge ... to restore an earlier state of things'"[23]—ultimately that of the original inorganic condition.

This undertaking has left several traces in Beyond the Pleasure Principle and it forms a psychoanalytic counter-narrative to the popular Darwinisms of Freud's time.

[34] Freud then continued with a reference to "the harbour of Schopenhauer's philosophy"; but in groping for a return to the clinical he admitted that "it looks suspiciously as though we were trying to find a way out of a highly embarrassing situation at any price".

"[37] To then explain the sexual instinct as well in terms of a compulsion to repeat, Freud inserts a myth from Plato that humans are driven to reproduce in order to join together the sexes, which had once existed in single individuals who were both male and female—still "in utter disregard of disciplinary distinctions";[38] and admits again the speculative nature of his own ideas, "lacking a direct translation of observation into theory ... One may have made a lucky hit or one may have gone shamefully astray".

[40] He had however already written (in June) to colleague and psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi "that 'curious continuations' had turned up in it, presumably the part about the potential immortality of protozoa".

Ernest Jones considers Freud's claim on Eitingon "a rather curious request ... [perhaps] an inner denial of his novel thoughts about death having been influenced by his depression over losing his daughter".

[42]—and it is certainly striking that "the term 'death drive'—Todestrieb—entered his correspondence a week after Sophie Halberstadt's death"; so that we may well accept at the very least that the "loss can claim a subsidiary role ... [in]his analytic preoccupation with destructiveness".

[57] On the same terms, Gilles Deleuze wrote in his 1967 literary study Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty that "the masterpiece which we know as Beyond the Pleasure Principle is perhaps the one where he engaged most directly—and how penetratingly—in specifically philosophical reflection.

[60] Many of Freud's colleagues and students initially rejected the theories proposed in Beyond the Pleasure Principle because the idea of a drive towards death seemed strange.