From struggle for pleasure to pleasure in struggling: psychoanalytic ideas on pleasure

Pleasure in the human being has always been a major theme, associated with pain, excess and needs, determining many moral dilemmas, including the ethics of medical, social, and educational intervention. The rhythmic movement between the multiple pleasurable experiences, the effort to retain them or avoid different pains present themselves in the mental structure as a key approach in the evolving way of learning and integrating reality and influences the development of the symbolic capacity. This paper shows the evolutionary place and the function that pleasure itself has had in the clinical field, as well as some of the main pleasures of becoming and being a psychoanalyst.