toward the pleasure principle'". After considering the inevitable presence of unpleasant experiences in the life of the mind, he concludes the book's first section to the effect that the presence of such unpleasant experiences "does not contradict the dominance of the pleasure principle ... does not seem to necessitate any far-reaching limitation of the pleasure principle." Exceptions to the pleasure principle Freud proceeds to look for "evidence, for the existence of hitherto unsuspected forces 'beyond' the pleasure principle." He found exceptions to the universal power of the pleasure principle—"situations ... with which the pleasure principle cannot cope adequately"—in four main areas: children's games, as exemplified in his grandson's famous "fort-da" game; "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." Repetition compulsion From these cases, Freud inferred the existence of motivations beyond the pleasure principle. Freud already felt in 1919 that he could safely postulate "the principle of a repetition compulsion in the unconscious mind, based upon instinctual activity and probably inherent in the very nature of the instincts—a principle powerful enough to overrule the pleasure-principle". 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" in precisely the same way. Building on his 1914 article "Recollecting, Repeating and Working Through", Freud highlights how the "patient cannot remember the whole of what is repressed in him, and ... is obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of ... remembering it as something belonging to the past:" a "compulsion to repeat." Independence from the pleasure principle Freud still wanted to examine the relationship between repetition compulsion and the pleasure principle. Although compulsive behaviors evidently satisfied some sort of drive, they were a source of direct unpleasure. Somehow, "no lesson has been learnt from the old experience of these activities having led only to unpleasure. In spite of that, they are repeated, under pressure of a compulsion". Also noting repetitions in the lives of normal people—who appeared to be "pursued by a malignant fate or possessed by some daemonic power," likely alluding to the Latin motto errare humanum est, perseverare autem diabolicum ("to err