Word.ws English Dictionary

pleasure principle

pleasure principle noun: the principle that human decisions and behavior are strongly motivated by the instinctual desire of the id, arising in infancy, to experience pleasure and avoid pain.

Noun

pleasure principle

  1. The principle that human decisions and behavior are strongly motivated by the instinctual desire of the id, arising in infancy, to experience pleasure and avoid pain.
    • Bork warns that America is in the grip of a radical individualism that recognizes no limit to the right of personal gratification, one for which the pleasure principle is the only principle that counts.December 28 1998, Richard Lacayo, "Where The Right Went Wrong," Time (retrieved 4 July 2015)
    • Health, too, was a consideration, though it was very much pleasure-principle health—the right to wring out every last throb of ecstasy from one's knackered organs.2002 January 26, Howard Jacobson, “A vision that took me back to adolescence, and a lot of American women to childhood”, in Independent, UK, retrieved 04 Jul 2015

Examples of pleasure principle in a sentence

  • They can’t seem to decide if the moral imperative is more crucial than the pleasure principle, or the other way around.2008 March 16, Claire Dederer, "Brownstoners" (book review of The Future of Love by Shirley Abbott), New York Times (retrieved 4 July 2015)
  • The pleasure principle is, on the whole, a sound one, then: having what you like is fine so long as you don't have too much of it in one go.2009 January 3, Blake Morrison, “A little of what you fancy”, in Guardian, UK, retrieved 04 Jul 2015:

Questions about pleasure principle

What does pleasure principle mean?
Pleasure principle means the principle that human decisions and behavior are strongly motivated by the instinctual desire of the id, arising in infancy, to experience pleasure and avoid pain.
How do you use pleasure principle in a sentence?
They can’t seem to decide if the moral imperative is more crucial than the pleasure principle, or the other way around.
What part of speech is pleasure principle?
Pleasure principle is a noun.

Words near pleasure principle in the dictionary

  1. pleasure houses
  2. pleasure oneself
  3. pleasure palace
  4. pleasure palaces
  5. Pleasure Point
  6. pleasure principle
  7. pleasure seeker
  8. pleasure seekers
  9. pleasure trip
  10. pleasure trips
  11. pleasure-dome

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pleasure principle (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “pleasure principle.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/pleasure_principle. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.