In his extraordinary and unsettling Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud turns his gaze from dreams and desire to the strange, compulsive force that returns us again and again to pain. What begins as a theory of wish-fulfillment fractures under the weight of trauma, grief, and war. With lyrical clarity, Aaron Murphy explores how Freud’s death drive emerged not only from clinical perplexity, but also from personal loss—the death of his daughter Sophie during the Spanish Flu. Murphy traces this theory through myth, neurosis, and mourning, offering a moving account of how repetition, ruin, and reality shape our lives. Between Eros and Thanatos, he argues, lies the delicate space we call living: “We encircle our delights and hold them close… Beyond that is mist, and storm surge, and whatever lies at the far end of death.”

What happens when the university refuses to be bought, branded, or silenced? At GCAS, we’re reimagining higher education from the ground up—scholar-owned, debt-free, and free from government or corporate control. This blog is where our ideas, research, and radical experiments in learning take shape in real time.

In this first post, we explore why traditional universities are under siege, what Terry Eagleton saw coming years ago, and how GCAS is building a model that resists those pressures by design.

As U.S. universities face rising political interference and anti-intellectual attacks, especially under the influence of Trump-era authoritarianism, GCAS College Dublin offers a bold alternative. Rooted in Europe’s centuries-old academic tradition and operating under a scholar-owned, debt-free model, GCAS empowers students to pursue rigorous, internationally recognized degrees without compromise or censorship. In this blog, we explore why earning your degree in Europe—especially with GCAS—is not just smarter, but essential.

What does it mean to teach liberation while students go into lifelong debt to listen? In this post, we confront the contradiction at the heart of modern academia and explore how GCAS’s debt-free model restores integrity, equity, and freedom to research and learning. At GCAS, education isn’t a transaction—it’s a shared act of transformation.

What if your education didn’t require international flights, massive campus infrastructure, or environmental sacrifice? At GCAS, our scholar-owned, online model isn’t just accessible—it’s ecological. In this post, we explore how GCAS is redefining higher education to meet the demands of the climate crisis, offering a sustainable alternative that unites serious research with low-impact living.

Philosophy has long been split between thinking and doing, theory and practice. At GCAS, we reject that division. We see philosophy not as something trapped in books or lecture halls, but as something built, taught, lived. This blog explores how the very act of creating and sustaining GCAS is itself a philosophical practice—one that unites the love of wisdom with the work of transforming education and society.