The Death Drive: A Contemporary Introduction [Paperback]

This comprehensive yet accessible book analyses the clinical and historical experiences that led to the radical, complex and fundamental psychoanalytic concept of the death drive.

Dr. Rossella Valdr?s introductory book on the complex and difficult topic of the death drive is clear, easy to read, and rigorous.

Among psychoanalysts there is no agreement on this Freudian concept, which has been remarkably successful in the field of culture, but has not convinced a significant portion of the psychoanalytic profession and has encountered outright rejection from another portion.

Freud came to hypothesise a self-destructive drive driven by two needs: to explain the failures of analytic work stalled by the tendency of various patients to repeat the traumatic experience, their steely determination to perpetuate their malaise; to make clear the human destructiveness so dramatically manifested in World War I.

With his theorisation of the death drive, Freud laid the cornerstone of his model of the homeostatic functioning of human mind-body matter: the tendency to return to a previous state of tension (to the constant level of minimal tension - the constancy principle, or to the total absence of tension - the nirvana principle). This model forms the basis of every human beings defensive structure.

Criticism of Freud primarily concerns the difficulty of applying the concept of the death drive in the clinical field without a certain degree of schematisation. Repetition compulsion does not require a biological foundation of its interpretive value. The same is true of the economic discourse on masochism and in general the quantitative, defensive functioning of the psyche that obeys the logic of need. Structural resistance to transformation in analysis is best explained by the rejection of the feminine.

The death drive seems rooted, from the very French analysts wholSÍ