Psychoanalytic Reflections On The Freudian Death Drive

Psychoanalytic Reflections on The Freudian Death Drive is a highly accessible book that investigates the relevance, complexity and originality of a hugely controversial Freudian concept which, the author argues, continues to exert enormous influence on modernity and plays an often-imperceptible role in the violence and so-called "sad passions" of contemporary society. With examples from cinema, literature and the consulting room, the book’s four chapters – theory, the clinic, art and contemporaneity – investigate every angle, usually little explored, of the death drive: its "positive" functions, such as its contribution to subjectification; its ambiguous relationship with sublimation; the clues it provides about transgenerational matters; and its effects on the feminine. This is not a book about aggression, a type of extroflection of the death drive made visible, studied and striking; rather, it is about the derivatives of the pulsion that changes in the clinic, in life, in society, in artistic forms. With bold and innovative concepts and by making connections to film and books, Rossella Valdrè unequivocally argues that the contemporary clinic is a clinic of the death drive. Psychoanalytic Reflections on The Freudian Death Drive seeks to relaunch the debate on a controversial and neglected concept and will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists. Today’s renewed interest in the Freudian death drive attests to its extraordinary ability to explain both "new" pathologies and socio-economic phenomena.

Contemporary Perspectives on the Freudian Death Drive provides a sustained discussion of the death drive from the perspective of different psychoanalytic traditions. Ever since Freud introduced the notion of the death drive, it has been the subject of intense debate in psychoanalysis and beyond. The death drive is arguably the most unsettling psychoanalytic concept. What this concept points to is more unsettling still. It uniquely illuminates the forces of destruction and dissolution at work in individuals as well as in society. This book first introduces Freud’s use of the term, tracing the debates and developments his ideas have led to. The subsequent essays by leading Viennese psychoanalysts demonstrate the power of the death drive to illuminate psychoanalytic theory, clinical practice, and the study of culture. Since this book originally arose from a conference in Vienna, its final segment is dedicated to the forced exile of the early Viennese psychoanalysts due to the Nazi threat. Due to its wide scope and the many perspectives it offers, this book is a tribute to the disturbing relevance of the death drive today. Contemporary Perspectives on the Freudian Death Drive is of special interest to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, social and cultural scientists, as well as anyone intending to understand the sources and vicissitudes of human destructiveness.

This book focuses on the intrapsychic vicissitudes of what it means to be truly alive and how death accompanies us at each step of our life's journey. It shows that, psychologically-speaking, death is always present in life and life in death.

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. In The Death Drive: A Contemporary Introduction, Rossella Valdrè traces the path that led Sigmund Freud to theorise this key concept in his essay, Beyond the Pleasure Principle. She considers its roots in Freud's experiences of war trauma and his assessment of the human compulsion to repeat, as well as its consequences on his later theoretical and clinical work. Short vignettes from the clinician's room and examples from books and films introduce the reader to the birth and development of the concept, its biological and philosophical roots, and its many clinical implications. Valdrè also reviews its varied reception among post-Freudians, and examines the controversies and questions that the death drive commonly engenders within the psychoanalytic community. She concludes by considering the death drive through the medium of art, its relationship with sublimation and the confirmation neuroscience is beginning to provide. Written in a style that is at once accessible and precise, this book is an invaluable tool to students and psychoanalysts in training approaching the theory for the first time, as well as practising analysts, postgraduate students and scholars familiar with the concept and looking to explore it further.

Winner of the 2008 Gradiva Award! Can something as negative as loss also be a positive, transformative experience? Is it possible that not only individuals but also societies can be developmentally arrested by problematic mourning? On Deaths and Endings brings together the work of psychoanalytic scholars and practitioners grappling with the manifold issues evoked by loss and finality. The book covers the impact of endings throughout the life cycle, including effects on children, adolescents, adults, those near death and entire societies. New psychoanalytic perspectives on bereavement are offered based on clinical work, scholarly research and the authors’ own, deeply personal experiences. The contributors present compelling, often moving, enquiries into subjects such as the reconfiguration of self-states subsequent to mourning, the role of ritual and memorials, the tragic impact of unmourned loss, modern conceptualisations of the death instinct, and terror-based losses. In that much psychotherapy is conducted with people who have suffered some form of loss, this book will be an invaluable resource for all mental health professionals. The emphasis on the potential of working through the vicissitudes of these experiences will provide inspiration and hope both to those who have endured personal loss and to anyone working with grieving patients.

A brilliant probe into the political and psychological effects of our changing relationship with social media Former social media executives tell us that the system is an addiction-machine. We are users, waiting for our next hit as we like, comment and share. We write to the machine as individuals, but it responds by aggregating our fantasies, desires and frailties into data, and returning them to us as a commodity experience. The Twittering Machine is an unflinching view into the calamities of digital life: the circus of online trolling, flourishing alt-right subcultures, pervasive corporate surveillance, and the virtual data mines of Facebook and Google where we spend considerable portions of our free time. In this polemical tour de force, Richard Seymour shows how the digital world is changing the ways we speak, write, and think. Through journalism, psychoanalytic reflection and insights from users, developers, security experts and others, Seymour probes the human side of the machine, asking what we’re getting out of it, and what we’re getting into. Social media held out the promise that we could make our own history–to what extent did we choose the nightmare that it has become?

Whereas Freud himself viewed conscience as one of the functions of the superego, in The Still Small Voice: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Guilt and Conscience, the author argues that superego and conscience are distinct mental functions and that, therefore, a fourth mental structure, the conscience, needs to be added to the psychoanalytic structural theory of the mind. He claims that while both conscience and superego originate in the so-called pre-oedipal phase of infant and child development they are comprised of contrasting and often conflicting identifications. The primary object, still most often the mother, is inevitably experienced as, on the one hand, nurturing and soothing and, on the other, as frustrating and persecuting. Conscience is formed in identification with the nurturer; the superego in identification with the aggressor. There is a principle of reciprocity at work in the human psyche: for love received one seeks to return love; for hate, hate (the talion law).

The third book in the new 'Encyclopaedia of Psychoanalysis' series. This book will be of interest to all those students and professionals alike who might have come to question consoling notions of therapy as leaving something important and central to Freud's thinking, his often neglected second reference point, the death drive.