Life and Death in Psychoanalysis Book

French Psychoanalyst and student of Lacan attempts to reconcile a number of crucial contradictions in Freud's oeuvre in this complex and important text. He deals primarily with temporal perspectives on issues such as masochism and sadomasochism, the ego and narcissism, seduction theory, and most importantly the death drive. Laplanche is most interested with the economic paradoxes of constancy that are inherent in Freud's theory of the death drive, and the life drive. For Laplanche, the death drive is always imbued with libidinal energy, "born of a formalistic concern for symmetry, the term 'destrudo,' once proposed to designate the energy of the death drive, did not survive a single day. For the death drive does not possess its own energy. Its energy is libido" (124).

Life and Death in Psychoanalysis is a tremendously important work on Freud and his thought.