Death and Desire: Psychoanalytic Theory in Lacan's Return to Freud Richard Boothy,  Routledge, 1991,  266 pp.

The issue of death has not been one of the most talked about or investigated in psychoanalytic circles as of late. The early controversy about Freud's concept of a death instinct died rather quickly. Few would say today that they endorse the concept. This book is a refreshing, erudite, and clearly argued support of the death instinct theory, based on the Lacanian return to Freud. The concept of a death instinct was rejected mostly in the climate of the ego psychology orientation of the post-Freudians, particularly of Heinz Hartmann with his theory of the Ego as an organ of adaptation through a conflict free ego sphere. Lacan rejected the goals of the ego psychologists as he considered them totally mistaken and contrary to psychoanalytic goals and alien to the Freudian concept of cure in analysis. Lacan considers the death drive to be a fundamental Freudian construct and one without which the tripartite structural theory of Freud cannot be understood.

Lacan's main argument here is that the ego psychologists took the Ego to be synonymous with the philosophic subject. The author of this book reviews this controversy and convincingly documents the argument with quotations from Freud and Lacan. He states that one of his goals is to show that, “There is far broader and deeper coherence in Lacan's thought than may at first appear.” In this goal he thoroughly succeeds, even at the price of painstaking piecing together of quotations from disparate sections of Lacan's extensive writings, in topics to which Lacan did not dedicate explicit writings, such as the notion of psychic energy.

I will focus this review mostly on the second chapter, which is the one