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This is an ambitious book. “It aims to show how and why death has been marginalized or repressed in psychoanalysis” (p. 1). The author, having worked on his subject for over a decade, is enormously well informed and thoughtful. Although he vigorously challenges Freud's view of death in
psychic life, he does so with respect and, especially toward the end of the book, with increasing admiration.
He finds that Freud fails to attend to death:
It all starts from a few statements by Freud about death's inaccessibility to the unconscious (, pp. 289, 296-7; , pp. 57-9; , pp. 129-30, 140). Death is negative, abstract, it involves time, and cannot, therefore, be part of unconscious thought. Accordingly, if people are afraid of death, these fears should be understood as secondary, as indications of another “deeper” problem, mostly castration. This is where it all starts but not where it all ends. For this position reverberates throughout the history of psychoanalysis, finding various expressions. It consists in a kind of disbelief in death, an unwillingness to recognize death as a possibly influential psychic factor [pp. 1-2].
Then, again, he writes:
However, as sometimes happens, Freud's position on death is more ambivalent, vacillating, and complex than the positions of many of his followers. Even when reductionistic, it is multifariously so. Freud's work, particularly in its less reductionistic manifestations, contains fruitful intuitions and sharp insights into the nature of our attitude toward death. It often betrays a tension between reductionistic tendencies and attempts to attribute the utmost significance to death. Many times, only Freud's more reductionistic statements were adopted by future generations of theoreticians and analysts [p. 2].
This is a thoughtful, scholarly work but, perhaps because it is a compilation of many individual publications, unnecessarily repetitive. The author tends to present so many sides to his argument, crediting with one hand, dismissing w