Editorial

No stronger impression arises from the resistances during the work of analysis than of there being a force which is defending itself by every possible means against recovery and which is absolutely resolved to hold onto illness and suffering… These phenomena are unmistakable impressions of the power in mental life which we call the instinct of aggression or of destruction according to its aims and which we trace back to the original death instinct of living matter… Only by the concurrent or mutually opposing action of the two primal instincts - Eros and death instinct - never by one or the other alone, can we explain the rich multiplicity of the phenomena of life. (Freud 1937, pp. 242-243)

How can we best explain ‘the rich multiplicity of the phenomena of life’ when there is so much ‘power in mental life’? How does the mind work? What model shall each of us find holds the best explanation? Whatever our views are about Freud, whether it makes sense to suggest that there is an ‘original death instinct of living matter’, or that we are caught between two opposing ‘primal instincts’, one thing that this issue testifies to is that the ‘power of mental life’ still confronts us anew each day as we work. We may argue for the exclusivity of our own theory under the belief that it alone seems to fit the phenomena better than another, but it is humbling to remember that when we write a paper we are struggling as best we can to ‘explain the rich multiplicity of the phenomena of life’.

First, Günter Seidler in ‘Destructive Narcissism and the Obliteration of Subject-Object Separation’ argues that we can explain destructive narcissism as the wish to obliterate all distinction between the subject and the object in order to return to a primordial place of peace. There is no need, in his theory, for destructive narcissism to be driven by a destructive instinct. Then Maggie Turp in ‘Encountering Self-Harm in Psychotherapy and Counselling Practice’ wants us to consider that ‘physical act