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Before I start, I want to thank our three morning presenters warmly for their thought-provoking papers. I offer special congratulations and thanks to you, Joseph, who have really enriched the psychoanalytic literature with your remarkable and so generous work on The Processes of Defense.
It is difficult, Joseph, to choose what points to address amongst all your rich concepts, material, and elaborations. I will start with what you say towards the very end of your book (p. 323), when you seem to fear that what you present may suggest a closed theory. On the contrary! I have the feeling that, and it is also the way I try to work, you maintain the difficult tension between drive-centred theories and object relation theories, never discarding one or the other, even when you do not refer explicitly to them. All along you succeed in keeping your thoughts in the realm of psychic reality, where drives meet external reality. You take into consideration the importance and the impact of external and historical reality and the unconscious traces it leaves in the psyche. You explicit in detail, and with a lot of coherence, the work and constraints that external reality imposes on psychic reality and the different defence processes and mechanisms that it entails. For Freud, the essence of the defence mechanisms resides in the anti-cathexis that protects the ego against conflicts. With the reference to trauma, do you feel that we sometimes are far beyond a question of ego conflicts, closer to the conflict between the fundamental instincts, life and death? At first, I thought that your zero process was essentially a manifestation of Freud's death instinct. But I now think that it manifests really the fusion of the two. The triumph of the death instinct would mean the