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From Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920/1955b) onward, Freud would remain faithful to a concept which already had a long conceptual history before it was developed into a full-fledged concept of Freudian metapsychology, that is, the death instinct (De Vleminck, 2016). None of Freud's concepts ever provoked such controversy, with analysts arguing for (e.g., Melanie Klein) or against (e.g., D. W. Winnicott) the death instinct's added value for psychoanalytic theory and practice, resulting in “remain” and “leave” camps—with a rhetoric similar to the recent Brexit campaigns in the United Kingdom. A similar kind of polarization with regard to the death instinct was at stake between Jacques Lacan and Jean Laplanche. In his landmark paper “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious” (originally published in ), Lacan provokingly argues that “to evade the death instinct in his [Freud's] doctrine is not to know his doctrine at all” (1966/2006, p. 679). In what follows, I will neither discuss nor defend a Lacanian perspective on the death instinct. Instead, I will try to argue against Jean Laplanche's critique of Freud's death instinct. In line with Laplanche, however, I will argue for an alternative “critical” reading of Freud, equally aiming at “putting Freud to work,” as Laplanche likes to call it. Scrutinizing Laplanche's critique of Freud's death instinct through a very peculiar Freudian lens, I want to “problematize” Freud's death instinct from a different methodological perspective, that is, by re-contextualizing it in the research matrix of melancholia. Present constraints mean that I can only really hint at the argument here, but I shall try to do so in two brief steps: (1) a summary and critique of Laplanche's reading of Freud, and (2) an alternative reading of Freud, trying to making sense of the death instinct.
It has to be noted that the issue of the dea