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Louis H. Hamel, Jr., Esq. is a Massachusetts lawyer retired from the Boston firm of Wilmer Hale (formerly Hale and Dorr), where he long chaired Trusts & Estates and was active in Pensions, Exempt Organizations and Family Business practice. Earlier he taught Philosophy at Manhattanville College in Purchase NY and then managed a family industrial real estate business in Haverhill, Massachusetts. He has read Psychoanalytic materials for 40 years and has done other writings on Law and Psychoanalysis. He was a member of the Boston Psychoanalytic Allience until it ceased operations. He is a Fellow (Retired) of the American College of Trusts and Estates Counsel. We invite readers to respond with papers and letters to the editor to these fascinating pieces of legal and Psychoanalytic theory and practice.
“Pleasure in my own pain” is self-contradictory the way Change or Motion was self-contradictory and thus impossible (the senses deceive us) to Parmenides and Heraclitus and others, while Zeno proved it impossible to get from point A to point B without passing through an infinite series of intermediate points (which is impossible). Aristotle leapt into the Excluded Middle and called Potency a Principle of Being (Bodnar, 2012), authorizing us to perceive what we perceive in the way of motion and change.
Psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche performs an exhaustive critique of Freud's expositions and self-critiques with regard to the paradoxes (including violation of the Law of the Excluded Middle) of the death drive posited in 1920 (Freud, 2010). Laplanche speaks of ubiquitous aggression and destruction first; and, second, he speaks of Freud's reaffirmation in 1920 of what Laplanche calls, “the fundamental economic principle of psychoanalysis, and that in its most radical form: the tendency to zero” (Laplanche, 1976/1985, p. 85).