You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Catherine Couvreur is a former joint editor of the monographs of the Revue française de psychanalyse. Her book faithfully reflects the trend of French psychoanalytic thought today. The reader is immediately interested and thrilled by the way she does not hesitate to share her inner experience with us—an experience that reveals her to be at once writer, clinician and theoretician.
Freud bequeathed to us a territory of thought—a territory in which to think—situated in the space between. The existence of two metapsychological topographies plunges us into a field of tension, one of whose manifestations—the polarity of love and death—denotes the functional antagonism that holds sway in the life of every psyche.
The book's title is taken from a phrase used by Freud in a letter to Schnitzler, which the author chose because, in her view, it reveals an essential characteristic of the life of the drives, namely, that it is always in a state of tension between psyche and soma, narcissistic cathexis and object cathexis, love and destruction, binding and unbinding (p. 1). In addition to these functional polarities, there are those of presence and absence, pleasure and unpleasure, sensitivity and rationality. Finally, there is the polarity of clinical experience and theorisation (p. 7).
By this title, the author takes us (back) over the field ‘beyond’ and ‘within’ the pleasure principle, thus placing herself in the direct line of descent of Freud's concepts of trauma after the turning point of 1920 (the second topography). However, during the course of this journey we discover threads and colours that intersect, interweave and blend in such a way as to reveal the existence of traces of contradictory ideas against the background canvas. Freud, then, has indeed left us in this ‘space between’; it is in this space that the author's reflective activity is laid bare for us as belonging to the transitional field. In this way we observe her own psychic places ‘for thinking and being’, beca