On: The comments of Dr Jon Mills

Dear Editors,

First of all, we would like to thank Dr. Mills for his kind and generous evaluation of our paper. We feel honored by his willingness to discuss our ideas: his writings with which we are familiar, as well as his letter, in spite of his criticism and points of disagreement, reveal a rigorous and scholarly reading of Freudian thought. Notwithstanding, we would like to try to make clearer the objectives of our paper and the standpoint from which they were pursued. The paper is part of a wider project for an internal reading of Freud's metapsychology, and it seeks to grasp the meaning and the relationships of Freud's fundamental metapsychological concepts as they are presented in his work. Of course, there is no reason, given a different or subsequent approach, not to resort to certain philosophical tools in order to solve the conceptual difficulties remarked upon by Dr. Mills. We have no doubt that Hegelian dialectic can be extremely useful for a philosophical re-description of the Freudian instinctual duality, as Dr. Mills suggests. But this was not our objective, at least in the article in question. In our opinion, the philosophical sophistication of Freud's texts is manifest even if only subjected to an internal analysis. Moreover, we never intended to defend the idea that instinctual duality can or should be treated as a metaphysical dualism. On the contrary, we tried to show that this duality is demanded by the internal logic of Freud's theory, and not by the adhesion to a philosophical reference external to psychoanalysis. In this context, one of the terms of this duality—the death drive—seemed more easily justifiable by the theory's presuppositions, while a justification of the theoretical necessity of the concept of a life drive seemed to involve greater difficulties. We do not agree that ours is a standard interpretation of Freudian thought: the more common attitude is either to accept the second instinctual duality at its face value and overlook t