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Those who have decided to follow Freud until the end of his work are few and far between; rarer still are those who have taken up his last drive theory and used it as a serviceable tool for approaching extreme pathologies or the limits of the neuroses. Benno Rosenberg, an eminent French psychoanalyst and member of the Paris Psychoanalytical Society (SPP), was one such. This book is a testimony to his work and aims to carry his thinking beyond the circle in which it was born.
His method was simple: it was to read and reread Freud, and to have others read Freud's work in his seminar at the Institute of Psychoanalysis of the SPP. It was a matter of reconciling the points of convergence and divergence in Freud's writings throughout his life until a light emerged giving meaning to his contradictions. Benno Rosenberg then proposed to trace a new line of coherence that could be shared with all of us. The method was simple, elegant, and above all enlightening; it was Freud, but it was also “Benno” [sic]! Like many others, I am indebted to him for having understood the necessity of Freud's last drive theory, its usefulness, and the notion of drive fusion. The death drive was de-diabolized and became, in spite of everything, a necessary force of life. The changes of perspective
introduced by Benno Rosenberg entail turning away from psychopathology in order to make an understanding of these vital processes possible. The reader will have understood that Benno Rosenberg tackled the most extreme clinical situations, a human condition that could not be reduced to an over-simplistic positivism, and that he required theory to provide support for his therapeutic approach.
It is a pity that behind the sometimes polemical orator some were unable to discover the exceptional pedagogue handling with seriousness “a very fine sense of irony and an amused scepticism” (20). He gave his interlocutor a certain pleasure in thinking together, which is noticeable in the contributions to this boo