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.
There are very good reasons to welcome the publication of the second edition of Ronald Britton’s Sex, Death and the Superego: it contains many changes and additions, large and small, and one completely new chapter, titled “PS(n+1) Brain, Mind and Self”, a development of Britton’s 2015 book Between Mind and Brain: Models of the Mind and Models in the Mind. To quote him on the subject of his neuroscientific observations (63): “I believe that some day the concept of the ego will be where the psychoanalytic theory of the mind and the neuro-scientific theory of the brain will meet. That is where Freud started”. About his concept of PS(n1) he says in his Introduction to the present edition:
I conceived of the term PS(n+1) from Bion’s PS< >D. … This seemed too static to me; in my version (n) denotes the current state of what is a lifetime of successive cycles of integration and de-integration. As life moves on and (n) increases in cycles of PS(n)>D(n), new knowledge means abandoning coherence, D(n), for a period of accumulation of facts and formulations that are un-integrated, what I call PS(n+1).
Britton also describes an important theoretical and clinical difference between the previous edition and this one: “I thought of myself as taking a new path, but I soon found out that I was stepping into the footsteps of an earlier pioneer, Ronald Fairbairn. As I have done, he stated that Freud’s system was based on redundant physics” (2). Fairbairn is mentioned only once in the first edition:
The idea that a part of the personality could be an enemy of the central self was described vividly by Fairbairn (1952). Initially he called this “the internal saboteur”, later changing this to “anti-libidinal ego” in a tripartite structure comprising a central ego and a libidinal and anti-libidinal ego. Fairbairn took the view from Melanie Klein that a primordial ego was engaged in object relations from the outset, and that splitting of the ego was its earliest defence. (118)
(Later Klein (1