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This ambitious article asks us to examine arguably our most archaic primitive anxiety, the fear of extinction. Nociforo attempts to explore how this fear underpins the development of terrorism; mafia related links to the most speculative aspects of capitalism; the proliferation of information technology; and also, closer to home, the potential demise of our own profession. I will focus primarily on the latter. Nociforo draws upon Bion’s Group theory, Meltzer’s ideas about Paranoid Anxieties, and Freud’s Oedipal Complex (interestingly the Death Instinct is extinct, at least in this paper), among others, to address the fear of extinction and how it can be projected onto others with disastrous effect.
Nociforo makes use of many theories and insights that are familiar; however, she is encouraging us to apply the way that we use our theories, and our capacity to think with them, to vast, threatening areas, which impinge upon our world and upon our professional identity. She also introduces new concepts or ideas that are unfamiliar, or being developed, such as the ‘Basic Assumption of Omerta’ (p. 1314), or ‘thinkability’ (p. 1312). Overall, she borders on success, despite attempting to do so much in a single paper. I would recommend this article as a basis for reading/discussion groups that may then grapple with complex issues, which require collective experience and the conjunction of many minds. Additionally, this article perhaps makes for important ‘compensatory’ reading for those of us steeped in primarily Jungian thinking, which some suggest has an insufficient conceptualisation of the perverse and the destructive elements of the psyche.