Freud, Psychoanalysis and Death by Liran Razinsky (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2014;  303 pp.)

In Freud, Psychoanalysis and Death, Liran Razinsky proposes that death appears to be an aporia in the Freudian system due, in large part, to the fact that Freud could not reconcile the issue of death's representability in the unconscious, or more precisely, the impossibility thereof. In his view, the psychoanalytic ‘approach’ to the issue of mortality would be more accurately described as an evasion, a selective inattention originating in Freud's assertion that death has no place in the unconscious and amounting to what he perceives as the systematic denial, repression or reduction of the psychic significance of death's singularity in the theory and practice of psychoanalysis.

At the outset, Razinsky's aim appears to be to offer an intellectual biography of Freud as seen through the prism of death. Indeed, he provides a compelling and detailed evaluation of Freud's relation to his own finitude as source of conflicting affects, contrasting Freud's personal obsession with his own mortality as evidenced, for instance, in his correspondence with Fleiss and Ferenczi, with his denial of any correlative to death in the unconscious and his subordination of the fear or anxiety provoked by death to the fear of castration, loss, separation or guilt. Drawing out this disparity, Razinsky's insinuation is that Freud, unable to reconcile his deep ambivalence to death or broach the issue directly, attempted to overcome or master this inevitable threat theoretically through diversions punctuated by outright dismissal. But the repressed invariably returns, and Razinsky argues that despite Freud's explicit ‘theoretical rejection’ (Razinsky, 2014, p. 44), his conflicts with death, personal and analytical, are written into his texts, appearing in derivative forms in The Interpretation of Dreams and later as a symptomatic ambivalence in his 1915 paper ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death’, both of which reflect the tension between the centrality of death in Freud's thought and his res