Diatkine considers "the old debate" on the relationship between the death instinct and destructive or violent behavior, a debate which has been present since the First World War, and the theoretical revisions in psychoanalytic theory that to some degree reflected the horrors of that conflict. Diatkine's position is that aggressiveness is not a useful concept in metapsychology. Many naïve psychoanalytic accounts discuss in confused, Adlerian fashion a "quantity of aggression that becomes pathogenic unless discharged." Diatkine maintains that aggression and violence are relational terms which have meaning only for an acting subject and an object that is being attacked. Freud's theory of the death instinct, in contrast, was a purely intrapsychic one: violence and aggression result from intrapsychic contradictions, from conflict between the desires of the individual and that individual's representations of others; in other words, from the dissonance between fantasies and perceptions of