From Death Instinct to Attachment Theory: The Primacy of the Child in Freud, Klein, and Hermann: Philippe Van Haute and Tomas Geyskens. New York:  Other Press, 2007.  164 pp.

When Freud introduced the concept of the death instinct,1 he acknowledged that it was a highly speculative notion:

It may be asked how far I am convinced of the truth of the hypotheses that have been set out in these pages. My answer would be that I am not convinced myself and that I do not seek to persuade other people to believe in them. Or, more precisely, that I do not know how far I believe in them. [Freud 1920, p. 59]

In the event, few of those others were persuaded; aside from Klein and her followers, most psychoanalysts found the idea both theoretically implausible and clinically dispensable, and Freud himself rarely referred to it in his later writings. For most, it has survived as the ur-text in the evolution of the theory of aggression. In the present, compact volume, two Dutch scholars (identified as “philosophical anthropologists” and practicing psychoanalysts) revisit the concept of the death instinct, both as Freud conceived