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At a time when much of contemporary psychoanalysis considers drive theory a relic of old-fashioned, European-style Freudian thinking, and when—and even more so—the Death Drive has been voted out by majority
acclamation, to publish a book whose title starts with Thanatos certainly speaks of a courageous commitment to all facets of our psychoanalytic discourse.
Accordingly, Karnac and the Harris Meltzer Trust deserve a big thank-you for publishing this book. And so do its authors, Pentti Ikonen and Eero Rechardt—both towering figures in Scandinavian psychoanalysis, and also (though perhaps less so) internationally known. Collaborators and friends for decades, Ikonen and Rechardt share “an interest in Freud as a thinker” (p. xi) and have devoted their lives as analysts to carving out in particular their views on the theory and clinical application of Thanatos, with its two branches: shame and destructiveness.
Freud never used the term Thanatos in his writings,1 but stayed with the notion of Todestrieb (death drive, or death instinct in Strachey's translation) —even though he did not hesitate to use the term Eros for his life instinct. This asymmetrical word choice is peculiar. What could it mean that Freud used Eros, a term borrowed from classical mythology, for his life drive, while sticking with the bodily anchored, biologically leaning drive notion for his death instinct? In his later years, didn't he call instinct theory our “mythology,” and characterize the death instincts in particular as more enigmatic and demonic—thus mythical—than the life drives?2
This choice might reveal Freud's oscillation at the juncture between his first conception, defining the drives as the body's demand on the mind, and his second conception, which draws on mythical entities in order to describe the mysterious, powerful, and indefinite character of human strivings.
And what do Ikonen and Rechardt mean to indicate by changing Freud's term Todestrieb into the Greek notion Thanatos'? Explic