Epilogue

Creating connections between past, present, future, and the self by procreating is how humans grapple with death and the limitations of life. This theme, described by Kulish, reverberates in all the other articles, reflecting the inexorable power of a life force, which Freud (1920) described in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. He described this life force as part of a duality with a death force where death always wins out.

From a philosophical perspective, he may have been correct, but from the perspective of living human beings, life always wins as long as we are alive and, since we cannot comprehend death while we are alive, all we have is life and our creativity in dealing with death. This issue of Psychoanalytic Inquiry is a loud statement of the pervasiveness of life over death in human nature. Freud wrote pessimistically about the overbearing power of death that has reverberated in the analytic literature ever since, especially in clinical psychoanalysis, although 100 years since writing, we are still vitally thinking and debating over his creative endeavor about the place of the death force in life.

Melvin Bornstein, M.D.

Issue Editor