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Eero Rechardt has for many years made important contributions to The Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Review. Since 1978 he has written a number of significant and highly original papers, some of them also published in other journals too. As an expression of gratitude, some of his colleagues in the Finnish Psychoanalytical Society have collected many of his papers in this book.
It is not possible to consider the writings of Eero Rechardt without acknowledging his friend and colleague Pentti Ikonen. The first and main part of the book contains papers written jointly by Eero Rechardt and Pentti Ikonen.
The work of these two pioneers of the Finnish Psychoanalytical Society is built on their understanding of drive theory. In particular, they have developed an understanding of the death drive, “Thanatos”, and how to interpret this drive. They have pursued this understanding in their work with different subjects like the psychology of destructiveness, the problem of binding in narcissistic pathology, the understanding of shame and the meaning of construction.
The second part of the book contains papers written by Eero Rechardt. Here, he discusses his understanding of transference, the psychology of panic anxiety and his thoughts on psychoanalytic theory and psychoanalysis as science. His points of view are illustrated with many clinical examples. He also uses his psychoanalytic understanding in relation to different topics, such as the threat of final destruction in nuclear war and the relation between musical cognition and the development of archaic meaning schemata in infants. This part of the book gives a glimpse of Eero Rechardt's extensive engagement in applied psychoanalysis.
Rechardt and Ikonen's interpretation of the death drive follows Freud's thoughts in “Beyond the pleasure principle” (Freud, 1920). In this paper, Freud describes the death drive as the drive back to the original, inorganic state. Freud himself was careful to point out that his thoughts about this were m