Description
Book SynopsisThroughout this enlightening collection, Neil Maizels considers the helical tandem between the Life Instinct and the Death drive in the light of canonical literary figures like Thomas Hardy, Patricia Highsmith, Sylvia Plath and Shakespeare, classic filmmakers like Hitchcock and contemporary television shows such as Curb Your Enthusiasm, The West Wing and Succession.
This light is filtered through intricate clinical work whereby Maizels seeks to illustrate and expound on the strength and indefatigability of the Life Instinct. He makes a case for it as the relentless driver of integration and binding in the ever-growing, expansive psyche. He considers both Freud's original equation of the Life Instinct with Eros and a widening interconnecting love of mankind, and Melanie Klein's with gratitude and creative reparation. This book is a multi-layered presentation of the clinical and theoretical work of Neil Maizels as it has evolved and convolved over several de
Table of Contents
1. Inoculative identification in Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train 2.Self-envy, the womb and the nature of goodness – a reappraisal of the death instinct 3. The destructive confounding of intra-uterine and post-uterine feeding as a factor against emotional growth 4. What could be better than nuclear warfare?: An essay on the quest for eirenarchic survival 5. Dreams Grown False: The ‘"cannibalization"’ of alpha function 6. The role of Disidentification in the growth of personality and during the analytic termination phase 7. Working through, or beyond the depressive position? Achievements and defences of a Spiritual position 8. ""I'm Miss Red!"" Reworking a premature weaning in a lonely young girl 9. Loneliness and its amelioration through transformations of the Internal Father 10. Two Vices and a film review i Sometimes a cigar ... on smokers and non-smokers ii The significance of Swearing as a proto-language iii Life and Death of a Planet in Melancholia – a film about depressive cynicism 11 The wrecking and re-pairing of the internal couple: in clinical work and in Shakespeare’s Othello and The Winter's Tale 12 Trees of knowledge in Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders 13 Distraction – as both an important manic defense, and yet also as a creative unconscious consolation when facing immense depressive or disintegrative states 14 Narcissus Rejects: Unbearable Beauty and the urge to destroy it, in The Comfort of Strangers 15 Inconclusive Conclusion: The resilient persistence of the life-death instinct through variations in its relationships with the drive to death
