ABSTRACT
What leads Freud to this change is not the conflict between an unconscious ruled by the pleasure principle and a rational ego trying, in the name of reality, to overpower the instinctual libidinal demands. For Freud, what lie beyond the pleasure principle are death and aggression. The battle is not between Eros and Ananke, the libidinal sexual instincts facing reality or necessity, but between Eros and Thanatos, life and death. The ‘other’ of reason should not be idealized as desire, as pure instinctual life, for it harbours in its core a threat to life itself. Melanie Klein is the author who took this controversial development of Freud’s theory most seriously. Indeed, by concentrating on the death instinct, she was able to show how, from the very start, the infants are struggling with their destructive as well as their libidinal instincts. We intend to show the particular relevance of Kleinian psychoanalysis to philosophy and the human sciences.
