ABSTRACT
Andre Green is a former president of that Society and a former director of the Institute of Psychoanalysis. He was Freud Memorial Professor at the University of London. In the natural sciences, of which psychoanalysis is one, clear-cut general concepts are superfluous, indeed impossible, according to Freud. Freud constantly repeated that the basic concepts of a science cannot be demonstrated. If fusion and defusion are the ordinary state in which the amalgamation of the life and death drives can be observed, Freud nonetheless suggests that one can, albeit rarely, observe the death drives in the defused state. In 1923, Freud envisages melancholia as a 'pure culture of the death instinct', which is different from the point of view expressed in 'Mourning and Melancholia'. Freud writes: If one is prepared to overlook a little inexactitude, it may be said that the death instinct which is operative in the organism - primal sadism - is identical with masochism.
