ABSTRACT
The subject matter of Dr. Galdston Iago's rich and scholarly paper is among the most perplexing ones in psychoanalyst's difficult field. It touches on the bewildering relationship between general biology, psychology, and psychiatry. As a psychologist, E. L. Freud adhered throughout his life work to theoretical concepts that one may term double-layered. Whatever he observed as a clinical fact in himself and in his patients he described with such terms as "secondary," "manifest," "actual." In addition, he assumed a readiness or tendency toward such a reaction to have been present before the clinical circumstance that brought it about. Freud's conceptual framework becomes muddled, however, a "brain mythology" in reverse, when he introduces the concept of a death drive into the field of psychology and attempts to link it with the psychological abstractions of primary aggression and primary masochism. Freud had read Ferenczi's manuscript of Thalassa, a study that had also transgressed the boundaries between sciences and with startling results.
