ABSTRACT
Where the dialectical relation between the life and death instincts become dissociated, ‘zombie states’ result in which individuals inhabit deadness as if it were aliveness. This chapter takes up psychic deadness to argue that these states actually reflect an alive deadness, where the individual is neither depressively collapsed (dead) nor fully alive, but animated in his deadness without self-reflective capacities or idiomatic signatures. This chapter utilizes a clinical vignette to illustrate particular countertransference difficulties associated with aliveness and deadness in the analytic situation, as well as the powerful contagion associated with zombie states.
