ABSTRACT
Using vignettes from two cases from her clinical practice as well as memoirs by American female writers, the author considers the death drive’s “Nirvana-side” and the resulting masochism and repetition compulsion. She argues that repetition compulsion is the main hindrance to both analysis and life. Next, she discusses the transgenerational transmission of repressed and split instinctual aspects. She considers these aspects as psychic holesthat plague a generation because the previous generation did not work through them. The chapter concludes with a question about woman’s body today: is it the battleground where the death drive wages its current war? Freudian psychoanalysis was founded on hysteria and, by extension, female desire. Something similar yet opposite is happening in psychoanalysis today: female patients deny desireand use their bodies for this denial. This renders the female body a symbolic place for both hysteria and the denial of desire.
