ABSTRACT
The author firmly plants the Freudian concept of the death drive in the middle of our post-modern world and declares that contemporary clinical practice is a clinical practice of the death drive which is difficult to recognise and to treat as dependency on analysis is spurned and the symbolic dimension avoided. In light of Green’s work on today’s negative sociocultural phenomena, she hypothesises that the death drive is widespread as disinvestment, not as aggression, the death drive’s most visible expression. She argues that what characterises our era is the absence of desire and investment in objects, ideals and vital areas of the Self. She supports this point by arguing that the most underestimated pathology today is addiction, dependence on the non-human (drugs, food, video games) as well as the human (narcissistic relationships in which the Other is considered part of the Self). The author concludes that Freud’s hypotheses remain relevant and deserve to be further explored.
