Death and Desire: Psychoanalytic Theory in Lacan's Return to Freud

The influential work of Jacques Lacan challenges readers both for the difficulty of its style and for the wide range of intellectual references that frame its innovations. Lacan's work is challenging too, for the way in which it recentres psychoanalysis on one of the most controversial points of Freud's theory - the concept of a self-destructive drive or "death instinct". "Death and Desire" presents, in Lacanian terms, a new integration of psychoanalytic theory in which the battery of key Freudian concepts - from the dynamics of the Oedipus complex to the topography of ego, id, and superego - are seen to intersect in Freud's most far-reaching and speculative formulation of a drive toward death. Boothby argues that Lacan repositioned the theme of death in psychoanalysis in relation to Freud's main concern - the nature of fate and desire. In doing so, Lacan rediscovered Freud's essential insights in a manner so subtle and penetrating that prevailing assessments of the death instinct may well have to be re-examined. This book should be of interest to professionals in training and practice, undergraduates and graduates in the fields of psychoanalysis, literary criticism, philosophy and feminist theory.