The concern of this book is the levelling out of meanings and values in contemporary culture. We seem preoccupied with survival at the expense of human suffering. The paradox running through this work is that increasing riches and abundance creates inner weakness, impoverishment and loss of control. Internal reserves are being depleted at the same rate as external ones. Alarm is expressed about relationship breakdown, sex abuse, hard porn, addiction and violence. There is nothing new in that, except that this work attempts to create a rigorous psychoanalytic commentary on these critical issues. The loss of a religious dimension and the rise of the new therapies, the crisis in parenting and education, feminism and the collapse of male narcissism, the loss of privacy under capitalism are all explored in the context of the breaking of social bonds which is loosening the social fabric world-wide, creating dislocation and fragmentation. Psychoanalysis, outside the clinic, has much to contribute here, turning, as it does, around the themes of transgression, repression and liberation and so on.

This work brings Freud’s most neglected, yet radical, concept of the death drive into sharp focus. Without this concept psychoanalysis loses all its power and rigour. The book begins with the Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, then takes us through the work of Klein and Bion, coming up to date with contemporary work in biology as well as Lacanian psychoanalysis and the postmodern cultural theory of Jean Baudrillard.

What is the death drive? Is it just another word for destructiveness, which good therapies or drug regimes might be able to dispose of? Is it a response to the failure of early parenting? Is it an excess at the core of human subjectivity? Is it a biological given, or should we ever consider the death drive outside the context of the twentieth century - our culture of unbounded positivity haunted by its own deferred death? This book takes the death drive theory to be fundamentally destabilising at the level of culture and psychoanalysis itself. It is exciting, apocalyptic, challenging and provocative....

This book forms a volume (No. 3) of The Encyclopaedia of Psychoanalysis, being developed by Rebus Press, concerning the more neglected areas of psychoanalytic theory. This particular book will be of interest to mental health professionals and anyone else who has ever questioned traditional consoling notions of therapy and human nature. Can we really afford to ignore the death drive, which formed such a crucial "second reference point" in Freud’s thinking? The contributors to this volume focus their attention on the death drive and explore the wide-ranging implications of the theory across diverse fields, from biology to literature, from addiction studies to popular culture, from philosophy to ethics, as well as within the discipline of psychoanalysis itself.

The death drive concerns extremes: on the one hand, an impossible excess of pleasure and pain, and on the other an ineluctable, morbid repetition of the Same; impossible excitement and zero stimulation. The death drive appears as an alien force at the heart of life. Freud realised that there was indeed something beyond the pleasure/reality principle that constitutes our human normality. We ignore it at our peril.....

‘Therapy may be mad,’ declares Rob Weatherill in this outspoken volume. Therapy here means particularly psychotherapy and counselling, but can be taken to signify the whole therapeutic culture of well-being. More and more people believe in therapy who have lost belief in everything else, but their faith is misplaced. ‘For a long time now it has been punching above its weight.’
Counselling and therapy yearn to bring about integration within and between people. The dominant ethos is a holistic one. This book aims to refute, primarily through the prism of modern psychoanalysis and postmodern theory, the notion of a return to nature, to holism, or to a pre-Cartesian ideal of harmony and integration. Far from helping people, therapy culture's utopian solutions may be a cynical distraction, creating delusions of hope. Yet solutions proliferate in the free market, to the precise degree that there are no solutions. This is why therapy is our last great illusion.