Rob Weatherill, who has made the death drive a major research topic since his book The Sovereignty of Death (Weatherill 1997), draws in the collective, societal aspect Laplanche highlights. He starts with a past generation’s  appalling collision with the death drive in the shape of  First World War,  and goes on to consider our current rediscovery  of it in the anarchy of Brexit. The current state of psychoanalysis, especially in the Lacanian part of it, is seen as part of the same descent. Weatherill’s paper too is enriched by references to many and varied texts and authors.

Ben Hooson, on the other hand, offers a close, meticulous reading of Freud, setting against one another his early text The Project for a Scientific Psychology (Freud 1950) and Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud 1920). Both of these notoriously difficult works are treated with a wry humour in a fresh and surprising approach.  Hooson concludes with a surprise too: the death drive is the saviour of our sanity!

We received an unusual number of book reviews this time, and with them two innovations for Sitegeist. Two of the reviews are of books from psychoanalytic giants, Jung and Laing, rather than newly published books, combining book review with personal assessment of these figures. And for the first time too, we have been asked to publish a response to a past book review, Chris Oakley’s of Rob Weatherill’s book The Anti-Oedipus Complex (Weatherill 2017), in our last edition. This we were pleased to do and Weatherill’s response is included here. It is always a special pleasure to publish reviews of books by Site authors, and there are two here: one of Julie Walsh’s co-edited volume Narcissism, Melancholia and the Subject of Community and the other Christina Moutsou’s new book Clinical Fictional Narratives in Relational Psychoanalysis. The latter was the subject of the second in Sitegeist’s series of occasional events. Watch out for the third, scheduled for November.