Psychoanalysis

I shall be discussing six books, divided into three pairs. The first pair consists of edited volumes that reprint classic short texts by Freud and gather new essays, by diverse hands, related to them. The second and third pairs consist of monographs, the second pair exploring and developing the methodological principle of free association, and the third examining desire and alterity. The chapter is divided into three sections: 1. Re-Reading Freud; 2. Free Association; 3. Desire and the Other. Each section treats one pairing and, where it is germane, underscores points of connection between texts from different pairings. Two significant books appeared in 2016 which are organized around papers by Freud: Marlène Belilos’s Freud and War and Gabriela Legorreta and Lawrence J. Brown’s On Freud’s ‘Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning’. Belilos’s volume is a dossier of varied material that largely gravitates around Freud’s celebrated exchange of letters with Albert Einstein in 1932. It contains reprints of the exchange itself, ‘Why War?’, in the Standard Edition translation, and of an earlier, less well-known paper by Freud, ‘Wir und der Tod’ (‘Death and Us’), a text that never found its way into the Standard Edition and which is translated by Mark Solms. There are contextual materials relating to Freud’s inscription of a copy of ‘Why War?’ to, of all people, Mussolini, and some theoretical papers by Francophone analysts which take up the relationships among life, death and destructiveness at the core of Freud’s missive to Einstein.

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