The Origin of the Death Drive

In this episode we talk psychoanalytic theory and practice. With Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle as our touchstone, we get speculative about human desire, the death drive, and the relationship between psychoanalysis and political struggle. We discuss the problem of scaling up from individual psychology to collective organizations, the opacity of the subject, and some of the psychosocial pathologies peculiar to the United States here in the twenty-first century. We could all use a bit more transference!

leftofphilosophy.com | @leftofphil

References:

Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1989).

Music: Vintage Memories by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com