1st Edition

From Freud To Kafka The Paradoxical Foundation of the Life-and-Death Instinct

By Philippe Refabert Copyright 2014
    142 Pages
    by Routledge

    142 Pages
    by Routledge

    This book takes the reader on a captivating journey leading from an erroneous founding assumption inherited from Freud, to the proposal of a principle better suited to allowing the psychoanalyst to accompany the patient out of his impasse. The founding assumption of the book, already questioned by many analysts among whom Sandor Ferenczi figures as a brilliant forerunner, was the author's starting point in re-examining the basic precepts of psychoanalysis. Reading Kafka made the author conclude that this masterful storyteller describes borderline situations, so familiar to him, better than anyone. An avid reader of Freud, Kafka suggests that the human capacity to bear a paradoxical position between life and death is not given to the child naturally, at birth. Kafka seems to say that giving life is easy, but that giving it the necessary support in the form of the trace of death is more problematic.

    Part 1 , A misunderstanding between Freud and the man from the country , Oedipus’ answer to Freud’s enigma , A presumed paradoxical endowment , Sketches of the paradoxical system in Freud’s work , A transitional psychic matrix , An origin between absorption and expulsion , Destruction of the paradoxical system: murder of the other in the self , Part II , Failure of the paradoxical system (1): before the Law , Failure of the paradoxical system (2): The Silence of the Sirens and Josephine the Singer , Absorption—expulsion: The Vulture , The vicarious system of the man-from-the-country , The paradox of the birth of the artist: The Judgment , The resolution of a misunderstanding , Schreber’s transsexuality as catastrophic healing and method of survival after the destruction of the paradoxical system

    Biography

    Philippe Refabert