1st Edition
The Life-Death Instinct Feeling Through Creative-Clinical Moments
Throughout this enlightening collection, Neil Maizels considers the helical tandem between the Life Instinct and the Death drive in the light of canonical literary figures like Thomas Hardy, Patricia Highsmith, Sylvia Plath and Shakespeare, classic filmmakers like Hitchcock and contemporary television shows such as Curb Your Enthusiasm, The West Wing and Succession.
This light is filtered through intricate clinical work whereby Maizels seeks to illustrate and expound on the strength and indefatigability of the Life Instinct. He makes a case for it as the relentless driver of integration and “binding” in the ever-growing, expansive psyche. He considers both Freud’s original equation of the Life Instinct with Eros and a widening interconnecting love of mankind, and Melanie Klein’s with gratitude and creative reparation. This book is a multi-layered presentation of the clinical and theoretical work of Neil Maizels as it has evolved and convolved over several decades. It places the feeling through of one’s conflicts at the heart of the mind’s generation of a unique identity, equipped to evolve its own unique form of creative spirit in the face of life’s most pressing psychological challenges: the limitation of time, and reciprocated beauty.
The Life-Death Instinct: Feeling Through Creative-Clinical Moments is important reading for anyone seeking to expand their knowledge in this fascinating intersection of psychoanalysis and the arts.
1. Inoculative identification in Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train 2.Self-envy, the womb and the nature of goodness – a reappraisal of the death instinct 3. The destructive confounding of intra-uterine and post-uterine feeding as a factor against emotional growth 4. What could be better than nuclear warfare?: An essay on the quest for eirenarchic survival 5. Dreams Grown False: The ‘"cannibalization"’ of alpha function 6. The role of Disidentification in the growth of personality and during the analytic termination phase 7. Working through, or beyond the depressive position? Achievements and defences of a Spiritual position 8. ""I'm Miss Red!"" Reworking a premature weaning in a lonely young girl 9. Loneliness and its amelioration through transformations of the Internal Father 10. Two Vices and a film review i Sometimes a cigar ... on smokers and non-smokers ii The significance of Swearing as a proto-language iii Life and Death of a Planet in Melancholia – a film about depressive cynicism 11 The wrecking and re-pairing of the internal couple: in clinical work and in Shakespeare’s Othello and The Winter's Tale 12 Trees of knowledge in Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders 13 Distraction – as both an important manic defense, and yet also as a creative unconscious consolation when facing immense depressive or disintegrative states 14 Narcissus Rejects: Unbearable Beauty and the urge to destroy it, in The Comfort of Strangers 15 Inconclusive Conclusion: The resilient persistence of the life-death instinct through variations in its relationships with the drive to death
Biography
Neil Maizels has been a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and clinical psychologist with children, teens and adults for over four decades, and has published internationally in journal papers and book chapters. With a special interest in the arts and psychoanalysis, he is also a professional composer and artist. He lives in Melbourne, Australia.
