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BOOK REVIEWS M. Guy Thompson, The Death of Desire. A Study in Psycho- pathology. New York and London: New York University Press, 1985. xviii + 215 pp., $40.00 (cloth); $15.00 (paper). Thompson presents an attempt at synthesizing phenomenological studies made by Scheler, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty with the psychoanalytic tradition. Thompson also tries to synthesize the two approaches of Laing and Lacan. Crucial for Thompson's integrating effort is his understanding of the concept of desire. Thompson follows Lacan in using Hegel's inter- pretation of the concept of desire. This in turn allows for incorporating an essential insight present in Freud's case studies that tends to be absent in his metapsychological studies: Human beings need and look for recogni- tion by others and are therefore emotionally dependent upon others. By conceptualizing human beings in physical terminology through his con- cept of libido, Freud prevents the conceptualization of the emotional dependence of human beings. Conceptualizing human beings by means of the concept of desire brings that dependence into focus. Thompson does not follow Lacan slavishly, though. He was a student of R. D. Laing and thus is privy to an alternative tradition (which includes the whole school of object relations: Klein,
Journal of Phenomenological Psychology – Brill
Published: Jan 1, 1992
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