DT: My main focus will be justified doubts about the premature resort to the explanation of an individual subject’s mind attacking itself. While according to psychoanalysis this can occur, there are many other routes leading to the same mental outcome. I will give a perspective on what I have observed as a psychoanalytic clinician.
LB: In post-Kleinian thought a ‘deathly state of mind’, one depicting a state or enactment of mindlessness, is commonly interpreted in terms of the activity of the Death drive where a (primary) destructive force is directed at the thinking capacities of the mind. I critically consider the theoretical basis for this interpretation in Bion’s theory of thinking, and suggest another explanation.