Lipton’s Journal/February 2, 1955/432: Difference between revisions

It is really incredible that analysts have played with concepts like the death-wish for so many decades now, and yet have done no large work I know of on what are probably the two greatest abstractions for the mass of humanity, Hell and Haven. How much of human behavior is motivated by this, and yet on the environmental accident (or could it have been possible anywhere else?) of psychoanalysis being born in German-Jewish rational circles where Hell and Heaven were considered old-fashioned, the problem relatively has been ignored. One of the most profound and ineradicable human attitudes—“If I hate myself even more, if I think of myself as being even more despicable than my despicable action, then I do not necessarily go to Hell.” Why torture our understanding of life by trying to postulate a death-instinct. The explanation of self-destructive acts is right under our noses.