Introduction to the Book

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.

Founding Assumption and Re-examination

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.

Influence of Kafka

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’s Perspective on Life and Death

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.