The Destructive Element

Book excerpt: Freud's account of the sublimated drives at work beneath the surfaces of advanced societies, alongside the modernist fictions of Joyce, Proust, Kafka, Woolf and others, both reflected and inaugurated a strain of modernism preoccupied with the darkest elements of the human psyche. In The Destructive Element Lyndsey Stonebridge examines the career and legacy of British psychoanalyst Melanie Klein as a lens through which to examine the 20th century's fascination with death drives, the sublimation of civilization's discontents and the socialization of children--fascinations that would surface throughout the cultural production of the West. At once cultural history and psychoanalytic theory, and a bold reformulation of the legacies of modernism, The Destructive Element is an essential contribution to our understanding of the Western tradition.