The Destructive Element: British Psychoanalysis and Modernism

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.