A Child Is Being Killed – On Primary Narcissism and the Death Drive Leclaire

A Child Is Being KilledOn Primary Narcissism and the Death Drive\nAuthor(s): Serge Leclaire, Marie-Claude Hays\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: Stanford University Press, United States\nImprint: Stanford University Press\nISBN-13: 9780804731409, 978-0804731409\nSynopsis\nThe powerful thesis of this book is that in order to achieve full selfhood we must all repeatedly and endlessly kill the phantasmatic image of ourselves instilled in us by our parents. We must all combat what the author calls \""primary narcissism,\"" a projection of the child our parents wanted. This ideathat each of us carries as a burden an unconscious secret of our parents, a hidden desire that we are made to live out but that we must kill in order to \""be born\""touches on some of the fundamental issues of psychoanalytic theory. Around it, the author builds an intricate analysis of the relation between primary narcissism and the death drive.\n\n Each of the book's five chapters begins with one or more case studies dra.