History and contents of the book

'The Death Instinct and Knowledge' was published in1972 in a cultural context where Freudian thought dominated in not only the field of psychoanalysis. (It is currently in its eighth edition and published by Nuove Edizioni Romane). For this reason, it was ostracized resulting in the author's expulsion from the Italian Society of Psychoanalysis in 1976 and a general and prolonged silence from Italian culture. This silence has been recently broken and room has been made for progressive awareness of the innovative theses of the book. This congress marks a high point in the evolution of this awareness. In fact, the book preceded by 20 years current mass media reports discussing the death of Freud.
Its formulation of the discovery of the dynamics of psychic birth and the related proposal of an original mental sanity of the human being has had 2 important consequences in the field of psychotherapy.
The first is the possibility to 'do psychotherapy', that is to cure psychic reality once it has become ill, avoiding the Freudian desperation of an unmodifiable unconscious. This marks the beginning of a confrontation still evident with the current trend of psychiatry reliant on organic and pharmaceutical concepts.
The second consequence is the 'Epistemological break' with a dogma, including the secular one, of the impossiblity to know the unconscious. Such a break, in turn, has relevant effects on research on the formation of the image and of language - both verbal and figurative.
Further information about events related to the book 'The Death Instinct and Knowledge' and on the related expulsion is contained in an article delivered at the 5th Conference of the International Association of the History of Psychoanalysis, held in Berlin in 1994.

Foreword to the first edition of The Death Instinct and Knowledge
The Disappearance Fantasy - Chapter I of The Death Instinct and Knowledge