“This is a sharp, courageous, innovative and highly documented exploration of one of the most problematic, unsolved and disputed areas inside freud’s theory: preservative drives, in between life and death drives.

Cordelia Schmidt-Hellerau develops here a revolutionary approach to the topic, involving an unexpected, substantive metapsychological revision, a subsequent remarkable change of clinical perspective, and a further reconsideration of many cultural assumptions which are connected with this new vision.

A convincing proposal about a theoretical “shibboleth” that played for decades and still plays a divisive role in the psychoanalytic community”

Stefano Bolognini
IPA Past President

Cordelia Schmidt-Hellerau, Ph.D., studied literature, philosophy and psychology in Heidelberg and Zürich, where she worked as a university professor for clinical psychology. She is a training and supervising analyst at the Swiss Psychoanalytic Society and at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. Her areas of expertise are metapsychology, in particular drive theory, its clinical application, and applied psychoanalysis of creative processes. She is the author of two books and over 40 articles, published in many languages, and edited a Freud Reader and two collections of Short Stories. Currently she is the Chair of the IPA in Culture Committee. She works in private practice in Chestnut Hill.