This volume contains Freud's essay -Creative Writers and Daydreaming- which explores the origins of daydreaming, and its relation to the play of children and the creative process. Each contributor offers an insightful commentary on the essay.

Freud's -Beyond the Pleasure Principle- constitutes a major landmark and a real turning point in the evolution of psychoanalytic theory. Pushing aside the primacy of the tension-discharge-gratification model of mental dynamics, this work introduced the notion of a daemonic force within all human beings that slowly but insistently seeks psychic inactivity, inertia, and death. Diverse and rich connotations of the proposal are elucidated in this book. Other consequences of Freud's 1920 paper--namely, the marginalization of ego instincts, the introduction of Freud's second dream theory, and the...

In -Constructions in Analysis- Freud introduces the notion of constructions, different from interpretation, and considers it necessary--under certain conditions--to reconstruct a part of the infantile history of the subject. The difference between construction and reconstruction as well as which should be the limit of the intervention of the analyst in order to avoid a proposal far removed from the patient discourse, are a part of present debates on this subject.The editors, Thierry Bokanowski, Sergio Lewkowicz and Georges Pragier, together with the contributors to this volume, accepted the...