This book is a journey through almost forty years of practice. Each chapter is independent of the others and develops around a specific theme: psychoanalysis in France, the transference, fathers today, psychic bisexuality, the sick body, human destructivity, and so on. The underlying thread is none the less the question of knowing how the drive operates between the biological body and mental functioning consisting of representations and affects, and, especially, how it gives rise to thinking.If thinking is an "act of the flesh", as the author asserts, how can we refine our understanding of...

Desire, Pain and Thought presents a new perspective on primal erotogenic masochism, which Marilia Aisenstein regards as the core of psychoanalytic theory. Aisenstein distinguishes between pathological masochism – the active search for pain – and primal erotogenic masochism, which she believes develops in early childhood.