On the Death Instinct and Creativity: Freud, Yeats, Joyce, and Us March 23, 2012

A talk by Paul Schwaber, Professor of Letters at Wesleyan University, a practicing psychoanalyst, and author of The cast of characters: A reading of Ulysses.

The forces of living, of eros, of dreaming and of creativity only have meaning in relation to forces of non-living, destruction and a pull toward dissolution of the self. Dr. Schwaber re-traces Freud's path in first conceiving a death instinct and contemplates the dynamics of creativity in the face of the forces of dissolution in two characters dreamed into life by Freud's contemporaries James Joyce and W.B. Yeats: Molly Bloom in Ulysses and Leda in the 1923 poem Leda and the swan.