… the new film based on Don DeLillo’s novel of that name —
Cronenberg focuses on the psycho-biological forces that resist a man’s best-laid plans: the lust for chaos and destruction latent in an optimized order, the need for degradation that’s fed by a rigid discipline of self-exaltation, the sickness manifested in an excessive concern for health, the trend to self-mutilation in obsessive grooming, the hunger for colossal failure in the drive for success and for death in the vigilant and violent defense of life all emerge in the course of the film and invest it with an oppressive tension that Cronenberg maintains skillfully.
— reminds UD of these lines from Adam Phillips, a British psychoanalyst:
There are parts of ourselves – that don’t want to live, that hate our children, that want ourselves to fail… [T]here is something strange about humans: they are recalcitrant to what is supposed to be their project.
August 18th, 2012 at 10:39AM
http://newbooksinpsychoanalysis.com/2012/03/19/leo-bersani-and-adam-phillips-intimacies-university-of-chicago-press-2008/