I have also found myself drawn back to my essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which had been hanging fire, with a strengthened conviction that I am on the right lines in positing a death instinct, as powerful in its own way (though more bidden) as the libido. One of my patients, a young woman suffering from severe hysteria, has just “given birth” to some writings which seem to lend support to my theory: an extreme of libidinous phantasy combined with an extreme morbidity. It is as if Venus looked in her mirror and saw the face of Medusa. It may be that we have studied the sexual impulses too exclusively, and that we are in the position of a mariner whose gaze is so concentrated on the lighthouse the he runs on to the rocks in the engulfing darkness.
Yours,
Freud
The White Hotel
D.M. Thomas - 1981