Longing for Nothingness demonstrates how conflict between a life and death drive structures desire and the formation of the symptom and how this conceptual framework can be used to treat men and women in the nursing home. In the process, Andrew Stein presents a surprising and novel reading of such important psychoanalytic thinkers as Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and Melanie Klein.

In Longing for Nothingness: Resistance, Denial, and the Place of Death in the Nursing Home, Andrew Stein offers a groundbreaking new psychoanalytic treatment of the depression and other mental conflicts suffered by residents living in nursing homes. Freud famously argued that humans had a dual drive, toward life and toward death, and in this new study Stein shows that residents may suffer because they cannot control one part of that dualism, their 'longing for nothingness.' Weaving together elements of Freud's life and writings, Lacanian and Kleinian notions, and clinical material in a new and surprising manner, Stein shows that a frightening breakdown of symbolic and imaginary defenses opens nursing home residents to these deeply repressed longings. Because they often do not know how to respond, the result is an increase in their suffering and tendency to despair. Longing for Nothingness makes an impassioned plea for all people, not only residents of nursing homes, to fully acknowledge the role of death in the structures of their desires. By doing this, they will be spared the unnecessary suffering caused by the struggle to keep their longings for death repressed. Stein presents an alternate strategy: bringing the longings for death a little more into consciousness, where they can be addressed without fueling debilitating symptoms like depression and rage.

Part 1 Part I Death and the Chain of Life
Chapter 2 Chapter 1: The Destructive Side of Our Erotic Life
Chapter 3 Chapter 2: The Theme of Death and Dying in Early Freud
Chapter 4 Chapter 3: Freud's Later Views Concerning Death as a Drive
Chapter 5 Chapter 4: Death and the Other
Chapter 6 Chapter 5: Death and the Chain of Life
Part 7 Part II The Death Drive in the Nursing Home
Chapter 8 Chapter 6: Introduction to Death in the Nursing Home
Chapter 9 Chapter 7: Life for the Resident in the Nursing Home
Chapter 10 Chapter 8: Resident's Narcissistic Frames of Mind
Chapter 11 Chapter 9: Negation of Death in the Nursing Home
Chapter 12 Chapter 10: Coda and Exit