title: Zombie states: reconsidering the relationship between life and death instincts.
abstract: Where the dialectical relation of life and death instincts has become dissociated, zombie states result-in which individuals inhabit deadness as if it were a full experience of aliveness. Bypassing reservations about the speculative nature of these instincts, this paper reconsiders their relation in order to highlight certain types of clinical phenomenology that could otherwise be lost to current ways of conceptualizing aliveness and deadness. A clinical vignette illustrates particular countertransference difficulties associated with dichotomizing issues of psychic aliveness and deadness, as well as the powerful contagion associated with what the author terms zombie states.
authors.affiliation: New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, USA. bruce.reis@nyu.edu
authors.forename: Bruce
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Reis
mesh_terms: D003643:Death; D003861:Depersonalization; D004213:Dissociative Disorders; D006801:Humans; D007323:Instinct; D008297:Male; D001523:Mental Disorders / Q000523:psychology / Q000628:therapy; D011574:Psychoanalytic Theory; D011575:Psychoanalytic Therapy