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This paper starts from the thought that we cannot take for granted that a society's highest values will survive in the long term as effective motivators within that society. By ‘highest values’ I mean values such as justice, concern for members of weak and minority groups, and respect for promises and for the attempt to speak truthfully – values that apply at the highest level of generality. If they are to survive and to be effective, two things may be necessary: firstly, unpredictable ‘epiphanic’ moments in which the power of these values is emotionally experienced by individuals, and secondly, institutions and a vocabulary in which these values can be remembered, discussed and affirmed in emotionally and imaginatively impactful ways. I shall suggest, with reference in particular to the thought of Emmanuel Levinas and Ronald Dworkin, that the second of these factors, the remembering and affirmation of values, marks out the crucial, perhaps even the irreplaceable, contribution of a ‘religion’ to a society. The failure, within psychoanalysis and also more widely, to appreciate the working of this function in a society over generations may mean that the consequences of ‘growing out of religion’ (Winnicott) have not yet been adequately recognized.

Consciousness was described by Freud as‘a fact without parallel’. This paper suggests that the attempts by modern psychology and neuroscience to understand consciousness have failed to appreciate that it lies for clear and necessary reasons beyond the reach of 'science’as we have understood it since the seventeenth century. The author goes on to argue that the fact of consciousness implies a world of subjectivity and uniqueness which will only be integrated with the world of empirical science if there can be profound changes in our understanding of science itself; or, alternatively, if clear bounds are recognized to science's domain.

When Freud first put forward his relatively late hypothesis of a death drive, he did so using a rather surprising argument from evolution. However, he came to support it with a neuroanatomical argument dating back to the earliest days of psychoanalysis. In this paper I look at these two streams of argument in some detail, and conclude that neither is persuasive. My thesis is then in two parts: firstly that the death drive, as such, probably merits no future in psychoanalytic thinking; secondly that, though mistaken, Freud's discussion of the death drive was hugely productive for the future development of psychoanalysis. Perhaps the abiding interest of the ‘death drive’ lies in this apparent paradox that mistaken theory can be truly fruitful. … you are right in inferring that I have often been compelled to make detours in following my own path.

If psychoanalysis is a science, then it differs in important ways from other sciences, such as physics, which are often taken as paradigmatic in the field. It does so above all because living beings place a demand upon time. Out of this demand value springs. In the case of human beings, this demand, studied in its greatest depth by psychoanalysis, is not only for the values of survival and reproductive success but also for the values that conduce to psychological growth and health. To incorporate this objective importance of values into a scientific picture involves a huge shift in the way in which we conceive the world, with implications for the wider perception of the sciences in general.