You (and many others on this list) probably already know it, but even the title
appears to be ironic, given what you say about the content of the book. In Freud's
early work he thought of drives as biologically driven to preserve the species,
borrowing rather directly from Darwin. After World War I, Freud changed his theory
and postulated the existence of a thanatos drive, a drive toward death and
destruction that undid the positive direction of the eros drive. Freud's later theory
never caught on in psychiatry or psychology;
But Percy evidently wanted us to think that modern psychiatry had itself
fallen into the grips of the very drive in which it did not want to believe.
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