From the author: One of Woody Allen’s latest films, “Irrational Man,” quite successfully shows us the inner emptiness and desire for destruction. The film tells about an episode in the life of gloomy philosophy professor Abe Lucas. Suffering from depression, suicidal thoughts and a complete loss of meaning in life, he comes to teach philosophy in a small town. One of Woody Allen's latest films, Irrational Man, quite successfully shows us the inner emptiness and desire for destruction. The film tells about an episode in the life of gloomy philosophy professor Abe Lucas. Suffering from depression, suicidal thoughts and a complete loss of meaning in life, he comes to teach philosophy in a small town. This emptiness is so unbearable and lifeless that you want to fill it in different ways. And then he tries to get into someone else's life and destroy it. First, the professor finds a young girl who has a boyfriend. He seduces her with his grown-up charisma and depressive reasoning, feeding off her youth and “fresh ideas” that he is so jealous of. The girl's relationship with her boyfriend is gradually fading, she is fascinated by the professor. But this, it seems, is not enough for him. The hero of the film begins to pry into the life of a complete stranger to him, a judge, the thought of killing whom begins to occupy all his time. His entire inner emptiness is filled with fantasies that it is the death of the judge that should give his own life meaning. But is it possible to fill your life by killing another? It seems that we are faced here with what S. Freud designated as an attraction to death and destruction. The title of the film itself is not accidental. After all, “irrational” is something incomprehensible to reason. Something that cannot be explained from the point of view of rational existence, since the matter here does not concern life. Thanatos, Sigmund Freud's term for the death drive. Along with Eros, as an attraction to life, Thanatos is distinguished by its desire for aggression and destruction. Freud emphasized that “the death instinct silently drives man toward death, and it is only through the action of the life instinct that this death-like force is projected outward in the form of destructive impulses directed against objects in the external world.” In other words, the main character is drawn to death, because he feels that something has died inside him, and everything living and dependent around him causes anger, envy and the desire to destroy it. Throughout the film, we see confirmation that there was always something dead, inanimate in this professor, which made him lose meaning and not see any pleasures in life. Without any emotion, he talks about significant events in his life, where his friend’s head was torn off in Iraq, or he helped poor people in Africa. All this sounds so boring that it seems to be not filled with any meaning or life for him. If it is not something fictitious and invented at all. Now he can only steal this “meaning” from others, being very jealous that they have it, and trying to destroy these others. The judge, in part, represents the professor himself. He lives alone, his life is quite gray and monotonous, there are only ritualized actions in it that somehow save him from boredom. Because of these rituals, death comes to him when the hero of the film puts poison in his juice, which he drinks every day in the same place. In a sense, ritual is the opposite of the spontaneity of life, its creative component, flow. In the context of this film, the theme of envy is also very important, which can be very destructive if it is not realized. Envy, according to Melanie Klein, takes its origins from the mother, when the child is very jealous of her that she has something he cannot live without, that she can feed him, but the child himself is not able to do this on his own. This causes gratitude, envy, and a desire to destroy the mother for humiliating dependence on her. However, with normal development, the mother helps