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It is my intention to propound and to defend the thesis that “those who fear to die lack the courage to live.” This I advance not as an exercise in scholasticism, or as a proposition for dialectic fencing, but rather as a conviction derived from clinical experience. In other words I advance my thesis as a postulate in psychodynamics. But first I must define the two crucial terms involved: to die and to live. In the sense I employ them, they are the equivalents of Eros and Thanatos. “To live” implies the dynamic process of “self-fulfillment.” To die does not mean “exitus,” the instant of the final and irrevocable dissolution of the living process. In my usage, to die refers rather to that phase of Eros wherein the investments heretofore made in the immediate person of the individual are henceforth made in other personages and in the social organism. At first blush it may appear as if I had with some violence distorted the common meaning of the expression to die to suit my convenience. But a little reflection will suffice to correct that impression. The vernacular is replete with sayings that accord with my usage, as for example: “to die by degrees” and, even more pointedly, “to have given the best part of one's life.” Furthermore, I want to relate my thesis—that “those who fear to die lack the courage to live”—to Freud's postulated death instinct. Thanatos in Freud's intention is also a something other than exitus.
I do not, however, want to entangle either you or myself in the briary wilderness of semantic subtleties. Even as Freud derived his theory of the death instinct from clinical experience, so do I base my thesis on clinical experience. And to these experiences I must refer, drawing from them, and not from semantics, such support and validation for my propositions as they will afford me.
I must begin with Freud's theory of the death instinct. Of all the theories which Freud postulated, this, I believe, is the one which has proved least acceptable to his discipl