You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
A review of the relevant psychoanalytic and philosophical literature reveals that death anxiety is a multi-faceted phenomenon which has been interpreted at several levels of analysis, including the level of infantile conflict and intrapsychic structural tensions, the level of primary instincts, the level of object relations, and the level of ontological givens. Theorists of the Freudian school have typically treated the fear of death as a secondary phenomenon, a compromise formation or derivative which both disguises and symbolically expresses other unconscious infantile anxieties, such as the fear of castration, the fear of separation or object loss, the fear of abandonment and/or persecution by the superego, the fear of one's own self-directed hostility, and the fear of overwhelming sexual excitement. A few writers, mostly Kleinians, have argued that death anxiety derives from the danger arising from the inner working of a hypothetical death instinct. Other authors, within the framework of object-relations theory, have associated death anxiety with both the dread of symbiotic envelopment on the one hand, and the fear of individuation on the other. And finally, the existentialists have claimed that death anxiety, or the dread of imminent Nonbeing, is built into the ontological structure of human existence and hence is omnipresent and at the core of every fear.
The psychoanalytic treatment of a patient suffering from a severe narcissistic personality disorder with borderline features provided insights into yet another aspect of death anxiety — namely, the extent to which the dread of death may be viewed not only as a pathological derivative or an ontological given, but also as a developmental achievement.
The essence of this patient's disorder lay in his extreme narcissistic vulnerability, rooted in a failure, developmentally, to consolidate and internalize a cohesive, stable, and positively colored self-representation. Since he lacked the internal structures necessar