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Whereas the subject of adaptation and mourning in relation to object loss has been the focus of considerable attention in the psychoanalytic literature (Pollock, 1961; Siggins, 1966; Miller, 1971), relatively little attention has been paid to the process by which the individual anticipates, reacts to, and comes to terms with his own death. The discrepancy is less extreme when the comparison is limited, as perhaps it should be, to writings about anticipation of object loss in contradistinction to those dealing with the anticipation of one's own mortality (the loss of the self), since the literature on anticipatory mourning in general is relatively sparse (Futterman et al., 1972). Nevertheless, of the three topics—adaptation following object loss, adaptation in anticipation of object loss, and adaptation in anticipation of the loss of the self—the last has undoubtedly been investigated and discussed least.
Those psychoanalytically oriented authors who have been contributors to the recent dramatic groundswell of scientific interest in the psychology of death and dying, or “thanatology,” generally agree that psychoanalysis has not accumulated a body of clinical observations in this area and has given the subject relatively little emphasis theoretically. Eissler (1955), for example, is struck by the failure of psychoanalysis to build upon Freud's original formulations. He writes:
Since Freud has made death a central concept of his psychological system one would have expected that psychoanalysis would devote more effort to the study of death itself. Strangely enough, this has not happened. In general, death is still viewed as a purely biological phenomenon unless
Page 233it is consciously or unconsciously induced by man himself [p. 39].
Similarly, and much more recently, Avery Weissman (1977) has observed, that along with psychiatry as a whole, psychoanalysts have avoided the subject:
Schur's contemporary study of Freud's thoughts about death and extinction underscores this anomaly