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Psychoanalytic treatments can proceed for many years without more than passing notice being granted to the inevitable reality of one's own death. Especially in the first half of life, which is the period in which most analyses are undertaken, many concerns seem more pressing than the termination of life. Death can be put off as a prospect to the remote future, and anyway is not alterable by what we think about it. But the curious effect of evading consideration of death is that analyst and analysand are omitting—or censoring—from the orbit of associations what is literally a defining thought about human existence. Although all living things, and especially all animals, act to defend or prolong their lives, only humans, as far as we know, are aware of their mortality. That ought to make a difference in the way we lead our lives, and in the way we think about our lives during psychoanalysis. To avoid the idea of death is to be inauthentic about life.
Making Death Thinkable is a compilation of short papers approaching its topic from several angles. While this makes for a degree of disconnection between the chapters, and some repetition, it has the corresponding benefit of promoting an open-minded attitude to a variety of theoretical models. Franco De Masi never strikes one as stuck in a single inflexible mode; this, taken with a comfortable informality of style, put into fluent English by the translator,1 disarms that resistance to the subject which is one of the themes of the book.