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I recently lost a beloved analytic teacher and colleague, Selma Kramer, to death. The deep sense of sadness that followed not only stirred up affects pertaining to some earlier losses but also brought certain pre-existing conceptual preoccupations again to my attention. I began to think of death, not only in the setting of mourning for my senior colleague, but in the context of psychoanalytic theory at large. I felt that psychoanalysis has not squarely faced the issue of death. To be sure, there exists literature on grief following death, ranging from Freud's (1917) “Mourning and Melancholia” to the more recent contributions of Pollock (1970), Engel (1975), and Volkan (1981), to name a few. However, it is not mourning over death that I have in mind when I say that psychoanalysis has side-stepped this profoundly important facet of human life. Perhaps, the wording of this preceeding sentence itself gives us a hint. Is death apart from life? Or, is it a part of life? Is it an unexpected, shocking, and traumatic occurrence that happens only to others and, when it does, has to be psychically metabolized by those left behind? Or, do affects and fantasies (conscious or unconscious) about death exist throughout life, exerting silent or, at times, not too silent, impact upon the dynamics and structure of the human mind?
In his second dual-instinct theory which juxtaposed life and death instincts, Freud (1920) valiantly attempted to take the latter position and show that certain mental operations (e.g. repetition compulsion, the Nirvana Principle) have subterranean links to the ever present, intrapsychic pull towards non-existence. Most subsequent analysts, however, laid the postulate of death instinct to rest. Even Melanie Klein, who seemingly championed the concept, largely focused upon the externalized manifestations of death instinct and not upon the issues of death and dying themselves, as these might exist in the deepest layers of the human psyche. Death instinct, in its