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Recent Years have seen the publication of three important books that treat, each in a different manner, the issue of Freud's attitude toward
death. Starting with Adam Philips's Darwin's Worms, through Diane Jonte-Pace's Speaking the Unspeakable, and culminating in Jerry Piven's Death and Delusion: A Freudian Analysis of Mortal Terror, all three books deal, exclusively or together with other issues, with death in Freud. In addition to a short review of each of them, I discuss the shift these three books represent in psychoanalytic thinking about death. Whereas earlier critics pointed out the deficiencies in Freud's thinking, the books under review each present Freud's ideas on death as a contribution, something to learn from. Freud, the authors claim, has something to teach us regarding mortality and our attitude toward it, especially when we have existential concerns at heart.1 I suggest, however, that although this new approach has its merits, something is lost if analysts too readily adopt it without taking into account the earlier criticism of Freud's approach.
Freud argued that death has no place in the unconscious and that death anxiety is always reducible to something else. What for so many non analytic thinkers and artists was the most troubling of the givens of existence was, to a large extent, for Freud and later for the majority of analysts, merely a byproduct of other factors or a symptom. It is this emphatic bias in psychoanalytic thought that became the target of pointed criticism of such authors as Yalom (1980), Hoffman (1979), Rank (1945), Searles (1961), Becker (1973), and Lifton (1979). Their criticisms are sharp and well written and convincingly reveal Freud's blind spot. Yet the curious riddle is how their criticism was received. These books appealed to a certain kind of audience. Yalom's book is an essential one for practitioners of existential analysis. Becker won the Pulitzer Prize, attracted a group of followers, and even influenced empirical