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Anxiety about death waxes and wanes throughout the lifecycle. Adolescents manage this fear through the counterphobic enjoyment of horror and slasher movies and through risk taking. In young and middle adulthood, existential death anxiety is often mitigated by our preoccupation with establishing careers and families. This anxiety reasserts itself as we enter late middle age when our powers begin to wane and an older generation of family and friends begins to die off.
Yalom tells us “We can never live every moment wholly aware of death but we generate methods to soften death's terror. We project ourselves into the future through our children; we grow rich, famous, ever larger; or we embrace an impregnable belief in an ultimate rescuer… Death anxiety is the mother of all religions” (p. 5). Yalom refers to his own atheism several times in the book but emphasizes his respectfulness toward those who believe in a deity and who take comfort in this belief.
Yalom takes as his intellectual giants the classical Greek philosophers, especially Epicurus, who believed that “the omnipresent fear of death was the root cause of human misery.” Yalom rephrases this and asserts that, “death anxiety is the wellspring of many of our worries, stresses, and conflicts” but gives his optimistic twist that “confronting death allows us to reenter life in a richer, more compassionate manner” (p. 9).
Yalom believes that generations of psychoanalysts got off track when Freud said that death had no representation in the unconscious and that “the emphasis on the past is a retreat from the future and from the confrontation with death” (p. 19). Yalom sees death anxiety manifest itself covertly in dreams that permeate his numerous clinical vignettes. Overtly, it is expressed and experienced in worries about abandonment and annihilation. Following Epicurus, one of the salves Yalom proposes against death terror is the acknowledgment of the symmetry of existence—we return to the same nothingness after death