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In his brief introduction to his book Hägglund refers to the magnitude of his subject—the incomprehensible nature of death, and the overwhelming fear and sense of helplessness which it induces in us, and he sets out to explore the ways in which we meet it. To do this he considers creativity and its roots in life processes, in order to see if the same dynamics are operative in enabling us to approach death in a creative way, and so to consider the meaning of creativity from the perspective of death. I am doubtful about this distinction; a search for a creative attitude to death would seem to involve an acceptance of life and death as a unified process. Jung expresses this when he says ‘From the middle of life onwards, only he remains vitally alive who is ready to die with life.’ Hägglund has stated the limits of his approach, he has excluded a wider discussion about meaning and has concentrated on investigating the nature of creativity in the context of psychoanalytic concepts. By approaching the subject in this way he is bringing the relatively familiar into relationship with the unfamiliar, which is helpful in breaking down the taboos with which we tend to approach death, but, in my view, it over-emphasises a causal-mechanistic, as distinct from a teleological, approach to the dying process.
Hägglund divides his book into five sections. In each there is a survey of the psychoanalytic literature relevant to the subject, and he is meticulous in stating his references. In the first section of the book he discusses the fear of death in all its forms both as a reality and as a neurotic phenomenon belonging to childhood anxieties. He then summarises five psychoanalytic case studies on work with dying patients, and elucidates a theme from these studies as follows: the principal defence mechanism against the fear of death is denial; only after this defence fails do more primitive mechanisms such as projection and introjection become operative. The dynamic aspect of the dyin