The Dark Self: Death as A Transferential Factor

My Main aim in this paper is to delineate a theoretical model which derives from and embodies the variety of encounters I have had with death, including my own survival of a near fatal illness twenty years ago, my work with dying persons in a hospice programme, and my ongoing analytic practice.

Statements like, ‘It won't kill you,’ ‘Do or die,’ ‘Dead serious,’ ‘Scared to death,’ ‘Death and taxes,’ ‘A matter of life and death’ and innumerable others, each refer in a somewhat indirect way to our shrouded awareness of the omnipresence, intensity and ultimate nature of death. Our commonplace, everyday anxieties concerning any form of risk, failure, need or limitation, all of which inhabit the darker reaches of the self, can be traced ultimately to the ego's most dreaded fantasy: its own extinction. We can glimpse in these expressions, which invade our daily conversations, just how powerful an influence death exerts on our everyday lives, yet our awareness of this inevitable fact of the human condition is apprehensively fragmented and obscured by the illusions that attend the self preservational drive, what Freud aptly called the ‘ego instincts’. Despite the ego's horror in the face of its own mortality, death has tremendous psychological utility. It is in reality the primary catalyst for individuation and offers us the opportunity to enter our own destinies by passing through the ego's illusions into the ineffable essence of human life.