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Robert Langs is a brilliant thinker whose devotion to detail, both in his writing and his approach to clinical practice, is without peer. In this book, he turns his attention to an examination of the psychology of death anxiety and the extensive ways in which it manifests itself in conscious and unconscious communication in the psychotherapeutic relationship. Reading this book is like taking a trip to a foreign land - the experience of different attitudes and concepts inevitably bring into focus one's own personal views that may otherwise be taken for granted. Langs's rigorous attention to securing the frame of the therapeutic relationship and his deeply held belief that any modification of the frame by the therapist always has negative consequences for the patient forced me to once again examine my attitudes regarding the frame. Although I find his position to be too rigid and authoritarian for me, it was valuable to reflect upon his arguments. I found myself paying more attention to boundaries in analytic sessions and more attuned to modifications and their impact upon subsequent process.
Langs proposes that ‘the danger of death appears to be the most fundamental and universal source of adaptive and defensive structures’ designed to ensure survival. Death anxiety is the price we pay for the gift of language, and the capacity to remember the past and predict the future. Accordingly, no human being is exempt from death anxiety, just as no one is exempt from death itself, although the defensive structures of denial and repression allow for living life as if survival is ensured. Utilizing a systems theory approach, he examines the phenomena of death anxiety and the emotion processing