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We do not, ordinarily, think of the feeling of death as contagious. Infectious diseases are, of course, transmissible through a virus, and contagious through contact with an organism carrying the virus.
Psychoanalytic researchers have borrowed the concept from biology, and became interested in the contagion of feelings. Escalona (1953) points to the mother/infant dyad and shows the extreme susceptibility of one to the other of emotions. Spotnitz and Meadow (1976) elaborate on the idea, and extend it to the emotional communication that takes place in the analytic setting between patient and analyst.
Death seems different, though. Death comes in varied sizes and shapes. In the absence of a known physical entity that serves as an infectious agent, we do not think that we must die merely because something else has. The idea of death doesn't seem to be catching.
Yet, there is some evidence that seems to belie our sense that each impulse toward death is independent of every other impulse toward death. The recent phenomenon of teen-age suicide has the look of an infectious disease. Clusters of deaths are occurring. Apparently once one occurs, another is more likely, and yet another, until it begins to have the look of an epidemic.
A psychoanalytic group that I have been running for a little over a year gives evidence of the phenomenological sense of death as contagious. The group was an already established cancer group that. I inherited. At the time that they were bestowed upon me, they had been together for a year, meeting, at first informally, to