In defense of the 'death instinct' as promulgated by Freud, a schizophrenic or 'borderline' schizophrenic girl, thirty years of age, is described. The patient had been in analysis for a year but had to stop. She wrote to the analyst a few months after termination of treatment and told of a picture she had seen in which a man lay asleep. Over him was a huge terrifying figure in a black cloak with a dagger in hand, ready to kill the man. The patient's fantasies were as follows: 'I imagined a life self and a death self engaged in a terrible struggle for power over each other. The life self in me lies asleep, weak, hardly aware of the danger. The death self is strong and armed with all the unhappiness of living, the discouragement, despair, hate, anger,—all are in danger.' She felt that her life self was nurtured by favorable circumstances, and the death self by unfavorable ones. Which way the scales tipped determined which prevailed,—the life self with its encouragement and optimism, or the death self with its gloom and destructive thoughts.