Fear of death derives from intolerance of tension, and from the mechanisms employed to free one's self of all anxiety. Patients with this fear achieve a psychic state that parallels death: in the goal of attempting to destroy the (psychic) illness, they destroy themselves in order to emerge newborn from the ashes of the old self. The concept of death derives from various life experiences, among them a sense of incompleteness, separation anxiety, the affective component of the sinking, falling feeling (Lewin), and the experience of the death of someone toward whom one has been ambivalent. In various ways man has tried to deny death's inexorableness: he stresses its accidental nature, he attributes it to evil spirits, and he constructs such denials as the myth of the phoenix.