Meetings of the New York Psychoanalytic Society

January 14, 1958. SELF-REPRESENTATION, ANALITY, AND THE FEAR OF DYING. Bernard Brodsky, M.D.

The author postulates that the fear of death is not only derived from castration anxiety and fear of desertion by the superego (separation anxiety), but is also related to memory traces of states in which the self-image was extinguished. In the anal phase these are merged with the psychic representation of the excreted and discarded stool.

Contributions to the understanding of the fear of death are presented: 1. A function of the death instinct (Eissler). 2. A symbolic fear of bad sleep interrupted by anxiety and guilt (Lewin). 3. An outcome of the sense of guilt. 4. From the structural standpoint, fear of death is derived from separation anxiety, castration anxiety, and fear of being deserted by the protecting superego (Freud). 5. What the ego fears from external or internal sources is overthrow or extinction, and stems from either fear of strength of instincts (Freud) or fear of disorganization of the ego (Waelder). 6. Experiences of self-extinction may occur where neutralized energy disappears from the ego (Kris). 7. Self-representation is disturbed in schizophrenics, leading to end-of-the-world fantasies, loss of identity, and sensations of having died (Jacobson). 8. Death is equated by children and by ancient Egyptians with the state of immobility and with the closure of the eyes (Chadwick). 9. Loss of object (death) is expressed by the depressed patient as defecation (Abraham). 10. Death, corpses, and feces are equated in the unconscious (Fenichel). 11. The child's interest in the duality of living and death is based upon the comparison of the erectile penis to the inert stool, leading to rumination upon life and death, the moving and nonmoving flatus, representing the ghost of the stool (Greenacre).

The self-image is primarily a body image, formed by the end of the first year through tactile, oral memory traces of hand-mouth experience and from the percepti