The author repudiates the concept of a death instinct as explaining the fear of death, and supplements Freud's derivation of the fear of death from castration anxiety and object loss. This common fear is related to memory traces of earlier states in which the self-image is extinguished. Data from three analytic patients emphasize the anally fixating influences common to the mothers of the three, and their prolonged interference with the autonomy of the patients in childhood. The