The Mother, Anxiety, and Death. The Catastrophic Death Complex: By Joseph C. Rheingold, M.D. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., Inc., 1967. 271 pp.

This book is a scholarly and erudite psychological elaboration of the myth of the evil mother, be it Eve, Lilith, Ishtar, Pandora, Anath,

or others, who has brought death and sorrow into this world. The myth paraphrases the universal and innate destructiveness of the mother toward her offspring1 which, according to Dr. Rheingold, is responsible for what he calls man's 'catastrophic death complex'.

The mother's destructiveness includes a general filicidal impulse—'to destroy brutally the infant'—,and a mutilation impulse—a more specific impulse directed toward the infant's genital organs. 'While the mother's filicidal impulse engenders fear of death, her mutilation impulse engenders mutilation fear and the mutilation complex (castration).' Dr. Rheingold believes that already in the womb both filicidal and mutulating impulses of the mother are conveyed to the infant through empathy. The ego of the newborn 'is able to perceive external danger and its own helplessness'. He 'knows' about the mother's unconscious impulses and responds to them with 'terror that is beyond imagination'. Even the foetus possesses an ego that is able to evaluate external danger and may even be 'neurotic'.

Anxiety is the re-experiencing of organismic disturbance produced in the infant by the catastrophic threat of the maternal destructiveness. This is modifiable only to a degree by later experiences. Anxiety does not repeat, as Freud thought, the response of the infant to the inevitable postnatal deprivations caused by the delay of need gratification. The latter gets meaning only through the impact of the infant's realistic appraisal of the threat deriving from the maternal destructive impulses. 'Fear of separation', 'maternal deprivation', and 'yearning for mother' are one-sided formulations that do not consider the influence of 'maternal sav