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The issue of death and anxieties about death, repression and derepression of existential and predatory anxieties, analytic position and the management of it have received attention in the psychoanalytic literature in singular or isolated ways. However, they have not hitherto been treated as convergent issues within our clinical horizon. This error has been corrected by Robert Langs in his most recent work, Death Anxiety and Clinical Practice.
The book has three parts. The first part deals with basic perspectives on death issues where latent and manifest strategies for observing and formulating death anxiety, death and the systems of mind, and death as a ubiquitous and elusive dread are tackled. The second part focuses on death issues and the patient. Here, Langs covers, among other clinical topics, how the patient deals with death-related triggers, psychological defenses, communicative defenses, death anxiety and its presentation by the patient and its consequences for the frame in treatment. The third and last part emphasizes Langs's views on death anxiety and the therapist's defenses against it as well as problems of technique. Although the three parts are separate in terms of how each part delineates one broad scope of death anxiety, a current runs through the whole book. I shall attempt to give a flavor of Langs's trend of thought.
Langs begins with the idea that “the danger of death appears to be the most fundamental and universal source of adaptive and defensive structures, and historically it has operated as a selection pressure for the development of protective activities from the beginnings of life” (p. 4). Formulations based on language are required to grasp the problems that are posed by the reality of death, the threat of it and the accompanying anxiety, whatever affects are admixed and aroused. Further, language and its capacity to help define the self facilitates in humans the ability to connect experiences as humans try to cope with death as an inplacab