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Though Freud is known to have rejected the salience of death anxiety by reducing it to castration or asserting that the unconscious could not imagine its own death, his writings also demonstrate a nuanced recognition of the psychological importance and complexity of death. This paper will reexamine some of Freud's thinking about death, while extending the implications of Freudian thought to arrive at conclusions which may even contradict Freud's own beliefs. Neoteny correlates with the motive to evade, deny, and restructure aspects of reality which presage annihilation. With the developing ego, death becomes avoided phobically and obsessively through prohibition, displacement, and illusion. A variety of defenses, including repression, denial, isolation, reaction formation, and undoing, operate to keep death and its impact from consciousness. Religious phantasies of afterlives, mummification, and salvation show how death it evaded, forgotten, rejected, turned into joyous
The author has treated death anxiety and its relation to repression, phantasy, and symbolism in several other articles. Those interested, or who feel the present article has neglected important ideas, can consult Piven (in press b, c).
Dr. Piven teaches in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, New School University, where his courses focus on the psychology of religion, evil, and death. He has rained at the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis and is the author of The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima (in press).
phantasies of rebirth. Conscious death anxiety is the anomaly, while repression of death anxiety is the norm. Further, death is a threat to self-preservation, and hence repression of death anxiety is connected to the pursuit of pleasure. Sexuality is not only biology struggling for gratification, but a consequence of prolonged helplessness which renders nearly every postdiluvian experience painful or anxious. Religious phantasies are libidinal transferences which restore the imaginary security of the past.