The Symptom, Fear of Death

Many attempts have been made to identify prototypical experiences of life from which our concept of death has emerged. It must be considered derivative since no experience short of death is similar enough to warrant comparison. Sleep, unconsciousness, separation, etc., are extensively reviewed in the literature of psychiatry as bases of comparison. Our discussion of fear of death as a symptom must consider these.

Patients experiencing a fear of death often feel a sense of incompleteness, which has suggested many origins of this fear. Chadwick (6), in a cultural consideration of the sequence of death and castration as punishment, suggests that since castration is a lessening of the death punishment, castration fear may be a derivative of the primary fear of death. The incompleteness of castration is suggested as specific for our understanding of fear of death. Separation has also been described as the primary experience expressed in this symptom. Separation from the breast, in particular, is considered by many the prototype of fear of death and of castration. Klein (17) regards fear of death as primary anxiety but believes that castration and fear of death are supplementary, saying, “The loss of the genital means the end of the creative power which preserves and continues life.” Accepting the concept of life and death instincts operating at birth, she writes that the painfulness of the birth experience accentuates the persecutory anxiety and makes the death instinct felt as an overwhelming attack. Zilboorg (22) writes that the term “self-preservation” implies a force of disintegration and that the affective aspect of the resistance of this force is fear of death. Ferenczi (7), developing the idea that the child is closer to “individual non-being” and not protected from it by the adult's experience, suggests that neither the life force nor the death force has any great innate strength, but each is established through experience. Fodor (8) suggests that ‘fear of death i