Death as A Countertransference*

There is only one case in which despair is pure. It is that of the man condemned to death.

Psychotherapists frequently have a queasy feeling about Freud's disquisitions on death. These are the formulations of Freud they least often discuss and only infrequently write papers about. Since these conceptions came somewhat later in his career, they are often attributed to the insecurities of aging, or to difficult cultural experiences. Thus Eros is most prominent in psychoanalytic theory, where-as Thanatos recedes into the background. It is not my purpose in this essay to make a case for or against the death instict† or even to offer didactic advice on the handling of the fear of death.1 I want rather to highlight a problem in psychotherapy not frequently seen in this special perspective, and to point out its implications for the treatment.

As man's powers of mass destruction have grown, so has the topical discussion of death in psychotherapy. If a word count could be taken of a random sample of coeval psychotherapeutic protocols, death would show a tremendous rise in contentual frequency. The existential psychiatrists and philosophers have pointed up the growing frequency of despair and alienation in Western culture and have