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Since Freud introduced the “death instinct” and R. Park founded the study of “thanatology,” there has appeared an abundance of writings: E. Furman10 has gathered over 2000 references. Yet, the death instinct remains a most controversial topic; many authors doubt its existence, while others investigate Freud's personal motives for creating this highly abstract, exceptional concept. One reads about the influence of the First World War with its increased external threats to life, of the possible prodromata of Freud's own fatal disease, and of Freud's own childhood encounters with death. The emphasis on the exemptive aspects of the death instinct, rather than on its integration into the instinctual array, is in disregard of Freud's explicit suggestion: “… the great opposition between the life and death instincts … a similar polarity—that between love and hate. If only we could succeed in relating these two polarities to each other and in deriving the one from the other.”9
Through observation of terminally ill patients I became convinced of the driving momentum of the death instinct, noting its rapprochment and convergence with the life instinct. My explanation is the following: the process of dying brings about a regression to infantile ideation, object-relationships, and to the earliest pattern of emotional response. As active turns passive, coping behavior is abandoned and the unitary matrix of the primary affective constellation is uncovered. The baby in distress had cried for mother's protection and for her warm engulfing closeness—i.e., for a symbiotic reunion, be it at the expense of its own discrete existence. It is a regressive wish for non-being. This was the baby's combined preverbal expression of the interwoven life and death instincts, the precursors of libido and aggression. The death instinct, like the other primary instinctual drives,