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Death has two faces. One is nonbeing; the other is the terrifying material being that is the corpse. The form of nothingness — a fear that someday one ceases to be. As one grows older one pays more and more attention to the second, material side of death. Nonbeing is infinite emptiness…. It is no coincidence that all poems about death depict it as a journey, but the journey is in vain. When his ride is done, they find him in bed and bang his head on the threshold.
The controversy over the concept of the death drive is far from settled. Even at the special Seminar of the European Psychoanalytic Federation in March, 1984, there was little agreement between the speakers. Their various positions will probably be published independently and need not be reviewed here, except for Eero Rechardt's (with Pentti Ikonen) Presentation of “Vicissitudes of the Death Drive”. Rechardt described the shift to an “inanimate state” as an adaptive attempt to eliminate disturbance caused by aimless, unbound libido. Rechardt thereby detached the death drive from its long supposed tie with destruction. Similar views have been put forward by the present author in previous publications (Lowental, 1981, 1983a) where the manifestations of the drive during the dying process were shown to limit it and make it into only one of several constituents of man's composite motivation for death.
One further note on autodestruction and aggression. These predominate in certain states where outward-directed destructive fantasies as well may be related or inferred, yet these, too, denote only one aspect of the wide range of the death drive as it will be conceptualized below. By the way, we have translated Todestrieb as “death drive” rather