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“Death” generally refers to the end of life. In line with different concepts of life arise corresponding meanings of death. One then means not just the process of dying, the destruction of life, but the end itself.
I will not attempt to give a kind of encyclopaedic classification of different conceptions of death: biological, psychological, sociological, ethical, medical, philosophical and religious. Such an enumeration would hardly be interesting. I would personally expect an article on death to consist of the author's own subjective, committed ideas and standpoints on the subject matter.
It is difficult to present these thoughts. One hesitates to speak seriously about death. Both the speaker and the audience feel awkward. One necessarily glides into religious questions, which are also considered tabu.
Some psychoanalytic thinking has been done on this topic, albeit little. I would maintain that death is not a psychoanalytic problem, that is to say, cannot be resolved through psychoanalysis. Anxiety in the face of death is of course an important practical analytic question, but I will not go into this question here. The analysis of that fear is dependent upon the analyst's own ideas about death, and on the question of death itself, I would like to here make a contribution. Neither will I discuss here the therapy and ministrations of the dying.
Of all the many relevant related problems, I will address only a few themes, each of which is in itself quite comprehensive. Unfortunately, the difficulty is compounded by the fact that the following discussion requires some philosophical and mathematical understanding, which is, as is well-known, not so popular among psychoanalysts. To deal with these questions thoroughly will unfortunately not be possible due to the limited scope of