Rheingold, Joseph C. (1967).  The Mother, Anxiety & Death:  The Catastrophic Death Complex.  Boston:  Little, Brown & Company (click the previous link for information on purchasing through Amazon).

80--Much of what is described as "deprivation" of the child is motivated by maternal hostility, which expresses itself typically in impulses to mutilate and to annihilate. The infant is "aware" of these impulses in the mother, even though they may be repressed and coexist with a conscious attitude of tenderness.  Rage, then, is a defensive reaction, a primitive assertion of the will to live.  It means a counterattack on the threatening object, and it serves to mitigate the feeling of helplessness.

83--Clinical study has convinced me that there are many persons to whom the very acknowledgment of parental (really, maternal) destructiveness means a violent death.

118--Clinical experience demonstrates that women have as intense an incestuous tie with the mother as that found in men.  This tie frequently implies not only a longing for mother's love and protection, but also a fear of her. The fear is first of all the result of the very dependency that weakens the person's own sense of strength and independence.

If the child of such a mother (who is in reality a cannibalistic, vampire-like, or necrophilous person) grows up without breaking the tie with her, he cannot escape from suffering intense fears of being eaten up or destroyed by the mother.  In such cases, the only way to allay the fears that may drive a person to the border of insanity is to break the bond with the mother, but the fear engendered in the relationship is at the same time the reason why it is so difficult to sever.

119--Do we know how we would feel if we were to be pushed into a cage where a lion expected us, or if we were thrown into a pit filled with snakes?  Can we express the terror that would strike us, seeing ourselves sentenced to trembling impotence?  Yet is precisely this kind of experience that constitutes the fear of mother. Can there by doubt that the syndrome of decay, the evil tendency in man, is basically rooted in the mother-child relationship?

124--The other side of submission to the mother's death wish is a defensive counterhostility, and her active filicidal impulse arouses the matricidal impulse...The most transparent defense is the typical overvaluation of the mother by devotion and care, and by the adoration of the very object the person seeks to destroy.

202--"Love" is a seeking of protection against death and a cloak for hostility.  These are the affects of the catastrophic death complex...The threat of the violent annihilation of the human species that now hangs over us is finally traceable to the maternal destructive influence. The tendency to destructiveness and self-destructiveness is universal because the maternal filicidal impulse is universal.  It cannot be sufficiently stressed that, in the beginning, the catastrophic death complex means the response of a very young organism to an empathized threat in the mother's mind. 

In its infantile form the death complex is realistic, a fear reaction to a real danger or what the organism "perceives" as a real danger.  Because of its very early origin and the later repression of its components, the complex preserves its pathogenic power throughout life.  Long after infancy, we dread (unconsciously) that at any moment we may be helplessly subjected to annihilative or mutilative attack.

Even if the mother was vicious and continues to exert baneful influence, one is no longer an infant and need not fear traumatic death at her hands.  It is the unrealistic nature of the postinfantile danger situation that perpetuates the calamitous effects of the infantile complex.  No matter how much the mother's attitude and behavior may change in a salutary direction, the child's original response cannot be erased.