"If the repression of death and the repression of individuality have this importance in human history, psychoanalysis ought to be able to detect their role in the formation of neurosis in individual lives. Freud, however, did not make use of his hypothesis of a death instinct (as distinct from an aggressive instinct) in his clinical writings.

"But if death is the aspect of life which confers on life individuality, independence, and separateness, then a priori the repression of death should produce symptoms which exhibit on the one hand a flight from independence and separateness and on the other hand the compulsive return of the repressed instinct.

"But such an ambivalent attitude toward independence and separateness is at the heart of all neurosis, according to Freud's later clinical writings. The ultimate cause of repression and neurosis is anxiety, and anxiety is "the anxiety of separation from the protecting mother." One of the hallmarks of the neurotic personality is a lifelong fixation to the infantile pattern of dependence on other people.

"Although Freud does not make the necessary theoretical links between anxiety and his death instinct, he does say that what the ego fears in anxiety "is in the nature of an overthrow or an extinction." It looks therefore as if the specifically human capacity for anxiety does reflect a revolt against death and individuality, or at least some deep disturbance in the organic unity of life and death."

I develop this idea in Symbiosis and Separation: Towards a Psychology of Culture.

Richard Koenigsberg