ABSTRACT
Examining death and dying in relation to the concepts of ego and self, little and big self, in terms of Freud's psychoanalysis and Jung's analytical psychology, and exploring them through a number of clinical cases, shows death's crucial role in individuation, transformation, and change. The birth of the new cannot happen without the corruption, sacrifice, and death of the old. Death, the coniunctio, the state of union and wholeness, is, in part, desired and sought by all. But dying—that is, corruption—means leave-taking, loss, surrender, and sacrifice, and most of us try to escape it. Neurotics and psychotics try to escape it by creating a situation in which they have nothing to sacrifice. Its attractive force, its dynamism, betrays itself in man's capacity to suffer voluntarily a hero's death and to experience the ecstasy of self-abnegation, be it in the surrender to an ideological cause, in love, or in the experience of the mystic.
