ABSTRACT
In ongoing psychotherapy, a patient's death anxiety is often signalled by the appearance of death-related themes, coupled with a variety of defensive responses. These compromised communications simultaneously reveal and conceal the unconscious death issues activated by a particular triggering event. There are two significant aspects to this active triggering event: the third-party self-revelation, which is a frame deviation that is likely to activate unconscious forms of predatory forms of death anxiety in the patient, and the nature of the disclosure, which is manifestly death-connected and likely to evoke mainly conscious and unconscious existential forms of death anxiety. Whatever the trigger and its meanings, the responsive death anxiety may be felt directly or be relegated to unconscious experience. The search for death-activating triggers and death-related encoded narratives is therefore an ever-present task in all types of psychotherapy, even though these are very difficult to detect without the use of the communicative approach and trigger-decoding.
