ABSTRACT
A concern with the theme of death forces one to re-examine the theories developed about it by Sigmund Freud and G. G. Jung. Both Freud and Jung took up what had been so neatly swept under the late nineteenth and early twentieth century carpets—the subject of death. When Freud proposed the existence of a death instinct or Thanatos in 1920, he argued that every fundamental physiological process must have a mental equivalent, an instinct. And so he postulated the existence of a death instinct as the psychic equivalent of those physiological processes that lead to a reduction of differentiation and to the reinstatement of state; examples of such physiological processes he mentioned the process of catabolism and the constant dying and re-creation of cells. In a very scholarly discussion of the concept of the death instinct, published in 1953, Flugel cited the various phenomena that he thought had contributed to the formulation of the death instinct.
