ABSTRACT
Anxiety about the limited nature of our existence delivers us to the cushion of handed-down magic as well. Injecting imagination and pleasure into what seemed morbid and frightening allows us a good night's sleep. The horrid witch of mortality becomes the maudlin muse of our creativity. In "Analysis terminable and interminable", Sigmund Freud referred to the death instinct and related masochism, negative therapeutic reaction, and unconscious guilt to its derivative, the aggressive drive. The death instinct can not be observed in its original form, since it always becomes manifest as a destructive process directed against objects and the self. The fact is that denial and acceptance of one's mortality constitutes one of those dialectics that seem ubiquitous in the human psyche; other such dialectics involve the tension between symbiosis and individuation, activity and passivity, homosexuality and heterosexuality, and religious belief and atheism.
