ABSTRACT
The fear of death is to be seen in many children. Equally, the fear of death is "rational", but normally exists only when one is confronted with its imminence. The death wish having been enacted, the uprooting of the pole took on, through displacement, an intolerable intensity. The actual death—followed by an actual castration—("feared by Paul")—(uprooting of the pole from the ground) brought Paul the immediate threat of libidinal death: this is anxiety. From this arises the symptoms of death: pained facial expressions, annihilation of the affective drives even to the depth of the vegetative passive oral stage, and the freezing of the respiratory muscles. Castration anxiety is a turmoil of libidinal frustration. It is triggered by a conflict between drives, aggressive and passive, at the service of sexuality, prohibitions coming from the external world or from the superego. But the reason for the anxiety and the conflict remain unknown to the conscious part of the ego.
