ABSTRACT
This chapter describes how, of all the emotions, the fear—or, rather, the terror—of death dominates the scene in the field of human reasoning to varying degrees and in relation to different life experiences and cycles. Thus in "Thoughts for the Times on War and Death", Sigmund Freud writes that either man has no wish to acknowledge the reality of death or wants to strip it of its quality of total extinction by giving life to the doctrine of the soul and the belief in immortality, in spirits, and in demons. Melanie Klein embraces as an axiom the theory of the death instinct, which Freud held as highly speculative. R. Bion accepts as true the Kleinian assumption, connecting, however, within the formulation of the contained-container model, the hypothesis that the infant would feel as though it were about to die with the death instinct and with the function of maternal reverie.
