ABSTRACT
Human beings are the only creatures aware of their own mortality. This chapter reviews some of the literature about how people make sense of our awareness of death and its place in one's psyche. It discovers the Cowan-Jenssen Susan's blind spot regarding his mortality and how it impacted in the consulting room. The chapter explores how the ritual of the therapy hour can act as a defence against an awareness of death, for both the client and the therapist. A clinical vignette describes how the denial of his own anxiety about mortality from fully understanding the depth of client's terror of living and dying. All the arts and sciences have their roots in the struggle against death. The 'death instinct' explains man's capacity for destructiveness in the language of instinct, rather than the language of relationship.
