ABSTRACT
In this chapter I wish to focus on one possible factor, the internal relationship with death, which might contribute to the evolution and manifestation of evil. I shall try and demonstrate, through case material drawn from the analysis of an Israeli soldier, the disastrous way in which identification with death might take over some of the processes of mourning and lead to evil-doing. Following Freud’s (1917) and Klein’s (1940) formulations I will concentrate on a special kind of mourning, which I shall call “Murderous Mourning”. This happens when there is a failure in workingthrough early anxieties owing to an overdose of death experiences. These might be concrete or phantasized, in the external environment as well as in the internal one. This death-infused situation is characterized by an internal catastrophe following the vicious attack on the caring, nurturing and tender parts of both the self and the object. All these parts are experienced as weak, and therefore as threatening to survival. This comes about because weakness is often equated with the danger of psychic or actual death. This internal attack is brought about by a massive internal splitting. All the threateningly weak parts of the self are projected into the object that becomes a target for destruction or total annihilation. The destroyed objects, as well as the weak parts of the self, are quickly replaced by a new, omnipotent, omniscient and indestructible deadly object in order to avoid fragmentation. Death anxieties are thus mitigated by identification with death itself and the protection it brings. The individual, in unconscious phantasy, is infused by and fused with death as an internal idealized object. This “death object” serves as a gravitational, tyrannical core within the self, resulting in overwhelming murderous feelings and behaviour.1 As such, the state of murderous mourning I am describing constitutes a special pathological organization (Steiner 1993).
