ABSTRACT
In one form or another, the death constellation occurs in each one of us. S. Freud, in "Beyond the Pleasure Principle", described the two polarized instincts of life and death. He stated that all of us live in a state in which we are pulled toward life on the one hand and death on the other. Some people seek a magical denial of death, perhaps through a religious belief that can be proved neither correct nor incorrect. In the healthy cycle there is the response to interpersonal difficulty, an indigestible experience or a series of experiences, a retaliatory fantasy, dream or token action, often of a mild kind, guilt, then persecutory anxiety to depressive anxiety transformation. The therapeutic task is to restore the balance in direction of more civilized behavior, and by means of transformation from the paranoid-schizoid to depressive position and the container and contained relationship, to help people to own various parts of themselves.
