ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis began as a treatment for neurotic symptoms, and then came to encompass character disturbance, perverse and borderline conditions and psychotic states. All these affect the quality of people's lives. Psychoanalysis has a lot to offer on the subject, and two analysts who make a good starting point are Donald Winnicott and Thomas Ogden. Winnicott's work has been called 'a kind of biography of the sense of aliveness as it unfolds in infancy and throughout a lifetime'. In Winnicott's book Playing and Reality, he makes a fundamental distinction between two ways of living. The first is based on a relationship to reality that he calls 'creative apperception'. Death can be described and investigated as a biological fact. Speculations and fantasies about what it is like can be represented. However, to represent the experience itself one would have to die, but not have died.
