Across the depth-psychology corpus, ‘Birth and Death’ functions not as a binary opposition but as an interpenetrating polarity—a dyadic structure in which each pole secretly contains and generates the other. The range of positions is wide. Grof anchors the conjunction in perinatal phenomenology, arguing that the biological fact of birth encodes an experiential template for all subsequent encounters with death and rebirth, accessible in expanded states of consciousness. Merleau-Ponty approaches the pair from phenomenological epistemology, insisting that neither birth nor death can be known from within lived experience; they remain ‘prepersonal horizons.’ Nhat Hanh and the Buddhist transmission through Evans-Wentz dissolve the opposition altogether, positing no-birth and no-death as the ground beneath the apparent cycle. Otto and Kerényi read birth-death continuity through myth and cult, showing that divinities of fertility and divinities of death merge because the ancestral dead literally rise in the newborn. Neumann and Eliade situate the polarity within the Great Mother archetype and initiatory symbolism, wherein death to the profane condition is the necessary precondition of spiritual rebirth. Campbell crystallizes the synthetic formula: ‘Only birth can conquer death.’ Together these voices establish birth-and-death as a master tension organizing soteriology, clinical depth psychology, ritual theory, and phenomenological philosophy alike.
At every type of birth, life is shaken to its foundations, not by sickness nor by some external menace but by its most important function. It is just in this circumstance that its association with death becomes clearest.
Otto argues that birth and death are structurally inseparable in the great moments of life’s transformation, explaining why deities of fertility and death so frequently merge into a single divine figure.
, Dionysus Myth and Cult (1965), 1965thesis
They are used to living in birth-and-death, and they forget about no-birth and no-death. A wave also lives the life of water, and we also live the life of no-birth and no-death.
Nhat Hanh presents the realization of no-birth and no-death as the liberating knowledge that dissolves the apparent cycle of birth-and-death, relocating identity from the wave to the water itself.
, The Sun My Heart, 1988thesis
Only birth can conquer death—the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new. Within the soul, within the body social, there must be—if we are to experience long survival—a continuous ‘recurrence of birth’ (palingenesia) to nullify the unremitting recurrences of death.
Campbell identifies the hero’s fundamental task as enacting perpetual psychic and cultural renewal, positioning continuous birth as the sole counterweight to the recurrent power of death.
, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, 2015thesis
Neither my birth nor my death can appear to me as experiences of my own… I can apprehend myself only as ‘already born’ and ‘still alive’—I can apprehend my birth and my death only as prepersonal horizons.
Merleau-Ponty establishes birth and death as the constitutive outer limits of phenomenal experience, beyond which the subject cannot reach and which therefore remain perpetually anonymous.
, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962thesis
All life, from the simple virus to the vast galaxy, is marching from birth to death, to birth and death, again and again. Death is not an event which takes place on a particular day in a particular place. It is a process that starts the day we are conceived.
Easwaran renders the Gita’s vision of birth-and-death as an uninterrupted cosmic process rather than discrete events, demanding a fundamental reorientation of personal identity.
, The Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living: A Verse-by-Verse Commentary, 1975thesis
Birth cries and death rattles intermingle in a flicker of an eyelash. I realize that my own place in the rhythmic pattern of death and birth is but a moving instant—and that is more than enough.
Edinger documents an experiential encounter with the birth-death rhythm through the body-self totality, framing it as a numinous alchemical sublimatio that produces union with the universe.
, Anatomy of the Psyche: Alchemical Symbolism in Psychotherapy, 1985thesis
The Mother holds the child in her arms, embracing him in death as in birth. The meaning of the cross as a tree of life and death is further amplified by the symbolism of the cross as a bed… the bed of birth and death.
Neumann traces the symbolic identity of birth and death through the Great Mother archetype, showing how the same maternal substance—wood, earth, vessel—serves as both cradle and coffin.
, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, 1955thesis
Human kind are not to cling to life on earth with its ceaseless wandering in the Worlds of birth and death (Sangsāra). Rather should they implore the aid of the Divine Mother for a safe passing through the fearful state following the body’s dissolution.
Evans-Wentz presents the Bardo Thodol’s soteriological core: liberation consists in escaping the samsaric cycle of birth and death, and the text provides the technique for doing so at the moment of dissolution.
, The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Evans-Wentz Edition), 1927thesis
Anyone who achieves kenshō and leaves the house of birth-and-death is a house-leaver… He never has a moment’s respite from the toils of birth-and-death.
Hakuin Ekaku uses birth-and-death as a technical Zen designation for samsaric entrapment, and kenshō as the experiential departure from that house—making the dyad a soteriological threshold.
, Wild Ivy: The Spiritual Autobiography of Zen Master Hakuin, 1999thesis
This initiatory birth implied death to profane existence. The yogin ‘dies to this life’ in order to be reborn to another mode of being, that represented by liberation.
Eliade demonstrates that initiation universally structures spiritual transformation as a passage through symbolic death to a new birth, making the birth-death sequence the grammar of all sacred transition.
, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, 1957supporting
Birth, death and, vii, lx—lxi. — Four Kinds of, 178, 182. — Supernormal, 1561, 178, 188—90, 206. Birth-trauma, xli, xlii.
The Tibetan Book of the Dead’s index entry confirms that birth and death constitute the primary organizing dyad of the text, articulated in four modes and tied directly to the birth-trauma doctrine.
, The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Evans-Wentz Edition), 1927supporting
The encounter with death on the perinatal level takes the form of a profound firsthand experience of the terminal agony that is rather complex and has emotional, philosophical, and spiritual as well as distinctly physiological facets.
Grof argues that perinatal matrices bring the subject into a direct experiential encounter with death—not merely its symbol—embedding the birth-death nexus in somatic memory accessible through deep non-ordinary states.
, Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD Research, 1975supporting
As the perinatal process unfolds, the intensity of negative experiences tends to increase and the feelings of release and liberation thereafter become deeper and more complete.
Grof charts the phenomenological arc of the death-rebirth process in psychedelic therapy, linking the depth of the death experience directly to the quality of the subsequent liberation.
, LSD Psychotherapy: Exploring the Frontiers of the Hidden Mind, 1980supporting
Terra Mater or Tellus Mater so familiar to Mediterranean religions, who gives birth to all beings… ‘Thine it is to give or to take life from mortal men’… ‘who bringeth all things to birth, reareth them, and receiveth again into her womb’.
Eliade establishes Earth Mother mythology as the cosmological ground for the birth-death unity, showing that the same maternal matrix gives and reclaims life across Mediterranean and indigenous traditions.
, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, 1957supporting
Time was thus analogical with fate. Saturn was the god of fate and karma—the implacable ruler whose decrees meant cessation and death. Cessation means emotion; and so does birth. All great changes, all moments when time seems to act with particular power and significance, are causes for intense emotions.
Rudhyar locates birth and death within a Saturnian time-philosophy, rendering both as emotionally charged moments when fate’s power becomes most legible in the life of feeling.
, The Astrology of Personality: A Re-formulation of Astrological Concepts and Ideals in Terms of Contemporary Psychology and Philosophy, 1936supporting
this nightmare of birth and filth had happened. There were many images of the torturer and the tortured as the same person, very much as the mother and the baby were the same person.
This LSD session report presents the birth-death nexus as experiential collapse of oppositional roles—torturer and victim, mother and child—illustrating Grof’s thesis about identity dissolution in the perinatal zone.
, Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD Research, 1975aside
If we cannot bear the tensions of change, cannot accept that at certain times in our lives we must remain inactive like the Hanged Man… then death may appear in the guise of a heart attack, stroke, or other sudden illness.
Nichols uses Tarot symbolism to argue that psychological resistance to the death-rebirth rhythm—refusing the necessary passivity of transformation—invites literal death as the psyche’s enforced renewal.
, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey, 1980aside
There are five incomparable days in the believer’s life. The day one is born, when life is given… The day one dies, when life is received back into God’s hands.
Pargament cites a Christian framing of the lifespan in which birth and death are the two supreme sacred thresholds that religion marks off from ordinary time and wraps in ritual significance.
, The psychology of religion and coping theory, research,, 2001aside