The Seba library treats Death Wish in 9 passages, across 5 authors (including Freud, Sigmund, Yalom, Irvin D., López-Pedraza, Rafael).
adults’ death-wishes against, 276–278, 287–288 childhood experiences … children’s death-wishes against parents, 273–276 children’s death-wishes against siblings, 266–288
Freud’s index entries establish the death wish as a systematic, multiply-directed psychic phenomenon operative across family relations and across the developmental spectrum, from childhood through adulthood.
, The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900thesis
the anxiety about death is the expression of a repressed wish to be passive and to be handled by the father-undertaker… ‘death means for this boy final sado-masochistic gratification in a homosexual reunion with the father’
Yalom critically examines the psychoanalytic tendency to translate death anxiety into object-relational or libidinal derivatives, arguing that such translations evade the primacy of death fear itself.
, Existential Psychotherapy, 1980thesis
death as the primordial psychic mover; even in an illness that can be taken as having been caused, specifically, by the family history (personal complexes)
López-Pedraza argues that psychotherapy’s Asclepian bias against death forecloses the transformative power of the death-ward movement, which functions as the primordial engine of psychic change.
, Hermes and His Children, 1977thesis
the working through of death anxiety brought the analysis to a successful conclusion… Only when the analyst moved to a deeper level — the meaning of his symptoms in the context of death fear — did the clinical picture alter.
Yalom demonstrates clinically that symptoms previously resistant to oedipal and preoedipal interpretation yield only when reconstituted as expressions of death fear, reorienting the analytic frame from wish to anxiety.
, Existential Psychotherapy, 1980supporting
‘The hounding and the pressure drove me,’ she wrote, ‘to think of trying the final solution, death.’
Hari documents the death wish as a lived, socially produced response to sustained persecution and degradation, grounding the concept in the concrete circumstances of Billie Holiday’s harassment.
, Chasing the Scream: The Search for the Truth About Addiction, 2015supporting
he quickly became suicidal again… One Christmas Day, he decided to finish the work he began when he was a little boy jumping off his porch, and he took a car and drove it into a wall at sixty miles per hour.
Hari traces a chronic death wish in an addict’s biography, linking suicidality to unresolved early trauma and the agonies of withdrawal, illustrating the wish as a compound of suffering rather than instinct.
, Chasing the Scream: The Search for the Truth About Addiction, 2015supporting
the knowledge of the death which rumbles unceasingly at the edge of consciousness. Our belief in exemption from natural law underlies many aspects of our behavior.
Yalom situates the death wish within the broader economy of death anxiety and its defences, arguing that the belief in personal exemption — not a wish for death — is the primary organiser of psychic life.
, Existential Psychotherapy, 1980supporting
he had decided that he did not wish to die the demeaning death of an alcoholic, and had become totally abstinent.
Yalom reports a clinical case in which direct confrontation with death imagery — the inverse of the death wish — catalysed therapeutic transformation by awakening the will to live.
, Existential Psychotherapy, 1980supporting
the mourner had died instead of the dead, or that they had died together, or that neither had ever been born; so great is their grief at Hector’s death
Alexiou identifies in archaic Greek lament a ritualised wish for one’s own death as an expression of grief’s extremity, providing a cultural-historical context for the death wish as culturally sanctioned mourning idiom.
, The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition, 1974aside