Introduction to Death, Immortality, and Unconscious Fantasy: A Symposium

Abstract

Arlene and Arnold Richards’ papers examine a very important and timely topic in psychoanalysis—death, immortality, and unconscious fantasy. Given the aging of our profession and society, this topic is highly relevant clinically and personally.

Dr. Arlene Kramer Richards provides a comprehensive, concise, historical overview of the usefulness of the idea of the death instinct, comparing the death instinct, death drive, and unconscious fantasy of what happens after death. Her article focuses on the clinical utility of the construct, while also providing a poignant examination of the major theoretical and philosophical ideas about death by such psychoanalytic titans as Freud, Klein, Spielrein, Arlow, Brenner, and Kohut, among others.

Dr. Arnold Richard examines conscious and unconscious fantasies of death and immortality, focusing on the wish for immortality, as expressed in our dreams. He provides a collection of his own dreams, and self-analysis, which demonstrate how the wish for immortality operates in dreams and waking life. He provides highly useful commentary on Freud’s conflicts about his own mortality and its impact on the psychoanalytic theory of human motivation. In addition, he offers an innovative framework for potentially integrating wish-fulfillment dreams and traumatic dreams, and suggests that the wish for immortality might be added to the inventory
of primary dream wishes, along with sexual and aggressive wishes.