"Thus Freud's own analysis of anxiety shows that there is a close and deep connection between anxiety and the death instinct. Anxiety is a response to experiences of separateness, individuality, and death.

"The human child, which at the mother's breast experiences a new and intense mode of union, of living, and of loving, must also experience a new and intenser mode of separation, individuality, and death; in the dry language of Freud, a trauma is constituted when the ego comes into contact with an excessive demand of its own libido.

"In the human family the expansion of Eros onto a new and higher level entails the expansion of death onto a new and higher level. It is because the child loves the mother so much that it feels separation from the mother as death. As a result, birth and death, which at the biological level are experienced once only, are at the human psychic level experienced constantly; the child can say with St. Paul, "I die daily."

"One effect of the incapacity to accept separation, individuality, and death is to erotize death to activate a morbid wish to die, a wish to regress to the prenatal state before life (and separation) began, to the mother's womb. Freud analyzed the castration complex as the fear of losing the instrument for reuniting with (a substitute for) the mother's womb. Hence, as Freud so often said, in choosing a wife we still seek our mother, and in the genital act "the vagina comes into the inheritance of the mother's womb."

"Ferenczi, in Thalassa, has amply developed the analysis of sexual intercourse as an aiming at "the genital re-establishment of the intra-uterine situation," without, however, being clear on the morbidity of this "regressive uterine tendency, " and therefore, in my opinion, illegitimately projecting the same tendency onto all organic life, just as Freud did.

"In human beings at any rate, the special concentration of libido in the genital region, in the infantile phallic phase and in the adult genital organization, is engineered by the regressive death instinct, and represents the residue of the human incapacity to accept death, separation, and individuality. And in the same essay Ferenczi, going beyond Freud, showed how the earlier phases of infantile sexuality, the oral and anal, are also dominated by the same regressive trend.

"The special concentration of libido in the mouth in earliest infancy, the hypercathexis of the act of suckling, results from the inability to accept separation from the mother and is sustained by fantasies of uterine regression.

"The anal stage (the most fantastic psychoanalytical paradox, involves symbolic manipulation of feces as a magic instrument for restoring communion with the mother." 

Richard Koenigsberg