Against death's representability: Freud and the question of death's psychic presence.

What has been described as the psychoanalytic neglect and rejection of death is grounded in a set of claims made by Freud against the possible representation of death. Death is held to be absent from unconscious thought because death is negative, abstract, and involves time, because there is neither an instinctual correlative for it, nor a past precedent. In addition, when we ponder death, we discover that we are still there as spectators.