Death anxiety, a critical influence on human life and its psychotherapies, has been relatively neglected by psychoanalytic writers. The author proposes several reasons for this oversight and introduces the communicative or strong adaptive approach to psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, which has recently begun to explore this issue. The features of the approach are described, with emphasis on a revised version of Freud's topographic model of the mind. Three forms of death anxiety are postulated: existential, predatory, and predator. The author explores the effects of each form on emotional adaptations and the psychotherapy experience, and their role in the evolution of the emotion-processing mind-the postulated mental module with which people adapt to emotionally charged events and their meanings.There are many dimensions to the prospect and experience of death and the issues that it raises for human life. Investigations and thinking related to this critical subject have been enormously diverse. They include the basic existential philosophical position that the fear of death is humankind's basic dread (Becker, 1973; Leichty, 2002; Piven, 2002, in press); studies on the stages of, and reactions to, dying (Leichty, 2002); detailing the many ways in which humans deny death (Becker, 1973;Langs, 1997; Leichty, 2002); the exploration of the thesis that humans possess a psychobiological need to die-a death instinct (Freud, 1920(Freud, /1955dKlein, 1975); considerations of the role of transference and religion in the denial of death (Piven, 2002); experimental investigations of so-called terror management and the ways in which the mobilization of death-related anxieties affects a variety of personality features and coping strategies (Greenberg, Pyszczynski, & Solomon, 2002); and studies of the fear of psychic dissolution as evoked by traumatic anxieties that are responsive to a wide variety of danger situations (Hurvich, 1989(Hurvich, , 2000.The present article is offered as a fresh contribution to this literature. Its primary focus is on the subject of death anxiety-the conscious and unconscious dread of being annihilated (predatory death anxiety), of the consequences of harming or annihilating others
