What is the psychological significance of death for the dying person, for his environment and for society – for all of us who know that we are mortal? In 17 essays, the author deals with these problems from the psychoanalytic, socio-psychological and historic-cultural perspective. He provides various approaches to a thanatology, facets of a science of death. The study includes three clinical cases, presented with an intensity and a literary descriptive power which has seldom been found in literature since Freud.