Curating meaning in the experience of life and death is an inevitable process within the human experience. The degree to which the experience of death plays an active part of the material and conscious realm can be understood by looking to the unconscious. Psychoanalysis enables a more comprehensive and accurate interpretation of the meanings of life and death through its conceptualisation of the unconscious foundations of all human experience. Psychoanalysis is the tool by which we can gain deeper insight into the patterns and frameworks that penetrate into the conscious from the unconscious. The universality of psychoanalytic topography can be witnessed socially and cross-culturally, further contributing to the understanding that the unconscious and its formations of meaning in the human psyche are a shared experience that extends into the material, conscious, and cosmological realms. By looking at ethnographies interpreted through the psychoanalytic lens, we are able to gain a deeper and more meaningful understanding of the interplay between rituals, beliefs, materiality, and practices and attitudes that exist around
death. To do this we must primarily look to the father of psychoanalysis; Sigmund Freud (1910; 1933; 1985). By understanding the underpinnings of psychoanalysis and its interpretations of life and death through Freuds work, we gain a deeper knowledge of the unconscious responses to death, in drive, desire, conflict, and mourning. Robert Lifton (1979) introduces the concept of symbolic immortality as a universal denial of death within the unconscious. By combining this concept with Freuds psychoanalytic base further knowledge can be explored through the ethnographic examples that exist within ouroboric cosmologies and show death to be assumed as a transition or transmigration rather than a material end. To understand life is to understand death, therefore we must extrapolate experiences in ethnography around mortuary practices in order to understand the cosmological lifeworld and psyche of the people we are observing. Thus, this essay will holistically explore how psychoanalysis enhances the accuracy of meaning created from the human experience through the observance of death in examples from anthropological ethnographies.