The text emphasizes that constellations of undigested fantasies and emotions associated with death in some form dominate the unconscious of murderers individuals. Treatment based on the perspectives of Sigmund Freud and the theories and techniques of Melanie Klein, Herbert Rosenfeld, Hanna Segal, and Wilfred Bion seeks to expand these individuals repertoires beyond acting out by facilitating the beginnings of a mourning process. The discussion notes that the use of countertransference is essential to the analysis of psychotic and borderline persons and that the psychoanalyst or therapist must preserve what Bion describes as the indispensable aloofness necessary for the study and elucidation of the unknown. The death constellation occurs in each person, as noted by Freud in 1920 in his description of the two polarized instincts of life and death. The healthy function of the murderous fantasy is part of essential reality testing in the family, the workplace, or other settings involving family-close occupation in limited life space. The healthy cycle of response to an indigestible life experience includes a retaliatory fantasy, dream, or token action; guilt; then persecutory anxiety to depressive anxiety transformation that wipes the slate clean. Breakdown in the cycle may lead to problems. The therapeutic task is to restore a balance in the direction of more civilized behavior and to take the action paragraph out of a death wish. Index and 35 references