Life Against Death examines that aspect of psychoanalysis to which Freud himself turned his thoughts in his later years; that is, the relationship of psychoanalysis to history and to man's cultural situation in general.
This analogy supplies Freud with his notion of the 'archaic heritage'; mankind is a prisoner of the past in the same sense as 'our hysterical patients are suffering from reminiscences' and neurotics 'cannot escape from the past.'