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The representatives of the medical profession use surgical techniques to approach death, especially in organ transplantation. However, patients often unwittingly experience the effects of magic thought. Thus, two thought systems coexist and clash with each other: scientific and animist thought. A fundamental dissymmetry between the two must be noted, however, following the analysis proposed by Freud in Totem and Taboo. Indeed, animist thought system is not complete, as no magical techniques are available to the patients. But their absence is explained precisely because of the ubiquitousness of surgical techniques, whose efficiency and rationality hide their unconscious motivation: a refusal of death, related at the same time to their deadly power. However, it is precisely this hidden aspect of medical rationality—what makes it a “practice on the threshold of transgression”—that is revealed by patients’ magic thought. This mode of thinking should be considered as the “return of what is repressed” in medical rationality, as the patients show conscious, guilt-ridden phantasies, including a death wish for the giver.