On Being Mortal Part 3: Psychotherapeutic Approaches
Given that most of us in SOFiA are in our 70s or 80s, it seems strange that death and mortality play such a small role in our writings. In what follows, your Editor attempts to fill this void and to come to grips with the fact that we are not immortal and that life will come to an end for us all. Many thinkers regard exploring death as like staring at the sun; something that’s impossible to do. However, the aim in this review is to build up a picture of what it means to be mortal, a biological creature with a limited lifespan, an individual that faces its own death, by surveying what literature, medicine, psychotherapy and theology have to say about it. The Denial of Death by Ernst Becker
This work from 1973 is rightly regarded as a classic, but it does plunge most readers into a foreign world. In this world, Freudian psychoanalysis is king even though Becker is a cultural anthropologist rather than a psychoanalyst. In this book, he is mostly engaged in an attempt to broaden Freud’s approach, without fundamentally questioning its authority.
The Heroic is a key concept. We admire those who risk death for some noble aim, for example the soldier who leaps out of the trench to engage with the enemy or a swimmer who risks death to rescue a drowning swimmer. Key to the heroic person is the ability to courageously counter the fear of death, indeed that is what we most admire about him or her. Becker concludes that heroism is a reflex of death anxiety.
He also is most impressed by the dual nature that we humans exhibit. On the one hand, we can in our imagination soar into galactic space or imagine past or future worlds, but at the same time we are a biological creature that has limits, that excretes and has other not-so-intellectual functions.
For Becker, there are two fundamental arguments about death and it isn’t possible for either argument to cleanly win. The ‘healthy-minded’ argument holds that fear of death is not natural but comes about through bad experiences with one’s parents. If they are hostile to his life impulses and frustrate him, he will grow up afraid of death. But if they are supportive and loving, he will have no such fears.
The ‘morbidly minded’ argument holds with the psychoanalyst Zilboorg, that underneath all appearances, the fear of death is universally present. If this fear was always in our consciousness, we wouldn’t be able to function, so it is repressed and we ordinarily go about our daily life as if we were immortal. Becker emphatically sides with this argument.
Notable, at least for me, is also the fact that Becker shows a sympathetic understanding of theologians such as Paul Tillich and religious thinkers such as Eric Fromm. Generally speaking, thinkers today do not reference theologians at all. Indeed, Becker aims to bring about a convergence of religious and psychological thought.
“We don’t want to admit that we do not stand alone, that we always rely on something that transcends us…Augustine was a master analyst of this, as were Kierkegaard, Scheler, and Tillich in our day. They saw that man could strut and boast all he wanted, but that he really drew his “courage to be” from a god, a Big Brother, a flag, the proletariat, and the fetish of money and the size of a bank balance. (Page 33)
Existential Psychotherapy by Irvin Yalom
You might be surprised that I include this work, which is something like a textbook, but for this variety of psychotherapy, death is an important feature of existence, along with freedom and meaning. In fact, Yalom devotes 189 pages to the issue of death and ways of dealing with death anxiety.
One major theme is bringing out the positive value of death awareness. This brings home the fact that this is our one and only life. “While the physicality of death destroys an individual; the idea of death can save him.” This makes our decisions crucial as time is limited and we cannot live out all options.
Another theme is that we repress the awareness of death. We live as if life would go on indefinitely. It is only particular events that can break through the denial of death and bring an awareness of our finiteness into consciousness: the death of a parent, child, or friend; seeing how our siblings have aged, divorce, even the business of committing to a partner, which means that you have made a choice and are now stuck with it.
After a long section, Yalom turns to examine the way children become aware of death and how they deal with it. Then he looks to the practical business of doing therapy with clients. Here his approach differs from most other psychotherapists. While they are concerned to reduce anxiety and to make life more pleasant and easy, Yalom believes that we need to face reality and that this can make life deeper and more meaningful.
Mortals: How the Fear of Death Shaped Human Society
By Rachel and Ross Menzies 2021
This is a much more recent psychological work by two Australian psychologists and it breathes a much different atmosphere. While Yalom’s work contains mostly stories of therapeutic work with clients, this one focusses on empirical research, of which recent times have seen an enormous volume. So they report on clever experiments that conceal their real purpose and can show for example, that being made aware of death leads judges to determine a ninefold greater amount of bail than those not made aware. These experiments always have a control group and provide an exact, quantitative comparison between those recently made aware of death and a similar group that has not. While earlier psychologists relied on personal introspection, they rely on quantitative statistical reports.
They don’t have a good word to say about Freud; they emphasise what he got wrong and they don’t seem to have any historical sense of the changes his work brought about. Finally, there is also great interest in the evolution of the human brain and the way its workings affect us.
I think this is the best of the writings on death from a psychological perspective that I have come across, although I found much to complain about in their treatment of religion.
After an introductory chapter, the authors look at the way religion has tried and failed to provide an answer to death by erroneous beliefs in life after death. Essentially, we are given a perspective on religion that owes much to the new atheists, according to which religion is responsible for much of the evil and suffering in the world. “Although religion evolved largely to assuage our fear of death, it has since become one of our biggest killers…Try as it might, religion cannot wash the blood from its hands.”
We are given detailed descriptions of the process of mummification in Ancient Egypt, and an overview of religion in Greece, Rome, Hinduism and Buddhism. We are not to treat seriously a Buddhist monk’s injunction to meditate on one’s death, as real-world religious practice paints a very different picture of Buddhist practice. Money spent on a temple to venerate the Buddha’s tooth would be much better spent on providing undernourished children with food, protection against malaria, or safe drinking water. The authors are determined to denigrate any religious claim, even if it involves a complete sidetrack from the theme of the chapter.
The authors ask, “have any religions failed to promise believers eternal life?” They find an obscure text in the Hebrew bible according to which “Yahweh will swallow up death forever,” not recognizing that Ancient Israel, in marked contrast to neighbouring Egypt, found no consolation in life after death. It’s true that they believed in a post-death existence in Sheol, a sort of shadowy underworld, but this was of no consolation. Only later did they take up the idea of resurrection.
In ancient cultures, religion and culture are intertwined. As Paul Tillich says, Religion is the substance of culture and culture is the form of religion. That there is some form of existence after death was the universal assumption of ancient cultures. It is a mistake to blame this exclusively on religion, as though it were a domain completely separate from culture.
Having comprehensively dismissed all religion, the authors turn to culture and civilization. “The entirety of human civilization may be one elaborate defence against death.” By following the various decrees of our culture, we can attain a kind of symbolic immortality. The oldest pieces of hominid art are Indian sculpture. There’s the Pharoah Khufu, who had a grand pyramid built, which was once the largest building in the world. And then there’s Michaelangelo, who insisted that his Sistine Chapel paintings were done as frescoes, painted quickly onto fresh plaster. In these various ways, artists attempted to attain a permanent reminder that they once walked the earth.
Successive chapters deal with the upside and downside of love, the health industry and its difficulties letting patients go when there is no more hope, the value of self-esteem as a counter to death fear, funerary practices (maintaining bonds to the dead is common in many other cultures and may help people cope with the loss – a 2005 study of 92 widows found that nearly half reported talking to their dead spouse, and they were much more likely to be coping well). Then they look at mental illness and the death dread that often underlies it, followed by suicidal thoughts which often lead to a false diagnosis of depression and an examination of the thought of Albert Camus, concluding with an examination of Stoicism.