Individualism and the Emerging “Modern” Ideology of Death

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One predominant theme of Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death and Alan Harrington's The Immortalist is the impact of individualism upon orientations toward death. This paper begins with a theoretical elaboration of individualism and argues its development is associated with an emergent death ideology emphasizing personal control. In two national samples we found attitudes toward suicide, abortion, and the right to die scale unidimensionally and we proceeded to demonstrate how the indices of individualism were the best predictors of one's position on this scale. This article suggests a potential research domain which integrates existential and psychoanalytic thought within an empirical social psychology of death.