Denial Of Death Research Articles

Spontaneous war weddings as a reaction to a national trauma: A terror management theory perspective

On 7 October 2023, 3,000 Hamas terrorists from the Gaza Strip infiltrated Israel. Over 1,300 people were killed on that day, and over 240 were abducted to Gaza. On October 8, Israel declared war on Hamas. The current study delves into the prevailing phenomenon of spontaneous war weddings held in military settings during the war. Drawing from Terror Management Theory (TMT) and utilizing an ethnographic approach, we analyze published media reports of these weddings. We suggest that this phenomenon is a sign of three terror management anxiety buffer mechanisms activated in view of current national and personal mortality salience: the validation of cultural worldviews; the enhancement of self-esteem; and the pursuit of proximity, in the form of a sense of closeness to attachment figures. All three anxiety-buffer mechanisms contribute to the fortification of psychological defenses, the denial of death, and the maintenance of psychological equanimity in view of this incomprehensible threat.

The Magic of Death

Death awareness can serve as an awakening experience and act as a powerful spark for significant life changes. The central question is, “How could death awareness and its creative examination transform our fear of death, open a path to liberation and self-empowerment, expand our consciousness, and lead us toward more meaningful, creative, and service-oriented lives?” The premise is that, instead of avoiding the reality of death, there is an opportunity to look into it and examine our fixed ideas and preconceptions about it—focusing on the person’s fear of their death and not on their other fears related to the death and dying of significant others. Furthermore, the article examines death as a catalyst for significant life changes and fear of death, further exploring how death anxiety shows up in our lives, why reducing death denial is essential, how to honor death and all the lessons it teaches us, and how to transform our relationship with our mortality. It examines cross-cultural wisdom and alternative epistemologies that support the transformation of our death, such as spirituality, creativity, consciousness, transpersonal psychology, and Tibetan and Zen Buddhism. Future research would expand on the idea that the transformation of the relationship with death could foster personal growth and intensify connections to Earth and all living beings.

Expanded Transference: A Humanities Perspective on the Generative Core of Ernest Becker’s Theory of Human Nature

The death anxiety thesis is widely considered to be Ernest Becker’s primary contribution to social theory and is associated with his most widely read book, The Denial of Death (1973). This essay suggests Becker is understood in a more sophisticated and nuanced way when his death anxiety thesis is situated in the context of his earlier work in the humanities and social sciences. The death anxiety thesis itself is one component of a much broader theoretical conceptualization of expanded transference, a constant thread through all of Becker’s writings from his doctoral dissertation through his final posthumously published works. Furthermore, the contention here is that this conceptualization of expanded transference provides a far more comprehensive and complex interpretation matrix for the understanding of human motivation, as well as cultural and political phenomena, than the death anxiety thesis does in isolation.

If “Denial of Death” Is a Problem, Then “Reverence for Life” Is a Meaningful Answer: Ernest Becker's Significance for Applied Animal and Environmental Ethics

Abstract Ernest Becker analyzed human death anxiety and explained how it governs our ideologies and behaviors—something now confirmed by thousands of psychological experiments in terror management theory. This anxiety is managed through what he terms “hero systems,” cultural ideals we create to give us a sense of meaning. Most hero systems deny that we are, like all animals, creatures in a mortal body. This denial of our basic biological nature has caused humans to stand against their world, leading to an assault on the planet and nonhuman animals. Becker believed pacifism/nonviolence was the only hero system capable of keeping humans from destroying the earth and each other. But “reverence for life” transcends concern for humans alone and extends safeguards to all life, making it a vital solution to many of our modern problems.

The Autoethnography of a Teacher Educator

I turn to evocative autoethnographic storytelling as a means to experiment with the text of teacher education and re-imagine my role as a professor of education and early childhood literacy. When I feel that the rigidity of rubrics and standards designed to evaluate my students is creating an uncomfortable distance between us, I invite the formation of a literate thirdspace. My stories convey the feeling of being in-between states of authority and imagination, and question the image of the child’s fragility, including my own. As my students respond with their own memories through discussion, commentary, and writing, my autoethnography emerges as more personal and concrete. The inevitable death of my mother collides in my mind with the university’s literacy curriculum as I am teaching it, and I am forced to revisit the absence of friends, and my mentor to cancer. The denial of death as part of our own, and our children’s experience, is challenged by a child’s words at the end of this paper, where I finally learn to accept loss and the painful act of saying goodbye.

Blogging at the end-of-life: Anticipatory grief, losses, and positive experiences in facing terminal illness

This paper explores the experiences of people who blog about their own terminal illness and dying through the lens of anticipatory grief. Anticipatory grief is a concept which is frequently applied to those people who will be bereaved by death, rather than those who are themselves dying. Ethnographic content analysis of terminal illness blogs of two Australian women clearly narrate experiences of loss and grief which can be understood through the frame of anticipatory grief. Yet they also document positive experiences of growth and connection which can be conceptualized as resilience rather than a demonstration of denial of death.

The Work of Overcoming Racism/White Supremacy

ABSTRACT Utilizing the work of Wilfred Bion, Harry Stack Sullivan, and other theorists and practitioners, as well as philosophers and students of race in America, this article argues that racism/white supremacy sabotages our work, and yet is fundamental to our way of doing, being, and thinking in our society. As a result of the centrality of racism/white supremacy, the author lays out four challenges which, if met, will aid in overcoming racism/white supremacy: (a) the first challenge of denial, (b) the second challenge of impaired empathy (and the failure to think), (c) the experience of shame, and (d) the denial of death. The article discusses each of these and concludes with a word on the possibility of passion—if we are able to overcome racism/white supremacy.

THE OLD AGE AND DEATH – THE DEEPEST CRITICAL THOUGHT

The elderly were shielded by the depersonalization of medicine brought on by individualism and competitiveness. As they get closer to the end of their lives, older patients frequently need to make peace with themselves and acknowledge their accomplishments and shortcomings. Medical professionals should therefore be considerate while speaking with patients and providing them with information. The terror of the elderly is not death itself, but rather their current state of abandonment. Death denial and terror are nonsensical because life is only given with the condition that it will end one day. In this context, the objectives of medical care are to accompany and lessen pain, not necessarily to provide therapies that attempt to extend biological life. Today's world has undergone significant changes as a result of the denial of death, which directly affect how those who are terminally ill are cared for. There has also been a significant change in how terminally ill persons pass away. This essay offers a succinct history of death as well as a look at some of the religious teachings on pain and death. It also talks on how the medicalization of death stops the dying person from communicating with their surroundings, paying off debts, forgiving and receiving forgiveness, and being fully himself in the short time they have left. This essay concludes that the correct function for a doctor to play is to ‘listen’ to what the patient needs. By doing this, the doctor's profession will become a more magnificent, decent, humane, and ennobling activity.

Translation, Cultural Adaptation, and Analysis of the Psychometric Properties of the Death Transcendence Scale for the Brazilian Context.

The study of the coping strategies used by humans to cope with their finitude has been the center of attention of several researchers throughout the history of psychology. The present study aimed to translate, culturally adapt, and validate the Death Transcendence Scale (DTS) for the Brazilian context. This was a cross-sectional study with a sample of 517 Brazilians. The European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer - Quality of Life Group Translation Procedure protocol was used for the translation and the cultural adaptation process. The results of parallel analyses indicated the relevance of extracting up to five factors, which explained 58.23% of the scale's total variance. The Brazilian version of the DTS, with validity evidence, consisted of 21 items, considering that items 13, 17, 20, and 21 were excluded according to exploratory factor analysis. As far as we know, the version of the DTS developed in this study is the only instrument available in the Brazilian context that allows the measurement of a theory dedicated to understanding how humans cope with their finitude, beyond death denial.

Death Denial in Bengali Cinema: A Terror Management Analysis of Srijit Mukherji’s Baishe Srabon and Hemlock Society

Everything that human beings do from the time of their birth, is a way for them to deny the inevitability of their death. A person adopts a myriad of ways to transcend the fear of death from their life and consciousness. This paper examines how the artistic medium of Bengali cinema provides insights into this existential issue and offers ways to overcome anxieties associated with human decay. Employing the Terror Management Theory (TMT) and film narratology, the study analyses two of Srijit Mukherji’s films, Baishe Srabon (2011) and Hemlock Society (2012), that involve plots where the characters explicitly encounter the fear of death. Both films substantiate TMT’s stance that humans seek immortality by establishing a “cultural worldview” and “self-esteem”, which provide individuals with an illusion of symbolic existence that will last even after their death. Social Science Review, Vol. 38(2), December 2021 Page 159-174

Inpatient end-of-life care delivery: discordance and concordance analysis of Canadian palliative care professionals' and South Asian family caregivers' perspectives.

End-of-life care involves a multitude of functions delivered by a team of healthcare professionals. Family caregivers get involved in every aspect of the palliative care journey. Meeting the needs of ethnically diverse patients can be a daunting task for Western-trained healthcare professionals. Family and professional caregivers need to have a mutual understanding of perspectives and expectations to integrate family caregivers into end-of-life care. The South Asian population in Canada is fast growing, and very little is known about their understanding and expectations of end-of-life care. The purpose is to provide research-based knowledge on discordances and concordances of encounters and perceptions of end-of-life care delivery between South Asian family caregivers and palliative care health professionals. Individual interviews were conducted among seven palliative care professionals, in a tertiary care center, and seven South Asian family caregivers who have provided care, in the same inpatient center, for the same period. The constant comparison, a component of the grounded theory approach, was employed to compare the two types of caregivers' perspectives that emerged in the qualitative data. The family caregivers were divided in their perception based on death denial and acceptance. The findings weaved the discordances and concordances of meaning assigned to palliative care to the three themes that emerged: the role of the family caregiver, communication needs and challenges, and barriers to the family caregiver participation in decision-making. The discordance between professionals and family caregivers arose in the death-denial group and concorded with the death-accepted group. The findings revealed a consequence of the survival optimistic bias, as creating dissatisfaction toward the end-of-life care delivery system when the palliative care professionals prognosticate imminent end-of-life. The family caregivers' interactions and encounters were shaped by their acceptance or denial of the death of their family member in care. Gaining conceptual clarity on the meaning of palliative care and providing education on the process of end-of-life care delivery are crucial to integrating ethnically diverse family caregivers into the decision-making process.

웰다잉(well-dying) 교육프로그램이 대학생의 죽음과 웰다잉에 대한 인식에 미치는 효과

This study was a quasi-experimental research to confirm the effect of a well-dying education program on the perception of death and well-dying among college students. It was intended to provide basic data for the development of well-dying education programs targeting youth. The study design was a two-group pre-post design, and the participants of the study were 55 nursing students and 52 non-nursing students from one university. The data was collected from October 4 to October 11, 2021, once a week for 1 hour for 2 weeks and analyzed using paired t-test and repeated measured ANOVA using the SPSS 26.0 program. The participants showed a significant decrease in 'Anxiety of death', and 'Denial of death'. A well-dying education program's beneficial effect significantly improves 'Interest of death', 'Positive of death', ' Will to respect life', and 'Perception of Well-dying' in the participants. In addition, by group differences, nursing students had ‘Interest of death’, ‘Positive of death’, and ‘Will to respect life’ and ‘Perception of Well-dying’ had a significant effect on improvement. College students in other majors had ‘Denial of death’, ‘Interest of death’, and ‘Positive of death’ had significant effects. Based on this study, the well-dying education program can be expanded and applied to college students, which can be used to change the perception of death and well-dying among them positively.

The Central Role of Schools in Promoting Death Education Interventions

Avoidance of discussion about death is common in contemporary Western societies. Plenty of literature substantiates that (at the beginning of the sentence), the actual tendency toward death denial can produce many negative effects such as the suppression of death-related thoughts and emotions. Death Education aims to strengthen the psychological anchors that allow us to recognize the profiles of anguish, prevent the decompensating factors of pathological mourning and process the experiences of loss at all ages. The article aims to support the usefulness and use of Death Education interventions in schools and their central role in promoting these interventions.

Read online The Denial of Death

read online The Denial of Death

Marshall Sahlins, where are you? From the intellectual to the existential

Marshall Sahlins, where are you? From the intellectual to the existential

How Deep Time Can Help Shape the Present: Existential Economics, “Joyful Insignificance” and the Future of the Ecological Transition

An awareness of deep time—both humanity’s deep past and the Earth’s deep future—and an understanding of its existential implications can significantly enhance the chances that humanity might still be able to transition towards an ecologically sustainable way of inhabiting the biosphere. This essay explains in detail why this is so, using analysis of a science fiction story that evokes existential horror at humanity’s ultimate cosmic insignificance. With the tools of “terror management theory” (a paradigm of existential thought based on the work of Ernest Becker and emphasizing the saliency of the denial of death in human motivation and behaviour) and of “existential economics” (an approach postulating that the way in which the economic system is organized and operates is crucially influenced by this widespread denial of death), the essay suggests that death denial has turned into the capitalist denial of life, and that only a deep reconciliation of humanity with its true ontological place in the universe will make it possible for us to transition towards a regenerative rather than a destructive system. This will entail new modes of human thinking, feeling, and acting anchored in a shared sense of “joyful insignificance,” as well as a renewed sense of “cosmic indigeneity”—a sense that all humans are indigenous to this planet and that this fact has major implications for how we ought to live into the deep future, anchored in our deep past.

The Death of Cryonics: Factors Related to Its Poor Uptake

Cryonics is a technique for freezing dead bodies at very low temperatures in the hope they will be revived at some time in the future when medical technology becomes available. At present, there are no known revival methods; however, the role of innovation in medical practice leads certain individuals to hypothesize that death will be reversible in the future. While cryonics might resonate with certain questionable contemporary Western cultural themes of death denial and neoliberalism its uptake remains minuscule. Several reasons may be pertinent. First cryonics does not fit with existing western cultural views of death and medicine. Second, poor marketing, prohibitive cost, and the lack of involvement with the funerary industry may be significant factors impacting poor intake. Third, the cryonics discourse around ideas of ‘death’ constructs a barrier that prevents ‘outsiders’ from relating to the task of cryonicists. Fourth, the general public may have a poor understanding of this technology. Finally, there may be religious objections and cultural reductions due to the lack of ritual and thus no possibility of memorializing the dead, which impacts the human appeal of cryonics.

The Power of Death Valence: A Revised Terror Management Process.

Terror management strategies (TMS) are assumed to affect social prejudice. In a prior study, positive death valence in wave 1 reduced gender-related stereotypes in wave 2. Psychosocial intervention against prejudice requires a deeper understanding of the terror management process. We investigated the relationships between death anxiety, death valence, mortality salience and TMS in a mixed method study. Participants showed complex emotions in the face of death, including fear, anxiety, sadness and ambivalent calm. Positive death valence was associated with more conscious fear, but with less implicit death anxiety, while negative death valence was associated with more death denial. In conclusion, we propose death anxiety as a distal precursor and death valence as a proximate precursor of the plural TMS that are triggered by mortality salience.

From ritual loss of life to loss of living rituals: on judicialization of slaughter and denial of animal death

ABSTRACT The increasingly industrial character of meat production has entailed significant changes to the relations we have to the animals we eat. In this article we first describe some of the practices and rituals that characterized slaughter in Norway up to the first decades of the 20th century. In this period, Norwegians drew on rituals to make the killing of an animal meaningful and acceptable. Then, by exploring the original impetus toward “humane slaughter” in the early to mid-20th century, we show how ritual transformations of animals into meat gave way to laws and regulations to justify animal killing. Finally, we provide a contemporary example of how far this “judicialization” of animal killing has come, and argue that this process has enabled the widespread denial of the animal origin of meat.

Atitude perante a morte e opinião de estudantes de Medicina acerca da formação no tema

Abstract: Introduction: Currently, most people are inserted in a sociohistorical context of denial of death, including physicians who deal with dying daily who consider themselves unprepared in the face of the death of a patient. The discomfort of these professionals in the face of the death process is due in part to the lack of the training that occurred during graduation. Objective: This study aimed to analyze the opinion of medical students at the Faculdade Pernambucana de Saúde (FPS) about teaching and perceptions on death and dying during graduation, verify the importance in medical education and describe this approach through the students’ perspective. It is also objective to find aspects that influence the belief of undergraduates about the theme. Method: This is an exploratory cross-sectional study with quantitative method, conducted between August 2020 and July 2021. Data collection was carried out through online questionnaires, with a sample of 365 subjects, after acceptance and marking on the free and informed consent form, sent to students by e-mail. For analysis, epi-info software was used using relative and absolute frequencies to describe qualitative variables and position and dispersion measures to describe quantitative variables. The chi-square test was used to verify the chi-square test, considering a significance level of 5%. The study followed all the precepts of Resolution nº 510/2016 of the National Council of Ethics in Research and received approval from the ethics committee of the college under opinion number 4,228,016. Result: Most students associate anguish, fear, and sadness with the process of death and agree that the discussion of this process in graduation impacts on the practice of medicine and on the psychosocial well-being of the physician. The students agree that the approach to the death process happened in rare moments during graduation and consider it necessary to include more disciplines that address it. Conclusion: The discussion about the process of death and dying process during medical graduation is necessary, and the insertion of modules that approach it is recommended in the medical course of FPS to contribute to the students’ understanding of this process and in the psychological preparation of these students to deal with death in the exercise of the profession.