Death Flashcards
Tachistoscope
device that displays an image for a specific amount of time. It can be used to increase recognition speed, to show something too fast to be consciously recognized, or to test which elements of an image are memorable.
Galvanic
- relating to or involving electric
currents produced by chemical action.
Somatic
relating to the body, especially as distinct from the mind.
Psychodynamics
the interrelation of the unconscious and conscious mental and emotional forces that determine personality and motivation.
Inchoate
just begun and so not fully formed or developed; rudimentary.
Sequelae
a condition that is the consequence of a previous disease or injury.
“the long-term ______ of infection”
Efflorescence
A whitish, powdery deposit on the surface of rocks or soil in dry regions. It is formed as mineral-rich water rises to the surface through capillary action and then evaporates. Usually consists of gypsum, salt, or calcite.
Galvanic skin response (GSR)
a change in the electrical resistance of the skin caused by emotional stress, measurable with a sensitive galvanometer, e.g., in lie-detector tests.
Curvilinear
contained by or consisting of a curved line or lines.
Neurosis
a relatively mild mental illness that is not caused by organic disease, involving symptoms of stress (depression, anxiety, obsessive behavior, hypochondria) but not a radical loss of touch with reality. Compare with psychosis.
Psychosis
a severe mental disorder in which thought and emotions are so impaired that contact is lost with external reality.
Vitalism
the theory that the origin and phenomena of life are dependent on a force or principle distinct from purely chemical or physical forces.
Caveat emptor
the principle that the buyer alone is responsible for checking the quality and suitability of goods before a purchase is made.
Abreaction
De-repressing certain noxious wishes and thoughts achieved through reliving the experience that caused it (typically through hypnosis or suggestion).
Existential psychotherapy
A dynamic approach to therapy which focuses on concerns that are rooted in the individual’s existence.
Dynamic psychotherapy
A model that posits that there are forces in conflict within the individual, and that thought, emotion, and behavior, both adaptive and psychopathological, are the resultant of these conflicting forces. Furthermore - and this is important - these forces exist at varying levels of awareness; some, indeed, are entirely unconscious.
The four ultimate concerns
Death, freedom, existential isolation, and meaninglessness
Death
The ultimate concern. We exist now, but one day we shall cease to be. Death will come and there is no escape from it. It is a terrible truth and we respond to it with mortal terror. ‘Everything,’ in Spinoza’s words, ‘endeavors to persist in its own being’; and a core existential conflict is the tension between the awareness of the inevitability of death and the wish to continue to be.
Freedom
An ultimate concern. Ordinarily we think of freedom as an unequivocally positive concept. Throughout recorded history has not the human being yearned and striven for freedom? Yet freedom viewed from this perspective of ultimate ground is riveted to dread. In its existential sense ‘freedom’ refers to the absence of external structure. Contrary to everyday experience, the human being does not enter (and leave) a well structured universe that has an inherent design. Rather, the individual is entirely responsible for - that is, is the author of - his or her own world, life design, choices, and actions. ‘Freedom’ in this sense, has a terrifying implication: it means that beneath us there is no ground - nothing, a void, an abyss. A key existential dynamic, then, is the clash between our confrontation with groundlessness and our wish for ground and structure.
Existential isolation
An ultimate concern. Not interpersonal isolation with its attendant loneliness, or intrapersonal isolation (isolation from parts of oneself), but a fundamental isolation - an isolation both from creatures and from world - which cuts beneath other isolation. No matter how close each of us becomes to another, there remains a final, unbridgeable gap; each of us enters existence alone and must depart from it alone. The existential conflict is this the tension between our awareness of our absolute isolation and our wish for contact, for protection, our wish to be part of a larger whole.
Meaninglessness
An ultimate concern. If we must die, if we constitute our own world, if each is ultimately alone in an indifferent universe, then what meaning does life have? Why do we live? How shall we live? If there is no preordained design for us, then each of us must construct our own meanings in life. Yet can a meaning of one’s own creation be sturdy enough to bear one’s life? This existential dynamic conflict stems from the dilemma of a meaning-seeking creature who is thrown into a universe that has no meaning.
the primary tense of existential therapy
The past - that is, one’s memory of the past - is important insofar as it is part of one’s current existence and has contributed to one’s current mode of facing one’s ultimate concerns; but it is as i shall discuss later, not the most rewarding area for therapeutic exploration. The future becoming present is the primary tense of existential therapy.
‘At this moment, at the deepest levels of my being, what are the most fundamental sources of dread?’
The individual’s earliest experiences, though undeniably important in life, do not provide the answer to this fundamental question. In fact, the residue of earliest life creates a biological static that serves to obscure the answer. The answer to the inquiry is transpersonal. it is an answer that cuts beneath any individual’s personal life history. It is an answer that applies to every person: it belongs to the human being’s ‘situation’ in the world.’
As Ludwig Binswanger, one of the best known existential analysts, said, ‘There is not one space and time only, but as many spaces and times as there are subjects.’
‘There is not one space and time only, but as many spaces and times as there are subjects.’ The various existential analysts agreed on one fundamental procedural point: the analyst must approach the patient phenomenologically; that is he or she must enter the patient’s experiential world and listen to the phenomena of that world without the presuppositions that distort understanding.
What are some of the most important qualities that make the human being human?
choice, values, love, creativity, self-awareness, human potential, etc.
1963 humanistic psychology’s five basic postulates
- Man, as man, supersedes the sum of his parts (that is, man cannot be understood from a scientific study of part-functions.)
- Man has his being in a human context. (that is, man cannot be understood by part-functions which ignore interpersonal experience.)
- Man is aware (and cannot be understood by a psychology which fails to recognize man’s continuous, many-layered self-awareness.)
- Man has choice (man is not a bystander to his existence; he creates his own experience.)
- Man is intentional (man points to the future; he has purpose, values and meaning.)
Yalom’s four basic postulates on death:
- the fear of death plays a major role in our internal experience; it haunts as does nothing else; it rumbles continuously under the surface; it is a dark, unsettling presence at the rim of consciousness.
- the child, at an early age, is pervasively preoccupied with death, and his or her major developmental task is to deal with terrifying fears of obliteration.
- to cope with these fears, we erect defenses against death awareness, defenses that are based on denial, that shape character structure, and that, if maladaptive, result in clinical syndromes. In other words, psychopathology is the result of ineffective mode of death transcendence.
- Lastly, a robust and effective approach to psychotherapy may be constructed on the foundation of death awareness.
‘Don’t scratch where it doesn’t itch…’ Two basic propositions about death and the practice of psychotherapy:
- Life and death are interdependent; they exist simultaneously, not consecutively; death whirs continuously beneath the membrane of life and exerts a vast influence upon experience and conduct.
- Death is a primordial source of anxiety and, as such, is the primary fount of psychopathology.
Heidegger believed that there are two fundamental modes of existing in the world:
- a state of forgetfulness of being
2. a state of mindfulness of being
Heidegger’s state of forgetfulness of being:
One lives in the world of things and immerses oneself in the everyday diversions of life: One is ‘leveled down,’ absorbed in ‘idle chatter,’ lost in the ‘they.’ One surrenders oneself to the everyday world, to a concern about the way things are.
Heidegger’s state of mindfulness of being:
In this state one marvels not about the way things are but that they are. to exist in this mode means to be continually aware of being. In this mode, which is often referred to as the ‘ontological mode,’ one remains mindful of being, not only mindful of the fragility of being but mindful, too, of one’s responsibility for one’s own being. Since it is only in this ontological mode that one is in touch with one’s self-creation, it is only here that one can grasp the power to change oneself.
Hegel postulated that history itself is what man does with death. Robert Jay Lifton has described several (5) modes by which man attempts to achieve symbolic immortality:
- the biological mode - living on through one’s progeny, through an endless chain of biological attachments
- the theological mode - living on in a different, higher plane of existence
- the creative mode - living on through one’s works, through the enduring impact of one’s personal creation or impact on others
- the theme of eternal nature - one survives through rejoining the swirling life forces of nature
- the experiential transcendent mode - through ‘losing oneself’ in a state so intense that time and death disappear and one lives in the ‘continuous present.’
Some common fears about death:
- My death would cause grief to my relatives and friends.
- All my plans and projects would come to an end.
- The process of dying might be painful.
- I could no longer have any experiences.
- I would no longer be able to care for my dependents.
- I am afraid of what might happen to me if there is a life after death.
- I am afraid of what might happen to my body after death.
several seem tangential to personal death…
fears about pain obviously lie on this side of death; fears about and afterlife beg the question by changing death into a nonterminal event; fears about others are obviously not fears about oneself. The fear of personal extinction seems to be at the vortex of concern: ‘my plans and projects would come to an end,’ and ‘I could no longer have any experiences.’
Kierkegaard on fear and anxiety (dread):
Kierkegaard was the first to make a clear distinction between fear and anxiety (dread); he contrasted fear that is fear of some thing with dread that is a fear of no thing - ‘not,’ as he wryly noticed, ‘a nothing with which the individual has nothing to do.’ One dreads (or is anxious about) losing oneself and becoming nothingness.
Jacques Choron, in a review of major philosophic views about death, distinguishes three types of death fear:
- What comes after death.
- The ‘event’ of dying.
- Ceasing to be.
Of these, the first two are fears related to death. It is the third, ‘ceasing to be’ (obliteration, extinction, annihilation), that seems more centrally the fear of death.
One of the most common and potent death-denying defenses:
The sense of specialness.
Individuals who dream of death:
Those individuals who have very high or very low conscious death anxiety tend to dream of death.
Being ‘too close to the truth.’
Perhaps it is not translation that the neurotic patient needs; he or she may not be out of contact with reality but instead, through failing to erect ‘normal’ denial defenses, may be too close to the truth.
adumbrate
report or represent in outline; indicate faintly; foreshadow or symbolize.
dysphoria
a state of unease or generalized dissatisfaction with life.
anlage
the rudimentary basis of a particular organ or other part, especially in an embryo.
Freud and Nietzsche
Freud is close to Nietzsche’s position, which considers conscious deliberation entirely superfluous to the production of behavior. Behavior, according to Nietzsche, is determined by unconscious mechanical forces: conscious consideration follows behavior rather than precedes it; one’s sense of governing one’s behavior is entirely illusion. One only imagines oneself to be choosing behavior in order to satisfy one’s will to power, one’s need to perceive oneself as an autonomous, deciding being. Death, then, can play no role in Freud’s formal dynamic theory. Since it is a future event that has never been experienced and cannot be truly imagined, it cannot exist in the unconscious and thus cannot influence behavior.
Freud’s big discovery:
Libido theory. ‘Many people have flirted with the unconscious, but i was the first to marry it.’ The energy component of Freud’s model (the sexual force or libido) - a constant amount of energy that proceeds through predetermined, well-defined stages of development during infancy and childhood, that may be bound or unbound, that may be cathected onto objects, that may overflow, be damned up, or be displaced, that is the source of thought, behavior, anxiety, and symptoms - is entirely original; it was the big discovery, and Freud clung to it fiercely. For the sake of the libido theory he sacrificed his relationships with his most promising disciples, who deviated because they refused to accept his absolute insistence on the new discovery - the central role of libido in human motivation.
Cathexis
the concentration of mental energy on one particular person, idea, or object (especially to an unhealthy degree).
Freud’s error:
There seems little question that Freud correctly delineated an important factor in human behavior. Freud’s was an error of overcathexis: his fierce investment in the primacy of libido was overdetermined; he elevates one aspect of human motivation to a position of absolute primacy and exclusivity and under that aspect subsumed everything human, for all individuals and for all times.
Freud’s great contribution:
Freud’s great contribution was his formulation of a dynamic model of the mind. To introduce death, both a fear of death and an embracement of death, into Freud’s dynamic model is merely to reintroduce it: death has always been there, beneath castration, beneath separation and abandonment.
