Introduction
In thinking about death one is likely to come up with two inescapably true and mutually excluding conclusions: certainty and unknowing (Orbach, 1999, p.9). On the one hand, each of us seems to be convinced that death is inevitable and inescapable, while, on the other hand, nobody of the living is able to confidently predict the time of his/her death and provide a clear vision of what is going to happen to what can be called a soul after the body is dead. Since ages lots of people have been dreaming to invent a way to either escape or at least postpone the moment of death. Different tools and methods have been used to try to get closer to immortality as an eternal goal of mankind, such as the stone of the philosophers, blood of infants and other suspicious medications.
Recent achievements in science (namely, transplantation, stem cells research and cloning) have made immortality look a more real goal.
Nevertheless, world’s community concerns related to the protection of human rights with regard to the achievements of biotechnology and medicine have led to the fact that the research on vast majority of technologies, which are potentially associated with immortality-related prospects, is being severely controlled, and the purposes of exploration are being restricted to therapeutic ones.
Thus personally I believe that while immortality cannot be currently considered a close-to-everyone prospect, it is worth concentrating on encountering death as containing some positive elements
. For the purposes of this assignment I would like to consider death and death anxiety as drivers for multifaceted personality development, and research into encountering death as a chance to experience love; encountering death in terms of searching for the sense of life; rethinking death with regard to the possibility to become oneself and, finally, explore the role of death anxiety in internal personality development.
Such a research will help us get into the basics of existential psychotherapy, which is often used to help patients, experiencing existential fears (e.g., death anxiety), preventing them from productive living and functioning, as well as patients in terminal states and the ones, who have experienced the loss of a loves person. Furthermore, learning to perceive death and death anxiety more as triggers for development, rather than inevitable threats, is of great use for everyone, looking forward to develop his/her personality.
Encountering death as a chance to feel love
Death is most common example of critical situation. One of the peculiarities of facing some kind of critical situation may be a person’s experiencing stronger feeling of love towards other people, his/her own family or even the whole world. In these terms love can be viewed as the antonym to fear. When overcoming his/her own concerns related to dying, a person is becoming ready to reinvent the world, being full not of fear, but of love. Many philosophers express the view, which states that love and death are strongly interconnected, and even cannot exist without one another (May, 2007, p.102). In other words, awareness about the inevitable nature of death provides a person with the chance to experience love.
So, death is strongly associated with loneliness. Therefore, being initially afraid of death, one is looking forward to avoid its indications, namely loneliness. Thus every person looks forward to love in order to escape loneliness, which he/she associates with death. Such a trend is even brighter for those, who have personally experienced situations, involving deaths of loved ones.
While sometimes death of loves ones can lead people to the willingness to get locked in the castle of their own thoughts and memories, the majority of people seek to love and be loved more even more than before their encountering-death experience. If the love between a man and woman is considered in this regard, it is being associated with birth of a new life, becoming an especially attractive option. Therefore, love does not only help to brighten finite life, but helps people overcome loneliness and isolation as sources of anxiety and fears.
Encountering death and sense of life
Another often considered way death influences life is a growing need to get the sense. In this case death makes a person reconsider his/her own life in terms of sense as its main element. The state of reconsidering one’s life after having encountered death, is often defined as “existential crisis”.
Particularly finite nature of life can be considered the element, which strengthens the need to look for a sense of life. In case the life was infinite, people would most likely waste enormous amounts of valueless time as they would be confident in the fact that they would live eternally. By comparison, people, who are aware of the direction they want to develop within and feel they have a mission to be implemented, concentrate on making steps towards their goals, designed to help them achieve the mission. They tend to make best use of limited time, provided for them to live, and thus achieve their goals in an effective manner.
Realizing infinity of time can lead to eternal postponing of actions, so death as a realistic reminder about limited nature of life urges people either to look for a sense of life (if they feel, their lives tend to lack it), or taking more specific steps to accomplish goals they associate with the sense of life. In other words, death promotes more serious attitude towards life and purposefulness.
Very frequently people say that the sense of life lies in just living, enjoying life and taking opportunities to explore as many positive aspects of life as possible. Nevertheless, despite being able to fully enjoy life itself, nature, relationships with other people and endless variety of other things, people often complain about the lack of interest in life, boredom and the fact that everything seems to be okay, but nothing brings the feeling of enjoyment. Despite all the opportunities of modern age, more and more people tend to consider life senseless, and demonstrate suicidal behavior.
For such people the death of a loved one can become the opportunity to reconsider things, which lived people are free to enjoy (like air, sun, meeting an old friend, trying a new kind of sport), while dead ones are already deprived of this chance.
Such a consideration may help those, who have experienced a tragedy, to realize that living is never senseless due to the great difference, which exists between the lived and dead ones. In this regard it is also worth mentioning that people in terminal states also tend to more fully enjoy the opportunities of life, which they know they are going to lose soon.
Encountering death and a chance to become oneself
While modern age of globalization provides people with endless opportunities for professional and personal development by providing state-of-the-art means of getting information and communicating, tempos of life in modern urban centres often deprive their inhabitants from the chance to get to know themselves as they tend to run from school to university, and than just around the circle “office-home-office”.
In terms of this eternal movement particularly death can become a reason for a stop and interest in exploring oneself in a more profound manner, allowing exploring one’s uniqueness and coming closer to so-called “congruence”. In most basic terms congruence can be perceived as a real being or a relationship of consistency, which is being established between a person’s experience, awareness and communication (Tudor&Worrall, 2006, p.17).
Firstly, encountering death can be associated with inner transformation, which stems from all the psychological anti-death protective mechanisms failing.
Furthermore, closeness of death can help a person to get rid of everything, which is unnatural for him/her, and was obtained due to the influence of social environment and its stereotypes. At terminal stages of illnesses people tend to realize that they have too little time to pretend in order to fir stereotypes and, therefore, they have a chance to get to know themselves more profoundly and start doing whatever they have always wanted to do.
Greatness and unavoidable nature of death makes people understand that nothing artificial is any more important, thus making people more individualistic and free from societal impacts we are currently more and more being influenced by.
In both the case of finding a sense of life and becoming oneself, it is important to realize that death does not allow people to delay existence and think that something can be done in the future. Thus death should be viewed as “absence of a possibility of opportunity”, while life is a “possibility of opportunities”. When somebody dies, a person feels that his/.her unity with this person stooped to exist, therefore, he/she gets exposed to the absence of possibility of opportunities and perceives the need to make best use of time in order to use as many opportunities as possible.
Despite the fact that from what is highlighted above it may seem that somebody’s death is nothing but a source of positive transformation, I cannot help mentioning that, when encountering death, people tend to go through an extremely difficult period of sharp grief and denial, which can be both useful (as inevitable means change) and totally devastating.
Death anxiety and its role in personal development
Death anxiety is usually associated with the loss of self as death is believed not only to deprive us of existence, but prevent us from the opportunity to be self. Furthermore, a fear of death is associated with the fear of change as death means a rapid change of state from being alive to becoming dead.
The fear of change is likely to manifest itself in extremely wide variety of fears humans are not likely to associate with the fear of change, namely a fear to lose love or support, to be used and get nothing as substitution, a fear of freedom etc. This fear is the one, which helps the person feel comfortable and think that he/she possesses all necessary powers to fully control his/her life.
Nevertheless, as people are in vast majority of cases unable to predict their own deaths, they should not feel that everything is stable due to the fact that not knowing when they are going to die means that they can expect death to wait for them almost every moment.
Thus death anxiety can be viewed as greatest fear of one’s life. Here a question appears whether death anxiety can have positive consequences for self-development or just serve a constant source of inevitable pressure.
The need to cope with the fear of death is often believed to be a key motive of people’s inner emotional experiences, which can have long-term effects on both micro- and macro-social levels. According to the ideas of I.Yalom (1980), macro-effects of this phenomenon involve thinking out means to fill time, creating entertainments, believing in progress and even forming concepts, such as success, which create a vision of the purpose to be reached (p.45-50).
In microsocial terms people tend to compensate their fear by using mechanisms, which have already been invented at macrosocial level or using some other (sometimes contacts-between-people-based) approaches. For instance, a person may try to compensate his/her fear by becoming more influential or seeking to get under the influence of another (more dominant) person. Either the feeling of one’s power or the power of another person creates the vision of being protected against death, despite the fact that death is inevitable.
Despite the fact that working out compensatory mechanisms is not always concerned with the ways people usually associate with self-development, even hiding from death anxiety involves thinking and rethinking the world around and self in the context of the environment, therefore, creating prerequisites for seeing perspectives of changing self to feel more comfortable against the background of inevitability of death.
Apart from the need to form compensatory mechanisms, death anxiety can lead to such states as grief and depression. While in psychotherapy depression is most always viewed as the feeling of nothingness, some point, which does not allow a person moving and developing further, grief has a changing nature and can be considered with wide variety of feelings, including offence, guilt, anger and realizing injustice of the world around in personal terms. Coming through a death of a loved one is concerned with variety of emotions, which despite their destructive nature, can further lead to constructive changes in personality structure.
After a crisis, which is characterized by sharp emotional pain, and denial stages of grief, a person usually tends to rethink his/her unity with a person, who had died, explore their relations, rethink his/her own life with regard to the loss and even recreate his/her system of values. Furthermore, a person, who has just lost a loved one, can become more interested in the issues of death, death anxiety and their role in personality formation, can become more open to the theme of death and thus reload his/her inner mechanisms of approaching death anxiety and death.
So, it is evident that death anxiety can be helpful in two basic dimensions. The first one deals with outer manifestations of compensatory mechanisms, being employed by people in order to cope with the existential death anxiety.
When creating means to fill time and striving for success, people may achieve far-reaching results in different spheres of professional and personal development. For instance, being driven by death anxiety and willingness to invent anti-death medication, health professionals all over the world have been achieving significant progress in combating lots of communicable and incommunicable diseases, which tend to exert significant negative influence on quality of life of patients. In emotional terms someone, willing to get to know reasons and consequences of his/her fears, may start studying philosophy and psychology, and thus contribute to his/her personal development.
Both at macro- and microsocial levels death anxiety-related compensatory mechanisms can be viewed as leading to progress at global and personal scales respectively.
Secondly, encountering death and death anxiety is concerned with experiencing wide variety of emotion, which, despite being painful, means activeness of person’s inner life. Active inner life is most always concerned with self-development as rethinking the world around and his/her place within it, a person tends to get to know how the world is organized and develop more profound understanding of life.
Conclusion
In people’s conscience the concept of death is inevitably associated with darkness, inescapability, coffins, cemeteries and nothingness. People tend to think that death can lead to nothing but negative change. In terms of this assignment I have tried to substantiate the fact that both death of loved people and death anxiety can have positive impact on the life of a person.
First of all, after having been personally exposed to death as an inescapable end of life, one is likely to be looking forward for love and develop brighter and franker feelings, combating isolation and intuitively feeling love between man and woman to be opposite to death due to implicitly meaning birth.
Secondly, directly feeling limited nature of lifetime, people are becoming more purpose-oriented, and can more effectively define and accomplish what one can call mission. In other words, under pressure of finite nature of time, allocated for one’s life, a person is more motivated not to delay actions and look for sense of life and take action. Same feeling of limitedness of time (especially in cases of terminally ill patients) allows people to get to know themselves better as they get motivation to get rid of stereotypes, being artificially posed on them by society.
Furthermore, particularly proximity and real nature of death can help people start enjoying most usual things, which they tend to ignore, when not thinking of differences in opportunities, which exist between the alive and the dead. As for death anxiety, it is necessary to mention the fact that it can be considered an important driver for development both with regard to personal development of one human being and at macrosocial level.
References
May, R. (2007). Love and will. NY: W.W. Norton
Orbach, A. (1999).Life, psychotherapy and death. The end of our exploring. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishing
Tudor, K., Worrall, M. (2006). Person-centred psychotherapy: a clinical philosophy. London: Routledge
Yalom, I. (1980). Existential psychotherapy. NY: Basic Books
