Since the dawn of Civilization, death is considered an aspect that fascinates and, at the same time, terrifies Humanity. Death and the supposed events that follow it are, historically, a source of inspiration for doctrines philosophical and religious, as well as an inexhaustible source of fears, anguish and anxieties for beings humans.
Interest in the topic of death began with the reading of some reports from LELU (Laboratory of Studies and Intervention on Grief). The contact with these reports, and the analysis of death as a psychic phenomenon, were the starting point of this work. The articles came up against the natural longings about death and showed that, despite the ethereal dimension that death takes on the level psychic, there are professionals and entities committed to studying it in a scientific way, using a methodology essentially psychological.
Due to the initial contact with the LELU material and the interest aroused by it, the search for other research already carried out in the same field was a natural impulse, and ended up forming the theoretical basis that supports this work.
Death as a physical phenomenon has been extensively studied and continues to be the subject of research, but it remains an impenetrable mystery when we venture into the realm of psyche.
Talking about death, while helping to elaborate the idea of human finitude, provokes a certain discomfort, because we come face to face with this same finitude, the inevitable, the certainty that one day life comes to the end.
The human certainty of death triggers a series of psychological mechanisms. And it is these mechanisms that instigate our scientific curiosity. In other words, the focus of interest would be how man deals with death; their fears, their anxieties, their defenses, their attitudes towards death.
The objective of this research is the theoretical deepening of the issue of death, focusing on the way in which men deal with this inevitable human phenomenon, realizing the psychological mechanisms that come into play when man is faced with death.
The subject of death is by no means a current discussion. Many philosophers, historians, sociologists, biologists, anthropologists and psychologists have discussed the subject throughout history. This is because death is not part of a specific category; it is a question that runs through history, it is above all an essentially human question.
Within the various theoretical approaches that enable reflection on death, one of them is of special interest to us: the psychoanalytic approach. It was this approach that gave substance to our questions about death, whether through personal analysis or through theory itself.
The conception that one has about death and man's attitude towards it tends to change according to the historical and cultural context. Undoubtedly, the advent of capitalism and its times of crisis gave rise to a new view of death, which, according to Torres, (1983), has to do with the emergence of capital as the main force of production. In this sense, the living can do anything and the dead can do nothing, since their productive life has been interrupted.
Faced with this crisis, in which men find themselves completely abandoned and unprepared, we see this theoretical deepening as a way to scale the death, contributing to its better understanding and elaboration, especially equipping health professionals, who work side by side with this theme.
This work is structured in three main parts. The first seeks to analyze the impact of death on society over time, showing how different peoples at different times dealt with this issue. The second part talks about the ambiguous feelings generated in us, human beings, when we are forced to face our own death, as well as the death of another. The third and last part talks about grief in its different contexts.
HISTORICAL DATA
We have a cultural heritage about death that defines our view of death today. According to Kastenbaum and Aisenberg (1983), current interpretations of death are part of the legacy that previous generations and ancient cultures have bequeathed to us.
We will then take a short walk through history so that we can understand how the idea of death found today was constructed.
Archaeologists and anthropologists, through their studies, discovered that Neanderthal man already cared about his dead:
"Not only does Neanderthal man bury his dead, but he sometimes gathers them (Children's Grotto, near Menton)." Morin (1997)
Also according to Morin (1997) in prehistory, the dead of the Musterense peoples were covered by stones, mainly on the face and head, both to protect the corpse of animals, and to prevent them from returning to the world of alive. Later, the dead man's food and weapons were deposited on the stone grave and the skeleton was painted with a red substance.
“Not abandoning the dead implies their survival. There is no report of virtually any archaic group abandoning their dead or abandoning them without rites.” Morin (1997)
Even today, in the highlands of Madagascar, throughout their lives, the kiboris build a brick house, a place where their bodies will remain after death.
According to Kastenbaum and Aisenberg (1983), the ancient Egyptians, in their highly developed society from an intellectual and technological point of view, they considered death as an occurrence within the sphere of action. They had a system that aimed to teach each individual to think, feel and act in relation to death.
The authors go on to say that the Malays, living in an intense community system, appreciated the death of a component, as a loss to the group itself. This time, a work of collective lamentation in the face of death was necessary for the survivors. Furthermore, death was seen not as a sudden event, but as a process to be experienced by the entire community.
According to Aries (1977), in the Vulgate, the book of Wisdom, after death, the just will go to Paradise. The Nordic versions of the book of Wisdom rejected the idea of Paradise described in the original book. for, according to the translators, the Norse do not expect the same delights as the Orientals after the death. This is because the Orientals describe Paradise as having “the coolness of the shade”, while the Norse prefer “the warmth of the sun”. These curiosities show us how human beings want, at least after death, to obtain the comfort they did not get in life.
Buddhism, through its mythology, seeks to affirm the inevitability of death. Buddhist doctrine tells us the “Parable of the Mustard Grain”: a woman with her dead child in her arms seeks out Buddha and begs him to revive. Buddha asks the woman to get some mustard seeds to revive him. However, the woman should get these grains in a house where no one has ever died. Obviously this house was not found and the woman understood that she would always have to count on death.
In Hindu mythology, death is seen as an escape valve for demographic control. When the "Mother-Earth" becomes overloaded with living people, she appeals to the god Brahma who then sends the "woman in red" (who represents death in Western mythology) to take people, thus alleviating the natural resources and population overload of the "Mother earth".
According to Mircea Eliade (1987), the Finno-Ugrics (people from the Kola Peninsula and Western Siberia) have their religiosity deeply linked to shamanism. The dead of these peoples were buried in family graves, where those who died longer ago received the “newly dead”. Thus, families were made up of both the living and the dead.
These examples bring us an idea of continuity in relation to death, not being the same, considered as an end in itself. There was a certain attempt at magical control over death, which facilitated its psychological integration, thus not having an abrupt split between life and death. This no doubt brought man closer to death with less terror.
Despite their familiarity with death, the Ancients of Constantinople kept cemeteries away from cities and towns. The cults and honors they rendered to the dead were intended to keep them away, so that they would not “come back” to disturb the living.
On the other hand, in the Middle Ages, Christian cemeteries were located inside and around churches and the word cemetery also meant “a place where you no longer bury”. Hence, ditches full of overlapping and exposed bones around churches were so common.
The Middle Ages were a time of intense social crisis, which ended up marking a radical change in the way men deal with death. Kastenbaum and Aisenberg (1983) tell us that fourteenth-century society was plagued by plague, famine, crusades, the Inquisition; a series of events leading to mass death. The total lack of control over social events was also reflected in death, which could no longer be magically controlled as in previous times. On the contrary, death came to live side by side with man as a constant threat to haunt and take everyone by surprise.
This lack of control brings to the consciousness of man at this time, the fear of death. From there, a series of negative contents begin to be associated with death: perverse, macabre contents, as well as torture and scourges start to relate to death, causing a total estrangement of man in face of this event so disturbing. Death is personified as a way for man to try to understand who he is dealing with, and a series of artistic images are consecrated as true symbols of death, crossing time until the days of today.
Kübler-Ross (1997) describes that social changes are increasingly intense and rapid, expressed by technological advances. Man has become more and more individualistic, worrying less about the problems of the community. These changes have their impact on the way man deals with death today.
Today's man lives with the idea that a bomb can fall from the sky at any moment. It is not surprising, therefore, that man, faced with so much lack of control over life, tries to defend himself psychically, in an increasingly intense way, against death. "Decreasing your physical defense capacity every day, your psychological defenses act in various ways" Kübler-Ross (1997)
At the same time, these atrocities would be, according to Mannoni's point of view, (1995), true impulses of destruction; the visible dimension of the death drive.
Mannoni (1995), citing Aries, says that death revealed its correlation with life in different historical moments. People could choose where they would die; far or near such people, in their place of origin; leaving messages to their descendants.
The possibility of choice gave rise to a growing loss of dignity when dying, as Kübler-Ross tells us (1997): "...Gone are the days when a man was allowed to die peacefully and with dignity in his own home."
For Mannoni, nowadays, 70% of patients die in hospitals, while in the last century, 90% died at home, close to their families. This is because, in Western societies, the dying person is generally removed from their family circle.
"The doctor does not accept that his patient dies and, if he enters the field where medical impotence is confessed, the temptation to call the ambulance (to get rid of the “case”) will come before the idea of accompanying the patient at home, until the end of life.” mannoni (1995)
Natural death gave way to monitored death and resuscitation attempts. Often, the patient is not even consulted as to what he wants to be tried to relieve him. The medicalization of death and palliative care often only serve to prolong the suffering of the patient and his family. It is very important that medical teams learn to distinguish palliative care and comfort for the dying patient from a simple extension of life.
Another behavioral aspect of human beings in relation to death is that in the past, people preferred to die slowly, close to the family, where the dying person had the opportunity to say goodbye. Today, it is not uncommon to hear that instant death is preferable to long suffering caused by an illness.
However, according to Kovács (1997), contrary to common sense, the time of the disease, precisely helps to assimilate the the idea of death, and to be able to make concrete decisions, such as adopting the children or the resolution of disagreements.
According to Bromberg (1994) our culture does not incorporate death as part of life, but rather as punishment or punishment.
THE MAN FACING DEATH HIMSELF / THE MAN FACING THE DEATH OF THE OTHER
From a very early age, as babies, when we begin to distinguish our own body from the mother's body, we are forced to learn to separate ourselves from who or what we love. At first, we live with temporary separations, such as changing schools. But there comes a time, when our first definitive loss happens: someone who is very dear to us is one day gone forever. It is precisely this “forever” that bothers us the most.
However, the more aware we are of our daily deaths, the more we prepare for the moment of the great loss of everything. that we collect and nurture throughout life: from all intellectual baggage, all affective relationships, to the body physicist.
With the increasing distance of man in relation to death, a taboo is created, as if it were inadvisable or even prohibited to talk about this topic.
According to Bromberg (1994) “as we learn in our culture, we avoid pain, we avoid loss and we run away from death, or we think about running away from it...”
This current picture reveals the dimension of the split that man has made between life and death, trying to get as far away from the idea of death, always considering that it is the other who is going to die and not him. We then launched into the question of anguish and fear in relation to death.
One of the basic limitations of man is the limitation of time. According to Torres (1983): "...time generates anguish, because from the temporal point of view, the great limiting factor is called death..."
Existential Psychoanalysis, pointed out by Torres (1983) reveals the dimension of the anguish of death: "The anguish itself in us reveals that death and nothingness opposes the deepest and most inevitable tendency of our being", which would be the affirmation of the self same.
Mannoni (1995) searches in Freud for words that speak of man's anguish in the face of death: "... Freud places it either in reaction to an external threat, or as in melancholy, in the course of an internal process. It is always, however, a process that takes place between the self and the severity of the superego."
According to Kastenbaum and Aisenberg (1983) the human being deals with two conceptions in relation to death: the death of the other, of which we are all aware, although it is related to the fear of abandonment; and the conception of death itself, the awareness of finitude, in which we avoid thinking because, for this, we have to face the unknown.
It is the anguish generated when coming into contact with the fatality of death, which makes the human being mobilize to overcome it, triggering for this purpose, various defense mechanisms, expressed through unconscious fantasies about the death. A very common fantasy is that there is an afterlife; that there is a paradisiacal world, watered by the pleasure principle and where there is no suffering; of there being the possibility of returning to the mother's womb, a kind of birth in reverse, where there are no desires and needs. Unlike these pleasurable fantasies, there are those that arouse fear. The individual can relate death to hell. They are persecutory fantasies that have to do with feelings of guilt and remorse. In addition, there are projective identifications with diabolic figures, relating death to a being terrifying, skull-faced, intertwined with fears of annihilation, disintegration and dissolution.
Man is the only animal that is aware of his own death. According to Kovács (1998): "Fear is the most common response to death. The fear of dying is universal and affects all human beings, regardless of age, sex, socioeconomic level and religious beliefs."
For the Existential Psychoanalysis enunciated by Torres, (1983): "... the fear of death is the basic fear and at the same time the source of all our achievements: everything we do is to transcend death.”
He complements this thinking by stating that "all stages of development are actually forms of universal protest against the accident of death."
According to Freud (1917) nobody believes in their own death. Unconsciously, we are convinced of our own immortality. “Our habit is to emphasize the fortuitous causation of death – accident, illness, old age; in this way, we betray an effort to reduce death from a necessity to a fortuitous event.”
Source: Brazil School - https://brasilescola.uol.com.br/psicologia/estudo-teorico-morte.htm