Death and Dying

Type of psychology: Developmental psychology
Fields of study: Aging; classic analytic themes and issues; stress and
illness
Death is a universal human experience that, for most of history, has been primarily the
province of religion and philosophy. It has, however, increasingly been a concern of social
scientists; perhaps, more than has been previously realized, death has important
things to teach both scientists and laypersons about human existence.

Key concepts

• chronic illnesses
• death anxiety
• defense mechanisms
• denial
• five-stage theory
• syndrome

Although death is a universal phenomenon, it is a topic which has come late
to psychology and the other social sciences. All people, including authors,
scholars, and theologians, have dealt with death since before the beginning
of recorded history. Handling death in a scientific way is, to a large extent, a
product of the twentieth century.
The reasons for the scientific neglect of death are manifold. It is a complex
idea and one against which most people build defense mechanisms
(psychological strategies, generally unconscious, which the personality uses
as a defense against anxiety). The scientist might argue that death is not an
empirical fact (that is, one which relies on information that comes through
the senses, as opposed to relying on logical or rational processes), in the
sense that no one can experience death firsthand in order to study it or write
about it. Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, said that no one
can imagine his or her own death, and that does seem to be true; one who
tries to imagine himself or herself dead is still around, in some sense, doing
the imagining.

Some scholars have distinguished between the death state and the death
event. The death state (what it is like to be dead) is essentially a religious or
philosophical issue. It is not amenable to empirical study, although the impact
of death on other people and the impact of thoughts about death while
one is still alive can be studied. The death event, on the other hand, is, to
some degree at least, a part of life. It is possible to study how, why, and where
people die. It is possible to study the process of dying and to study grief and
bereavement.
It has also become necessary, particularly in recent years, to ask difficult
questions about death: questions about when physical death actually occurs, about humane treatment for the dying patient, about the so-called right to
die, about children and the best way to answer their concerns about death,
and about how best to help people deal with their grief. Most of these questions
generally cannot be answered by science alone. Almost all deal with
ethical, religious, and social issues as well as with scientific information.
It has been argued that Americans are “death-denying.” Even though aspects
of death are around all the time, Americans live most of the time as if
death were not a reality. Ernest Becker argued in his classic book The Denial
of Death (1973) that American lives are organized around the fear and denial
of death. His often-convincing, although primarily philosophical, argument
is augmented by research such as that of psychologists at Princeton University
who studied undergraduates, most of whom did not admit having much
conscious death anxiety (an emotional apprehension or vague fear caused
by thinking about or facing the fact of death). Yet by a word-association test,
measures of galvanic skin response (a biological electrical current in the
skin assumed to be related to levels of psychological anxiety), and response
latency (the time between the presentation of a stimulus word and the response
from the subject), researchers collected data that clearly showed that
these college students responded to words related to death with greater
emotional intensity than to equivalent words drawn from other topic areas.