Death & Madness

Death and Madness

HOW IT AFFECTS THE LIVING

Death and Madness

Death

Team Menber

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

To practice death is to practice freedom. A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave - Montaigne

I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it - Mark Twain

The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time - Mark Twain

It is psychologically beneficial to have death as a goal toward which to strive - Carl Jung

Death is the key to unlocking the door to true happiness - Mozart

When we are prepared for death, life is sweeter - Shakespeare

To free oneself of death anxiety, nearly everyone chooses the path of repression - Becker

Repression of death is the enemy of mankind - Becker

Robert Jay Lifton states that we must “know death” in order to live with free imagination. In order to liberate our global schemas we must make death our friend.

People see death as terrible, as tragic. Because they want to live, they see death as the enemy of life and therefore deny death, which then becomes even more fearful and monstrous. Beneath this fear of death lies "the ultimate fear . . . the fear of looking into ourselves.

Remembering . . . brings life into focus . . . It sorts out your priorities, so you do not live a trivial life . . . It helps you take care of the most important things in life first. Don't worry about dying; that will happen successfully whether you worry about it or not.

Our denial of death complicates problems that exist in society. It is why there is no long-term vision, not very much thought for the consequences of actions, little or no compassion.

If you are not afraid of dying, there is nothing you cannot achieve.

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Death and Madness

Death & Children

Team Menber

Children do not have the resources or experience to integrate loss into their world.

Death shatters a child's view of immortality.

The death of a child is the most intense form of grief. This loss also bears a lifelong process: one does not get 'over' the loss but instead must assimilate and live with the death.

Deaths such as suicides and other sudden, unexpected deaths can result in complicated grief due to the sudden shock. The surprise makes it difficult to integrate the "story" of the loss, so the person struggles with an initial task of simply believing that the loss has occurred.

We live in a death-denying, grief dismissing world.

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Death & Madness

Madness

A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.

If you were never allowed to express anger in your family, your anger becomes an alienated part of yourself. You experience toxic shame when you feel angry. This part of you must be disowned or severed.

Mental illnesses happens to people who are not allowed to work through their emotional issues.

When shame has been completely internalized, nothing about you is okay. You feel flawed and inferior; you have a sense of being a failure.

There is no way you can share your inner self because you are an object of contempt to yourself.

To be severed and alienated within oneself also creates a sense of unreality. One may have an all-pervasive sense of never quite belonging, of being on the outside looking in.

The condition of inner alienation and isolation is also pervaded by depression. There is the sadness of losing one's authentic self. Perhaps the deepest and most devastating aspect of neurotic shame and madness is the rejection of the self by the self.

In so doing the alienated self becomes the hated and evil self. If only this self did not exist then there would be no problem. False self and true self engage in an inner battle for control. The stakes may be survival or at the very least all-consuming.

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Team Menber

Death & Madness

Existentialism

Team Menber

Becker’s automatic cultural man is a modern description of Kierkegaard’s “Philistine.” For Kierkegaard, Philistinism was man fully concerned with the trivial.

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