By Jeremy CLAVIER and Eve BIHAN
“The idea of death saves us”
Irvin Yalom
It is with this strange sentence that Yalom announces how death is a fundamental issue in people’s lives. Life exists at the same time as death, it is the condition that allows us to live life in an authentic way. When you realize how brief life is, you don’t want to waste time losing yourself into futile problems. Thus, the confrontation with death can have positive effects on an individual’s changing.
Yalom has set up numerous focus groups with people with terminal cancers to develop his theory on death. According to him, it is a crisis or a danger that some are going to take advantage of as an opportunity for change and also operates a real personal growth.
This way of thinking is counter-intuitive, when we know to which point the confrontation with the proximity of death can be a shock, a real trauma, for example, when a diagnosis is announced, or a car accident. Yet, according to Yalom, the awareness of death gives life its intensity, as we become aware of the importance of life and enjoy it. The awareness of death favours a twist on the immediate entertainment and appeasement to which we rush to forget our worries.
If Yalom gives death a real power of self-actualization, he does not forget the anguish of death. But what is anguish ? First of all, anguish is not anxiety, it is more like an emotional distress, a feeling of discomfort. The term anguish is already not very evocative, a vague fear without a real object, or an unknown object. Larivey speaks in this case about an approximation of emotion: we circle around it without ever really naming it. This is precisely how Yalom defines anguish: the fear of a “nothing”, which is impossible to cope and generates a feeling of powerlessness. But it is not nothing if you look at it more closely. What is behind this anguish? An aggregate of various fears.
If we are more particularly interested in the anguish of death, we realize that it may include :
- A fear of suffering
- A fear of the afterlife
- A fear for the consequences on our loved ones
- A fear of our own disappearance, of no longer being.
“Pure” anguish cannot be treated in therapy, because it is automatically subdivided and treated by defense mechanisms to be treated into minor issues. Anguish of death is expressed in a very diverse way: no longer thinking, always being busy, leaving a trace of ourselves, having an important socio-economic status. We do everything we can to forget death, and we do it well.
According to Yalom, there are 2 types of death anguish:
- Conscious anguish : awareness of fear of death, often correlated with depressive disorders or obsessive-compulsive disorders or acts (acting to stop thinking about it)
- Unconscious anguish: this is what happens in normal times for most people, anxiety is on standby
Initially, the child’s death anguish is managed by the parents. But according to Yalom, the awareness of death in childhood is earlier than the discovery of sexuality. For example, you just have to look out the window along the road in the countryside to see dead animals.
The thing that arouses the anguish of death, normally unconscious, is death itself. A traumatic life event where you thought you were dying yourself, the death of a close person … These events remind us that we are not eternal, and destroy our feeling of being powerful, of inviolability. The brutal reality calls us to order.
Facing death is normal, it is a healthy form of inoculation of the experience, according to Yalom. But this experience is only healthy when internal and external support makes it possible to manage our own anxiety in an adaptive way. Thus, the death of a parent for a child can have very deleterious consequences on his functioning, because he experiences death very early on. The feeling of being powerful is important to maintain in order to be able to set up activities and meaning to our lives. But if this feeling is broken too early, the child can grow up and think : “What’s the use of setting stuff in place since it’s all going to end?”
To conclude on the anguish of death, everyone is confronted with it: but defence mechanisms are being put in place to make it less painful and less conscious. Psychopathologies develop when the defence mechanisms put in place are ineffective in managing the terror caused by the death scenario. Moreover, many patients find themselves avoiding death through their symptoms: avoiding dying in order to avoid living.
As if death were the price to pay for enjoying life: “If I don’t enjoy life, I don’t pay the price?
Words we have learned :
- Focus groups = Groupes de discussion
- Counter-intuitive = Contre-intuitif
- Appeasement = Apaisement
- Anguish of death = Angoisse de mort
- To cope = Faire face
- Powerlessness = impuissance