Quirky Little Things

The science of the queer and the quotidian.

Jesse Bering is an experimental psychologist and Director of the Institute of Cognition and Culture at the Queen's University, Belfast. See full bio

May 2, 2008, Spirituality

Comments on "A Death in Zakopane"

A Death in Zakopane

By Jesse Bering, Ph.D. on May 2, 2008 in Quirky Little Things

It's almost as if we each secretly believe that we're special, privileged, likely to be rescued from death no matter how grim things look. After all, death is what happens to those other people. Read More

Freud

Submitted by Rob Sica on May 2, 2008 - 8:07am.

In the second part ("Our Attitude Towards Death") of his 1915 essay "Timely Reflections on War and Death", Freud traces the sense of personally-privileged immunity from death back to his drive-oriented structuring of the unconscious:

"...fundamentally, no one believes in his own death or, which comes to the same thing: in the unconscious each of us is convinced of his immortality. [...] our unconscious does not believe in its own death, it acts as though it were immortal. What we call our 'unconscious', the deepest strata of our psyche, consisting of drive-impulses, knows nothing negative, no denial -- in it, opposites coincide -- and for that reason too it does not know its own death, to which we can only give a negative content. So there is nothing instinctive within us that responds to a belief in death."

I wonder how much (if any) of this account can survive the deliverances of contemporary psychology that apparently put in doubt the dynamic conception of the unconscious Freud insisted upon.

Just Thinking

Submitted by Becky on May 2, 2008 - 12:51pm.

I am reminded of the old paradox in which a person is told something like "Whatever you do don't think about an elephant" and inevitablely an elephant enters thier thoughts. Could contemplating death be an example of this impossibility? Essentially to comprehend death one is being asked to conciously assess the unconcious or think about not thinking. Seems like an impossibility to me.

Hope for what? I doubt

Submitted by Lucy on May 2, 2008 - 5:00pm.

Hope for what? I doubt anyone thought they would actually be rescued from the gas. Hope belongs to another land- heaven, or the afterlife. Death is not what happens "to other people", but to all of us, and people *know* this. Unless you are certifiably crazy, the feeling of impassibility is anchored in the hope of the afterlife. Where else could it be? People don't disassociate themselves from the dead because they think they are immune to death- they disassociate because the dead live in another land. The dead are strangers in degree, not in kind.

Consider it more deeply

Submitted by Jesse Bering, Ph.D. on May 3, 2008 - 12:56am.

Lucy, I'm afraid you've missed the subtlety of Borowski's message to the living. More importantly, you've missed mine: "despite what we tend to say, I'm not convinced we fully appreciate the fact that we're no more special or entitled to life as were all those people decomposing under our feet at this very moment." There's a little thing called the unconscious that doesn't often gel with what we think we know and realise about ourselves.

Sorry if I wasn't clear- I

Submitted by Lucy on May 3, 2008 - 7:27am.

Sorry if I wasn't clear- I think we just misunderstand each other. I agree with you that people may think they are "special", or exempt, from death, but it's not simply that death elicits such unpleasant feelings they just slough it off and deny the reality altogether. I think they probably envision their own death, simulate it even, and imagine themselves in the afterlife, and this is what gets them through the horror. It's not hope that you're not going to die at all- that's just silly. It's hope that your life won't really be over when you die. Maybe it's the same mental process either way, but I think it's important to qualify the process of hoping not as simple denial of the facts but as a re-working of them.

I don't believe in an

Submitted by Lucy on May 3, 2008 - 7:29am.

I don't believe in an afterlife by the way! I'm just talking about how most people must think.

The rest of the quote

Submitted by Jesse Bering, Ph.D. on May 3, 2008 - 8:37am.

Perhaps. But I think the issue of the afterlife is somewhat different, as that requires an active conceptualisation of what happens "next." What Borowski is getting at, I think, is that we are strangely optimistic that we'll be personally favoured by a God who will intervene through some last minute rescue effort. When my mother, a lifelong pessimist and "realist", was very obviously nearing the end of her long battle with cancer, I was surprised to hear her talking about the next few months of hospice treatment. In fact she died three days later. This is the type of hope Borowski was referring to. I realise now I should have finished his quote, which is as follows: "It is hope that compels man to hold onto one more day of life, because that day may be the day of liberation. Ah, and not even hope for a different, better world. But simply for life."

Excellent post. I think

Submitted by Chris on May 24, 2008 - 5:17am.

Excellent post. I think there is a lot to what you said... and I think those effects happen at a greater level that we fully appreciate. I'd be very curious if there is any literature out on this topic. Although I could see this topic cross philosophical boundaries (unfortunately), so there may be a lack of formalized ideas. Lead me in a direction if there is one!