Quotes on Aging and Mortality Related Issues
Dr. Earnest Becker |
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Writing on the Subject of: |
Writing on the Subject of: |
Fear of death: The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity - activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for man. |
Heroism as a form of denying death: Anthropological and historical research also begin, in the nineteenth century, to put together a picture of the heroic since primitive and ancient times. The hero was the man who could go into the spirit world, the world of the dead, and return alive. He had his descendants in the mystery cults of the Eastern Mediterranean, which were cults of death and resurrection. The divine hero of each of these cults was one who had come back from the dead. And, as we know today, from the research into ancient myths and rituals, Christianity itself was a competitor with the mystery cults and won out - among other reasons - because it, too, featured a healer supernatural powers who had risen from the dead. |
Age that we become aware of our mortality. An increasing number of careful studies on how the actual fear of death develops in the child agree fairly well that the child has no knowledge of death until about the age of three to five. How could he? It is too abstract an idea, too removed from his experience. He lives in a world that is full of living, acting things, responding to him, amusing him, feeding him. He doesn't know what it means for life to disappear forever, nor theorize where it would go. Only gradually does he recognize that there is a thing called death that takes some people away forever; very reluctantly he comes to admit that it sooner or later takes everyone away, but this gradual realization of the inevitability of death can take up until the ninth or tenth year. |
Fear of death is basic and primary anxiety. A large body of people would agree with these observations on early experience and would admit that experiences may heighten natural anxieties and later fears. But these people would also claim very strongly that nevertheless the fear of death and is present everywhere, that it is the basic fear that influences all others, a fear from which no one is immune, no matter how disguised it may be. |
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