Death and Dying

by Sudhir Kakar

  Finally it is obvious that the more one goes into detail about the nature of post-bodily consciousness, the more speculative and parapsychological the detail becomes. What can be said with certainty of Jung’s position is that the living and dead are jointly involved in a process of humanity’s becoming conscious. The front line in this interplay is the individual’s move throughout life to the realization of one’s primal form or essential truth. The substance of this realization is retained beyond death as the individual’s greatest contribution to humanity’s conscious furtherance in which the dead remain intensely interested, though by and large beyond active engagement. The process in its totality is one in which divinity and humanity become incrementally self-conscious in one organic process, a mutual redemption grounded eternally in divinity and in human historical consciousness where the eternal becomes fully conscious in time.

  Mystical Death and Nothingness

  I would like to conclude briefly with an examination of the psychodynamics of the realization of one’s primal form, focused through the mystics to whom Jung was drawn. All were members of the apophatic tradition. In this tradition the mystical journey ended in a total emptiness beyond all form and definition. As such it is contrasted with cataphatic mysticism reliant on word and image. The cataphatic stream of mysticism retains throughout a distance between the mystic and the divine. The subject/object split is never overcome. If anything it is intensified. In contrast, the term ‘apophatic’ means that these mystics shared a common experience of unqualified identity with divinity in a psychic realm of nothingness intolerant of any distinction between particulars, including that between the divine and the human. All subject/object split is eliminated.

  Historically, Jung turns first to a member of the Beguine community, a 13th-and 14th-century group of women laity, with whom the imagery of the mystical marriage played a central role. He cites Mechthild of Magdeburg, who died in 1282, as enjoying an erotic relation with Christ, the divinized form of her animus or masculinity (CW 6, par. 392, 1971c). And indeed she did, describing a tryst in the frankly sexual trope of the Minnesingers, ending in a moment of veiled but intense sexual consummation with a seventeen-year-old Christ figure in a silence which speaks of unmitigated identity and sateity (Flowing Light, Bk 1, sec. 44). A contemporary Beguine, Hadewijch of Antwerp, is even more explicit. After a moment of sexual ecstasy with a thirty-three-year-old Christ figure she fully merged with the figure in a moment of identity beyond differentiation (Hadewijch, 7th vision, p. 280-82). Marguerite Porete, a third notable Beguine was burnt in public in Paris in 1310 for heresy. Her heresy centred on her experience of the annihilated soul whose annihilation led also to an identity with God as the nothing underlying the existent. Out of this experience she could say of herself, ‘Without such nothingness she cannot be All’ (Mirror, 129, 193). A moment’s identity with the nothing in which the totality is latent apparently generates a compassion that extends to all that is as a manifest concretion of the creative nothingness. In a surprising affinity with Marguerite’s statement Jung himself makes such immersion in the nothing the basis of an authentic modern spirituality in which the individual, after discarding all outgrown forms of religiosity, would ‘acknowledge that he stands before the nothing out of which the All may grow’ (CW 10, par. 150).

  Scholarship has currently linked the next of Jung’s favourite mystics to Marguerite Porete. Meister Eckhart, who died in 1328 during the course of his own heresy trial, lived during his first teaching period in Paris, with a fellow Dominican, William of Paris, who was Marguerite’s inquisitor and so effectively her executioner (McGuin, 9). That he likely had read Marguerite is most evident in his late and famous sermon Blessed are the Poor. Here Eckhart describes true poverty as the loss of intellect, will and personal identity to a primal immersion in the Godhead beyond Trinitarian differentiation. In this process Eckhart returns to his native divinity in which he continues to inhere even after his return to an active life in time (Schurmann, 214–20). In his work on Eckhart, Jung endorses such regression as the psychic equivalent of identity with God. ‘As a result of this retrograde process the original state of identity with God is re-established and a new potential is produced’ (CW 6, par. 25 5).

  Jacob Boehme (1474–1525), is the mystic most cited throughout Jung’s work. He is in some continuity with Eckhart in that he describes the return of consciousness to a moment of identity with the ungrund, the ground of being beyond the Trinity. But Boehme’s spiritual adventure does not end there. He then follows the emanation of the Trinity into creation and comes to the stunning realization that the polarity of opposites in the Trinity can be resolved only in historical human consciousness. The scholarly argument has then been made with considerable justification that much of Hegel’s system was an effort to give philosophical formulation to Boehme’s symbol laden mystical outbursts (Stoudt 1957: 24 fn. 5; Darby, 1982: 120-29; Hegel:1990: 1 17-31; 1995: 188-219). Through Feuerbach the divine drive to become conscious in history took a materialist bent in Marx a direction which still controls masses of humanity unified under its attraction. Thus the medieval mystical experience of death into one’s origin and return therefrom culminated in the widespread contemporary variants on the theme that divinity seeks its realization and completion in human history. Among these variants Jung’s psychology is prominent.

  Conclusion

  So why, then, the discourse on Jung’s appropriation of apophatic mysticism and its relation to his understanding of the primal or essential form? It is because the apophatic mystics seem to have realized that the attainment of this primal form involved a return to an identity with the formless origins of mind and nature. Such return then becomes the basis of an emerging personality moving towards an unbounded compassionate embrace of what is. Such extended sympathy becomes the substance of the contribution made to any specific society by the individual who has been immersed in and returned from the depths which underlie every civilization. At the specifically social level an identity, however evanescent, with the origin of consciousness as the origin of all significant religious and political concretions could only foster a tolerance, if not embrace, between them. Such extended inclusiveness would derive from a widening recognition of the joint provenance of all religious and political conviction from the depths of humanity common to them all.

  The moral imperative that follows from Jung’s near-death experience is the deliberate conversation with the unconscious in whatever form such conversation takes. Such discourse with the source of consciousness broadens the conscious perspective and redeems its origin in an extended human sympathy. Jung will write that when all else fails the cultivation of our primal form, the truth of the self, remains the greatest gift one can give to oneself and society. He writes, ‘But if you have nothing at all to create, then perhaps you create yourself’ (CW 11, par. 906). Even if so humble the realization of the self in life is what death cannot corrode. Of the attainment of the primal form and its preservation in eternity Jung writes, ‘The spectacle of old age would be unendurable did we not know that our psyche reaches into a region held captive neither by change in time nor by limitation of place. In that form of being our birth is a death and our death a birth’(L1, p. 5 69).

  Goodbye and Good Mourning

  Patrick J. Mahony

  My Layman’s Interest in Death: Reading and Personal Experiences

  Previous to my becoming a psychoanalyst,a broad reading in different realms intensified my curiosity about the complex manifestations of death. Nietzsche insisted that our very language is a cemetery and that if we scratch any word, we’ll find a dead metaphor (‘Über Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne’). More fundamentally, a medieval German text (quoted in Heidegger, 1927, p. 245) stressed that ‘as soon as a human being comes into life, it is old enough to die.’ Sophocles pronounced the timely caution at the closing of Oedipus Rex that we should not conclude a man is happy until he died—and then some. The truism that man is the only animal that
knows he must die gave no comfort to the French major medieval author François Rabelais. Voicing grave doubts about what’s beyond the rim of life, he wrote for his epitaph, ‘I go seek the great perhaps.’ Dismissing the possibility of an afterlife, Bertrand Russell resigned to being nothinged, unselved, unparented, unsonned. Contrarily, we find absolute fulfilment in John Henry Newman’s self-pennned mystical Latin epitaph: Ex umbris et imaginibus in vertitatem (from shadows and types to reality). In his L’Être et le néant (1943), Sartre proffered that death was the opposite of free choice, a stark contrast to Thomas Aquinas’s tenet that the freest act of man is death.

  As might be expected, many personal experiences led me to think in different ways about death. I conveniently confine myself to two experiences, one repetitive and the other, horrifyingly singular. In the latter, I actually owed my survival to a despairing resignation to dying. Many years ago in Morocco, I waded out to a tennis facility on a nearby island. After several hours of rigorous games in the hot sun, I set about returning to the mainland, only to encounter a rising tide and choppy waters. Then occurred this sequence: bitter exhaustion, a mirage that the shoreline was receding, panic, a similar mirage, a conscious effort to relax, then another mirage. Finally, intolerable exhaustion caused me to say to myself in despair, I die in Moroccan waters. But suddenly I became aware of no longer feeling my body or the ocean about me and I swam giddily to shore; only later did I realize that my body must have been flooded with endomorphines and that very despair chanced to save me. The life-saving reversal brought about by despair made me meditate about the unexpectable phenomena of death, but never ever enough, as my professional life was going to show me.

  In the matter of repeated influential experiences, my all-too-frequent visits to pay last respects in funeral homes turned my attention to certain unrealities that death occasioned in life. I would drift again and again into lonesome reverie as I stared at the frozen face of the corpse, for the real face that I yearned to see seemed to sink and hide inside. Whence the custom of making death masks, I concluded at one point, for they hearken back to the coffined mask, which in turn presides over the unseen face—a complication heightened by my recalling that the word ‘person’ derives from the Latin ‘persona’, which means mask. I found myself often reflecting afterwards,Where is the real face behind the mask of conventional behaviour? Where is personhood amidst an individual’s developmental series of masks, one layered behind the other? I could only partially agree with Schopenhauer’s generalization (1851) that the end of life resembles the end of a bal masqué when all the masks are taken off.

  I turn briefly from personal matters to my professional identity as a psychoanalyst thinking about death. It should be good to state at the outset that throughout the history of psychoanalysis there have been doubts and hostile wishes about how long it would last (to similar reports about his own death, Freud replied with Mark Twain’s retort, ‘News of my death are greatly exaggerated.’). Freud understood such wishes within the context of his belief that ‘there is nothing for which man’s capabilities are less suited than psychoanalysis.’ As he said to Jung (Freud, 1974, p. 75), ‘Every time we are ridiculed, I become more convinced than ever that we are in possession of a great idea.’ The passage of time has indeed highlighted Freud’s conviction that psychoanalysis would bury its dyed-in-the wool malevolent undertakers.

  In the following part of my exposition, I shall first consider various psychoanalytic theories about death and mourning. Then, in an extended section, I shall illustrate with four illustrative vignettes of prominent introspective personages, with major attention given to Freud himself. After that, my focus addresses the widespread and deadly idealization of heroes, a manifestation of another resistance to mourning. A short conclusion is reserved for a few pointed retrospections.

  Psychoanalytic Theories of Death and Mourning

  Given that both the depths of our being and the course of our life influence our conception of death, it is not surprising that Freud, obsessed throughout the decades by the idea of death, changed his ideas about its very nature, and sometimes contradictorily. He posited that the unconscious has no notion of death (1915c, p. 289), yet he also advanced a fundamental death drive. Thereby and despite himself, he gave birth to death in the human mind. As if that change were not revolutionary enough, he went on one point to defang death when he made the startling conclusion that ‘The death instincts are by their nature mute and the clamor of life proceeds for the most part from Eros’ (1923, p. 46). By so labelling Eros as the exclusive ‘mischief-maker’ (1923, p. 59), Freud thereby reversed the habitual associations between Eros and calmness on one hand, and clamour and death on the other.

  An area of psychoanalytic concern involves the range of fear involved in the fear of death. Crucial was Freud’s reconsideration (1923, pp. 56-59; 1926, 129-30, 140) as to whether the fear of death is primary, or whether that generalized fear is actually about something else. Attacking the popular tenet that ‘every fear is ultimately the fear of death’, and leaving aside the realistic anxiety and dread about an external danger, Freud concluded that the fear of death relates internally to a neurotic libidinal anxiety, and more specifically to a fear of conscience, a fear of castration, and ultimately a fear of the loss of parental love and protection. In his encyclopedic commentary, Fenichel (1945, pp. 208–09) supplemented Freud’s belief about the fear of death as covering up other fears. Apart from linking one’s fearful death with a fearful reunion with a dead person, Fenichel brought up other possibilities, such as a fear of punishment for wishing the death of another, or a fear of one’s own sexual excitement that could entail the terror of losing one’s ego. That said, relatively few analysts have studied the clinical topic of death, a fact made all the more curious in the light of Freud’s thesis that the immortality of the ego is the most touchy point in the narcissistic system (Freud, 1914, p. 91).

  Erik Erikson and Heinz Kohut, two of the most prominent psychoanalysts of the last century, re-questioned the fear of death as being optimally normal. For those two analysts, normal human development does not stop at adolescence, but confronts other age-appropriate tasks throughout life and ultimately overcomes the fear of death, i.e., the hurtful shell of our mortality eventually produces the pearl of wisdom. Thus the concept of wisdom from philosophical and religious traditions has been harnessed on to the theses about maturation in developmental psychology. According to Erikson’s chart outlining his conception of the life cycle, one’s task in late adulthood consists in negotiating between ego integrity and despair and arriving at a benign acceptance of death. More exactly, Erikson (1963, pp. 268-69) explained that ego integrity signals …

  a post-narcissistic love of the human ego … [But] the lack or loss of this accrued ego integration is signified by the fear of death: the one and only life cycle is not accepted as the ultimate of life. Despair expresses the feeling that the time is now short, too short for the attempt to start another life and to try alternate roads to integrity.

  In other words, as opposed to despair, wisdom ‘is the detached concern with life itself, in face of death itself. It maintains and conveys the integrity of experience, in spite of the decline of bodily and mental functions’ (1964, p. 133). For Kohut as well (1966), a mature, benign and calm acceptance of death’s inevitability ranks among the highest achievements of healthy development and a proud acquisition of wisdom. More specifically, according to Kohut, a realistic and adaptive growth culminates in wisdom, humour, the ‘maximal relinquishment of narcissistic delusions’, and the attainment of a ‘cosmic narcissism’ which transcends individual narcissism. All of these achievements, Kohut insisted, are involved in the ultimate act of cognition, namely, the calm acceptance of death.

  Erikson’s and Kohut’s broad explanations should be modified. To start with, wisdom may be partial rather than global. We all know people whose circumscribed erratic behaviour jars with their overall wisdom. If we roughly define wisdom as the combined reflective
attitude and practical concern that attends a prudent and serene judgement about conducting life (Kekes, 1995), would a person with that admirable attainment be automatically excluded from being wise if he never overcame an infantile traumatic fear of death? For another thing, psychoanalytic treatment aims to bring about psychic coherence and not morality (Jones, 1953), an observation borne out by the bitterness that has divided most psychoanalytic societies in the world. We should mind too that although Erikson and Kohut have been lauded for their wisdom, in actuality, their private lives afford ample contradictory testimony of their extended personal grotesqueness and lack of integration (Strozier, 2001; Boland, 2005).

  Erikson’s and Kohut’s views of development in turn were subjected to a psychoanalytic critique. In a subtle commentary Hoffman (2001) spoke for a maturation that allows for greater conflict, existential dread of death and anticipatory mourning. Hoffman emphasized that in advanced development, one arrives at an ambivalent tolerance of mortality that sees death parodoxically as rendering life both meaningful and meaningless, precious and valueless. Melanie Klein would also agree with Hoffman. In her view, working through the depressive position is never fully achieved, for its completion would entail a perfectly mature individual (Segal, 1979, p. 140). But just as Hoffman implicitly says that Erikson’s and Kohut’s generalizations are based on denial, might not one further examine whether Hoffman’s own scepticism is unjustified in that it wilfully admits of no exceptions to his statement that for everyone, life is partly valueless and meaningless? He would outrightly dismiss the manifestly fearless attitudes towards death found among those given to kataphatic or negative mysticism.1