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I appreciate being designated the Karen Horney lecturer for this year, especially so because I know that this lectureship signified a commitment to expansion of thought in our field and a questioning of that which is given to us. Such questioning is urgently needed now in all fields. My own evolving interest in ‘psychohistory’ has led me to a concern with death and to a re-examination of the position we have accorded to death in psychological theory.
Serious concern with the way in which people confront death leads one to question the nature of death and the nature of life in the face of death. In my work in Hiroshima I found that studying an extreme situation such as that facing the survivors of the atomic bomb can lead to insights about everyday death, about ordinary people facing what Kurt Vonnegut has called “plain old death.” I feel that our psychological ideas about death have been so stereotyped, so limited, so extraordinarily impoverished, that any exposure to a holocaust like Hiroshima, or My Lai, or in fact the entire American involvement in Indochina, forces us to develop new ideas and hypotheses that begin to account for some of the reactions that we observe. I want to suggest a few such principles that are both psychological and historical.
My basic premise is that we understand man through paradigms or models. The choice of the paradigm or model becomes extremely important, because it determines what might be called the ‘controlling image’ or central theme of our psychological theory. Human culture is sufficiently rich that a great variety of paradigms are available to serve as controlling images, including those of ‘power’, ‘being’, ‘instinct and defense’, ‘social class’, ‘collective unconscious’, ‘interpersonal relations’, etc. These paradigms are by no means of equal merit, but each can be used to illuminate some aspect of human experience.
At the end of my study of Hiroshima, Death In Life, I stated that sexuality and moralism had been the central the