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During the last ten years more analysts and psychiatrists have turned their attention to the experimental problem of death and to the understanding and treatment of the dying person. Lack of interest has been concurrent with the increased expectation of life, the loss of religious faiths, the reduced social and economic value of the elderly person and to the tendency of people to die away from their own homes and families, and from long-drawn out chronic diseases rather than from acute and short ones.
The essays in this collection show that the whole approach to death and the dying is in the process of re-assessment. I was made particularly aware of a general acceleration of this re-assessment by the discrepancy between the first four essays and the last by Anselm Strauss, which is in fact a reprint of an article already published in 1965. Strauss fought there the battle to allow a person to learn about the imminence of his own death—which seems now already won, at least as far as the more progressive and advanced physicians and researchers in this field are concerned. This suggests a considerable change in the climate of opinion during the last 4 to 5 years.
The book opens, very logically, with a paper by Kastenbaum, in which he defines and discusses the various types of death—phenomenological death, social death, etc., and where he emphasizes the difference between ‘being fully alive’ and ‘merely plodding along’. Winnicott has really made a similar point in his paper ‘Location of cultural experience’ (I.J.P.A., vol. 48) when he wrote … ‘we have not yet started to describe what life is like apart from illness or absence of illness. That is to say, we have yet to tackle the question of what life is about.’
In the next paper by LeShan on ‘Psychotherapy and the dying patient’ this theme is extended in depth. LeShan suggests that it is by increasing the ‘being’, ‘the person’, and by re-arousing the creative impulses that the therapist supports most effectively a person's