Death and Dying: A Comparative Study of the Attitudes and Mental Reactions toward Death and Dying*

1. Introduction: The problem: technique.

2. Analysis of the data in normals and in psychoanalytic material.

3. Correlative aspects of the death attitude.

4. Discussion.

5. Conclusions.

I

The problem of death has always been the great enigma of humanity. It remains in the center of religious life. It is a problem everyone meets and from which no one can escape; it is always with us. There have been innumerable attempts to deal with this riddle We do not intend to review here the history of the problem or of proffered solutions. Of the latter, two efforts are at present in the foreground of scientific interest. These are the attempts of Heidegger and of Freud: they seem to be paradoxical. Heidegger sees the real meaning of existence in the fact of our death. He speaks about “existence towards death” (Dasein zum Tode), and he goes even so far as to believe that we perceive time only because we know that we have to die. The experience of time is, according to him, not a continuous experience but one that is based on the ever present knowledge that we have to die. The existence of death would therefore throw its shadow over our entire life so that during