Attitudes Toward Death of Scientific Authorities on Death

The phenomenal explosion of books on death and dying by behavioral, social, and medical scientists in the last decade has led Maddocks3 to label them “death experts” and to accuse them of profiting from the fashions of the times. He cites the sobering scientific fact that Erik Erikson's book Youth: Identity and Crisis, published as late as 1967 by the leading social psychoanalytic commentator of our times, makes only one reference to death, and then only to Arthur Miller's play, The Death of a Salesman. But by my count books alone on death and dying cited in the 1974 edition of the Subject Guide to Books in Print1 written by behavioral, social, and medical scientists number forty-nine. How do we account for such an amazing outpouring of research and scholarship on a topic once tabooed and even oppugned by most of us? Is it somehow related to the phenomenon of a professor of my acquaintance who, after a serious recent coronary attack, began vigorously giving courses on death and dying, whereas he had been totally indifferent to the topic before? Indeed, he became an expert on death and a minor campus celebrity to boot. In this study, we are asking whether writing a book on death against all obstacles is in some way a defense against one's own death as well as a work of scholarship. An analogy can be made to an intensive psychotherapy or psychoanalysis where at least a fragment of the ego of the analysand belongs to the analyst as an introject of his own. In this sense healing is always self-healing. It has appeared to me that a scientist compelled to make a reputation or to become famous quickly can do so by placing Eros under his microscope—as Freud, Kinsey, Masters and Johnson, and others have done—or in lieu of sex they can focus on Thanatos —as Kubler-Ross, Shneidman, Weisman, and others have done—both