Concept
Death anxiety
Overview
Death anxiety is anxiety caused by thoughts of one's own death, and is also known as thanatophobia (fear of death). This anxiety can significantly impact various aspects of a person's life. Death anxiety is distinct from necrophobia, which refers to an irrational or disproportionate fear of dead bodies or of anything associated with death. Death anxiety has been found to affect people of differing demographic groups as well, such as men versus women, and married versus non-married. The sociological and psychological consensus is that death anxiety is universally present across all societies, but different cultures manifest aspects of death anxiety in differing ways and degrees.
Death anxiety is particularly prevalent in individuals who experience terminal illnesses without a medical curable treatment, such as advanced cancer.
Researchers have linked death anxiety with several mental health conditions, as it often acts as a fundamental fear that underlies many mental health disorders. Common therapies that have been used to treat death anxiety include cognitive behavioral therapy, meaning-centered therapies, and mindfulness-based approaches.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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We act in this case as if we belonged to the tribe of the Asra who also die when those whom they love perish.[1] But this attitude of ours towards death exerts a powerful influence upon our lives. Life becomes impoverished and loses its interest when life itself, the highest stake in the game of living, must not be risked. It becomes as hollow and empty as an American flirtation in which it is understood from the…
Sigmund Freud, Reflections on War and Death
States what Death anxiety is.
We may look far and wide without discovering a danger or an occasion which could even be exaggerated to account for it. These spontaneous attacks show therefore that the complex condition which we describe as anxiety can be split up into components. The whole attack can be represented (as a substitute) by a single intensively developed symptom—shuddering, faintness, palpitation of the heart, inability to breathe—and…
Sigmund Freud, Introductory lectures on psycho-analysis
States what Death anxiety is.
The characteristic disturbances of walking (astasia-abasia with trembling) are protective measures against the repetition of the anxiety, therefore phobias in Freud’s sense. The cases in which these symptoms predominate are called anxiety-hysteria. Those symptoms, on the contrary, which simply express the situation at the moment of the explosion (innervation, position of the body) are conversion-hysterias in the…
Sándor Ferenczi, Psycho-Analysis and the War Neuroses
States what Death anxiety is.
Related ideas
- Afterlife
- Sidney Hook
- Suicide
- Immortality
- Viktor Frankl
- Autonomy
- Greek mythology
- Rollo May
- Sigmund Freud
- Ernest Becker
- Martin Heidegger
- Erik Erikson
- Cognitive behavioral therapy
- Being and Time
- Phenomenology (psychology)
- Death
- Depression (mood)
- Anxiety
- Irvin D. Yalom
Place in the tradition
Part of Atheism.