... throughout life one must learn to die.Seneca
Summary
The ostensibly prosaic fact of the inevitability of death is, in actuality, one of the supremely potent sources of man's anxiety, and the feeling-responses to this aspect of reality are among the most intense and complex which it is possible for us to experience. The defense-mechanisms of psychiatric illness, including the oftentimes exotic-appearing defenses found in schizophrenia, are designed to keep out of the individual's awareness—among other anxiety-provoking aspects of inner and outer reality—this simple fact of life's finitude. Various characteristics of our culture serve to maintain our obliviousness to this fact of inevitable death, and the psychodynamics of schizophrenic illness, in particular, serve as strong defenses against the recognition of it. Although the earliest roots of schizophrenia may antedate the time in the individual's life when death's inevitablity tends to confront him, it is the writer's impression that this particular deeply anxiety-provoking aspect of reality is one of the major threats which the schizophrenic process is serving to deny.
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From the Chestnut Lodge Research Institute, Rockville, Md. This research was supported by a grant, to the institute, from the Ford Foundation. The author is grateful to Drs. Joseph H. Smith, Berl D. Mendel, Leslie Schaffer, and Donald L. Burnham for their helpful suggestions concerning a preliminary draft of this paper.
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Searles, H.F. Schizophrenia and the inevitability of death. Psych Quar 35, 631–665 (1961). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01563716
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01563716