Making Death Thinkable (De Masi)

“The awareness of the end of life is always present in us, and it faces us all the time with anxieties…”
“The idea of death does not only concern our biological destiny, but pervades our relationships, all of which are marked by issues of separation and morning”
“Our culture holds a linear notion of time, according to which individual life, delimited by birth and death, is unique and given only once.”
“As psychoanalysts…we should help every patient to develop their capacity to tolerate the thought of the transience of human life”
“The theoretical formulation of psychoanalysis, founded principally on child development, ….prevented us from appropriately thinking about the question of death”
“how could we enjoy success, love, the birth of a child, the pursuit of ideals, without freeing ourselves, at least temporarily, of the notion of death?
“If death were always present, the awareness of human finite nature would lead to a passive and melancholic acceptance of one’s fate and, ultimately, to a destructive view of life.”
“Although death provokes anxiety, it is precisely the thought of the temporal limit of our life that gives meaning to it.”
“The first concerns the presence or absence of the representation of death in the unconscious; the second links up with the wider theme of separation, loss of objects and loved ones; the third concerns the part played by annihilation anxiety in causing mental suffering.
“The occurrence of death is not exhausted simply by the pain of the separation from our loved ones; it also carries with it an anxiety about our own disappearance into nothingness, about the dissolution of our own identity and personal history.
“whilst in the course of life we can come to terms with our personal losses through the work of mourning, there does not seem to be an equally viable solution when faced with the problem of death.”
“try to understand why death anxiety might be inevitable”
“a subjective self, devoid of the notion of development in time, is inconceivable”…”an essential constituent of our core self, is thrown into question by the inevitable realization of our temporal finiteness.”
“This ineliminable conflict between the psychological illusion of infinite development and the necessarily transient nature of our biological structure is at the root of the anxiety and existential crisis we go through in the course of our lives.”
“The principal hypothesis of this work is that death, as a natural occurrence, is inscribed in our internal world as a psychotic disaster, a state of disintegration of one’s personal identity which is not easy to conceptualise or tolerate.
“The poet (Rilke) admires the beauty of nature, yet he does not derive any pleasure from it; as he is perturbed by the thought that all that beauty is doomed to disappear.”
“Freud concludes that a difficulty in tolerating the transience of things can only have two possible outcomes; one is the melancholia affecting the poet, which prevents him from enjoying beauty, the other leads to a state of endless revolt and dissatisfaction.”
“Freud maintains that the inability to enjoy and appreciate the transience of beauty is due to an inability to mourn.”
“Those who cannot mourn, unconsciously reproach their love object for not being perfect, but only finite as humans are”
“A true capacity to love should entail an appreciation of the object, without the demand that it should always be present or timeless.’
“Life is closed by death, but it is always open to hope, which may be experienced as a denial of the necessary occurrence of death.”
“As human beings, not only do we know what we do not know, but also when we do know something, and we cannot dismiss such knowledge.”
“there have been times in history when the notion of life after death and immortality was an unquestionable assumption”
“Our world would thus strive to bring the repression of death, rooted in life itself, to an institutionalized perfection, pushing the notion of transience to the margins of our collective awareness’
“Ours is probably the first culture that endeavors to provide an answer to the question of death, yet, in reality, it seems to be nothing but an attempt to erase and repress the question itself.”
"...it is necessary to distinguish fear of death, a feeling common to all human beings, from panic, which, instead, torments only some of us."

"at times...those who suffer from excessive death anxiety and panic attacks have been children precociously perturbed by a fear of death.:"

"It would seem that those who experience the most acute death anxiety are those individuals whose early childhood anxieties have not been contained and processed by their primary object."

"in meditation, one is totally absorbed in a pleasurable state, which...calls narcissism, ...regards as a regression to a primitive pre-object phase."

"It follows, however, that if the death instinct and pleasure converge, Freud's hypothesis...becomes untenable.