Psychologically Preparing for Death: Facing Your Mortality and Creating Your Symbolic Immortality

Abstract

This work is based on the belief that human beings need to feel that their lives have meaning, and at death to feel a sense of continuance. To experience these feelings, it is often essential to face our mortality and psychologically prepare for death. Symbolic immortality is one way to experience these feelings of meaning and life continuance through a legacy of progeny and other relationships and through creativity.

The historical beliefs about immortality are explicated, and then this dissertation focuses on the development of the fear and denial of death that was exacerbated by the scientific advancements and medicalization emerging from the enlightenment and continuing to the present. These developments have also made it difficult for many to believe in a literal immortality, creating a problem given the human condition’s lingering need for this meaning and continuance. These developments have been a roadblock to facing our mortality.

Robert Jay Lifton’s work on symbolic immortality is at the center of this work. This dissertation explores his five modes of symbolic immortality, the theological, the biological, the creative, through nature and the experiential, focusing finally on the biological and creative modes. Historically, humans have experienced meaning and legacy through children and grandchildren and through creativity in their art or other worldly activities. Examples of these are critically examined with their positive as well as negative outcomes.

This work argues for facing your mortality and preparing for death thorough a creative process. It is possible for everyone to experience symbolic immortality and psychologically prepare for death by reweaving our life story, using memoir, life review, reminiscence and reverie—or by using the goddesses Mnemosyne and Lethe, of memory and forgetting, to re-sculpt our life story into our myth that has meaning and traces of continuity.