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Proof of a ground-breaking psychological theory: that the fear of death is the hidden motive behind almost everything we do. 'A joy ... The Worm at the Core asks how humans can learn to live happily while being intelligently aware of our impending doom, how knowledge of death affects the decisions we make every day, and how we can stop fear and anxiety overwhelming us' Charlotte Runcie, Daily Telegraph 'Provocative, lucid and fascinating' Financial Times 'An important, superbly readable and potentially life-changing book . . . suggests one should confront mortality in order to live an authentic life' Tim Lott, Guardian 'Deep, important, and beautifully written ... utterly original' Daniel Gilbert
"This book is about dying, not about death. We are always dying a big, always giving things up, always having things taken away. Is there a person alive who isn't really curious about what dying is for them? Is there a person alive who wouldn't like to go to their dying full of excitement, without fear and without morbidity? This books tells you how." -- Front cover.
Exploring a new approach to interfaith/interreligious communication, the contributors to this collection seek to interact from the perspective of their own tradition or academic discipline with Ernest Becker's theory on the relationship between religion, culture and the human awareness of death and mortality. While much interfaith/interreligious dialogue focuses on beliefs and practices, thus delineating areas of disagreement as a starting point, these chapters foster interactive communication rooted in areas of the universal human experience. Thus by demonstration these authors argue for the integrity and efficacy of this approach for pursuing intercultural and interdisciplinary communication.
Including conversations with world leaders, Nobel prizewinners, business leaders, artists and Olympians, Vikas Shah quizzes the minds that matter on the big questions that concern us all.
Social and personality psychologists traditionally have focused their attention on the most basic building blocks of human thought and behavior, while existential psychologists pursued broader, more abstract questions regarding the nature of existence and the meaning of life. This volume bridges this longstanding divide by demonstrating how rigorous experimental methods can be applied to understanding key existential concerns, including death, uncertainty, identity, meaning, morality, isolation, determinism, and freedom. Bringing together leading scholars and investigators, the Handbook presents the influential theories and research findings that collectively are helping to define the emerging field of experimental existential psychology.
In Facing Cancer and the Fear of Death: A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Treatment, Dr. Norman Straker proposes that "death anxiety" is responsible for the American society's failure to address costly futile care at the end of life; more specifically, doctors default on the appropriate prescription of palliative care because of this anxiety. This leads to unnecessary suffering for terminally-ill patients and their families and significant distress for physicians. To address these challenges in the culture of medical education, increased psychological support for physicians who treat dying patients is necessary. Additionally, physicians need to reach a consensus regarding the discontinuation o...
This text explores the emotions of despair, fear and anger that arose after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in the Autumn of 2001. The authors analyse reactions to the attacks through the lens of terror management theory, an existenial psychological model that explains why humans react the way they do to the threat of death and how this reaction influences their post-threat cognition and emotion. The theory provides ways to understand and reduce terrorism's effect and possibly find resolutions to conflicts involving terrorism. The authors focus primarily on the reaction in the US to the 9/11 attack, but their model is applicable to all instances of terrorism, and they expand their discussion to include the Israeli-Palastinian conflict.
Psychology has worked hard to explore the inner self. Modem psychology was born in Wundt's laboratory and Freud's consulting room, where the inner self was pressed to reveal some of its secrets. Freud, in particular, devoted most of his life to explor ing the hidden recesses inside the self-hidden even from the conscious mind, he said. From Freud's work right down to the latest journal article on self-schemata or self-esteem, psychologists have continued to tell us about the inner self. More recently, psychology has turned some of its attention to the outer self, that is, the self that is seen and known by other people. Various psychologists have studied how the outer self is formed (impress...
This innovative and informative new text bridges the fields of gerontology and thanatology.
Uses the disciplines of psychology, anthropology, sociology and psychiatry to explain what makes people act the way they do.