Death and Dying

by Sudhir Kakar

  The topic of death leads into the intimate subject of mourning in its broader and deeper dimensions. Broader: ushering in a sense of loss more extensive than fears over physical death, Freud (1917, pp. 243–44) explained that one may mourn even ‘the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as fatherland, liberty, an ideal, and so on.’ Freud’s ‘so on’ would also include a part of one’s body or mental functioning, loss of employment, or one’s cherished place in the family. Deeper: with great insight, Freud (1923, p. 29) explained that our earliest investments in others are ‘indelible’ (1938, p. 199) and ‘we can never give anything up’ (1908, p. 145), for our very ego is not only as the precipitate (Niederschlag) but also as the history (Geschichte) of abandoned object relations.

  In sum, Freud clarified mourning work as constituting the very structure of the ego (Ricoeur, 1965). The thundering fact that mourning does not merely coil through our life but also modifies our ego and its very perception and experience of mourning contains a number of far-reaching implications. First, we are very ambulatory histories or archives of separations in our past lives. Second, the fact that our ego consists also of the representations of others undercuts the very opposition between mourning for ourselves and others. Third, a difficulty in anticipating and mourning our own death is compounded in the sense that the developing ego, structured by past mournings, functions as a cemetery as well as a greenhouse and is involved in mourning itself. To sum it up punfully: much kneading.

  E.M. Forster’s thesis in Howard’s End—’Physical death destroys us; the idea of death may save us’—urges us to differentiate between two kinds of mourning, one pathological and the other healthy. That it takes more psychic work to love is a factor bearing on the two kinds of pathological mourning, either the absence of mourning or the unduly prolonged, overdetermined reactions of grief. In either case we meet with severe unconscious guilt, predominance of aggressive over libidinal elements with regard to ambivalently loved dead person, and regressive behaviour thwart normal functioning. The ghosts of the ego’s constitution of abandoned objects may be summoned back to render doubly intolerable the mourner’s new abandonment. Among other things, all too frequently the mourner’s appalling experience as a child comes into play, e.g., his early life with a psychically dead mother (Green, 1983) or father (Kalinich and Tayor, 2008). In the particular instance when the manifest absence of emotion prevails, psychosomatic ramifications are liable to occur. As the founder of the famous mental hospital in London (the Maudsley) said so memorably: ‘The sorrow which has no vent in tears may make other organs weep.’

  Normal mourning over the death of an intimate occasions dejection, lowers interest in the external world and diminishes the capacity to love, so that the everday assemblage of memory, fantasy and emotion becomes suddenly unstrung into a disjointed puppetry. After the initial shock, the capacity for healthy mourning relies on various developmental achievements, including the toleration of frustration and pain, ego stability and resiliency, resiliency and an independence of self-esteem regulation. As well, normal mourning enabled the regulation of possible past mournings, the acquisition of self-constancy (the enduring integration of self-representations) and so-named object constancy (the enduring integration of the mental representation of significant others). Psychoanalytic theories vary, however, about the emphasis given to the amount of the survivor’s detachment from the departed. Greater valence is accorded to detachment in both Lagache’s position that the successful mourner in having to kill the dead person (tuer le mort—Lagache, 1938, p. 695) for the second time and perhaps for many times. Kernberg and others (2010) stress that in normal bereavement there obtains a measured detachment with the lost person, along with maintaining continuity by a self-enhancing and modified reinternalization of the deceased, an operation which is intensified by the paradox that the full appreciation of what one has only comes about subsequent to losing it. A further paradox, it must be said, is that such a complex reinternalization even aids in overcoming the mourning process.

  Vignettes of Mourning and Life’s End: Words on Death Sentences

  Prescinding from theoretical considerations to the clinically concrete, I shall present the vignettes of four prominent introspective personages—a pair of Buddhist monks, a Christian apologist, and the atheist Freud. In their exceptional—although not representative—kinds of mourning, the four protagonists offer further kinds of surprising reversals and will pose unforeseen questions and considerations. We shall also see in the final human drama that, contrary to frequent assertion, an accomplished life does not at all guarantee one’s acceptance of death.

  a) Two Buddhist Monks

  A preliminary clarification is in order about ‘soul murder’, classically expounded (Shengold, 1989) as the extreme effects of sexual or physical abuse and emotional deprivation in childhood. The perpetration of such brutal acts against children cause a terrifying, helpless neediness and sense of abandonment, and result in their emotional bondage and even identification with the abuser; in their psychic annihilation and inability to enjoy life, they also experience an acute precariousness of the world whereby abrupt reversals of fortune and behaviour are continually anticipated and ordinary mourning is rendered impossible. By extension, soul murder also occurs later on in life, most surrealistically in concentration camps, and that brings me to one of the most powerful autobiographies I have ever read, Le Feu sous la neige (Fire under the Snow) (1997) by the Tibetan Buddhist monk Päldèn Gyatso. His narrative is relevant to this symposium for two reasons: It depicts the diabolic means to kill the mind of others, and it contains the vignette of another monk whose reaction to dying and death shocks the reader by its unpredictable unusualness.

  Aiming to destroy the identity of their captives and make them into robotic bondages to socialism, Chinese state torturers of the deepest dye relied on numerous ways to affect every aspect of psychic and physical functioning, including the control of facial expression, tone of voice, perception of reality, method of reasoning, sources of self-esteem and moral integrity, and even confidence in one’s fellow inmates. Gyatso described the nigh incomparable soul murder he experienced throughout his thirty-three years as a prisoner in Tibet (by comparison, Nelson Mandela spent some five years less than that on Robben Island).

  To suggest somewhat the accumulative horror of Gyatso’s tortures, I take the mimetic risk of enumerating them in one prolonged sentence of perhaps wearying syntactic parallelism. The tortures were: never showing joy, compassion or sadness, yet, at all times, presenting an ‘agreeable’ face, indicative of one’s acceptance of socialism; speaking always with a calm voice, except when singing or reciting socialistic propaganda which had to be exclaimed enthusiastically; being subjected to group sessions of forced betrayals and mutual calumny that ended in mutual beating which, if not carried out with gusto, occasioned further beating; never having hopes of liberation, a counter-revolutionary crime justifying official punishment; experiencing constant close surveillance, including that carried out by cell spies; making false confessions in order not to be beaten and in order to demonstrate that the individual is wrong and the Party is forever right; confessing on the spot without hearing any accusation; exculpating torturers by saying that such and such victim was not killed but rather his breath spontaneously left him; being removed from one’s fellow cellmates every two or three months in order to prevent conspiracy or even friendship; being subject to sudden denunciations by pressured family members outside the prison; being deprived of anything enforcing one’s traditional identity, such as owning Tibetan eating bowls or anything coloured yellow or red, symbolic of Buddhism; and assuming an officially disapproved Buddhist sitting posture.

  As if that were not enough, for several months Gyatso was handcuffed behind his back, so that he could not eat, wash or go to the toilet without assistance. And at one point, he was tortured with electric rods, one inserted into his mouth, causing him to lose his teeth and fall unconscious. Fina
lly, the heroic Gyatso was considered unreformable and released! To take some measure of his pain throughout we can do no better than to recall Dante’s seering lines: ‘There is no greater sorrow/Than to remember, in misery, one’s happy time.’2

  A psychoanalytic explanation to account for Gyatso’s triumph over death involves a range of factors, superficial and deep. To name a few: one of his survival tactics was based on narcissistic triumph and the recognition that nothing is more insulting to his torturer than feeling that his power is not respected by his victim. More deep-seated factors included an undaunted tribal identity; an unusual ego strength and a spiritual fortitude coming from years of ascesis; and an exceptionally solid self and object constancy so that in his isolation he was nevertheless sustained by permanent mental representations of early loving relationships. One may even speculate that even if Gyatso lived early on under extraordinary duress, he would have counted among those fortunate children who are able to suck milk out of a stone. Another and most likely innate ability was his extraordinary tolerance for physical pain, obviating in the overall his being betrayed by his body as happened to many other dignified victims when pushed beyond the limit of their forbearance. They asked to be killed during torture, or, failing that, later resorted to suicide. We wonder at last: Was Gyatso’s stupendous confidence in his survival such that any anticipatory mourning of an untimely death was sheerly out of the question for him?

  Gyatso’s incredible endurance that astonished his co-prisoners leads us to another monk convict whose mind-shaking endurance even Gyatso himself admired. That monk, a highly erudite abbot, could endure and resist the worst tortures. A seeming wonder of nature, he was unshakeable. Then one day there occurred an event whose tragedy puts further claim on our psychological interest. The torturers finally announced to the abbot in question that they would now kill him. I quote Gyatso: ‘No one could have anticipated the monk’s reaction when he learnt that he was condemned to death. He begged that he be spared; he prostrated himself before the Chinese officer, just as monks formerly did before their master or a high lama, and he sobbed uncontrollably’ (p. 196). Yes, yes, we readers say, he died unhinged.

  How can we psychologically understand this abbot who surpassed everyone in braving torturous dying, yet collapsed at the end game? Though our considerations of the abbot’s tragic disarray3 and utter disempowerment remain tentative, they may retrospectively give us a modicum of mastery over a story which otherwise fully overpowers us. Although the relatedness intrinsic to Tibetan culture and to the Buddhist religion may predispose its members towards a positive attitude towards life and decrease anxiety towards death, it does not of course obviate the dire peculiarities of experience which may push individuals in a deleterious direction.

  Our attempt to understand the abbot’s bizarrely unexpected fate plunges us further into an array of questions. Did the abbot suffer from guilt that needed the relief of a repeated penance, a repetition that was excluded by a finalizing punishment? Did he derive narcissistic benefit by rendering his torturers impotent? Was there also the ongoing exhibitionistic satisfaction of being admired by guards and prisoners alike for his persistence? Did he shudder at being no longer able to witness himself as the cynosure of praise? Did the abbot conceive of death as castration, as the end of his power? Did death constitute the ultimate and unsufferable detachment from others? Did death represent an intolerable dissolution of his ego boundaries? Or did reincarnation, long welcomed as a conscious belief, suddenly emerge from psychic depths in a doubting guise that pulverized his sense of individuation?

  b) C.S. Lewis

  From the Buddhist monks I pass on to the Christian apologist C.S. Lewis. Along with his fame as one of the most outstanding men of letters in the 20th century, he was a professor at Oxford and Cambridge; a lay theologian; an eminent scholar of medieval and renaissance literature; a literary critic and prolific author whose fictional work includes novels, poetry, science fiction, as well as narratives for children. Towards the end of his life, the self-satisfied bachelor culminated a long friendship and married Joy during her very convalescence in hospital. Having total recall, Lewis and his cancerous wife had the mutually exceptional experience of enjoying everything that they ever read. She remained sickly throughout the four years of their marriage while the loudly clicking clock punctuated the intermingling of their joy and anticipatory mourning. Three years after she expired, he followed suit. It is that sequence of mournings and their successful nature that merit examination here.

  Joy’s demise worked like a death sentence upon Lewis, and he proceeded, in unusual fashion, to working out his scorching grief in an act of writing. Rough-hewn and compiled from four notebooks, A Grief Observed (1961b) starts out like a dismembered collection of his own death sentences and his empty life without joy. The very title of Lewis’s work indicates how he tried to contain his distraught reaction by distancing: He wrote about a grief observed, not experienced, and moreover, the reference to the third person passive replaces the agency of the first person I.

  Shaken to his roots, the Christian called God a cosmic sadist and a vivisectionist who brutally cut up the living into pieces; and on the other hand, he traced out the gloomy-go-round of his inner experiences marked by anger, resentment, fear and loneliness. In the graphic description of his grief he discussed the ‘sudden jab of red-hot memory’ and the ‘invisible blanket’ between him and the world so that his wife’s absence imposed itself ‘like the sky, spread over everything’. Later on, Lewis could recall the paradoxical reversal, ‘How much happiness, even how much gaiety, we sometimes had together after all hope was gone.’

  And later, Lewis wrote, ‘Grief still feels like fear … Up till this I always had too little time. Now there is nothing but time. Almost pure time, empty successiveness … I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.’ Eventually, there occurred a peculiar inward turn that was prepared for by his regretted wallowing in his own grief and not thinking of Joy’s pain. Lewis noted: ‘I’d had had a very tiring but very healthy twelve hours the day before, and a sounder night’s sleep … And suddenly at the very moment when, so far, I mourned Joy least, I remembered her best … How easily I might have misjudged another man in the same situation? I might have said, ‘He’s got over it. He’s forgotten his wife,’ when the truth was, ‘He remembers her better because he has partly gotten over it.’

  Later, though at home again with his theism, Lewis arrived at this illusory gratification: ‘For me at any rate the programme is plain. I will turn to her as often as possible in gladness. I will even salute her with a laugh. The less I mourn her the nearer I seem to her.’ And he immediately appended the sobering note: ‘An admirable programme. Unfortunately it can’t be carried out. Tonight all the hells of young grief have opened up again.’ The very last two sentences of Lewis’s grief work show a memory with his unforgettable double vision of joy. He jotted down that in her last moments, ‘She said not to me but to the chaplain, “I am at peace with God.”’ She smiled, but not at me. Poi si torno all’eterna fontana. Actually, those Italian words, translated into the English as ‘Then she turned to the eternal fountain’, are from the end of Dante’s Paradiso and refer to the very last interaction between Beatrice and Dante, the enamoured heavenly traveller who felt precipitously left on his own.

  Fast forward: After her demise, Lewis lived for another three years, albeit in bad health. Close to the end, he passed into a phase from which he himself was not expected to emerge. Upon awaking and recalling the biblical fate of Lazarus raised by Jesus from the dead, Lewis voiced in a whimsical spirit that it was onerous to do his dying all over again.

  Several psychoanalytic comments help to shed light on Lewis’s painful journey through successful mourning.

  Genetically, Lewis’s pain was an accumulated one, hearkening back to the alienation from his father and the slow death of his mother, leaving the nine-year-old Lewis alone with his older
brother. In terms of his subsequent emotional life, the quest for his lost mother dominated his relations with women—so much so that Lewis’s overdetermined choice of wife was a woman who also had cancer and who had two small sons. Lewis’s subsequent mourning was distinguished by a yo-yo effect rather than by a strict progression from one stage to another (cf. Kübler-Ross, 1969). Yet he succeeded finally in confirming his self-integration: ‘Nothing will shake a man—or at any rate a man like me—out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself.’ Struggling through despair, he also arrived at a reconsolidation of his religious beliefs as well as at both a relinquishment and repossession of his beloved.

  Of great psychological value is Lewis’s nigh unique multi-phasic and multi-levelled narrative of mourning in writing, and the twists of its unexpected outcome. Some psychoanalysts have explored how successful mourning of past trauma either paves the way for creativity or is part of that creativity (Pollack, 1975, 1978), as if underscoring the Homeric tenet that the gods devise disasters so that song may exist among men (Odyssey, 8: 579). Still other analysts have examined the ultimate end of creativity as a simultaneous way of overcoming the fear of death and achieving immortality. An unexpected chapter was added to the plot of Lewis’s widowhood when he published his memoir under a pseudonym. Some unapprised friends read the awesome book and gave copy of it to Lewis, thinking it would help him in his grieving. It was only then, that self-dug up out of his own private grief, Lewis publicly acknowledged that he had penned the celebrated record of bereavement. Only then did he go about giving copies of his book to fellow-sufferers.