Roczniki Filozoficzne

Volume 28, Issue 4, 1980

Psychologia

The Problem of Attitudes Towards Death

The article presents some theoretical and methodological problems of investigating attitudes towards death, i.e., thanatological attitudes (thanatos — death; logos — science, knowledge). Death is a complex phenomenon. One can speak of psychological death and of the psychology of death. Psychological death can take the following forms: thanatomimesis, phenomenological death, social death. From the point of view of psychology death is interpreted as a certain type of interpersonal relation, a context in which information is transmitted. There are as many kinds of death and attitudes related to it as there are ideas, situations, answers and perspectives available to man. Man’s attitude towards death is dominated by fear. Modern man suppresses the problem of death and this leads to neurotic disturbances. Death is ambivalent, but when it is made meaningful it becomes something positive. The attitude towards death depends on: individual developmental experience, cultural con. text, Weltanschauung, current personal circumstances, resistance to stressful situations, level of danger to one’s life. In early investigations of attitudes towards death only the dimension of fear was taken into account. Many different aspects are being investigated now. For the psychology of death to develop more fully, connections ought to be studied between certain aspects of personality (value preferences, awareness of sense of life, religiousness, level of anxiety, self-acceptance, attitude to time) and attitude towards death. The author’s experimental research has revealed that it is necessary to distinguish at least two aspects in the thanatological attitude: attitude towards one’s own death and attitude towards the death of a close person.