The meaning of life and death in the eyes of Frankl: Archetypal and terror management perspectives

This article aims to uncover the meaning of life and death across the lifespan of the extraordinary person, Viktor E. Frankl (1905–1997). Frankl was purposively sampled due to his international acclaim as an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist, who later became famous as a holocaust survivor and the founder of logotherapy. Through his approach of “healing through meaning,” he became the founder of the meaning-centred school of psychotherapy and published many books on existential and humanistic psychology. The study describes the meaning of life and death through two theoretical approaches: the archetypal analysis based on C.G. Jung’s and C.S. Pearson’s work and a terror management approach based on the melancholic existentialist work of Ernest Becker. The methodology of psychobiography is used to conduct the psycho-historical analysis of the interplay of archetypes and death annihilation anxiety throughout Frankl’s lifespan. The article evaluates how archetypes and death anxiety interacts and how they built meaning in different stages of Frankl’s lifespan. The theories are discussed and illustrated in the light of Viktor E. Frankl’s life.

The Role of Mind-Body Medicine in a Cancer Survivor’s Experience

This paper tells the personal story of a cancer survivor and her experience dealing with death. It analyzes Ernest Becker’s thesis, The Denial of Death, by examining the solutions, which he suggests humans use to cope with the fear of death by establishing a sense of purpose and control. The author identifies examples of Becker’s solutions by looking at the mechanisms she used to cope with the possibility of dying through out her journey with cancer. With a tendency toward secularization and a focus on psychology in present day, the solutions people use to deal with death are changing. The author looks at how self-help, in the form of mind-body medicine, is a new solution that is used to deal with the fear of death in the present day socio-cultural landscape. While providing control, this way of dealing with the fear of death can be isolating and lead to self-blame. Keywords: Ernest Becker, Denial of Death, mind-body medicine, psychologize death, self-help.

Symbolic Survival and Harm: Serious Fraud and Consumer Capitalism’s Perversion of the Causa Sui Project

Based on empirical research carried out with those convicted of serious fraud, the current article explores the motivations behind engagement in acquisitive criminality. Drawing on the work of Ernest Becker, the article seeks to transcend superficial explanations of fraud which draw on notions of greed and individual pathology, locating causation instead at the level of consumer capitalism’s perversion of the contemporary causa sui project through its stimulation of deep human existential anxieties. It will be suggested that the acts of economic predation perpetrated by the men in the study represent attempts to escape anxiety through the avoidance of symbolic annihilation and that they are illustrative of the way in which the contemporary capitalism generates harm.

Mitigating death anxiety: Identifying music’s role in terror management

Based on the ideas of social-anthropologist Ernest Becker, Terror Management Theory (TMT) explains human behavior as being motivated by conscious and unconscious mortality salience. This article examines the role of music in the denial of death and catalogues related literature in the music and social psychology fields. Categories include: TMT and art, music used as control condition in TMT research, and songs and TMT. A brief description of Becker’s theory and TMT and a discussion of the functions of music in culture precede the literature review. Analysis of the literature suggests that (a) music provides a safe window frame through which to examine death, (b) music created for community purposes may buffer death anxiety more readily than that created for individual purposes, and (c) songs prompt mortality salience and simultaneously buffer death anxiety depending on individual music preferences, cultural worldviews, and perceptions of famous others. The review further identifies limitations in TMT studies regarding music and terror management and highlights the need for additional empirical research to untangle the complexity of music’s role in mitigating death anxiety growing out of mortality salience.