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The fear of death seems to based on two things: the presence and certainty of death and the uncertainty of what follows. For sure, every culture and religion has its own version but these conflicts will never be reconciled, since nobody comes back to tell of the afterlife …

But behind biological death, the abstract, objective, external, empirical fact of being dead; hide more complex feeling which are called by the phenomenologists:

  • fear of ceasing-to-be: a personal, subjective and emotional feeling which arises from our awareness of our own finitude
  • ontological anxiety, which has also been called "being-towards-death"
    and "the anxiety-of-nonbeing",

Our life is more and more a race to material welfare. Most of these distracting ploys amount to seeing death exclusively as an objective event, are often designed to provide an objective understanding of death.

Such approaches keep death outside of ourselves a phenomenon we know about only as observers, never as participants. Thus, the increasing disarray people feel when facing death personaly. How can it happen to me ?.
 

 

Regressive therapy theory

Frank Lake, a psychiatrist, discovered that under LSD his patients were re-living their birth trauma. His early LSD powered seminars were held with the Anglican clergy throughout Great Britain. Later the groups were expanded to include social workers, nurses, physicians and other health-care workers. Dr. Lake discontinued the use of LSD in 1970. He had found that using deep breathing techniques with primal therapy was as effective as or superior to LSD therapy.

Frank Lake found that, from a trauma viewpoint, births could be placed within four categories:

·The first one is non-violent as the fetus looks expectantly toward beginning a new phase of existence and such anticipation is achieved. This is the typical "good" birth in which the fetus concludes that life will be a challenge which they will successfully meet and any difficulties they encounter will be temporary and will be overcome. The experiences in the birth process serves a lifescript and optimism is a common feeling. The other stages listed below do not occur.
·"The second stage occurs when the birth passages prove difficult to dilate, or the bony pelvis is too narrow to allow the head to pass, at least not until severe moulding has occurred." The physical and mental suffering which the fetus endures is on a larger scale and/or the time consumed in the birth process is longer than that in phase one. And the baby being born wants to return to the comfortable womb is has just left.

·In the third stage "the head is jammed in the pelvis and can move neither forwards nor backwards. The will to return to the womb is as useless as the will to move forward. Only one struggle is possible, the struggle to live in spite of growing distress, crushing of the head, and lack of oxygen. The identity of someone suffering from an anxiety state not uncommonly has this biological emergency as its primary determinant."

·It is in the fourth stage that the elements of desire for death as well as the fear of death are developed. It is the feeling of one in whom "the loathing of the pain of being born may be so great that the wish to die almost entirely replaces the former longing to live. In fact, the intensity of the earlier longing is transformed, mechanically and without any act of the will to the latter, at the point where sheer intolerance of pain takes over."

Arthur Janov, the originator of primal therapy, wrote that those who relive the death experience in and around birth seem to finally resolve that fixation on death and suicide. It may seem odd that those few minutes around birth can determine whether or not one will consider suicide as a serious alternative at a later age. Attempts at suicide are attempts of the system to go back and get close to that death feeling. It's a way of recovering that original physiological experience in which the baby first came close to death in order to get into life. 
 

“What this means is that suicide is really an attempt at healing, It is really an attempt to conquer death. It is, ultimately, a testimony to the power of Primal Pain: one would rather be dead than feel it. And not so accidentally, feeling the early death allows us to leave those suicidal feelings behind, forever .” Arthur Janov - The Lifelong Effects of the Birth Experience































copyright @ 2006 by AF