Confronting Death Through Mental and Artistic Imagery

This chapter advances the thesis that the psychologically most basic image of death is the image of personal annihilation. There is a fundamental phenomenological error in the thought that the death of myself means the cessation of heartbeats, burial, and yet assures the continuation of the world. According to Koestenbaum’s phenomenological description, the basic image of subjective annihilation is an image of forever losing the ability to experience this world or any other world. As people move from total repression of death imagery to no repression thereof, they move from one extreme of psychological debilitation to another—from existential psychosis to existential depression. The possibilities for indirect confrontation with personal annihilation are, perhaps, best exemplified in artistic images of Jesus’ crucifixion. In all of the artistic images describes, the crucifixions as well as the more modem images, viewers are confronts with objectified and sublimated expressions of the subjective image of personal annihilation.