Word: feifel
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...embarrassment at the individual face of death," says Dr. Herman Feifel, professor of Psychiatry at the University of Southern California, "forces the seriously ill and dying person to live alone on the brink of an abyss with no one to understand him." It is ironic that the very truths from which the patient is being "protected" by family and doctors are the same truths with which he is being forced to live--alone. Hendin argues that our inability, or unwillingness, to cope with death results, in part, from a lack of close contact with it at an early age. "Current...
...local graveyard. At the University of Maryland, for example, students start by learning the ideas of ancient Jews. Greeks and Romans about death, then move into the Christian era. Texts include books of psychology such as Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's On Death and Dying and Herman Feifel's The Meaning of Death, supplemented with lectures by doctors and clergymen. Elsewhere, students even hear tape-recorded interviews with people who are dying. Says University of Minnesota Sociologist Robert Fulton: "The point is to bring a new perspective to death; to show that it is natural...
...doctors tend to have a high degree of thanatophobia (fear of death). To them death is the enemy and its victory a personal defeat from which they naturally turn away. In addition, indications are that many doctors had above-average anxiety about death in their childhood, and Dr. Herman Feifel, psychologist at the Los Angeles Veterans Clinic, speculates that this is why they became doctors in the first place...
Patients often make it clear that they do not want to know the truth. Yet in a study of attitudes among the dying, Dr. Feifel found the patients eager to talk about the subject that was being so carefully avoided by physician, family and friends. Once the old liturgies asked God's protection from a sudden death; today it is expected that people hope to die suddenly. And they do. In automobiles and airplanes, through war or crime, death comes ever more abruptly, ever more violently. And after middle age, it comes suddenly through heart attack or stroke. There...
...psychiatrist, Dr. Robert D. Wald, believes that the opposite situation is more common: "The assumption is that people don't want to die. From my experience, I believe that-more often than is generally realized-people reach a point where they are willing to die." To Psychologist Herman Feifel of the University of Southern California, who has edited a book on The Meaning of Death, what the patient is told is less important than how he is told...