"Once we said our children are children born in the cabbage; Today we tell him that his grandfather went to America." With this bar full of black humor to the English sociologist Geoffrey Gorer has already reported 30 years ago meant that the greatest taboo of our culture is no longer sex, but morte.Tutto this is fully understandable, after all, because modern thinking, cutting the dogmas and certainties of the religious tradition has broken down also, sometimes without even realizing it, the barriers that the psyche man had built, from the very beginning of civilization, to defend themselves from the anguish of death. In those dogmas and certainties, in fact, were still the promise of salvation offered by our immortality as any other religion to the followers of the True Church and the True Faith
but I would not be misunderstood. The collapse of religious dogmatism and political can not be considered for sure a disaster by any person engaged in the fight for freedom, peace and human evolution. Even a summary analysis of history and current reality reveals itself easily, in fact, was and is how high the price of blood, oppression and suffering humanity paid for those dogmatic defenses from anguish. Every religious and political dogma, in fact, it was always based, in every human group, on the certainty that his was the one true faith or the only true revolution and, therefore, the followers of any religion or politics were agents of evil and were exterminated or subjugated.
No regrets, then, for a cultural model that has bloodied all the course of human history and that, with Islamic fanaticism, still bloody .. But at the same time, I think we should not accept the removal of the insane death that now prevails in contemporary culture. We live in a dramatic crisis of human affairs, but it can be a crisis of growth, not of agony and death. We are not in an alley Czech. We have before us three roads too often ignored or neglected.
The first is the passion of love and because love is a powerful antidote to anxiety (in the words of Wilhelm Reich, pleasure and anxiety are the two opposite poles of the emotional life), and because the orgasm itself, as accompanied by a monertanea loss of consciousness can be seen as a kind of "mercy killing" case and not the French call "the little death."
The second way is the development of psychological problem in the context of the analytical report. It 's the way that, moreover, has always characterized the psychotherapy. Think that psychotherapy or gates to solve the problems of our lives is an old illusion ye say of good agreement by therapists and clients boastful. Psychotherapy, in fact, does not eliminate our major problems and inner conflicts, but it helps us to live with them and process them in a creative way. And the same can do with the problem of death, provided it not refuse to recognize the dramatic gravity, which unfortunately did until recently. Thus, through an in-depth patient and processing and analysis (note the activity for which I work now for fifteen years with my collaborators at the Institute of Humanistic Psychology Existential), we can greatly reduce our fear of death and succeed to metabolize in creativity, design and solidarity. Moreover, in psychological terms, this means translating the ancient teaching of the great thinkers. Plato defined philosophy "a dress rehearsal of the drama of death" and Montaigne wrote this maxim of supreme wisdom, "philosophizing is learning to die, but learn to die is also learning to live. "
But there is also a third way, humanistic and non-dogmatic, to face the anguish of death: that of scientific research into the afterlife. The exponent is more courageous and moving of this research is for me a humanistic American psychiatrist, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, who was also the initiator of psychological assistance to the terminally ill. Having monitored twenty thousand cases of people from every country ed'ogni culture (Christians, Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, Aborigines etc..) Declared clinically dead and then come back to life and having personally assisted several hundreds, the Ross wrote in "The Death and Life After Death" (Hawthorn Books, 1991): "For thousands of years lead us to believe in an afterlife. But for me it is no longer believing. This is just to know, "that is to know the evidence of life beyond this life." In the course of his research, in fact, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross found that the veterans from clinical death often describe experiences very similar, irrespective of their belonging to this or that culture. All say they experienced no pain the moment of death, seeing the doctors and other rescue workers bustle around their lifeless body, they were greeted in the afterlife con amore dalle persone morte a loro più care, di essere giunti ad un luogo di luce e gioia ineffabile e di aver vissuto con sofferenza e delusione il ritorno alla vita terrena ed al loro corpo. Naturalmente molti materialisti e molti atei hanno sepolto queste testimonianze sotto i loro sarcasmi. Ma, per parte mia, considero queste categoriche negazioni solo forme di dogmatismo paradossalmente identiche ai fideismi delle varie ortodossìe religiose. La psicologia e la scienza umanistica devono essere pronte, invece, ad impegnarsi in ogni tipo di ricerca seria e ad accoglierne i risultati. Certo, le osservazioni della Dr.ssa Ross e degli altri ricercatori in campo spirituale e parapsicologico vanno confrontate con quelle dei ricercatori di diverso orientamento e sviluppate in new directions, but can not be discarded based on the prejudices of a positivist and atheist thought is just as dated as the old dogmatic religious fanaticism. And not just because there should be no room for dogmatism in libertarian thought, but also because only a humanistic response to the existential crisis of Western culture can save us from the return of the old fanatic of a religious or political salvation and can make this a momentous crisis crisis of growth and creative affratellante for all humanity.
Luigi De Marchi
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