It is important for the person gradually to assimilate his true age, to stop protesting his youth, pretending that there is no end to his life. Eliot Jacques, in his truly superb little essay “Death and the Mid-Life Crisis,” in H. M. Ruitenbeek, ed., Death: Interpretations (New York: Delta Books, 1969), Chapter 13, beautifully develops the idea of the need for “self-mourning,” the mourning of one’s own eventual death, and thus the working of it out of one’s unconscious where it blocks one’s emotional maturity. One must, so to speak, work himself out of his own system. By a study of these dynamics we see how important it is for man to resign himself to his earthly condition, his creatureliness; and we seem to have put full scientific closure on James’s early insight on the place of inner emotional collapse in personal growth (James, Varieties, p. 99). We might say that in this sense Freud developed the dynamics for the total resignation that he could not himself quite manage.
What do You think about The Denial Of Death (2001)?
