Written Assignment 1 Delineate the theories of death anxiety put forth by Sigmund Freud and Ernest Becker. Indicate clearly how they differ. According to Sigmund Freuds theory of death anxiety and fear, people sometimes express fear of death; however, the psychoanalyst considered that thanatophobia was mostly a disguise for a somewhat deeper source of concern. Freud thought that it is not death that people are afraid of because Our own death is indeed quite unimaginable, and whenever we make the attempt to imagine it we . . . really survive as spectators. .
. . At bottom nobody believes in his own death, or to put the same thing in a different way, in the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his own immortality. (Freud 1953, pp. 304305) In contrast to Becker, Freud merely reduced death concern to a neurotic cover-up. At the same time, in contrast to Freuds theory, Becker considered that much of our daily behavioral patterns comprises of efforts to deny death; therefore, people keep basic anxiety under control.
Define social death and describe some specific ways in which it is manifested. Social death is defined as a condition of people who are not accepted by a wider society as fully human. This term was used by sociologists such as Zygmunt Bauman and historians of holocaust in order to identify and describe the part played social and governmental segregation in this process. Social death can be manifested in various ways; for example, governments can exclude people or individuals from society (e.g., ostracism in Athens; outlaws, criminals, to mention a few); slavery, persecution and apartheid are also the examples of social death; racial exclusion, changes in the identity of the individual is also an example of social death. References Freud, Sigmund. “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol.
The Term Paper on Social & Cultural Reality Theory in Action
Q. 1. Challenge DeVito, O’Rourke and O’Neill’s (2000) definition of culture using Richards (1999) or Anae (1997). How do DeVito et al look at membership within a culture and how does Richards see it differently? DeVito, O’Rourke and O’Neill’s (2000, p. 99) definition of culture is very limited when describing modern cultures of globalised human society. Perhaps where people are isolated to ...
4. London: Hogarth Press, 1953.
