In this thesis I introduced the idea of the necrophilic self - the cultural trait of death phobia within the individual. The psychoanalytic theory of the death drive provides an explanatory framework for understanding the ambivalent role of death and violence in modernity. In Chapter 6, I discuss artists who work with the materiality of death ⎯ the humiliation of the dead body.
Theories on death
By the mid-twentieth century, death had become largely anonymous, and dying people were often isolated from the rest of society. The death of a loved one always provokes reflection on one's own mortality and formation of a belief system. In order to gain a deeper understanding in this regard, the inner workings of the individual must be explored.
Thanatos: death drive theories
Freud expanded his metapsychology of the psyche with particular focus on the instincts (or drives). Furthermore, Freud (2004a: 128) pointed out that the purpose of the individual's life is the satisfaction of these innate needs. Kernberg depicts pathological self-destructive behavior as symptomatic of the death drive and its main motivational system.
The functions of desire: drive in Lacanian psychoanalysis
The necrophile self
In his essay “The Reality Principle and the Pleasure Principle Make a Deal” (2007), Zygmunt Bauman argues that we live in a time where the pleasure principle is married to the reality principle. As he writes, "the rationality of consumer society is constructed from the irrationality of its individual actors" (Bauman 2007: 188). Social theorists have investigated the question of how capitalism changes the perception and conception of "self".
Self-development, he argues, is 'the creation of a personal belief system through which the individual recognizes that 'his first loyalty is to himself'' (Giddens 1991: 80). Furthermore, the 'trajectory of the self' is organized in the sense that it appropriates the past to create a future. Elliott states: “the art of reinvention is inextricably intertwined with the allure of the next frontier, the breakthrough to the next frontier, especially the frontiers of the self” (Elliott 2013: 4).
This inward turn is generated and maintained by secularism and capitalism, which have erased "the belief of an experience external to the self" (p. 334). What Freud called the death drive is his psychoanalytic term for immortality, obscene immortality: the evil persistence and insistence that pushes beyond life and death, a zero-level and almost metaphysical dimension of a self-related negativity—the ultimate immortality strategy. In an interview, Bauman described this focus as "the presence of death as a specter that haunts the totality of life" (Bauman in Jacobsen 2011: 386).
As Wittgenstein noted, "the limits of language (the language that I understand) mean the limits of my world" (Wittgenstein 1999: 89), and the meaning of the word "death" is largely occluded in the West.
Death in the media
Geoffrey Gorer's essay "The Pornography of Death" (1955) is a classic study of the modern taboos surrounding death. These shows account for 40 percent of the total dead bodies in the surveyed shows, with an average of 25 dead per show. episode. In this sense, society and its oppressions give birth to the return of the oppressed in distorted forms that.
In the melodramatic presentation of the world, the good and evil agencies have their own independent origins. The resolution of these dark stories is now dependent on an escalation of the monstrous (Desilet 2006: 244). As with the porn star's body, the corpse is divorced from grief, spirituality and compassion.
In the presence of the great forensic team and criminal investigators, autopsy is consistent with rape, and curiosity about these is consistent with necrophilia (Foltyn 2008: 167). The monstrous is present in the tale of bizarre murders and of the perverse motives of murderers. Vilification falls under the monstrous/evil category and is therefore confused with defilement.
With the change in attitudes towards fear, we see a shift in the conception of the self – and therefore also towards death itself.
Death in art: the anatomical beauty and materiality of death
The creator hopes to raise people's awareness of the body as "naturally fragile in a mechanized world. According to them, it violates the dignity of the dead as well as indirectly human dignity. I suggest that this suspension of the abject behind the veil of aestheticism death illiteracy maintain
Body worlds cultivates a fascination with bodies and a culture that recognizes the uniqueness of the body (an alternative to the traditionally body-hating approach of Christianity). Both von Hagens and Hirst push the boundaries to remind us of the reality of death. The invention of the camera made family portraits more accessible and affordable to the masses.
A feature of the time was that the dead were sometimes represented as still alive but asleep. The camera's proximity to the dead was extended, indicating, I suspect, a cultural shift that reflects increased social concern with death. Margolles uses waste materials from the morgue and the street to tell the stories of the dead.
At a hospice in the San Francisco Bay area, Biçen created life-size pencil portraits of some of the residents.
The emotional and physical costs of death and grief illiteracy
The social architecture of illness is such that healthy people will experience great discomfort in the company of the sick. This archetypal role of the hero sets the benchmark (standards of shared social values and beliefs) against which a. One of the main lines of evidence supporting TMT is the mortality salience hypothesis.
No, the phobia of death is an elephant in the hands of a blind man as long as we persist in claiming that it is an attribute of North American culture or any culture. These encounters evoke feelings of anxiety and death by nature. In the child's inner world there are many damaged, injured or dead objects that represent the experience of mortality and destruction, which arouses anxiety.
Through projection, the individual sees elements of the fantasy situation in objective situations that symbolize the fantasy situation. It follows that any significant social change implies a change in the functioning of the social system as a defense system. This is an important consequence of the psychological interaction between the institution and the individual's defense mechanisms.
Yet it is, Jenkinson argues, one of the greatest successes of our death-phobic times.
Concluding words: a future of renewed death awareness?
I have argued that psychoanalytic theories of the death instinct – or Thanatos – first introduced by Sigmund Freud and then further developed by scholars such as Herbert Marcuse and Jacques Lacan, provide an explanatory framework for this. Building on the psychoanalytic theory of the death drive, I have argued that this schism in our relationship with death produces a trait within the individual that is shaped by our inability to think about death, coupled with an obsessive relationship with violent death and an excessive materialism. In this dissertation I have put forward the idea of the necrophiliac self – a cultural marker of death phobia within the individual – and argued that the sense of self in late capitalist society is shaped by what we deny and fear most; death (deadness) becomes us.
In Chapter 2, I shifted attention from the outward, cultural practices of death denial to the inner workings of the individual, namely the death drive, a concept developed by Sigmund Freud. He first assumed that the individual's inner drives are constantly focused on satisfaction or pleasure, suppressed by reality. I then discussed Melanie Klein, who viewed the death drive as innate in childhood, and Otto Kernberg, who viewed the death drive as a pathological, secondary phenomenon associated with malignant narcissism.
In chapter 3 I further underscored the concept of the death drive with Lacanian psychoanalysis by exploring desire as the fundamental drive of the individual. In Chapter 4 I argued that contemporary materialism is based on the fusion of the pleasure and reality principles, evidenced by the transformation of attitudes towards desire. I read the art of Tereza Margolles as a bold confrontation and representation of the immediacy of death, which evokes an encounter for its audience with the register of the Real that Lacan has called the Thing, and which I have understood here as death in the place of Real.
By entering the taboo space of the morgue, photographers Sue Fox and Cathrine Ertmann provided an illustration of the art that bears witness to death.
Bibliography
Bauman, Z 2007, 'The reality principle and the pleasure principle strike a deal', in A Elliott (ed), The Modern Bauman Reader, Routledge, Milton Park and New York, p. Bocock, R 1978, Freud and Modern Society : An Outline Analysis of Freud's Sociology, Holmes & Meier, New York. Bodyworlds 2017, “Missions of Exhibitions”, bodyworlds.com, viewed 29 August 2017,
Chatsworth House 2006, 'Saint Bartholomew, exquisite pain', Chatsworth House, vist 29. august 2017,
Doughty, C 2015, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematorium, WW Norton & Company, New York. Evans, D 1999, 'From Kantian ethics to mystical experience: an exploration of jouissance', in D Nobus (ed.), Key Concepts of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Other Press, New York, pp. Feldstein, R 1995, 'The phallic gaze or wonderland', in R Feldstein, B Fink & M Jaanus (eds), Reading seminar xi: Lacan's four fundamental concepts of.
Fink, B 1995b, 'The real cause of repetition', in R Feldstein, B Fink & M Jaanus (eds), Reading seminar xi: Lacan's four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis, State University of New York Press, Albany, pp.
