Przedmiotowy aspekt postaw wobec śmierci

Abstract

This article is a theoretical investigation to determine the conditions necessary for adequate empirical research on thanato-psychology. The paper has two parts. The first part deals with some issues regarding the psychology of attitudes. The attitudes are characterized by: denotation, direction, energy, intensity, centrality, permanence, complexity, ambivalence and objective content. The object of attitude – that is everything that a man directs his thoughts, feelings and actions to – is the most important trait of all attitudes, including attitudes towards death. In the second part of this study, the object of attitude towards death is dealt with more extensively. In the first place various circumstances of human death are described: disease, war, homicide, suicide, execution, banishment, imprisonment, torture and ageing. Subsequently several kinds of psychological death are described: thanatomimesis, phenomenological death and social death. In view of the subtle tendencies to manipulate man’s presence in the world, social death is especially important today. Because the object of attitude towards death is exposed in its full sense in the process of dying, two conceptions on this subject are presented: E. Kübler-Ross’ periodical theory of the stages of dying, and E. Shneidman’s recapitulative theory of the dying process. The present author proposes the combination of these two theories, which are in fact, in many respects, complementary. At the of this article there is a discussion about the existential dimension of the phenomenon of death. Death is a specific existential category, an essential trait of human existence in to terminal situations; it is connected with love, the purpose of life, absurdity and the experience of time. A man is responsible for bis own death because he is responsible for his own time.