Three Forms of Death Anxiety by Robert Langs, M.D.
I intend here to describe three forms of death anxiety. It has been the practice to treat death anxiety as a uniform or single entity, without recognizing the existence of an underlying typology. The importance of refining the concept comes from clinical findings that different types of traumatic events lead to different forms of death anxiety, each of which is experienced and responded to by humans in a distinctive manner. These responses are both conscious and unconscious i.e., within or outside of direct awareness. The former are generally well known and include traumatic and post-traumatic stress syndromes and responses to cancer and other types of grave illness. But it is not generally appreciated that death anxiety is prompted by every type of traumatic event and that it can register and operate entirely outside of awareness. The effects, nonetheless, are powerful and often devastating, and always include a tightening of communicative defenses in an effort to obliterate the conscious recognition of the various ways that a given trauma is impacting on the individual and the extent to which death-related anxieties have been activated.
The three classes of death anxiety are:
1. Predatory death anxiety. This form is the oldest phylogenetically in that unicellular organisms have receptors that have evolved to react to external dangers and they also possess self-protective, responsive mechanisms designed to insure survival in the face of chemical and physical forms of attack or danger.
In humans, this form of death anxiety is evoked by a variety of danger situations that put the recipient at risk or threatens his or her survival. These traumas may be psychological and/or physical.
Predatory death anxieties mobilize an individual’s adaptive resources and lead to fight or flight, active efforts to combat the danger or attempts to escape the threatening situation. These responses also may take mental and/or physical forms, and include both conscious and unconscious processing and modes of adapting.
2. Predation death anxiety. This form of death anxiety arises when an individual harms others physically and/or mentally. The arousal of this type of anxiety often involves unconscious rather than conscious realizations and processing. The primary reaction to this type of anxiety is that of conscious and unconscious guilt, which, in turn, motivates a variety of self-punitive decisions and actions by the perpetrator of harm to others whose deeper sources go unappreciated.
3. Existential death anxiety. This is the most powerful form of death anxiety and its activation is based in humans on the definitive, conscious awareness and anticipation of the inevitability of personal demise. This expectation and the anxieties it evokes are the result of human language acquisition, which led to a definitive awareness of the distinction between self and others, a full sense of personal identity, and the ability to anticipate the future. Humans defend against this type of death anxiety through denial, which is effected through a wide range of mental mechanisms and physical actions?many of which also go unrecognized. While limited use of denial tends to be adaptive, its use is usually excessive and proves to be costly emotionally.
Awareness of human mortality arose through some 150,000 years ago. In that extremely short span of evolutionary time, humans have fashioned but a single basic mechanism with which they deal with the existential death anxieties this awareness has evoked—denial in its myriad forms. Thus denial is basic to such diverse actions as breaking rules and violating frames and boundaries, manic celebrations, violence directed against others, attempts to gain extraordinary wealth and/or power—and more. These pursuits often are activated by a death-related trauma and while they may lead to constructive actions, more often than not, they lead to actions that are, in the short and long run, damaging to self and others. The detection of the roots of these behaviors is rendered difficult by the many layers of denial that humans mobilize, including the intensification of these denial-based defenses to a point where the awareness of reality and its meanings are reduced or obliterated. At such times, we tend to veer away from efforts to perceive and understand and tend to miss almost everything connected with the death-related experience.
In practical terms, at times of trauma it is crucial to pursue the process of trigger decoding (see article on this site) to discover the impact and meanings of the harmful event and to gain insight into how you are processing it—especially in regard to untoward behaviors that have been activated unconsciously by these anxieties. In addition, it is well to be forewarned that at times of stress, and especially when the scepter of death has been activated, it is important to be on the alert for decisions and actions that are unconsciously motivated by the need to deny death because they almost always prove exceedingly costly for all concerned.
Suggested Reading:
Langs, R. Death Anxiety and Clinical Practice. London: Karnac Books, 1997.
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