Death as Trauma Processing

Freud’s disciple Oskar Pfister attributes the condensed life impression which may occur due to the shock experience of imminent death to anti-cathexis; the psyche, Pfister claims, offers consolation by erroneously suggesting that the selection of contemplated experiences make up for a whole life.^[1] 

To Pfister’s deprecatory account of enhanced recollection at death, I prefer Bergson’s. Bergson emphasises that imminent death gradually removes our perception-determining interest and allows for a completely disinterested life-view.^[2] 

Interestingly, both accounts rest upon the same argument (viz., interest, self-protection). Bergson’s, though, presupposes less than Pfister’s while being more inclusive, or so it seems. If, as Bergson suggests, the removal of self-interest equally removes obstacles for recollection and accordingly activates memory, the result will be a more embracing or comprehensive consciousness and an invigorated personhood. 

The latter would be requisite, I think, for processing indigestible memories, or trauma – whether contingent trauma or trauma of birth. Ordinary mental self-protection understandably protects one against the stirring of past psychical damage, for example by oppressing or circumventing its re-emergence, by preventing confrontation with anything which reminds of this damage, or by re-cathecting mental energy in psychical defence mechanisms. Once there is no need for self-protection anymore, waves of past trauma will be absorbed by the abyss of the psyche. If death consists of enhanced subliminality, and the latter on an abysmal increase of consciousness, then death may indeed be an ultimate attempt to digest the indigestible and to process trauma. I would even go farther. 

In so far as trauma (whether of suffering or, finally, of birth itself) always represents a phenomenological excess and an overload of the mind, its constituents may contribute to mental strength and personhood once they will have been integrated. 

Clinical evidence teaches that unfortunately, successful integration is often a bridge too far. In such cases, I would argue, only the radical alterity of death could virtually provide what the self-protecting boundaries of waking consciousness cannot tolerate. One would, then, have to endeavour beyond the common negativity surrounding our descriptions of death (‘termination of life’, ‘end of metabolism’, ‘cessation of respiration and blood circulation’, etc.) and argue as of the in-between space which altered states of consciousness seem to allow for.

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[1] O. Pfister (1930), Shockdenken und Shockphantasien bei höchster Todesgefahr. In Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, 16, p. 449.

[2] “La vision panoramique du passé est donc due à un brusque désintéressement à la vie, né de la conviction soudaine qu’on va mourir à l’instant. Et c’était à fixer l’attention sur la vie, à rétrécir utilement le champ de la conscience, que le cerveau était occupé jusque-là comme organe de mémoire.” H. Bergson (1985, 1919). L’énergie spirituelle. Paris : PUF, p. 77. Also cf Imants Barušs & Julia Mossbridge, Eds. (2017). Transcendent Mind. Rethinking the Science of Consciousness. Washington: APA., pp. 72-75, and Edward F. Kelly & Emily Williams Kelly et al., Eds. (2010, 2007). Irreducible Mind. Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, pp. 386f. where the authors speak of “enhanced mentation”.