Pedagogy of Death

Over the last few years I have been able to incorporate into my trainings of clinians the ideas presented in this blog and they seem to have an impact on their view of things as if a door opens that was not noticed before. We can see our clients a little differently when those doors are openned. Death and the anxiety it provokes is a big blind spot for most clinians. Often we do not venture into the darkness that is theirs because we are afraid of annhilation but there is the possibility of transformation also. Again we confront the Pharmakon, the remedy and the poison. It is as if that which we fear the most offers us the greatest gold. When I guide a group of people through an exercise in which they symbolically experience loss the individuals in the group respond in two ways. Some will become introspective and experience grief and begin crying. Others get angry and blame the exercie or the facilitator for the pain of their loss. AS a country on September 11th 2001, many of us came together in our grief, our fear, our sense of community by raising flags etc. Others of us were angry and took our frustration out on those who looked threatening to us and in some cases murdered them. Our patients respond to the possibility of death similarly, some by external projection and others by introjection.