THE SHADOW OF DEATH ~Kristine Mann, M.D.
It is a common and well-accepted saying that “coming events cast their shadow before” them.
But perhaps the meaning of this, at least in many of its applications, is not fully realized.
For human beings, if they are half-way contented with an existing situation, do not care to concern themselves with the future, particularly if it is presented to them in a not very brilliant light.
We are still close enough to our animal instinct in our psychology to be able to lose
ourselves in the present, the actual now, even if we are only halfway comfortable in it.
But the longer an individual lives or the older the race becomes, the more men consciously take into consideration, in the shaping of their lives, that which has gone before and that which is to come after.
It is only in this way that life acquires continuity and is kept from being a series of events mechanically strung together on the string of time-in short, that life becomes organic.
Into the white heat of the present moment the past must enter implicitly if not explicitly, and this fact although commonly recognized has poignant significance to those who have been analyzed.
Perhaps only the analyzed realize fully through actual and usually painful experience how utterly a man’s entire life is conditioned by his previous family situation.
Indeed “psychologists” are beginning to recognize special peculiarities belonging to the only child, to the offspring of divorced parents, to the son of a drunken father.
all know in general that the conditions the present to an extraordinary degree and those who have had an unfortunate childhood are aware of the importance of a recognition and correction of this oftentimes over-dominant influence.
For life (as Bergson has said) is duration and must have continuity.
In the slow development of the individual, events of the past pass by imperceptible gradations into the present and are integrated with it ( more consciously in
analysis) by the human psyche.
While everyone perceives this process dearly, perhaps not so many are aware of how deeply also the intuited future shapes the present.
For the intuitive function leaps ahead to what perhaps may be ( or surely must be), and life is for the most part unconsciously, but also consciously, adjusted to what is to come.
This is shown in all sorts of obvious ways.
A man may know he is likely to marry and shapes his life toward that end.
If he is already engaged, he aims toward marriage with even more determination.
He must be educated for a profession or must learn some trade that will enable him to support a wife.
If a woman knows she is not going to be paid for a job, she does not do it SO’ well.
She does not intentionally neglect it; but if the stimulus of looking toward future rewards is lacking, the work flags.
The value to all types of industry in giving to the employees some assurance of possible advancement is now being more and more taken into consideration.
If this stimulus is lacking, the sense of obligation to the actual job is lowered.
A man must have something to look forward to if only in the way of the receipt of a weekly stipend, but also there must be some recognition of work well done.
At least a carrot must be held before the donkey’s nose to make him go forward.
Consciousness, we may say then, though it is most acute at the present moment, is always attempting to maintain the continuity of life-to integrate past, present, and future so that when we turn from the past by refusing to admit the errors into which we have stumbled or ignore the future and deny its possibilities, we pay the price of disintegration-partial or total.
The real difficulties that stand in the way of the successful integration of past with future are the concepts which the average man holds-the man who lives according to what Freud has called the pleasure-pain principle.
For such a person ( that person that we all have in us) cannot accept the flow of reality but must be shaping it to yield the highest return of physical or ego satisfaction.
And the
technique for this readjustment of the life forces to suit the comfort
and egotism of the individual is to forget the disagreeable incidents
in the past and hence learn nothing from them while forcing the
future as far as possible to fit into the pictured form that such an
individual holds always before him.
So many people say: “I never allow myself to think of that experience. It is too disagreeable.”
Yet a very unhappy occurrence may be just what is needed to make us conscious of our inferior side.
In avoiding an awareness of the past, we may simply be looking the other way when our shadow is clearly manifest directly in front of us.
And this holds true also of those catastrophes that come to us without any fault of our own-as a train wreck or war or a political regime that throws our whole life out of gear.
We need to face them.
For the horrible in life forces us back into a recognition of an archetypal reality.
Our individual relation to it becomes an unavoidable part of our own psychical development.
But equally often people refuse to look forward to the future and make any preparation for it, justifying their attitude on the authority of the Bible: “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”
Many men and women save nothing.
A surprising number spend as they go along on the principle “Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die” without considering that they may not die until day after tomorrow and may have nothing to eat, drink, and be merry with on their last day.
Perhaps the most striking example here in America of this unwillingness to consider the future-or perhaps better, this determination to live in the present-is shown in our habit of buying on the installment plan.
You can have your car, refrigerator, sewingmachine, home, immediately if you can invest a dollar.
Why bother
about the months to come in which the debt must be paid?
Indeed, this mortgaging of the years ahead is one of the most vicious policies
in the running of a nation as well as in the life of the individual, as Henry George has pointed out.
Now death is exactly one of those future events that casts its shadow before it.
For death is the most inevitable occurrence in life.
The present Archbishop of York, in addressing a group of students who had been attempting to justify lawlessness by the statement, “Well, a man must live,” replied “O, no, a man does not have to live; but he must die.”
And everybody knows even while he is a child that all must die.
Yet most of us (.at least in America) put the thought of our final destiny out of our minds and fill our lives with a round of activity that takes account only of the immediate past or immediate future.
“I know I made a mistake in my last investment.
I shall not be caught again” or “I’ve been married once unsuccessfully-never again” and this is as far as we try to foresee.
H. G. Wells wrote a very clever little essay which appeared in 1913 called The Discovery of the Future) in which he maintained that the more advanced a nation became the more it considered the future-always of course correlating it to the past.
And this is exactly what the · nations are illustrating today in building up armaments to prevent future wars.
Now for any one person ( and I desire to deal with this from the point of view of the individual) war is not so inevitable as death.
A large proportion of the population will never go to war, or see active service, whereas we shall all at varying periods experience death.
Since death is then such an overwhelming reality of life and three dimensional, it casts a long shadow before it, so that anybody who is at all conscious of that which is happening to him will surely be aware when in the course of his life he enters the shadow of death.
Before going on I must say a word about’ the Western attitude toward death and particularly the American attitude.
With us the object seems to be to avoid all consideration of it as far as possible.
When one runs up against it inevitably, in the deaths of relations or friends, he faces it as best he can.
Many believe in a future life which enables them to accept it more cheerfully.
And the poignancy of the loss sustained is mercifully blunted by the need of attention to all the details of funeral, mourning clothes, and so on.
Perhaps the majority, however, regard it as an insoluble mystery-better not think about it,
since we know nothing of it and there is so much in life to distract our attention.
So in our country the general policy is to absorb oneself in the conscious side of life-which is on the whole interesting ·enough to occupy the greater part of most people’s time and thought.
What Jung calls the hybris of consciousness has affected us more than any other nation.
We aim to live in the light and face the shadow side only when compelled.
But as a second point, I am aware that when one tries to discuss the general processes of life-infancy, childhood, adolescence, and so on-one begins to. realize that there are always many exceptions to any generalization one may make.
We all know of men like O’Sullivan, after whom the rubber heels were named, who could walk some fabulous number of miles a day at the age of seventy.
I knew of a doctor who performed a major operation at eighty-three. Justice
Holmes was still on the job at ninety odd.
These exceptions produce a peculiar effect on people’s minds, leading them in the middle period of life to regard men who retain their apparently full physical and mental capacities up to a ripe old age as examples of what Nature intended.
“Everybody should be able to continue the active life of middle age up to the time of death,” seems to be the argument.
‘But these exceptions should not mislead us as to the value of the later years of life which are in all probability not the same as those of the middle period.
Presumably Nature has some purpose in prolonging existence, even in animals, after the child-bearing age and with human beings during three and often four decades of life.
This premise we may safely enough conclude that the capacity of the individual cannot decrease on the physical side without producing some alteration in
his psychological attitude. ~Kristine Mann, Spring 1960, Page 89-93
