Citation

Halperin D, Schreiber G (2018) Death Acceptance through Otherness. Int J Psychol Psychoanal 4:031. doi.org/10.23937/2572-4037.1510031

Copyright

© 2018 Halperin D, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

REVIEW ARTICLE | OPEN ACCESS DOI: 10.23937/2572-4037.1510031

Death Acceptance through Otherness

Demian Halperin1,2* and Gabriel Schreiber1,2

1Division of Psychiatry, Faculty of Health Sciences, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel

2Department of Psychiatry, Barzilai University Medical Center, Israel

Abstract

When the subject of death appears in the therapeutic context, dealing with it can be a complex task. Levinas proposed that there is no anxiety towards one's own death but rather that fear for death is fear for the Other's death, meaning that because of death's incomprehensibility, it can only be experienced when it happens to others. According to him, both death and the Other represent a way out of solitude for the subject. Death is thus intrinsically related to human encounter. The present work deals with the way the philosophy of ethics, by drawing our attention to our responsibility in the face of the Other, helps us understand and address the question of death in relational therapy.