Interdisciplinary Book and Film Reviews

LIVING WELL AND  DYING FAITHFULLY:  CHRISTIAN PRACTICES FOR     END-OF-LIFE CARE   Edited By      John Swinton       & Richard Payne    Reviewed by       Geoffrey W. Sutton “Dying is a spiritual event with medical implications,” opined Gwen London, the former director of the Institute on Care at the End of Life at Duke University (xv).  I am reminded of a story about a Christian health care professional who was glad to be assigned to a pediatric ward from a geriatric ward where elderly patients were dying without having faith in Christ. She believed that God would save children from eternal damnation were they to die. Clearly, religious faith is a significant part of the identity of many people on earth. Most, if not all, religions imbue life and death with meaning. The brute fact of death has been widely studied in psychological science--especially in the context of T error Management Theory where terror refers to the awareness of one's own death. 

THE NAZI DOCTORS Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide   By  Robert Jay Lifton Reviewed by   Geoffrey W. Sutton Lifton peers into the lives of physicians who killed millions. He examines the beliefs and practices of Nazi culture, which provided a biomedical context for ridding Germany of disease by exterminating those targeted as responsible for such disease. In an evil irony, healers frame killing in an expanding narrative that ultimately reaches the level of genocide. In addition to records, Lifton included interviews with surviving Nazi physicians and some prisoner doctors who served as their underlings in Auschwitz. Lifton discloses his perspective, which is that of a an American psychiatrist, a Jew, with a psychoanalytic perspective informed in part by the ideas of Otto Rank. In the Introduction, Lifton informs us of key elements of his psychological model. People seek to deal with mortality by seeking immortality in various life projects. Many als

  The Denial of Death   by Ernest Becker A Review by Geoffrey W. Sutton The prospect of death, Dr. Johnson said, wonderfully concentrates the mind. The main thesis of this book is that it does much more than that: the idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity—activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for man.  — Ernest Becker, xvii I completed a recent reading of this old classic yesterday (13 December, 2015) because I was interested in Becker’s contribution to Terror Management Theory, which I find so helpful in understanding the ways U.S. leaders are publicly responding to terrorist activities. Becker’s ideas are more than forty years old and many have not withstood the test of time. However, his basic premise that we deny the reality of death in many ways remains valid