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Being-towards-death and Its Relevance to

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 Existential Analysis 19.2: July 2008

Being-towards-death and Its Relevance

to Psychotherapy
Mo Mandic

Abstract
This paper focuses on Heidegger's distinction in Being and Time between
Being-ahead-of-itself and Being-a-whole, in order to show how this
infonns psychotherapeutic work with chents. These terms in tum relate to
Heidegger's explication of an inauthentic relation to death, on the one hand,
and an authentic stance of Being-towards-death, on the other. Three
possible ways in which our stance towards Being-towards-death is relevant
to therapeutic work are highlighted, all based on a transition from an
everyday sense of experiencing life, to a more open and intense experience
of living founded upon the recognition of one's life as a whole or totality.

Keywords
Dasein, Being, death, Being-towards-death, Being-ahead-of-itself, Being-
a-whole, freedom towards death, authenticity, thrownness, releasement,
anxiety, care, the 'they'.

1. Introduction
In analysing the question of what it means, or amounts to being human,
most, if not all of us, inevitably fall on our attitude towards the issue of
death. Increasingly, I have worked with clients who have come to a point
in their reflections on themselves that has led them to become all too aware
of their finitude. They have been jolted into a confrontation with the fact
that time has elapsed, and that they have not made more of the situations
and circumstances in which they had found themselves in their lives. In
listening to this from different clients on many occasions, I have been
motivated to explore how philosophical considerations on this theme might
inform my work as an Existential-phenomenological psychotherapist.
Perhaps predictably, and for reasons that involve my strong affinity for his
work as well as the direct relevance of his writings in this area, I focus my
attention, and draw on, Heidegger's analyses in his Being and Time (1962).
As Cooper (1999, p. 133) has stated. Existential philosophy attends to the
issue of death because it 'reveals authentic possibilities of human
existence'. However, what is central to this (existential approach) is the
personal human response to death, rather than an empirical, third-person
analysis of death as an event that can be objectively scrutinised. Indeed, the

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 Being-towards-death and Its Relevance to Psychotlierapy

existential approach also places importance in addressing the issue of our

anxiety in the face of death, because, as Heidegger notes, 'Being-towards-
death is essentially anxiety' (Heidegger, 1962, p.31O). It is Heidegger's
hyphenation here that captures the relational nature of our human stance in
living as mortal beings, that we face the possibility of death - ow death - in
the immediacy of every moment that we are alive.
In this paper, I argue that Heidegger's particular idea of Being-towards-
death is important to psychotherapeutic work; it enriches the scope of the
therapeutic process. By this I mean that clients attend more to the sense of
meaning in their lives, and the possibilities that are open to them, rather
than exclusively focusing on the ending of life and the pointlessness of
truly engaging in any commitment to living in the face of this. In order to
show that this is pertinent to our work with clients, I use and make
reference to Heidegger's language, which is set within an extensive
labyrinth of neologisms and inter-connected ideas. Specifically, I claim
that the distinction that Heidegger makes between two of his self-created
terms, Being-ahead-of-itself and Being-a-whole is key to understanding
authentic Being-towards-death. Along the way, I recognise that the signal
outcome of addressing our Being-towards-death in terms of Being-a-whole
is our realisation of freedom towards death, which is a valuable endeavour
in psychotherapy.
Ordinarily, human beings avoid any reflection or contemplation of their
own mortality and a consideration on how this informs their lives, even
though, ironically, they are ultimately aware on a deeper level that they
will die one day. Many writers on death, from Jaspers and Tillich to Emest
Becker and Irvin Yalom, however, focus on the manner in which this fact
is pushed away from such awareness. However, Cooper and Adams (2005,
pp.79-80) have enumerated a number of 'strategies' that we employ to
avoid the anxiety in response to resolutely accepting our Being-towards-
death. Summarising Tillich, they assert that
[sjtich defensive strategies may bring a modicum of relief... but they
ultimately do more harm than good. Rigid and inflexible defensive
strategies require constant shoring-up in the face of reality, with the
result that the individual's existential anxieties take on an
increasingly neurotic form
(ibid, p.8O)
Yalom (1980, pp.117-141) has similarly identified defensive modes that
we tend to employ to ward off the anxiety of death: the idea of the ultimate
rescuer and the fundamental belief in one's own 'specialness'. With such
defences, however, we incur a cost, whether it be a compromise of our own
freedom and the possibilities to engage more with life, or the emergence of
symptoms that immerse us in rigid and sedimented stances in our lives. A

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focus on our own mortality and our attitude towards it, therefore, can bring
us to a greater awareness of the ways in which we obstruct our abihty to
engage more fully in the ways that we can exist. In the light of this, it is
Heidegger's attention to our relation to death to which I will now turn and
attempt to elaborate.

2. Heidegger's Analysis of Being-towards-death

The most direct and concise statement of Heidegger's position on death in
Being and Time, after teasing out the phenomenological insights that are
developed on the way, is as follows:
[ajnticipation reveals to Dasein its lostness in the they-self, and
brings it face to face with the possibility of being itself, primarily
unsupported by concernful solicitude, but of being itself, rather, in an
impassioned freedom towards death' - a freedom which has been
released from the Illusions of the "they", and which is factical,
certain of itself, and anxious.
(Heidegger, 1962, p.311)
In effect, we can understand this as saying that if we stop trying to flee
from our human existence as persons, and own the fact that we are faced
with possibilities, then we are able to free ourselves from living under the
particular ways that we have straitjacketed ourselves in conforming to the
norms by which we live. Only then do we engage with 'owning' or
claiming responsibility for ourselves and our very Being, which Heidegger
calls being authentic {eigentlich). This freedom, however, means that we
be authentic in our Being-towards-death. In being authentic, we do not
attempt to deceive ourselves again. However, whilst this may provide us
with a bearing on what Heidegger might intend with this passage, it may be
fruitful at this point to also spend a few moments in unpacking Heidegger's
language.
We, as Dasein, recognise our being lost in the social norms and practices
in which we are immersed and which protect us from the burdening weight
of responsibility and anxiety that is caused by any 'distantiality', or
straying from such norms and societal practices (which Heidegger calls the
'they') (ibid, p. 164). Remaining as a 'they-self, or a person who conforms
without wanting to question its relation to such norms, we evade our
facticity, or the existential 'givens' of our human existence. One of these
'givens' that characterise us simply in virtue of being human, is our being
mortal: if there is anything that we are 'programmed' to do, it is to die. We
recognise this 'lostness' in our tranquilising ourselves from anxiety in the
'they' through 'anticipation', which we might understand as our
responding openly and authentically to a possibility that provokes great
anxiety in us.

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 Being-towards-death and Its Relevance to Psychotherapy

The being that Heidegger refers to, Dasein, whieh has been translated as
'Being there' (ibid, p.27), or, more literally as 'there-Being', is used to
signify what we usually mean by 'person', or 'human being'. However, as
Gomer notes (Gorner, 2007, p.23), Dasein distinguishes itself from these
other, more familiar terms in that it is ontological (pertaining to the Being
of entities, rather than simply the entities as they are in terms of their
properties, such as size, shape, or other form of description, whieh is ontic).
And what does Heidegger mean by Being? He says that Being is not an
entity (Heidegger, 1962, p.26), but it is 'that whieh determines entities as
entities' (ibid, p.25). That is, the Being of an entity is that whieh makes it
what it is (i.e. an entity, sueh as a flower, the Sun, or a person). The word
'entity' (das Seiende) is used to describe 'that which is' (ibid, p.22);
Heidegger uses this term to refer to material objects, such as chairs and
tables, but also objects of our attention, such as time, space and persons.
A very important transition that Heidegger makes in moving from
Division I to 11 of Being and Time is from describing Dasein as Being-
ahead-of-itself to talking about its Being-a-whole. It is significant because
Heidegger describes how Dasein's fundamental Being is grounded in its
always Being-ahead-of-itself Yet, in order for Dasein to now authentically
recognise its Being-towards-death, it must grasp itself in terms of its
Being-a-w/?o/e i.e. a life in its entirety, or wholeness. At faee value, this
might be considered a contradiction: how is it possible to understand one's
life as a totality if one is still alive, and one's life incomplete? However, to
understand the reason for, and point of, Heidegger's focus on Being-a-
whole, we need to take into account what Heidegger intends to do in
Division n that was unfmished in Division I.
One key element to understanding, Heidegger claims, is interpretation
(ibid, p. 190), which we apply to the human realm, as opposed to explaining,
whieh we apply to the natural or seientific realm. Interpretation involves a
three-fold fore-structure (ibid, p. 191): fore-having, which takes into
account the taken-for-granted background that grounds the interpretation;
fore-sight, the way in whieh the issue or theme is to be approached, since
any approach will not be appropriate; and fore-conception, which
addresses the expectations that the interpreter already brings to the issue
being addressed (Dreyfus, 1991, p. 199). The level of interpretation
completed in Division I, Heidegger notes, 'cannot lay claim to
primordiality [beeause] its fore-having never included more than the
inauthentic Being of Dasein, and of Dasein as less than a whole'.
(Heidegger, 1962, p.276) He emphasises this undertaking as primordial in
that the Being of Dasein is to be brought to 'its possibilities of authenticity
and totality' (ibid, p.276). So, in order that Dasein is interpreted in its
primordiality in Division II, the 'fore-having' will interpret Dasein as a
whole, the 'fore-sight' will grasp Dasein in its mode of authenticity, and
the 'fore-conception' will address Dasein in its temporality (ibid, p.275).

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The very idea of Being-ahead-of-itself, as something still outstanding,

takes Dasein as being aware of endless not-yets into its future, whilst the
awareness of Dasein living towards its end, or thrown into living finitely,
and recognising that its possibilities are bounded by a finality, means that
Dasein does not live and then die later, but is living 'dyingingly', or, as
Carel puts it, that 'life is,..a process of dying' (Carel, 2006, p.69). It is the
awareness that there really is a final 'not-yet' that radically alters the
perspective that Dasein now takes towards its own life, and if this is
grasped authentically, Dasein's existence can be understood in terms of its
Being-a-whole.
In terms of authenticity, however. Cooper summarises nicely what I
believe Heidegger conveys in the way that we attribute responsibility either
to others or to ourselves:
/ come to appreciate that the shape of and significance of my life do
not have to be stamped upon it from the outside, but can belong to it in
virtue of the wayKS in which I, as an individual, take up the 'issue '
which my existence is for me. This is getting close to the thought that
to be an individual is to lend a 'wholeness ' and integrity to one's life,
and not to be 'dispersed' in the roles furnished by the 'they '.
(Cooper, 1999, p. 131)
In confronting our own death as a constantly impending possibility, we
experience anxiety. Being anxious is the fundamental state-of-mind
{Befindlichkeit), through which we understand ourselves and our lives:
[t]he state-of-mind which can hold open the utter and constant threat
to itself arising from Dasein's ownmost individualised Being, is
anxiety
(ibid,p.31O).
Anxiety individualises us, as death also does, because it is our ownmost
possibility. If death individualises us, then so does life, because life and
death are not understood in a linear fashion, but interwoven and
inseparable. Carel makes this, in my view, useful point, in saying that
Heidegger '[breaks] with the traditional view of life as mutually exclusive'
and views 'life and death, possibility and limitation, as intimately linked,'
(Carel, 2006, p.65)

3. The Relevance of Heidegger's Analysis of Being-towards-

death to Therapy
There are, I believe, several areas, topics or themes that Heidegger's
writings on death can inform us in our work in Existential psychotherapy.
Let me highlight three.

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 Belng-towards-death and Its Relevance to Psychotherapy

Firstly, we might consider the existential question of the meaning of (a)

life. Clients can be brought to confront the, in my view, powerftil
distinction between, what Jeff Malpas terms, mere 'living and having a
life' (Malpas, 1998, p. 120). Both relate to temporality, but in a
distinctively different way. Living involves going about our daily affairs,
experiencing difficulties and challenges with some aspect or other,
pursuing our interests and desires, and so on. Our focus here is more on the
various elements and unconnected features in our world. Having a life,
however, is grasping the fact that our life is a whole, that own-ing it (i.e,
being authentic) and owning up to it, means that we take responsibility for
how we engage with and have, or possess, that life.
This is, I think, what might be read into Heidegger's distinction between
Dasein's Being-ahead-of-itself and Being-a-whole, effectively inviting us
to consider the meaning of life in the sense that that life is uniquely ours.
This undertaking, I believe, would not be significant for us if we had no
notion of our mortality. In fact, it would be nonsensical; the meaning of
life for beings that live eternally, and therefore have no notion of finitude,
renders the issue of meaning, in my view, redundant. Our need for
defences would similarly be redundant, as would our sense of who we take
ourselves to, or aspire to, be.
If having a life, or Being-a-whole, is the more authentic and significant
orientation to living that we can embrace, how might this manifest itself in
our work with clients? Spinosa, Flores and Dreyfus (1997) have developed
innovative applications of Heidegger's ideas based on the human ability to
disclose different and new ways of Being, which inform the sense of
meaning that can indelibly shape our lives. Our engagement with existing
practices in our world allows us to note the disharmonies and tensions that
inevitably arise from the questioning of those practices, such that we
articulate new ways of disclosing ourselves in response to these
disharmonies". We would not be solely interested in the everyday ways of
disclosing ourselves and, in turn, the world, but in articulating a concern
that the 'they' itself was 'covering over' and avoiding by tranquilising
itself What is noteworthy here is their ability to hold on to these
disharmonies, in turn 'standing out' and not merging back in with the
'they'. We may be at the risk of opposition and disagreement, but our
stance with this approach shapes our identities towards fulfilling a
potentially more compelling future than the present one that we are living.
All this serves to emphasise, rightly, I think, even if a little obliquely, the
meaning that life can take on when that life is informed and shaped by our
limited span of existence, the impending possibility of our ownmost,
certain death, and the fact that it cannot be motivated by a Being-ahead-of-
oneself, which would be reflected in living an unconnected life that is
characterised by serial aetivities that 'get one through the day', we might
say, and where death is a far-off event, i.e. that will event-ually happen.

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Clients can find such meaning in their lives by appreciating the possibility
of articulating their responses to any existing practices in their society e.g.
at work, or in their relations with others, that ignite their passions and
interests, and that they believe can be challenged, changed or improved.
Their responses may well be considered 'marginal' by others, but this is
precisely the challenge: to maintain their perspective whilst acknowledging
others'. Whether they are cultural, entrepreneurial or political in nature,
such disharmonies generate a resolve for the expression of new ways of
Being through the disclosure of actions that are intended to impact on those
existing practices.
Secondly, our own death confronts us with the question of the extent to
which we are inauthentically hiding from living more intensely, or at least
more openly and authentically in relation to the world. In terms of being a
they-self. Existential psychotherapy can address the anxiety that keeps the
client from making him or herself distinct from the many others, or the
'they', with whom he or she identifies in the wish to be disburdened from
that anxiety. In this respect, I think that attending to clients in their
expressions of anxiety about certain aspects of their lives can also involve
challenging them to step beyond their sphere of familiarity, and comport
themselves differently towards situations and other people.
My work with dying patients within the NHS has, for me, emphasised
the distinction between Being-ahead-of-itself and Being-a-whole and how
this is manifested in patients'/ clients' attitudes towards their lives. An
example of this is in my work with a 59-year-old female patient, Maria.
We met in her hospital ward, a short time after she had been diagnosed
with terminal cancer. She had requested a meeting with me as a matter of
urgency. Almost as soon as we had sat down, she told me that she had
months... and then choked on her words, crying deeply and intensely, yet
silently. After some moments, she explained, rather reflectively, that
everyone has to die at some point, that she wasn't afraid of dying herself,
but she had been a month away from retiring and had been looking forward
to at least enjoying her time away from the demands of a job and career.
Much of concern centred around her attending to how she could best use
the time that she had remaining to undergo the most effective treatment.
However, as I encountered her in this relatively brief moment of time,
Maria seemed to be experiencing what Heidegger describes as the
[ejvasive concealment in the face of death [that] can not be
authentically 'certain ' of death, and yet is certain of it.
(Heidegger, 1962, p.300)
On the one hand, she was all too aware of, and acknowledged her
mortality, but also resisted the unpalatable fact that she would die in a
matter of months. In Heidegger's view, this centres on how we relate to,

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 Being-towards-death and Its Relevance to Psychotherapy

and understand, the certainty of death. In keeping with his understanding

of truth as 'uncoveredness' (aletheia), and certainty as holding something
to be true (ibid, p.3OO), certainty is Dasein disclosing, or engaged in
'uncovering' rather than concealing. Maria was all too certain about her
impending death, but at the same time she understood^ that this was what
she needed to conceal from herself This would seem to follow
Heidegger's explication of Dasein being inauthentic in its coping before it
can face any possibility to confront its circumstances in an authentic
manner, and not be somehow authentic at one stroke. However, this is not
the only thing that was noticed. She became more aware of her life, and a
return to her family home in Naples was where she now wished to live out
the rest of her days. Certainly, her thrownness had now included her cancer
as a way that her body now existed, and she had gradually and increasingly
come to accept and able to live with this.
Maria's experience, therefore, had initially 'oscillated' between one of
openness towards her mortality and also concealing its 'truth'. Gradually
coming to an acceptance, albeit painful, of the flnitude of her life allowed
her to understand it from a position of its entirety, of being a totality, rather
than a series of unconnected moments. Essentially, she was now concerned
with the issue of how she could have a life, even if it was limited, and she
considered various options and choices that were available to her in the
light of this. Time had moved from becoming an expendable resource to
being intimately bound in her very existence: she literally had no time to
lose in continually exploring the endless possible options about how to
spend her remaining days. There were more important choices to make,
and mundane, irrelevant options were pushed aside. Maria was now
resolute in her attitude towards her life, such that she was relating to it as a
totality, and, as a result, living more intensely and addressing her options
differently than when simply Being-ahead-of-herself
The third element or theme is the idea of freedom, or 'releasement'
(Gelassenheit) (Heidegger, 1966, p.54) towards death. Heidegger, as we
have noted earlier, emphasised this aspect of freedom towards death that
we experience, reflected in the 'unshakeable joy' of bringing ourselves
face to face with our authentic potentiality-for-Being (Heidegger, 1962,
p.358).
A number of my clients, otherwise relatively healthy and not suffering
from illness, have touched on the finitude of their lives, either indirectly, or
more explicitly, and the following vignette illustrates well the impact of
considering one's own mortality and the sense of the wholeness of life.
Ken, a 32-year-old unmarried man, had come to me to address his
marijuana and alcohol consumption, as well as his constant and unrelenting
pursuit of women for sexual gratification. After a number of therapy
sessions, he had come to recognising that his life was an unsatisfactory
series of moments that did not take in the idea of his life as a totality. He

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began to lament the manner in which he had wasted and squandered his
life thus far, and how he had grasped the future simply as one moment
following another and living without regard for a wider horizon from
which his life could be understood. We might say that Ken had
experienced a call of conscience about his life, resulting in existential guilt
about the fact that he wasn't living in a more committed way towards the
possibilities that were available to him. His frequent reference to his age
reflected his awareness of his temporality, and the concomitantly
increasing awareness of his responsibility for his own temporal life. In time,
he was aware of the choices that he could make, as well as the freedom to
act in the face of the boundary of his fmitude.

4. Critical Considerations
Julian Young (Young, 1998, p.l 15) has questioned the idea that anxiety is
the foundational mood for our authentically opening ourselves to our
Being-towards-death. He argues that other moods can equally open us to a
true acknowledgement of our mortality. Young gives the example of love,
and this seems to me to be based on Dasein's Being as founded on care
(Sorge) (Heidegger, 1962, p.84), the idea that our existence fundamentally
matters to us. This ties in to Heidegger's analysis of death when he says
that, 'care is Being-towards-death' (ibid, p.378). Whilst in agreement that
experiencing a deeper sense of one's life through one's recognition of love
towards others and oneself may bring about a deep awareness of one's
fmitude, my position is that anxiety nevertheless remains the foundational
mood that confronts us most abruptly and starkly in our thrown projection
towards death.
A Schopenhauerian response to Heidegger's idea of authentically
accepting our Being-towards-death and embracing our life as a whole is
convincingly conveyed in Ingmar Bergman's film, "The Seventh Seal",
which explores the question of how to respond to the very fact that we are
mortal beings and how we are to live with this"*. The central character in
the film is a mediaeval knight, Antonius Block, who has returned to his
homeland from fighting in the Crusades, accompanied by his squire, Jons.
As they make their way to Block's castle, they encounter various
presentations and scenarios of death, including a plague afflicting many
people, the decomposing body of a dead shepherd, and the personification
of Death. We witness various responses to death through the characters,
and it is Block's that most closely represents Heidegger's position: that we
develop an authentic stance towards death and the attendant anxieties that
it arouses. Having fought for his beliefs for a decade. Block is now thrown
into doubt about the existence of God as a result of his direct encounter
with Death. He comes to realise that Death just is: it doesn't hold back
anything:

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 Being-towards-death and Its Relevance to Psychotherapy

[t]he Knight realises that Death has no secrets. Death is just Death;
he doesn 't know anything about God, or the Devil or the afterlife, he's
only doing his job.
(London Review of Books, 20/9/2007, p. 16)
However, Block is still faced with trying to make sense of living in the
face of finitude. With his religious beliefs called into question. Block
reacts against the conventional norms of his society, which he expresses
through his efforts to help individuals who have been condemned by the
wider community. Here, Block authentically faces the 'they' and acts
according to his own conscience as an individual human being. But then
we go on to experience Block, arguably, going beyond, or certainly testing,
the Heideggerian position. He is horrified at the prospect of a life without
intrinsic meaning, uttering:

[Then] life is an outrageous horror. No-one can live in the face of

death, knowing that all is nothing
(Bergman, 1957)
Heidegger would claim at this point, and with which I agree, that this is
precisely what we have to live with, and to do so is to live an authentic
Being-towards-death^ But Block cannot reconcile himself with this, since
it provides him with no basis for living an authentic life of meaning. His
confrontation with Death places him in a tortuous, Schopenhauerian
position: if everything that he has done with a sense of purpose in his life is
'nothing', or ultimately has no value over and above his attaching
importance to it, then this is unacceptable. In short, life is a failure, or is
false and illusory. Either way, it involves suffering.
If Antonius Block were a client in a therapeutic relationship with us,
what could we possibly say in response? This is no small question for any
psychotherapist, since one premise of addressing death in a therapeutic
context might be to open the individual to engage with life more, given its
precious limitations. But the prospect of our very own self at some point
dying is an outrage, like tempting a young infant with sweets (i.e. the
wonder of life) and then simply hiding them away (i.e. the realisation that
nothingness prevails).

5. Conclusion
It is the introduction of distinctions that I believe provides us with a
transcendental element to Heidegger's work. That is, in elaborating the
inauthentic/ authentic, the Being-ahead-of-itself and the Being-a-whole, a
rich set of distinctions are provided in Being and Time for our work with
clients to furnish them with the possibility of confronting the extent to
which they 'own up', or honestly accept as particular to their own

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individual case, their Being-towards-death. The transition from a relatively

defensive stance to one that transcends this position serves to intensify the
experience of living and also to bring the vision of a life to an integral
whole or totality. Clients may typically be caught up in the everyday
aspects of living and, as such, are trying to make sense of their existence in
one way or another. For the most part, this is cashed out in terms of their
relation to the 'they' and the anxiety that may ensue as a result of their
experience of 'distantiality' from such norms and practices, or else a
palpable unease in fully recognising their individuality and thrownness as
mortal beings.
I am convinced that the therapeutic setting allows for a process of
increasing awareness of the extent to which the client has given him or
herself over to the dictates of publicly accepted norms, such that this
effectively discharges the client of his or her responsibility for making
autonomous decisions or 'leaps' of creativity in the way that they can live.
However, having looked at the relevance of Heidegger's ideas to
psychotherapy in this paper, it seems to me that such ideas may actually be
difficult to take on by us in practice, and therefore would remain relevant
only as abstractions. This may be so, but I think that nevertheless there is
still scope to shape one's life according to the transition from Being-ahead-
of-oneself to one's Being-a-whole, and if this is truly a possibility for us to
contemplate, then we can consider this within the frame of the
psychotherapeutic alliance.
My own Being-toward-death brings me to appreciate that the anxiety in
addressing my own 'living dyingly' also impacts on my Being with clients,
acknowledging the difficult challenge of being able to look Death in the
eye, as Antonius Block was able to do. Looking death in the eye is
certainly reflected in the experience of being told that one has months to
live, for example, and seems a tardy, though significant and alerting
message to 'get on with life' and infuse it with meaning in the time that is
remaining. But, in the light of Heidegger's analysis of death, I think it is
important to emphasise the tacit assumption that we tend to make: that
death is not realistically actualisable in any moment, and not an
'impending possibility', but at the 'opposite end' or pole to life, and so not
of immediate concern to us. It is only in experiencing endings, or difficult
situations, or dangers in our lives, that we glimpse our own nothingness
and feel anxious in doing so.
I feel that it is incumbent on therapists to be prepared to engage with
their clients' (as well as their own) mortality in a way that also explores
what sense this imparts to the living of life, and how that life needs to be
seen as a whole in order that significant meaning can be made of it; for if it
were merely seen as Being-ahead-of-oneself ñiturally, the meaning would
ultimately only be superficial. For most of us, realising how superficial we
have been fills us with a sense of purpose, and inclines us to do two things:

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 Being-towards-death and Its Relevance to Psychotherapy

following Young (1998, p.ll6), to be more autonomous, and also to be

more focused about how we live our lives. In this respect, I believe that
therapy can support individuals to find ways to do this.

Mo Mandic is an existentially-oriented executive and business coach. He

also maintains a London-based private practice as an existential
psychotherapist. He completed the Advanced Diploma in Existential
Psychotherapy in 2007.

Notes
' Heidegger's emphasis in bold print
^ Examples of obvious disharmonies, at least for me, include the purpose
and meaning of the National Health Services, on the one hand, and the
results-driven business model upon which it is run; or the state's plan to
invest £ 170 million in symptom-addressing (CBT) therapies, on the one
hand, and the non-reductive complexity of human beings, on the other.
^ 'Understanding' not in a cognitive sense of processing thoughts, but
existential, which can be understood as Verstehen, or a basic
comportment towards the world shown by our involved way of dealing
with things and others
"* I owe an acknowledgement of the influence of this Heideggerian focus on
Bergman's work to a paper by Professor Irving Singer, entitled Living
with Death
^ Heidegger would also refer to our heritage (Erbe) as the foundation for
giving a sense of purpose to our existence

References
Bergman, I. (1957). The Seventh Seal. Tartan DVD (released 2001).
Carel, H. (2006). Life and Death in Freud and Heidegger. Edition Rodopi:
New York.
Cooper, D.E. (1999). Existentialism. Second Edition Blackwell: Oxford.
Cooper, M. & Adams, M. (2005). Death. In Deurzen, E. van & Arnold-
Baker, C. (eds). Existential Perspectives on Human Issues pp.78-85
Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke.
Dreyfus, H.L. (1991). Being-in-the-world. MIT Press: Cambridge, Mass.
Gomer, P. (2007). Heidegger's Being and Time: An Introduction.
Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.
Heidegger, M. (1927). Being and Time. Trans. Macquarrie, J. & Robinson,
E.S.1962. Blackwell: Oxford.
Heidegger, M. (1959). Discourse on Thinking. Trans. Anderson, J.M. &
Freund, E.H. 1966. Harper & Row: New York.
London Review of Books, 20* September 2007.

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Mo Mandic

Malpas, J. (1998). Death and the unity of a life. In Malpas, J. & Solomon,
R.C. (eds) Death and Philosophy, pp. 120-134 Routledge: London.
Singer, I. (2004). Living with Death at
http://oew.mit.edu/NR/rdonlyres/Linguistics-and-Philosophy/24-
209Spring2004/18BFF15E-343B-4088-AD56-
80AFAEDD5B91/0/death_l.pdf accessed on 24/10/2007
Spinosa, C , Flores, F. & Dreyfus, H.L. (1997). Disclosing New Worlds.
MIT Press: Cambridge, Mass.
Yalom, I. (1980). Existential Psychotherapy. Basic Books: New York.
Young, J. (1998). Death and authenticity. In Malpas, J. & Solomon, R.C.
(eds.) Death and Philosophy, pp. 112-119 Routledge: London.

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