Death as Neurosis

“Being deprived of meaning and suppressed as the ultimate event giving meaning to life, death in our culture has become a neurosis, an illness to be treated therapeutically.  Whether obscured and masked by the funeral industry or naturalized by the apostles of everything natural, death remains omnipresent, but precisely as a neurosis.  This anxiety supplies clients for the offices of psychologists, counselors, and psychoanalysts of every shade and school.  The hitherto silent theme of death is now couched in endless therapeutic conversations about adjustment, identity, self-fulfillment, and normalcy.  For deep down, beneath the seemingly foolproof and scientific fences built by secularism, man knows that if death has no meaning, then life has no meaning either.  And not only life per se, but nothing in life has any meaning.  Here, we find the source of the underlying despair, violence, utopianism, lust, and, ultimately, foolishness that constitute the real background, the dark subconscious, of our seemingly happy and rational secularist culture.”  The Liturgy of Death, Alexander Schmemann