Disarming the Terror of Mortality
Ernest Becker, Epictetus, and the Clinical Rehearsal of Death
In a municipal courthouse in Tucson, Arizona, in 1989, psychologists Jeff Greenberg, Sheldon Solomon, and Tom Pyszczynski handed twenty-two sitting municipal court judges a routine packet of personality questionnaires. Attached was a hypothetical legal case file requiring them to set a cash bond for a woman arrested on a misdemeanor prostitution charge. Half of the judges received a standard packet. The other eleven judges found two extra open-ended prompts tucked into the middle of their forms, asking them to jot down a few sentences describing the emotions that the thought of their own death aroused in them and what they believed would happen to their physical bodies once they died.
The judges were trained professionals sworn to apply the law with dispassionate objectivity, and none reported feeling consciously rattled by the brief questionnaire. Yet when the researchers opened the completed bail sheets, the numbers diverged by nearly an order of magnitude. Judges in the control group who had not been reminded of their mortality set an average bail of $50. Judges who had spent two minutes contemplating their own physical death set an average bail of $455—more than nine times higher—against the exact same defendant for violating the moral norms of the community.
Greenberg, Solomon, and Pyszczynski had designed the Tucson experiment to test the central thesis of cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker's 1973 Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Denial of Death. A former U.S. infantryman who had helped liberate the Nazi concentration camp at Landsberg in 1945 and completed his manuscript shortly before dying of colon cancer at age forty-nine, Becker argued that the hidden engine driving human status mania, ideological fanaticism, and intergroup aggression is the terror of mortality. Unlike every other animal on Earth, a human being possesses an abstract, symbolic ego capable of projecting itself decades into the future. Yet that ego is coupled with the unbearable knowledge that its physical body is destined to decay in the dirt.
To keep from being paralyzed by existential terror, Becker argued, human beings construct immortality projects. We transfer our sense of identity into cultural status hierarchies, monuments, bank accounts, and national or religious dogmas that promise we are vital protagonists in a drama that will outlast our biological flesh. Consequently, as hundreds of Terror Management Theory experiments confirmed across thirty countries, whenever an individual's bounded ego is reminded of death—a trigger known as mortality salience—the mind reacts by fiercely defending its in-group worldview and punishing anyone who threatens the symbolic shield holding death at bay.
How can a human mind step off this treadmill of defensive tribalism before the end of life? Two thousand years before Becker, in first-century CE Nicopolis in northwestern Greece, the former Roman slave and Stoic philosopher Epictetus taught his students that the fear of death is not caused by death itself, but by the false belief that the temporary loan of our body and reputation is our private possession. Building on Plato's definition of philosophy in the Phaedo as the practice of dying and the monastery motto engraved over Mount Athos gates—that if you die before you die, you will not die when you die—contemplative traditions treated voluntary ego-dissolution as a dress rehearsal that strips death of its sting while the body is still healthy.
In December 2016, psychopharmacologist Roland Griffiths at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and psychiatrist Stephen Ross at New York University Langone Medical Center tested this proposition under double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical conditions. Griffiths's team enrolled fifty-one patients diagnosed with life-threatening recurrences of breast, gastrointestinal, or hematologic cancers who were suffering from clinical depression and death anxiety. In a supported residential setting, each patient underwent a single five-hour session with psilocybin alongside a placebo crossover session.
The therapeutic outcome did not depend on dulling pain like a sedative. Instead, statistical mediation analysis revealed that lasting recovery tracked a single event during the five-hour window: the completeness of the patient's self-transcendent experience, measured by the dissolution of the boundary separating their isolated biography from the wider continuum of life. Once a patient had directly experienced awareness continuing without the anxious scaffolding of the bounded ego, death lost its terror as an absolute annihilation. In Roland Griffiths's 2016 randomized crossover trial at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine with fifty-one patients facing life-threatening cancer, a single five-hour session that occasioned a high-scoring self-transcendent experience produced an immediate, enduring eighty percent clinical remission in death anxiety and depression six months later.