Spanning discussions of the fear of death, existentialism, ideology, childhood, mental illness, religion, and art, Feifel 1959 contains numerous foundational works that are required reading, including chapters by Jung, Wahl, Tillich, Marcuse, Kastenbaum, Nagy, and Schneidman. This is especially relevant when a collection of superlative individual articles form a body of work that has a major impact on that discipline. Space restricts the ability to list them all, but this section includes compilations that make original and scholarly contributions to various fields in death studies. Numerous anthologies on death contain works that deserve individual citation for their erudition and innovation. The studies that are cited in this article have been included because they are pioneering, essential, innovative, or contribute something unique to the diverse array of thanatological researches. This article cannot incorporate every significant study of death hence, numerous works that are important and erudite have been omitted. Where quiescence previously reigned, a cascade of different approaches surged. Studies accrued on the relationships between death and psychopathology, the ways that children understand and cope with death, and the historical modes of imagining, comprehending, depicting, grieving, ritualizing, and even celebrating death. Where subtle silence and avoidance of death in psychology once prevailed, an efflorescence of formal studies detailing our obsessions, denials, and diverse cultural preparations appeared toward the latter half of the 20th century. Scholarly treatments of death have traversed many phases during the last century. The way we contend with death varies among cultures, individuals, and periods in history. We thrive on visual carnage and a pornographic immersion in death as an evasion of our own buried fears and yearnings. We avoid its specter and speak cryptically of things ghastly, uncanny, or repulsive. Though death remains and ever haunts us, we often bury our mortality in tombs of silence. Death has inspired religion, poetry, philosophy, art, and the ornaments of culture through the ages. Ovid wrote that the completion of his work would withstand time and death, and not even Jove could abolish the immortality attained through such poetry. Socrates asserted that philosophy was a preparation for death, while Lucretius and Cicero claimed that the fear of death inspired the belief in gods and afterlives. Poets and philosophers have also limned the despair of human evanescence and death since antiquity. Religious rituals and stories reflected our tremors, questions, and yearning to place death into the continuity of nature, the divine, and the cycles of being around them. It afflicted and perplexed the imagination, forcing us to wonder why we existed, why we were created, and what purpose there might be in a life destined for ineluctable decay and disappearance. Since the earliest remnants of human culture, death was a trenchant mystery, bewilderment, and horror. Human beings are uniquely aware of death, for they can conceive the future, imagine the death of loved ones, and plot their own slow decay into aging, disease, death, and decomposition in the cold worm-riddled earth.
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