The Dying Body as a Lived Experience

This book tackles the problem of how anxiety over death throughout the course of a life - though often denied or repressed - persists as a pervasive but unspoken worry, influencing our conduct. It applies this focus to a range of normal anxieties, frustrations and aggressions in everyday life, in addition to specific problems such as dementia, depression, aging, and retirement. The book proposes that sensitivity to this dimension can empower us to develop creative relationships to the vulnerability of others and to ourselves as well. This book will have a wide interdisciplinary audience in the health sciences, in the sociology of health and illness, philosophy, bioethics, and in the expanding field of medical humanities.

Alan Blum is Executive Director of the Culture of Cities Centre and Senior Professor of Sociology and Communication and Culture at York University, Canada. He is the author of The Grey Zone of Health and Illness, Theorizing, and The Imaginative Structure of the City, and co-author of On the Beginning of Social Inquiry and Self-Reflection in the Arts and Sciences.

Prologue: The Dying Body as Lived Experience Introduction: Death, Mystery, Life 1. Desperation as Grey Zone 2. Fear and Trembling 3. The Collective Fantasizes Death: The Imaginary at the End of its Tether 4. Fear and Likely Stories 5. Death, Happiness and the Meaning of Life: The View from Sociology 6. Ending and Beginning Part 2: Dementia and the Look of Madness: Aging, Raging and the Poetics of Passing On 7. The Enigma of the Brain and its Place as Cause, Character, and Pretext in the Imaginary of Dementia 8. The Writing Machine: Public Health, Dementia and the Spell of the Brain as an Object of Social Enthusiasm 9. Plague Strikes the Family 10. The Cliche of Depression 11. Tragedy and Comedy 12. The Travesty of End of Life