Fear of Death: Differences between Survivors of the Holocaust and the General Israeli-Jewish Population
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Authors
Maritz, Yaffa S.
Issue Date
1988
Type
Thesis
Language
en
Keywords
Alternative Title
Abstract
This research attempts to demonstrate a possible relationship between survivors' experience of the Holocaust and their fear of death. For the purpose of this research, fear of death was divided into two major fears: fear of death of self and fear of death of others. These fears were tested in two dimensions: conscious fear and unconscious fear. Conscious fear of death was tested by a direct fear of death questionnaire that consisted of 38 questions addressing both fear of death of self and fear of the death of others. These questions also aimed to cover three dimensions of fear: Intra-personal (fear of personal losses), Interpersonal (fear of loss of relationships), and Transpersonal (fear of the unknown). The unconscious fear of death was tested by a Thematic Apperception Test (T.A.T.), which consisted of 4 selected pictures to which the respondents had to relate stories. Thirty-two people were interviewed in all. Among them, 19 were survivors and 13 Jews who came to Israel before the Second World War. The hypothesis of this research predicts that on the conscious level, survivors will be more resistant to talk about their own fear of death than the control group but will confess to some fear of death of other significant people. However, on the unconscious level, survivors will show more preoccupation with death themes and will express feelings like depression, anxiety, aggression, and guilt more often. The research's findings, in general, support the hypothesis. In most cases, survivors declined to talk about their fear of their own death and expressed some fear of the death of others but had a high level of unconscious preoccupation with death images.
The main purpose of this research is to alert people in the field of psychology to the possible discrepancy between conscious and unconscious expressions of the fear of death and to encourage those in the helping professions to take some actions to help survivors of the Holocaust and other traumatic experiences to come to terms with their fear. The main recommendations of this research are: 1.) To get more reliable statistical results, there needs to be a much larger number of respondents who are randomly selected; 2) There is a need to develop a more uniform test for the conscious and unconscious levels so it will be possible to do a comparative study of the results; 3) It is advisable to give the respondents a personality test to isolate the effects of different personalities on the results of the fear of death tests; 4) The questionnaire needs to be tailored to fit the particular education and language levels of the population.