Senescence, the Last Half of Life

by G. Stanley Hall

Little children often focus on some minute detail (thanatic fetishism) and ever after remember, for example, the bright pretty handles or the silver nails of the coffin, the plate, the cloth binding, their own or others’ articles of apparel, the shroud, flowers, and wreaths on or near the coffin or thrown into the grave, countless stray phrases of the preacher, the music, the incidents of the ride to the graveyard, the fear lest the bottom of the coffin should drop out or the straps with which it is lowered into the ground should slip or break, a stone in the first handful or shovelful of earth thrown upon the coffin, etc. The hearse is almost always prominent in such memories and children often want to ride in one. This, of course, conforms to the well-known laws of erotic fetishism by which the single item in a constellation of them that alone can find room in the narrow field of consciousness is over-determined and exaggerated in importance because the affectivity that belongs to items that are repressed and cannot get into consciousness is transferred to those that can do so.

Children often play they are dead, even when alone. They stretch out in bed, fold their hands, and hold their breath as long as they can to see how it feels to be dead. A few in fancy feel ill, imagine doctor and nurse, go through the last agony, imagine others standing about weeping and praising them, or perhaps picture themselves as the bystanders and see the imaginary death of a friend and try to weep. Real grief is hard for them and late to understand and they often think tears a pretense. They sometimes pick out pretty coffins for themselves or their chums and imagine becoming burial frocks. The odor of varnish from a coffin sometimes has an incredible persistence and power to call up feelings and emotions. Many children fear the corpse will wake and sit up—“he is not dead but sleepeth,” etc. Many are the records of how by calling, touching, pounding, or otherwise doing either forbidden or commendable things children strive to provoke or coax their dead relatives to awake.

Death has many degrees to children. The buried body is deadest. It is more so in the coffin than before being placed there. A very sick person who may die begins to be invested with the same awe. Lying in bed by day, the doctor, the silent nurse, the smell of medicines, often suggest that death has begun. Toward very old people children feel something of the same awe because they must soon die. According to some of our data some young children are incipient necrophiles, persistently trying to stroke, handle, or even kiss and hug the corpse. Scott’s curves indicate that up to and at the age of five death is more likely to be interesting if not attractive, while at about nine its real horror first begins to be felt. Some, at a very tender age, acquire associations that persist for years, perhaps through life, and which are liable to be evoked by specific instances. This is, for example, the case with the sight and smell of tuberoses, a black box or boat, a crepe veil or bow on a door, hat, or garment, tolling of bells or even the ringing of them, etc. Certain phrases in Scripture and in some morbid cases all allusions to death are liable to cause hysterical outbreaks. Some thanatophobes in whom these infantile fetishistic fears persist cannot go past an undertaker’s show window but go far around to avoid it. One such young man felt a sudden and strong aversion toward a young lady to whom he was attached as soon as he learned that she was employed in an undertaker’s establishment. These aversions often spring up suddenly, perhaps in the form of a convulsive sob, tears, or inexplicable depression, although they are usually of infantile origin. Children’s funerals and interments of pets are now represented by a small literature.

For young children the dead are simply absent and curious questions are asked as to where they have gone, when they will return, why the child cannot go with them. The infantile mind often makes strange mixtures of its own naïve constructions with adult insight. The distinction between psyche and soma, of which death is the chief teacher, is hard for the realistic minds of children. Told that Papa or Mama rest or sleep in the ground, they ask why they are there, where it is so cold and dark, why they do not wake, what they eat, who feeds them, impulsions in the race that primitive burial customs often elaborately answered by preparing bodies for reanimation, leaving food and utensils with the corpse, etc. When told of heaven above, children have strange, crass fancies, such as that the body is shot up to heaven, the grave dug open by angels, the body passed down through the earth and then around up, etc. It generally gets out of the grave and goes to its abode by night.

As ideas of the soul begin to be grasped it is conceived as a tenuous replica of the body hovering about somewhere, sometimes seen though rarely felt. It may even be talked to or fancied as present, though unseen. Children’s dreams of the dead are often vivid and rarely dreadful. In general the child thinks little or nothing but good of the dead and the processes of idealization, aided by adults, often almost reach the pitch of canonization so that later the memory of a dead parent may become a power in the entire subsequent life of sentiment as if all the instincts of ancestor worship were focalized on the individual parent. Indeed, we find some adults who maintain quiet sacred hours for thought of or ideal communion with their departed dear ones and such yearnings, of course, make a favorable soil for the ghost cult of spiritism. This component of our very complex attitude toward dead friends is also the stratum that crops out in the holy communion sacrament of the ghost dances of our American Indians, in which the souls of all the great dead of their tribe are supposed to come back and commune with their living descendants. Just in proportion as the dead are loved does death work its charm of sublimation and idealization, and just as a child of either sex has loved the parent of the other will he or she idealize a chosen mate snatched away by death. Thus, too, one factor in the belief in immortality is love that must conserve its object though deceased, this factor being quite distinct from the transcendental selfishness that would conserve our own ego. Young children often seem rather to rejoice in than to fear death. The excitement of all its ceremonies is new and impressive. Some even express a wish, after a funeral is over, that someone else would die. In their funeral games they quarrel as to who shall assume the central rôle of the corpse, which they feign well. One abnormal four-year-old tried to kill a younger mate and I find records of a number of pathological children who have actually done so, largely in order to enjoy the excitement of death, funeral, and burial. A sweet young girl was found dancing on the fresh grave of her younger sister, chanting, “I am so glad she is dead and I am alive,” suggesting not the ancient days of famine when every death left more food for the survivors so much as jealousy at the diversion of parental attention and care to the younger child.

Neurotic children often play with unusual abandon, as if to compensate for the depression, when they have just left a room where brothers or sisters have breathed their last. A small boy who lost his father said, “Now I will milk, cut wood, bring up coal,” etc., attempting thus to assume the father’s rôle, perhaps even putting on some of his attire; while girls whose mothers die become more tender to their fathers or the other children, feeling themselves to be in some degree the surrogate of the mother. Just as children of tender age far more often fear the death of others than they do their own, so they vastly more often wish the death of those they hate than they feel any suicidal impulse. Children’s propensity to play with death-shudders in their talk and thought was well illustrated in the case of two girls of perhaps seven whom I overheard while they were watching a man on a very high roof. One said, “Oh, I wish he would fall right down backwards and kill himself.” “And they pick him up all bloody,” giggled the other. “His bones all broke,” said the first. “And put him in a black box in the grave,” said the second. “And all his children cry,” said number one. “And starve to death,” added the other. They were getting more excited and spoke lower as they passed out of my hearing. The horror and also the fascination of rooms in which people have died often shows a conflict that is psychologically the same.

If death is thus distorted by misconceptions in infancy it looms up as a great and baffling mystery to fledgling youth. So little is it really understood by them that it is hard to utilize the fear of it even for motivating hygienic regimen. To tell a boy or girl in the teens that it has been proven that by conforming to certain established laws of health life may be prolonged on an average of fifteen years seems to them a far cry and it has little power as an incentive because they are so absorbed in living out all the possibilities of the present. There are certain perils, too, in using the death fear as a euthenic motive for the young. Yet during adolescence the death problem often becomes a veritable muse inspiring endless dreads, reveries, perhaps obsessions and complexes of the most manifold kind, especially in neurotics, in whom infantile impulses and adult insights are strangely mingled, producing weird perversions in later life. All these mazes we can never thread without a knowledge of the impression death has made upon the impressionable soul of man at every stage of life and perhaps most of all in the adolescent period, when youth first comes into close contact with the death thought.

When the young are achieving adulthood at the most rapid rate they are often overwhelmed with a sense of insufficiency, inferiority, or incompleteness against which they have to react as best they can. Tolstoi gave us a good illustration of this from his own boyhood. His tutor flogged him and he reacted as the only way in which he could “get even” by not merely the thought of suicide but the vivid imagination, well set in scene, of himself as dead and his father dragging the horrified tutor before his beautiful corpse and accusing him of having murdered his son, while the friends around bemoaned him as so brilliant and so tragically slain. It seems strange that at that period of life when both vitality and viability are greatest and the will to live seems to have its maximal momentum the death thought is so prone to be obsessive. But death is very hard to conceive and interpretations of what it really means differ with every age, race, individual, and perhaps almost every moment of life. It is so negative, privative, and human nature, like physical nature, abhors a vacuum so much that the soul balks not only at the idea of annihilation but at every thought of the arrest of life. Recent studies of children’s suicides show that although they begin at the early dawn of school age they are augmented by all repressions of their natural interests and instincts. Only at puberty or after, when the life of the race begins to dominate that of the individual, do children begin to comprehend what death really means; and even then, as the 58 suicides of German school children per year from 1883 to 1905 show, many, if not most, are sudden and impulsive and probably the majority, at least those of pubescent girls, are largely for the sake of the effect their death will have upon those nearest them. What child has not seriously considered suicide, at least in reverie? Several partial censuses have been unable to find one.[206]

As to the death wish, this may be often felt and even expressed impulsively on some special provocation and then the realization of it may bring not only horror but in neuropathic children may set up a prolonged and morbid corrective process to strangle it. We have many cases in which overtenderness to parents or relatives, which had become so insistent as to be troublesome, was motivated by the impulse to atone for a vivid death wish that took form in a moment of anger. In general we have only a life wish for our friends and reserve the death wish for enemies. Even in the most highly evolved emotional lives this is perhaps only a question of predominance, for psychoanalysts tell us that never was there a death, even of a lover, that did not bring some small modicum of joy to the survivor, swallowed up and overwhelmed as this component might be in grief. Were this not so, comforters and consolers would have no resources. We strive to think that our dear ones are happier, comforting ourselves with memories, and ascribe to the dead superior powers of transcendental enjoyment; while, conversely, no savage ever killed the bitterest foe of his tribe without elements of pity or perhaps phrases to atone for the soul of the victim or to his friends by saying propitiatory words or performing placatory rites. Even hell and devils never kill the soul and there are spots and spells of remission of torment so that surcease and nepenthe are not unknown, even in the inferno.

The death thought in some of our data seems to be spontaneous, that is, it may break out obsessively, not only on the slightest occasion but without any ascertainable cause. Some young people have spells of crying with wild abandon at the thought that they must die, which sometimes seems to sound out to them as if from the welkin. It is worst nights. It seems so unspeakably dreadful that they cannot steady their voice. The thought in the infant prayer, “If I should die before I wake,” etc., made one child more or less neurotic for years with horror of hell and judgment and she was wont to fancy herself found dead in the morning and used to pose for it to look her best. This, too, plays its rôle in revival hysteria. Some who have been very near death by drowning or other accident magnify this experience in memory until it may come to haunt them. Indeed, it seems characteristic of adolescence that although it may occur at later stages of life, in some quiet hour, perhaps when alone on the shore or in the forest or in a wakeful moment at night, the thought, “I must die,” seems to spring and fasten upon the soul like a beast of prey. It flashes out with great and absorbing vividness. Occasionally a voice seems to pronounce the sentence. In a few cases it is so intense that a child fancies itself in the act of dying and springs up in terror. Probably all morbid fears of death are regressive or reversionary and have childish features. One clergyman was so haunted by it that he could not conduct funerals and only after years was he able to find self-control in the conviction that he might live on till Christ’s second coming.[207]