1

Presentation for the 97th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association (August 16th – 19th Chicago 2002)

Regular Section on Death & Dying

Dr. Clifton Bryant, Presider.

Transcending Death Through Modes of Symbolic Immortality: The Relevance of an Underutilized Concept for Sociological Theory

Lee Garth Vigilant, Ph.D.

I. The concept of symbolic immortality has been used extensively in psychologically oriented work, particularly writings in the tradition of Robert J. Lifton’s depth-psychiatry with survivors of Hiroshima’s Atomic Bomb. Other researchers, primarily in the fields of psychology and social psychiatry, have drawn heavily upon this concept in studying various identity formation processes related to the postself. This concept turns out to be very relevant to the study of efforts to immortalize the self via sports, art, music, literature, and other forms of creativity. While the concept’s integration into psychological theory is relatively well developed, its integration into sociological theory is distinctly underdeveloped. This lacuna needs to be addressed given the relevance of this concept to a variety of theoretical paradigms within sociology.

II. Lifton’s Symbolic Immortality concept postulates an unexampled need that THE SELF has to “live” beyond its natural life span and the inevitability of its mortal demise. For Lifton, this NEED to achieve a sense of symbolic immortality is a requisite for mental health and social well-being in the face of incontrovertible evidence of our mortality and certainty of death.

III. The quest to achieve a sense of symbolic immortality assuages our fears of death on the one hand, while concomitantly, ensuring our continued existence, and by extension, our connectedness to the human community as a “post-self”.

IV. Said Lifton (1979: The Broken Connection: Death and the Continuity of Life): [quote] “A sense of symbolic immortality, then, is by no means mere denial of death, though denial and numbing are rarely absent. Rather it is a corollary of the knowledge of death itself, and reflects a compelling and universal inner quest for continuous symbolic relationship to what has gone before and what will continue after our finite lives.” [End quote]

V. It is this need for connectedness, or stated otherwise, our need for social interactions, that propels the quest to achieve a sense of symbolic immortality.

VI. Lifton posits five (5) ways to achieve a sense of symbolic immortality:

(a) Biologic: through progeny, or one’s social family.

(b) Creative: through acts of creation: artistic, musical, pedagogical, or scholarly (such as presenting papers at professional meetings).

(c) Theological: religious beliefs or pious living grounded in what Lifton refers to as “life power”, the ability to spiritually achieve a sense of transcending death.

(d) Natural: a cognizance of our connectedness to nature and the sense that we continue to exist with this world even after our mortal demise. (And lastly)

(e) The Experience of Transcendence: a psychic state that is so intense, that time itself stands still and death disappears. One might encounter these psychic states of transcendence in epiphanic experiences such as giving birth or experiencing the birth of a child; being born-again in the religious sense; or, the experience of orgasm, or being high on drugs for that matter. What is common to transcendence experiences is the feeling of transcending the mundane -a sense of being uniquely alive in the present.

VII. The empirical literature on symbolic immortality, although relatively small, has verified many of Lifton’s theoretical assumptions on the need to achieve a sense of symbolic immortality, from a 1974 study by Kastenbaum, which found overwhelming support (90%) for the statement, “people who have children and grandchildren can face death more easily than people who have no descendents to carry on,” to a 1996 study by Rubinstein that speaks of “lineal emptiness”, a phenomenon observed among childless women in her sample of 160 women at a geriatric center. To Drolet’s 1990 study, which found that as individuals get older the work of achieving a sense of symbolic immortality grows stronger, and that this work is associated with decreased fear of dying among established adults. Other studies by Schmitt and Leonard (1986) and Cortese (1997) have shown the importance of this concept to participation in professional and paraprofessional athletics in offering individuals the prospect of immortalizing the self through sports.

VIII. If Lifton’s presumption is true, that achieving a sense of symbolic immortality is important to the SELF’S well-being, then why has there been so few attempts at linking this important concept to core sociological ideas on the development of the self? Perhaps the easy answer is sociology’s emphasis on group processes, and the presumption that the quest to achieve a sense of symbolic immortality is an overly individualistic one, not at all involving group interactions. But in actuality, Lifton’s symbolic immortality concept is easily applicable to some of our core concepts in sociological phenomenology, symbolic interactionism, and structurationist theories on the self, just to name a few.

IX. Symbolic Immortality in Structuration Theory

I connect Lifton’s Symbolic Immortality idea to Giddens’ belief that the self is a reflexive project in late modernity. Here, the quest to achieve a sense of symbolic immortality emerges out of the uncertainties and existential anxieties that mark life in late-modern, highly developed, societies. The quest to achieve a sense of symbolic immortality reduces the “anxiety of uncertainty” by assisting us in “colonizing a future” for our post-mortal identities and “life” through strategic life planning in the present. Our creative acts, biologic and natural connections, and, the work to strengthen those links, and our religious and transcendental quests for certainty, are all, for Giddens, reflexive projects of creating “territories of future possibilities” for the self.

X. I also connect the quest to achieve a sense of Symbolic Immortality to the Giddens’ overriding concern for Ontological Security, that is, according to Giddens, the security in having a sense of continuity and order in our lives, a sense or perception anathema to the inevitability and omnipresence of death, dying, and social suffering.

XI. Symbolic Immortality in Symbolic Interactions

(As a branch of social psychology, symbolic interaction is expressly concerned with the self: principally, how the self develops through social interactions, how it interprets those interactions, and how it manipulates symbols to form those interpretations).

I connect the quest to achieve a sense of symbolic immortality to the self’s need for continued sociality. The work involved in achieving a sense of symbolic immortality, whether that work involves creative activity, the time and care spent in developing close relationships, or the hours spent cultivating one’s soul in religious meditation, is a work that is deeply social, and one that involves the manipulation of language, symbols, and signs in communicative praxis with others, to engender a sense of achieving that immortal identity for the self. In essence –and this point is certainly not lost in interactionist theory- the symbolically immortalized self cannot exist outside the confines of the very symbolic social interactions that will ensure the continuance of the post-corporeal self. The very quest to arrive at a sense of immortality is one that is deeply social and entrenched in social praxis.

XII. The quest to achieve a sense of symbolic immortality also involves a great deal of self-interaction. By self-interaction, Mead (1934) refers to a reflexive process in “turning-back of the experience of the individual upon herself” through internal conversations, whereby an individual might examine her biography to give meaning to her life’s work or project. The quest to achieve a sense of symbolic immortality naturally involves a type of life-review (Butler 1963) to answer the deep personal, yet expressly social, question ‘How will they remember me?’

XIII. Finally, I connect Lifton’s quest to achieve a sense of symbolic immortality to the symbolic interactionist work of legitimizing biography (Hewitt 1989) and self-objectification (Marshall 1986): requisite processes for preserving the postself identity given our “awareness of finitude” (Marshall 1986), and our attempt to write a closing chapter for life’s book.

XIV. Symbolic Immortality in Sociological Phenomenology

(Phenomenology places a premium on discovering how an individual constructs and interprets the social world in her/his mind. Its sociological goal, as outlined by Alfred Schutz (1962), is to understand the meanings or typifications that people attribute to their social experiences.)

XV. In purely phenomenological terms, the work to achieve a sense of symbolic immortality is a byproduct or a reflection of an individual’s symbolic universe that, according to Berger and Luckmann (1966), an individual uses to “refer to realities other than those of everyday experience.” Our symbolic universes help us to make sense of, and order, especially difficult biographical experiences, such as the death-anxiety. And for Berger and Luckmann, the foremost function of our symbolic universe is the legitimation of death. The quest to achieve a sense of symbolic immortality is principally a death-legitimizing and terror-assuaging exercise. As Berger and Luckmann put it in The Social Construction of Reality: “All legitimations of death must carry out the same essential task –they must enable the individual to go on living in society after the death of significant others and to anticipate his own death with, at the very least, terror sufficiently mitigated so as to not paralyze the continued performance of everyday life. (pg. 101)”

XVI. I also interpret the quest to achieve a sense of symbolic immortality as a reactionary stance against the problems posed by the “DEAD LIFE” in phenomenological terms.

XVII. In a most sagacious essay, MY DEATH, in his phenomenological meditation on being, Jean-Paul Sartre proposed that the distinctive feature of the dead life is how it stripes each and every one of us of our distinctive personalities and singleness over time. The peculiar feature of the dead-life is the homogeneity it represents. The dead-life erodes our personal uniqueness in order to reconstitute us with the whole dead collective. The fear embodied in losing our identities, our individual singleness, and in being forgotten generally, is what propels us to seek a sense of symbolic immortality in life. In Sartre’s phenomenology, the quest to achieve a sense of symbolic immortality is a quest to use others or things to “sculpture our own statue”, because, according to Sartre, “to die is to exist only through the Other, and to owe him one’s meaning and the very meaning of one’s victory…To die is to be prey for the living.” [End quote]

XVIII. Symbolic immortality ensures that we won’t become prey for the living because we can sculpt our own immortalized post-selves. The quest to achieve a sense of symbolic immortality is, then, the phenomenological act of preserving our uniqueness and singleness after death.

XIX. In conclusion, the quest to achieve a sense of symbolic immortality is of great importance to the sociology of death and dying. Symbolic immortality is easily applicable to some of sociology’s central themes on the self in social interaction. But sociology’s inattention to this concept has left open and unexplored questions around access barriers to a sense of symbolic immortality by “race”/ethnicity, social class, and gender. Nowhere is this omission as prominent as in the current scholarly literature on symbolic immortality. Thus, a sociology on the quest to achieve a sense of symbolic immortality might ask the following questions:

(1) What happens when most of the pathways to a sense of symbolic immortality are unavailable to large groups of people by certain individuations, race, social class, gender, disability, etc.?

(2) Do we find the same drive to achieve a sense of symbolic immortality across all human societies, or are there differences by nationality, by culture, or subculture? For instance, are individuals in post-industrial societies expressing different motives and drives for their quest to achieve a sense of symbolic immortality than those in largely agrarian or industrial ones?

(3) The work of symbolic immortality is one that is described as an individual’s quest for self-preservation beyond life. From a distinctly sociological perspective, is the need to achieve a sense of symbolic immortality ever expressed as a collective or an institutional one? And if so, how is the collective quest to achieve a sense of symbolic immortality different from, or similar to, the ways individuals pursue this goal? Moreover, are their motivations for this sense of immortality the same?

These are but a few questions that remain unexplored in the discourse on symbolic immortality. The quest to achieve a sense of symbolic immortality is a deeply social one, and its deeply social character is seen in a very simple question that George Herbert Mead posed some 64 years ago in The Philosophy of the Act (1938): [Quote] Apart from the instinctive love of life, is [the] demand for immortality any more than an assertion of the continuous character of the social value which the individual as a social being can embody in himself?” [End quote]

I say ‘No’, that the quest for a sense of symbolic immortality is but a reflection of the social nature of the self, and its undying need meaningful social interactions in this world and the next.

“So Death, that most terrifying of ills, is nothing to us, since so long as we exist, death is not with us, but when death comes, then we do not exist. It does not concern either the living or the dead, since the former is not and the latter are no more.” -Epicurus, 3rd Century B.C.