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Reflecting on the Inevitable combines evidence from several disciplinary fields to explore the varying ways each of us engages with the prospect of personal mortality. In each chapter the subtleties and applicability of key ideas are enhanced through a series of illustrative narratives built up around the lives of four people at different ages living in two adjacent houses.
Reflecting on the Inevitable is relevant not only to academics of death studies, but also those training and practicing in people-helping professions, as well as anyone experiencing or attempting to make sense of major life events.
List of contents
- Chapter 1: Other People Die
- Chapter 2: My-Death
- Chapter 3: Limits of Intelligibility
- Chapter 4: Aversion and Evasion
- Chapter 5: A Constant Companion
- Chapter 6: Essential Structures
- Chapter 7: Passionate Suffusion
- Chapter 8: Point-of-Transition
- Chapter 9: Self-Generative Process
- Chapter 10: Dialogue
- Chapter 11: What's to Gain?
- Chapter 12: Applications
- Conclusion
About the author
Peter J. Adams, PhD, has a background in philosophy, social sciences and health sciences. He was trained and practiced for many years as a clinical psychologist, working mostly with adults facing mental health, addictions, violence and life-change issues. His research publications have focused mainly on addictions, public health, unhealthy commodity industries and existential concerns and he has published five previous sole-authored books. He is currently a professor of population health at the University of Auckland in Auckland, New Zealand.
Summary
Death studies have, over the last twenty years, witnessed a flourishing of research and scholarship particularly in areas such as dying and bereavement, cultural practices and fear of dying. But, despite its importance, a specific focus on the nature of personal mortality has attracted surprisingly little attention. Reflecting on the Inevitable combines evidence from several disciplinary fields to explore the varying ways each of us engages with the prospect of personal mortality. Chapters are organized around the question of how an ongoing relationship might be possible when the threat of consciousness coming to an end points to an unspeakable nothingness. The book then argues that, despite this threat, an ongoing relationship with one's own death is still possible by means of conceptual devices, or 'enabling frames', that help shape personal mortality into a relatable object.
In each chapter the subtleties and applicability of key ideas are enhanced through a series of illustrative narratives built up around the lives of four people at different ages living in two adjacent houses. Reflecting on the Inevitable is relevant not only to academics of death studies, but also those training and practicing in people-helping professions, as well as anyone experiencing or attempting to make sense of major life events.
Additional text
Adams' highly original, sensitive, attention to the struggle we each have with our own death resulted in a finely-tuned, delicately-argued book. It uses the literary aid of four fictional characters, whose presence in the book makes its ideas both accessible and engaging.
