The mortal coil.

• Author: Judis, John B.
• Position: The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life - Book review

Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life (New York: Random House, 2015), 288 pp., $28.00.

For the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can. Then it stops," Karl Ove Knausgaard writes at the beginning of My Struggle. Death is the inescapable fate that awaits every human being. An immediate threat of death--from a terminal illness, an attacker, an oncoming minivan--can provoke panic, paralysis, rage or resistance. But what of Knausgaard's removed, even abstract, contemplation of human mortality? What is the significance, the effect on us, of this sheer fact of our mortality and of the act of contemplating it?

Does this ontological exercise disturb, depress or even devastate us? Or does it merely leave a fleeting impression, like the tides or the color of leaves in autumn? Three psychologists, Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pyszczynski, think that the contemplation of our eventual death has a profound effect on us--that it is the basis of religious belief, of our quest for wealth, fame and physical beauty, that it is the root of our fascination with celebrities and death-defying heroes, and our intolerance of other ethnicities, nationalities, religions and political philosophies, as well as of our desire to reproduce ourselves through children and immortalize ourselves through enduring social, physical and artistic creations.

Well before these psychologists had developed their views, philosophers like Soren Kierkegaard, William James and Martin Heidegger (to name a few), the psychoanalyst Otto Rank and the anthropologist Ernest Becker had speculated about how large the realization of mortality looms in our lives. What distinguishes Solomon, Greenberg and Pyszczynski is that they have attempted to devise psychological experiments to demonstrate how the fear of death directly affects our beliefs and behavior. They recount these experiments and put forth a theory of what they show in a new book, The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life.

It's not an easy read. The prose is perfectly clear and free of technical jargon. But the subject is the most unpleasant imaginable. When the authors tried to convince one publishing house to put out their book, an editor asked them if they could minimize the use of the word "death" throughout the text. As I read the book myself, I kept misplacing it, sometimes for days at a time. But I took their experience selling the book and mine reading it as evidence that they were on to something.

Solomon, Greenberg and Pyszczynski met as graduate students in psychology at the University of Kansas in the mid-1970s. They discovered that they shared an interest in Becker's work, and particularly in his last book, The Denial of Death, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1974. (I knew Becker slightly and admired his work when he taught at Berkeley.) A decade later, they prepared a paper for a psychological journal on Becker's work, but the editor rejected it. "I have no doubt that this paper would be of no interest to any psychologist, living or dead," the editor of American Psychologist wrote them. The editor advised them that no one would take their ideas seriously unless they could present experimental evidence to back them up. Over the last thirty years, the three psychologists, and a growing group of followers, have devised scores of experiments to explore the influence of the fear of death.

The psychologists wanted to study what they (awkwardly) termed "terror management"--terror referring to the abstract fear of death. In their experiments, they instructed subjects to think or write about their own mortality. They would then ask them questions or ask them to perform tasks, and would compare their responses with those of a control group that had been instructed to think about something neutral or pleasurable or about an anxiety-producing event (a forthcoming exam, for...