Notes
1. Good Death 1. See Philippe Aries, Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present 94 –103 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1974). 2. Jay Katz has invoked Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor—who exercises dictatorial authority in order to protect mankind from the vulnerabilities and terrors of freedom—as an analogue of the physician’s culturally approved role in protecting patients against the terrifying realities of sickness and death. The Silent World of Doctor and Patient 127, 164 (New York: Free Press, 1984). 3. Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973); this case is discussed generally in chapter 4, infra. 4. Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238 (1972). 5. Ronald Dworkin, Life’s Dominion: An Argument about Abortion, Euthanasia , and Individual Freedom 237 (New York: Knopf, 1993). 6. See Sheila Rothman, Living in the Shadow of Death: Tuberculosis and the Social Experience of Illness in American History (New York: Basic Books, 1994). 7. B. J. McNeil et al., On the Elicitation of Preferences for Alternative Therapies, 306 (21) New Eng. J. Med. 1259–62 (1982). 8. Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories 129 (Signet Classic ed.; New York: New American Library, 1960). 9. Sigmund Freud, Thoughts for the Times on War and Death (1915), in 14 Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 285 (James Strachey, ed.) (London: Hogarth Press, 1964). 10. Id. at 299. 11. See Valentin F. Bulgakov, The Last Year of Leo Tolstoy (Ann Dunnigan, trans.) (New York: Dial Press, 1971). 12. See Hans W. Loewald, Psychoanalysis and the History of the Individual 16 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1978). 13. Freud first posited the existence of a “death instinct” in his 1920 book 187 NOTES Beyond the Pleasure Principle, chapter 6. In his earlier thinking he had explained human aggression as one face of an instinct for self-preservation; by 1920, he had come to see aggression in a different light, as an independent and self-destructive psychological imperative. See James Strachey, Introduction , in Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents 8–9 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1962 ed.). 14. Id. at 104. 15. Compare Jonathan Lear’s incisive critique of Freud’s conception of the death instinct, that “there is a more austere hypothesis that better fits the evidence : that the mind has a tendency to disrupt itself, that these disruptions are not for anything—they are devoid of purpose. Indeed, insofar as mind is teleologically organized, these disruptions disrupt teleology . . . because the mental efforts to lend meaning to a meaningless disruption—an external trauma or internal self-disruption—abort.” Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life 77 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 2000). I would say that the imminent prospect of death, for oneself or for significant others, commonly provokes the kind of disruption that Lear portrays. 16. Taylor observes, “Here we see the origin of one of the great paradoxes of modern philosophy. The philosophy of disengagement and objectification has helped to create a picture of the human being, at its most extreme in certain forms of materialism, from which the last vestiges of subjectivity seem to have been expelled. It is a picture of the human being from a completely thirdperson perspective. The paradox is that this severe outlook is connected with, indeed, based on, according a central place to the first-person stance. Radical objectivity is only intelligible and accessible through radical subjectivity.” Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity 176 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1989). 17. Id. at 315. 18. See Robert A. Paul, Moses and Civilization: The Meaning Behind Freud’s Myth 1–4 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1996). 19. Thus Hans Loewald, one of the most influential post-Freudian psychoanalytic theoreticians, has observed, “the assumption of responsibility for one’s own life and its conduct is in psychic reality tantamount to the murder of the parents, to the crime of parricide, and involves dealing with the guilt incurred thereby. Not only is parental authority destroyed by wresting authority from the parents and taking it over, but the parents, if the process were thoroughly carried out, are being destroyed as libidinal objects as well.” The Waning of the Oedipus Complex, in Papers on Psychoanalysis 389 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1980). 20. As Loewald states, “Reconciling parricide with love for [one’s] father, and . . . the quest for emancipation and self-responsibility with . . . desire for identification and becoming one...
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