The Modern Human and the Problem of Death: A Study of Elisabeth Kubler-Ros's Theory

In 1955 Geoffrey Gorer condemned the new western society to avoid acknowledging the reality of the death. For him in the new western society death is thought of as a forbidden thing, namely something that should to be hidden and laid aside from the public opinion. The new man by feigning ignorance of the death and dying, try to make it far from him or her. Medical centers and burial institutions support this attitude and attempt to show that in human’s life the death does not enjoy of any essential reality. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross was one of the thinkers that believe that this attitude should to be change and that the denial of death is placed by its acceptance. Kubler-Ross begun her work by the book On Death and Dying (1969). In her book, by appealing to empirical observations, she claims that terminally ill patients when are faced with the reality of their impending death, through a mechanism of five stages can arrive at the acceptance of their death. These stages are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and eventually the acceptance. This theory or model from the time of its appearance was the subject of many critiques such as not making use of previous researches done on the topic of death and dying, ambiguity in the five stages, limitations of method of gathering information, not to pay attentions to individual differences and also to the impact of environment on the person. However, Kubler-Ros's theory played a crucial role in the field of thanatological studies and debates so that nowadays she is known as the greatest cotemporary thanatologist.