Thanatos Revised: What Psychology May Look Like with Positive, Enduring Attitudes Towards Death and Dying

Abstract

Death seems still to be a taboo in contemporary society, and in Psychology as well. Crucial debates around the end of life are emerging in a variety of clinical, cultural, and philosophical realms in relation to the meaning of consciousness and near-death experiences. After the advent of quantum physics, the very notion of 'evidence-based science' has profoundly changed and new markers on the entanglements of matter and meaning are now available. The present contribution aims at questioning Psychology in its core empirical split between body and mind and at getting familiar with different thanatological perspectives, such as Eternalism. More specifically, it tries to address the epistemological and ontological entanglements in Psychology in order to propose an enlarged notion of mental life able to counter any neuroscientific reductionism. My arguments will be interrelated through the discussion of a case study about Santa Scorese, a young Catholic woman assassinated in Italy in 1991 by a stalker and in the process of beatification since 1998. Santa Scorese has been described as a unique example of martyr for women's dignity of the present era and I am going to argue how she was passionately in love with God and with beauty while repressing her own body at the same time. The foci of analysis will be her original post-mortem published diary, her killer's letters, and an interview I recorded with her sister (currently highly committed in the complex Catholic process of beatification).

Once Upon a Time, Materiality: A Possible Scenario for Psychology in the Nature/culture Divide

“…As Barad brilliantly puts it with the notion of “iterative intractivity,” there is a co-participation of the knower in the construction of those conditions under which any phenomenon might or not manifest certain configurations, always as its internal properties re-emerging through certain scientific apparatuses. Back to localization, it is well-known how the Cartesian dualism mind versus brain has been replaced in psychology (often in social sciences in general) by the biological reductionism according to which mind conflates into body: there is no extension of mental activity outside the body and all mental processes are locatable in human neural system (Traversa, 2021a).…”