ABSTRACT

“The idea of death, the fear of it,” writes Ernest Becker in his Pulitzer Prize-winning, The Denial of Death, “haunts the human animal like nothing else.” This theoretical, text-based hermeneutic dissertation seeks to problematize the events of September 11, 2001, as a moment when death anxiety was made salient across America.

Focusing on the works of Otto Rank and Ernest Becker, this dissertation sets forth to research whether the events of 9/11 touched the American population with a sense of socio-cultural vulnerability. A crucial aspect of this research is determining whether America’s creation myth was shaken as a result of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon being undermined as symbols of enduring meaning and safety.

This dissertation seeks to hermeneutically explore if there is anything in America’s Founding Myths/American Dream that is constructed on, and sustained by, the human propensity to deny death. On this basis, the research question orienting this dissertation is woven from three strands.

The first is can we find evidence within America’s founding mythos that implicates it as a talisman created to ward off mortality?

Second, if it can be shown that America is determined to defend against death anxiety by projecting fear of mortality, how has that manifested in terms of its impact upon its citizenry, the people of the world, and the global environment, as provoked by the events of 9/11?

Third, if the American way of life is threatened as a hedge against mortality by 9/11, how might depth psychology respond to the questions posed within a culture challenged to examine death anxiety and death denial; specifically: can depth psychology respond in a way as to imagine a new mythos that assists in creating a less destructive and more meaningful relationship with immanent death?

This dissertation concludes that the traumatic events of 9/11, especially when seen as stimulating psychic dissonance with regard to socio-cultural myths designed to assuage anxiety regarding mortality, holds important social, political, and psychological implications for depth psychology.

Thomas' External ReaderWalter A. Davis, Ph.D,, Professor Emeritus,

Ohio State University

The Dissertation Defense of Thomas Patrick Donovan

"Into the Face of Death: September 11, the Destabilization of America’s Creation Myth, and Theories of Death Denial"

COORDINATOR: Dr. Elizabeth Perluss

ADVISOR: Dr. Jennifer Selig

EXTERNAL READER: Dr. Walter Davis

Dr. Jennifer Selig, Dr. Thomas Donovan, and Dr. Betsy Perluss

Tell us a little about your personal and educational background prior to Pacifica.

I was raised in New York City, in the Bronx, and really preferred reading (especially King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table) and daydreaming to being in the classroom. As a result, I struggled through regular school until I nearly dropped out of high school; my mother made sure that I didn’t. Once high school was over I knew I had to leave New York. One day a friend drove up in front of the neighborhood playground and asked: “Anyone want to go to California right now?” I went home, packed a duffel bag, and off we went to San Francisco. My odyssey had been initiated. From San Francisco I moved to Oregon, where I spent two years at the University of Oregon before wanderlust set in again. From Oregon

From an interview with Tommy

it was off to Seattle, then to Chicago, then back to the San Francisco area. In 1988, I completed my B.A. at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Over the course of that program the fire for education and being in academia was lit. I was eager to get my M.A. in the field of psychology. As I was looking for the right program I realized that at my age (52), I really needed to find a program that offered a doctoral degree.

What brought you to Pacifica?

It was all intuition. One day I was reading a magazine and came across an ad for Pacifica Graduate Institute. I was so viscerally drawn to the beauty of the images of the Lambert campus that I immediately went to the school’s website. I could feel the electricity pulsating through my body. I already had shelves of books by Carl Jung and James Hillman at home as part of my personal library; it felt like a moment of synchronicity and the combined M.A./Ph.D. was exactly what I was seeking. Once I spoke with the enrollment staff, and queried one of Pacifica’s recent graduates, I was clear that Pacifica was where I needed to be.

Tell us a little about how you came to your dissertation topic.

The title of my dissertation is: “Into the Face of Death: 9/11, the Destabilization of America’s Creation Myth, and Theories of Death Denial.” At the root of this topic is the death of my father when I was eight years old. So often parents resort to silence, clumsy explanations, or fantastical reassurances, in order to deal with their own grief and protect their children from pain. This was the case in my family after my father died. Death became a mystery I felt compelled to wonder about from that moment on. When the events of September 11, 2001, occurred, I wanted to understand the depths of the psycho-social impact of this day upon America, beyond the news reports and analyses that seemed to reduce it all to its political and economic dimensions. Upon reading Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death, I immediately felt that something of America’s creation myth was touched on that day; that, in fact, it was by entering the realms of myth that another lens could be found through which to appraise these events at a different depth, one that took into consideration an undermining of psychological safety at the level of America’s creation myth being shaken by a destabilizing rise in death anxiety brought on by 9/11.

What would you say has been one of the most rewarding aspects of this journey from student to doctor?

It has been rewarding to realize that I could actually write a work over 200 pages long. I feel like this journey has deepened my confidence in the possibility of becoming a full-time writer in this, the final chapters of my life.