Murray Bowen and Bobbie Holt 1983 at a Third Thursday Meeting at Georgetown University
The origin of the human condition is best explained by the natural selection for social interactions – the inherited propensities to communicate, recognize, evaluate, bond, cooperate, compete, and from all these deep warm pleasures of belonging to your own social group. Social intelligence enhanced by group selection made homo sapiens the first fully dominate species in earth’s history. E.O. Wilson[1]
Adaptation and other Relationship Shifts
The death or the illness of a family member are the most obvious times when families are required to change and adapt to the coming and going of its members. How the ongoing social group interacts during these periods can be subtle or dramatic. Some families pull together and can function at high levels while others fall into chaos. What is the difference between these families?
When a close family member falls ill or gracefully prepares for death, each family member is challenged to become more aware of the shifts in relationships. For some the automatic response is denial and for others there is opportunity to rethink and reorganize the part one has played in the family.
A social group maintains equilibrium and is dependent on individuals to function in specific ways. We probably “inherit” a position in our family depending on the family’s history, current needs and our natural abilities.
In other words, there is a general tendency to function according to one’s position in the group. The sibling position is an easy way to look at the “jobs” that are handed out by the family. Oldest are expected to be responsible, but not all oldest are leaders, not all middles are negotiators and not all of the youngest are funny.
Walter Toman, who did some of the original work on sibling position, noted that all things being equal, and often they are not, people function in predictable ways according to their sibling position.[2]
You might think of the family unit as a kind of ant colony where the colony “trains” its members to function in ways that can be useful to the way the colony has functioned over time. It is not really useful for members of the colony to see or recognize that they are being influenced to “do” or “be” for the colony. To be aware of relationship pressure is incredibly difficult for most people.
We can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness. Daniel Kahneman[3]
Shifts in relationships can usually be managed in a “stable” system, but losses of important members can throw off the balance in more fragile families. Anxiety increases as people react to how life has changed with the loss of an individual. The threat is very challenging if a death occurs in a relationship system in which people are highly dependent on one another in unseen ways.
Here are a few examples.
- A husband dies unexpectedly and his wife has never paid the bills and has no knowledge of the family’s financial situation.
- A husband is unable to cope with taking care of his children after the loss of his young wife.
- A child dies, and all the hopes for the future are lost.
There are many twists and turns in how tasks are divided between a husband and a wife and when you add children the complexity of the “need” for the other to function can become enormous.
The premise here is that people are dependent on each other in ways that are not seen or felt until something happens to the one we are dependent upon. The evidence of connection seems to be hidden until then.
Parental expectations, hidden dependency and “freedom”
In another example, parents may depend on one offspring and another seems to be “free” of the parental expectations. But when parents get sick, the “freer” sibling may be the one who has the most intense symptoms. The free one may say he is too busy to help out and may refuse politely to help with the care of parents, and then a few months later when mountain climbing, he has an “accident” and breaks his leg. If someone asks him if his parent’s illness impacted him, he will deny that there is a relationship between the accident and his relationship with his parents.
A highly dependent person will still not see that stress is increasing. Neither can he see that the distant communication with parents and siblings are not reflections of freedom but rather a “run away” position in which the dependent person gives up responsibility to manage self responsibly in the relationship system.
Sometimes it is very difficult to know who is responsible for what. It is difficult to be a mindful observer of self and even to ask, “Am I relating well to others or am I pretending in order to get along and make things OK?”
Often the family dependency is denied. You can listen for the denial, but hopefully remember that you cannot cure denial with confrontation. If a person is admitted to the hospital with a broken leg, or a broken head, or a broken heart, and someone points out that the timing of the symptom is connected to a death in the family, then the person will often say some variation of: “That is a coincidence, it means nothing. It isn’t relevant. I don’t care about my parents. What happens to them is their business.”
When I worked in a psychiatric hospital my favorite research was doing a three-generation family diagram to see if there were clusters of symptoms or deaths around the time people were admitted to the hospital. Turns out a majority of individuals were admitted around a death in the family or the anniversary of a death. However, this data was not popular with the medical staff. Psychiatry is still focused on the individual and his or her symptoms, not on the state of the system.
When people deny attachments there is little that can be done to make them wake up. If one is mindful of the blindness in the family as a natural way to manage anxiety, one can be more neutral and less upset about the blindness. If one can hypothesize that anxiety is going up and that people are reacting automatically to a threat, then more attention can be paid to reducing the threat than to trying to fix someone.
When something difficult happens in a family, one person often ends up dealing with the pain in the family because they are more observant and have a greater ability to maintain a more neutral stance. These are often the family leaders. If one is mindful of others suffering, then one is less likely to be drawn into the family emotionality or the drama. And then eventually the more observant person may find a way to be useful.
Anxiety can play out in predictable ways
The emotional process that surrounds death or threatened loss can seduce anyone to join in, take sides and try desperately to fix things. Siblings who at one time were in relatively good contact with each other can have a fight over the care of parents, or the will, or who said what to whom, resulting in a complete lack of ability to cooperate. The tension among people increases, people try to control one another and there is overall less mindfulness and less respect between family members.
Instead of open and calm communication there is the blame game that intensifies all interactions. The gossip network carries the latest news. Joining in by anyone can lead to generations of cut off, altering the way the social system is able to function both in the present and in the future.
Jumping in, getting over involved, cutting off, being distant and fighting, getting sick, worrying and blaming others are all automatic ways people respond to threats. These are mindless interactions in which the anxiety in the system has begun to control family members.
Knowing Bowen theory gives people a basic understanding of the automatic way that systems function and gives us a method, differentiation of self, to work on our part in any problem.
As one becomes a better observer of emotional process, one has a greater ability to change the part one is automatically asked to play, and to choose to redefine self in the system. This is a crucial skill to have during times of heightened threat.
The Emotional Shock Wave
As noted, it is incredibly challenging for some to see an impending death or ongoing loss of function of important family members as automatically influencing the way individuals are able to relate to one another. To become more mindful and less reactive to changes in the family is our biggest challenge. When one sees this automatic reaction to threat unfolding, how we refrain from getting overly reactive?
There is nothing harder than to bear witness while someone in a family is dying or losing function. Some people “respond” by having affairs, working all the time, or cutting off relationships. What do you do when you see these challenges in your own family or when you see the difficulty families have in coming to grips with each other and with the way they are connected to one another? Can you put in different thoughts without judging and blaming?
The threat travels underground and it’s hard for people to understand that the anxiety in one relationship can end up being expressed in another relationship. Think of the challenge for the average parent in dealing with a teenager who wants to do what she or he wants to do during a time when one of the grandparents is ill.
In general people have a hard time seeing the connection between illness or death in one member of the family affecting others in the family. It is automatic and therefore easier to blame the child than to say something that both informs and disturbs the blindness like: “It might be hard for you to manage yourself now that your grandmother is not doing well.”
When automatically reacting, the teenager’s parents can end up being angry that the child is not coming home on time. The child can seek more distance away from the blaming/controlling parents. But neither of them sees that this anxiety is related to the illness of the grandmother.
In addition to the turmoil and disruption in relationships that can be created around an impending loss, when a family member dies there is a missing person, a void that has been created and people must respond to the actual loss.
Death family pressure and acknowledging each person’s contribution
Many thoughts and reactions mix and swirl around the death of a family member, depending on the kind of relationships people had with the person and how that person functioned in the family. Some think that the deceased lived a good and productive life and may find it easy to acknowledge all that he or she did. Or maybe the deceased did not live a productive life and was the family scapegoat. Nevertheless, an acknowledgment of their functional role in the family can go a long way towards acknowledging the pressure that people are up against and allow people to be more aware of how family pressure works to do in some people and give others an extra boost.
Individuals in more mature families can deal with their dependency on each other without threats and blaming for the small and even more serious problems that arise. They are aware that there is increasing anxiety around losses and are able to be more mindful about the tensions in the system. Less mature families try to deny the dependency and end up with increasing symptoms.
Questions:
- What can we do to understand how death might impact relationships?
- What are the possible shifts and challenges to the social system?
- How has the system adapted to such threats in the past?
- Have individuals made plans as to living well at the end of their lives?
- Can they talk about these plans?
- Do rituals serve a higher purpose for the social group?
- What can the lives of Jesus and Buddha tell us about how life is lived as a strong expression of purpose?
What can enable people to be more thoughtful about the end of life?
The funeral provides an opportunity for the coming together of one’s family and friends to lend support around the death. An open casket allows people to see the body and recall the life of this person. The reality of life is seen and celebrated. Some religious groups consider it to be disrespectful to the dead to look the body.[4] In some traditions, a prescribed period of mourning provides daily gatherings for grieving families and friends to talk about the life of the person. Each belief has its reasons and one is free to pick whatever “belief” they would like. Often people pick the family tradition
Since cremation has become more popular there have been an increasing number of people who prefer to dispense with funerals and memorial services. They inadvertently may be seeking to avoid the reality of death and the honoring of a life. This appears to encourage greater weakness and discourages bringing up and dealing with difficult things in the social group.
Open and Closed Systems
Death is a part of life but how we deal with it may be determined by the kind of social system we are born into. Death comes to each of us. It cannot be avoided. But how one manages and copes with death is another question. One can hide from and avoid the death of loved ones or even of one’s pets. The thesis here is that there is a cost in denial or in hiding out. For most families it can make an enormous difference in the short and long term, if family members purposely see the stress related to death as enabling them to become a more resilient group.
It is not that people have free choices as to feeling overwhelmed and wanting to get away form the challenges. People are more likely to avoid the subject of death and the planning around death if they are born into a closed system where people are not at ease talking about difficult or personally meaningful subjects.
Closed systems are more intense and up tight than open systems. Most families are somewhere in the middle of this continuum. It is important for people to know that most people recover from the stress and strain around a death, and are as happy as they were before the loss after some time passes.
When people have some guidelines or hear about others who have done well after a death it gives them hope. This is another reason for people to work towards being more open and to be able to derive meaning and talk about their experiences with others.
When people are able to be open they have an easier time bringing up difficult and challenging topics. They are more open to both new people and new ideas. In addition new behaviors are seen as interesting and as representing something others can learn or appreciate. People in open families are often thinking of new ways to adapt rather than hide out and regard anything new as threatening.
- What do you do if you are born into a closed system and no one is allowed to talk about death, or make plans like wills or even to re-examine the old wills or possibly outdated trust agreements?
- Do you break the taboo and talk openly?
- If so what is the cost to you, to them?
- Can one person who makes an effort to be more open about death and illness alter a closed system? At what cost?
- Can the acceptance of death as just another life event give us more courage to adapt to the needed changes and be supportive of others without pity or criticism?
Those who seek to avoid difficulty and stress are more likely to be depressed. Yes, when people state they try to avoid stress, this answer was shown to predict greater difficulty in the years ahead. This was a ten-year study done by the Veterans Affairs in Palo Alto, California, demonstrating that the more one tries to maximize happiness and pleasure, the greater the conflict and problems, and the less meaning in their lives, and the greater the disruption in their community.[5]
Other species and behavioral responses to death
Chimps “Mourn” Nine-year-old’s Death?
Our instincts about life, reproduction and survival are not that different from other species. Can we watch the way other animals manage the illness and loss of a member of their social group to learn more about the basic adaptation to loss? Other animals participate in rituals enabling these animals to successfully adapt to the changes in the social group.
Mammals may not have rituals or a belief in a God or an afterlife, but they seem to understand that rituals like the cleansing of bodies and the visiting of the dead, serves them well. Even for elephants and chimps, the caring for the other does not end with the physical ending of life.
Elephants keep track of the health of their members. If one is sick they look after them, nudging them back to health. As an elephant approaches death the other animals nudge them towards the family burial spot. Elephants routinely visit these bone filled graveyards, and carefully touch the bones of ancestors. They seemingly come to pay respect or perhaps to remember. (You Tube Elephant Grieving BBC-Wildlife) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5RiHTSXK2A
Clearly the brain has to be adaptable for social learning as so many challenges occur in a lifetime. Our brains cannot have fixed responses. We need room to think, to reflect on what is happening, or did happen or might happen and what should we do about it?
Social learning, not instincts, enable us to solve problems in the here and now and not rely as much on what worked in the past. This is vastly different than for many mammals. Only the brain of the elephant is close to the human capacity for social learning.
These animals are matriarchal and require high levels of cooperation within the social group to promote survive. One speculation is that the attention paid to the death of one animal makes it easier for the troop to adapt to the loss and to find a way to replace the functioning of that animal. For example, a new matriarch is chosen or in the case of the death of the young, to move on and to reproduce once again.
There has been no documentation (that I can find) of an elephant troop failing to function after the death of one of its members. However there have been reports of elephants seeking revenge against poachers who have shot and killed animals.
Social interactions and selection:
Interactions occur in response to the history of interactions or habits plus the perceived or real changes in the environment. There can be grunt of recognition followed by a stare, a downward glance, which might be a reaction to shifts in relationships or in strategy. Has one animal or person entered into the relationship to dominate another or to cooperate? The way the hierarchy is formed, by either force or by invitation, can produce two very different kinds of social groups.
As E. O Wilson pointed out, evolutionary biology has been forced to return to group selection as a way to see how social groups are selected for as to a group’s ability to adapt and cope. The group is formed by the way in which interactions play out.
Consider the long history of funerals and the advantages that accrue to those who practice such rituals. Researchers have found burial grounds of Neanderthal man dating to 60,000 BC with animal antlers on the body and flower fragments next to the corpse indicating some type of ritual and gifts to the deceased. One of the first examples of this was unearthed in the Shanidar cave in Iraq; Neanderthal skeletons were discovered with a layer of pollen.[6]
One of the most prescribed death rituals takes place among the Hindu and requires intense cooperation and obedience to ritual.[7]
In all these examples of a ritualized way of dealing with death, the advantages to the ongoing social group are not always clarified. The guess is that the reasons such funeral practices have been found in every human society is that funerals enable the group itself to maintain a way of relating. If the group can find ways to promote survival of its members, these rituals may enable greater survival and therefore rituals around death would be selected for. This does not rule out selection for the individual members of the group. Selection for both individual traits and for a group may occur.
Strong individuals in a cooperative group may fare well as may weaker individuals in a strong group. But weaker individuals in a weak group will not fare as well.
Questions remain as to be how to be a “strong person” who is contributing to a “strong group?” Bowen’s observation was that if an individual could be more of a “differentiated” self that persons would not be as controlled by the emotionality in the group. Therefore, overtime the group itself would become stronger, less feeling driven and able to make more thoughtful decisions.
Family Strength:
The hypothesis is that social groups that can manage the emotionality and expression of feelings around the death of a significant person can move with more strength into the future.
Three indicators of strength to consider:
- People find ceremonies and rituals useful in allowing a public expression of respect for those who die.
- The memories of the person are useful. Recall how even elephants visit the bones of the ancestors.
- People are able to build new relationships that in some sense “replace” the function of the person who died. When a father dies a son becomes more involved with a distant uncle.
- Preparing for one’s own death. There are many details that one can attend during one’s life that can relieve the pressure on others. These range from funeral arrangements, the memorial service and obituary, to medical consents and powers of attorney, to speaking more openly with people.
Summary: Striving towards Clarity
Social interactions are key to how families are organized. Much of the way one interacts is influenced by the history of the social group. Death is one of the upheavals that forces social systems to change, for better or worse. The effort to manage relationships and responsibilities sets the stage for the future. Each of us has some idea about what kinds of relationships are worth striving towards, no matter if the person is dead or alive. Finding ways to relate well to others, during times of great upheavals, are our gifts to the future.
Footnotes
1 Wilson, E.O. The Meaning of Human Existence, 2014, W.W. Norton, Page 75 2 http://birthorders.com/theory.html, and Family Constellation: Its Effects on Personality and Social Behavior, 4th Edition 4th Edition by Walter Toman PhD 3 Levitt, Stephen and Dubner, Stephen, 2014, Think Like A Freak, Page 172 4 Viewing a corpse is more likely to bring to mind opinions on how the body appears, or an emotional reaction that is more tied to how we feel when seeing a dead person or grappling with our own mortality. None of these truly honor the deceased. https://au.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20130528054143AAMZTFW 5 McGonigal, Kelly, The Upside of Stress, Page 84 6 http://thefuneralsource.org/history.html 7 http://www.beliefnet.com/Faiths/Hinduism/2001/02/Rites-Of-Transition-Hindu-Death-Rituals.aspx?p=2
Abstracts of Interesting Readings:
“70% of family-owned businesses fail or are sold before the second generation gets a chance to take over. Just 10% remain active, privately held companies for the third generation to lead. In contrast to publicly owned firms, in which the average CEO tenure is six years, many family businesses have the same leaders for 20 or 25 years. https://hbr.org/2012/01/avoid-the-traps-that-can-destroy-family-businesses.
2) In 1838 Darwin read Malthus’s assertion that human population would skyrocket if not for natural controls such as famine and disease, Charles Darwin has a new insight: other a nimals’ populations must also be kept low by a struggle for existence, in which only the best adapted survive. The theory of natural selection is born. From Evolution:“Darwin’s Dangerous Idea”
Malthus believed that unless people exercised restraint in the number of children they had, the inevitable shortfall of food in the face of spiraling population growth would doom mankind to a ceaseless struggle for existence. Out of that unforgiving battle, some would survive and many would not, as famine, disease, and war put a ceiling on the growth in population.
These ideas galvanized Darwin’s thinking about the struggles for survival in the wild, where restraint is unknown. Before reading Malthus, Darwin had thought that living things reproduced just enough individuals to keep populations stable. But now he came to realize that, as in human society, populations bred beyond their means, leaving survivors and losers in the effort to exist.
Immediately, Darwin saw that the variation he had observed in wild populations would produce some individuals that were slightly better equipped to thrive and reproduce under the particular conditions at the time. Those individuals would tend to leave more offspring than their fellows, and over many generations their traits would come to dominate.[8] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/02/5/l_025_01.html
3) Hare studies how chimpanzees and bonobos solve problems, and in 2007 he happened to see one of our closest evolutionary relatives die. He was at a bonobo orphanage in the Democratic Republic of Congo when Lipopo, a newcomer to the orphanage, died unexpectedly from pneumonia. Although the other bonobos could have moved away from his body and travel anywhere in their very large, heavily forested enclosure, they chose to stay and groom Lipopo’s corpse. When their caretakers arrived to remove the body, the vigil morphed into a tense standoff.
In the video Hare took, Mimi, the group’s alpha female, stands guard over Lipopo’s body. When the caretakers try to push the corpse out of the enclosure with long poles, Mimi fights them, viciously. She grabs the poles with both hands, wrenching them away from Lipopo. She calls to other bonobos, who help her fend off the humans from two sides. Even when the vet arrives with a tranquilizer gun, Mimi stands her ground, her mouth open wide in a scream that’s inaudible in the silent film. Mimi wasn’t related to Lipopo. In fact, she barely knew him, Hare told me. But Mimi was willing to risk an encounter with a gun to protect the body of a mere acquaintance. “That’s why I started to cry,” Hare said. “I don’t know why she did it.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/30/magazine/want-to-understand-mortality-look-to-the-chimps.html
4) Scientists have watched chimpanzees, bonobos and other primates deal with death in ways that look strikingly like our own informal rituals of mourning: watching over the dying, cleaning and protecting bodies and displaying outward signs of anxiety. Chimps have been seen to make loud distress calls when a comrade dies. They investigate bodies as if looking for signs of life. There are many cases of mothers refusing to abandon dead infants, carrying and grooming them for days or even weeks.
When the scientists at the park realized Pansy’s death was imminent, they turned on video cameras, capturing intimate moments during her last hours as Blossom, Rosie and Blossom’s son, Chippy, groomed her and comforted her as she got weaker. After she passed, the chimps examined the body, inspecting Pansy’s mouth, pulling her arm and leaning their faces close to hers. Blossom sat by Pansy’s body through the night. And when she finally moved away to sleep in a different part of the enclosure, she did so fitfully, waking and repositioning herself dozens more times than was normal. For five days after Pansy’s death, none of the other chimps would sleep on the platform where she died.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/30/magazine/want-to-understand-mortality-look-to-the-chimps.html
5) The pictures of a baby elephant in Borneo, nudging and nuzzling the body of its dead mother in obvious distress and bewilderment, cannot fail to move us. Allegations that up to ten pygmy elephants were poisoned, perhaps by local farmers, are upsetting — perhaps because elephant emotions seem so like our own, so heartbreakingly close to human sorrow and grief. Any scientist knows how dangerous it is to project human feelings on to an animal, to force them into human molds or ‘anthropomorphize’ them, but it’s equally dangerous to ignore a wealth of scientific data based on decades of observation in the wild.
We may never know exactly what goes on inside the mind of an elephant, but it would be arrogant of us to assume we are the only species capable of feeling loss and grief. I have been filming animals in the wild for more than 20 years, and that has often meant being around elephants: they live across a huge range of habitats. But mass poaching has put them into terrible decline — around 40,000 elephants a year are killed by poachers and, according to some estimates, since the Sixties the population has been culled from 3.5 million to just 250,000.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2270977/Elephants-really-grieve-like-They-shed-tears-try-bury-dead–leading-wildlife-film-maker-reveals-animals-like-us.html#ixzz3inn5rkTg
6) Elephants are widely believed to mourn the deaths of members of their herd, and even pay homage to long-dead elephants. A 2005 study in the UK found the creatures displayed traits similar to humans and, coming across the remains of an elephant, would gently touch the skull and tusks with their trunks and feet. They are also believed to display a ritual around death, with several elephants travelling to visit a dead body and touching the corpse with their trunks. Some elephants have been seen to weep and others make sounds associated with grief as they cover the body with leaves and branches before keeping a silent vigil.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2090915/Well-forget-Elephants-say-sad-farewell-month-old-calf-died-heart-defect.html#ixzz3inoaI0Iw
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7) Like humans, elephants must learn behavior as they grow up. They are not born with the instincts of how to survive.[24] Elephants have a very long period in their lives for learning, lasting for around ten years. One comparative way to try to gauge intelligence is to compare brain size at birth to the fully developed adult brain. This indicates how much learning a species accumulates while young. The majority of mammals are born with a brain close to 90% of the adult weight,[24] while Humans are born with 28%,[24]bottlenose dolphins with 42.5%,[25] chimpanzees with 54%,[24] and elephants with 35%.[26] This indicates that elephants have the highest amount of learning to undergo next to humans, and behavior is not mere instinct but must be taught throughout life. It should be noted that instinct is quite different from learned intelligence. Parents teach their young how to feed, use tools and learn their place in the highly complex elephant society. The cerebrum temporal lobes, which function as storage of memory, are much larger than those of a human.[24]
8) Elephants are the only species of mammals other than Homo sapiens sapiens and Neanderthals[citation needed]known to have or have had any recognizable ritual around death. They show a keen interest in the bones of their own kind (even unrelated elephants that have died long ago). They are often seen gently investigating the bones with their trunks and feet while remaining very quiet. Sometimes elephants that are completely unrelated to the deceased still visit their graves.[15] Elephant researcher Martin Meredith recalls an occurrence in his book about a typical elephant death ritual that was witnessed by Anthony Hall-Martin, a South African biologist who had studied elephants in Addo, South Africa, for over eight years. The entire family of a dead matriarch, including her young calf, were all gently touching her body with their trunks, trying to lift her. The elephant herd were all rumbling loudly. The calf was observed to be weeping and made sounds that sounded like a scream, but then the entire herd fell incredibly silent. They then began to throw leaves and dirt over the body and broke off tree branches to cover her. They spent the next two days quietly standing over her body. They sometimes had to leave to get water or food, but they would always return.[35]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant_cognition#Death_ritual
If the elephant’s gargantuan cerebellum—as well as its intricate olfactory and temporal lobes—equip the creature with sensory superpowers, what features of the elephant brain account for its more sophisticated, more abstract mental talents: for its cooperative problem-solving, understanding of death and self-awareness? Based on what we know about brains generally, this type of intellect arises from the cerebral cortex. Manger and Herculano-Houzel’s recent investigations confirmed, however, that despite having a brain three times as large as our own, the elephant’s cerebral cortex contains surprisingly few neurons and is nowhere near as dense as the human or chimpanzee cortex. Yet the elephant is clearly capable of astounding intelligence.
9) Benjamin Hart of the University of California Davis has speculated that the elephant cortex derives its intellectual prowess not from local density but from widespread interconnectivity. He suspects that, whereas the human and chimpanzee brains have evolved many tight-knit networks of nearby neurons throughout the cortex—akin to states packed with highly populous cities—the elephant brain has favored lengthy connections between far-flung brain areas, building the equivalent of an extensive cross-country railroad system. http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/brainwaves/searching-for-the-elephants-genius-inside-the-largest-brain-on-land/
10) Quotes from Bowen’s chapter on The Family Reaction to Death
Direct thinking about death, or indirect thinking about staying alive and avoiding death, occupies more of man’s time than any other subject. Man is an instinctual animal with the same instinctual awareness of death as the lower forms of life. He follows the same predictable instinctual life pattern of all living things. He is born, he grows to maturity, he reproduces, his life force runs out, and he dies. In addition, he is a thinking animal with a brain that enables him to reason, reflect, and think abstractly. With his intellect he has devised philosophies and beliefs about the meaning of life and death that tend to deny his place in nature’s plan. Each individual has to define his own place in the total scheme and accept the fact that he will die and be replaced by succeeding generations.[9]
[1] Wilson, E.O. The Meaning of Human Existence, 2014, W.W. Norton, Page 75
[2] http://birthorders.com/theory.html, and Family Constellation: Its Effects on Personality and Social Behavior, 4th Edition 4th Edition by Walter Toman PhD
[3] Levitt, Stephen and Dubner, Stephen, 2014, Think Like A Freak, Page 172
[4] Viewing a corpse is more likely to bring to mind opinions on how the body appears, or an emotional reaction that is more tied to how we feel when seeing a dead person or grappling with our own mortality. None of these truly honor the deceased. https://au.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20130528054143AAMZTFW
[5] McGonigal, Kelly, The Upside of Stress, Page 84
[6] http://thefuneralsource.org/history.html
[7] http://www.beliefnet.com/Faiths/Hinduism/2001/02/Rites-Of-Transition-Hindu-Death-Rituals.aspx?p=2
[8] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/02/5/l_025_01.html
[9] Bowen, Murray; Bowen, Murray (1993-12-01). Family Therapy in Clinical Practice (p. 321). Jason Aronson, Inc.
