Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death

“It’s not easy to live every moment wholly aware of death. It’s like trying to stare the sun in the face: you can stand only so much of it. Because we cannot live frozen in fear, we generate methods to soften death’s terror. We project ourselves into the future through our children; we grow rich, famous, ever larger; we develop compulsive protective rituals; or we embrace an impregnable belief in an ultimate rescuer.”

Yalom uses the central metaphor of staring at the sun to illustrate the overwhelming nature of confronting mortality directly. The parallel structure in the final sentence creates a catalog of defense mechanisms that escalates from natural human behaviors to more desperate psychological strategies. The progression from “project ourselves” to “grow rich, famous, ever larger” to “compulsive protective rituals” to “impregnable belief” demonstrates increasing psychological intensity and desperation. The metaphor reinforces the book’s title while establishing death anxiety as a natural human limitation rather than a pathological condition. This passage exemplifies The Many Forms of Death Anxiety by cataloging the various ways humans unconsciously defend against their awareness of mortality.

“Death has a long reach, with an impact that is often concealed. Though fear of dying can totally immobilize some people, often the fear is covert and expressed in symptoms that appear to have nothing to do with one’s mortality. Freud believed that much psychopathology results from a person’s repression of sexuality. I believe his view is far too narrow. In my clinical work, I have come to understand that one may repress not just sexuality but one’s whole creaturely self and especially its finite nature.”

Yalom personifies death as having agency through the phrase “long reach,” suggesting mortality’s pervasive influence extends beyond obvious manifestations into hidden psychological territories. The contrast between Freud’s focus on sexuality and Yalom’s broader perspective establishes the author’s theoretical departure from traditional psychoanalysis while positioning himself within that intellectual tradition. The term “creaturely self” elevates the discussion from clinical terminology to existential language, emphasizing humans’ animal nature and biological vulnerability rather than purely psychological constructs.