context of a community to individual spiritual narrative. With the individ-
ual seen as the arbiter of his or her own death or way of dying, one poten-
tial consequence is isolation, the burdening of the individual with the
articulation of a narrative that is neither self-motivated nor comprehensible
by others.
One instance of this problematic encouragement can be seen as stemming
from the use of stage models by health care professionals based on an evo-
lutionary conception of rational subjectivity seeking to identify universal
responses to death and bereavement (such as the stage model of Kübler-Ross).
These generalized frameworks for dying (such frameworks are subject to dif-
ferent criteria in terms of cognition) are precisely the kind of approaches that
must be avoided, or at least analyzed carefully. Such responses tend to side-
step the individual humanity and history of the dying or the bereaved by
emphasizing a hierarchical model of stage development which, however
descriptive, assumes the primacy of the end result: acceptance or reconcilia-
tion, the “good death.” This end result is contextualized not in a life actually
lived, but perceived through religious language and personal mythology (this
is one of the crucial differences between Freud and Jung). In terms of stage
models, the focus on the end result tends to create blindness toward the dif-
ferentiated ways in which people die or grieve and, in fact, cumbersomely
legislates appropriate attitudes and behaviors. Instead of a legislative approach
to dying, the attribution of sacredness to the dying person, the hermeneutic
and discursive models of recognition and intersubjectivity outlined by
Habermas and Benjamin might prove more appropriate – models which
encourages differentiation and see difference as part of a conflict of assertion
and recognition. Within an intersubjective model the authority of “dying
well” or the norm requiring a “good death” is diminished. The very notion
of dying “correctly” becomes irrelevant. Balance between individuals relies
on the creation of ways of communicating that avoid positing the self (or
other) as an absolute authority. The ideal of autonomy cannot be understood
in terms of sovereignty; rather, is derived from paradoxical relations of asser-
tion and recognition – autonomy depends on recognition and contradiction
for its communicative power, the capacity of the autonomous subject to coop-
erate with others. What is required, then, is not the instillation of a sacred
interiority of the subject as a means of articulating a new version of the “good
death,” which emerges out of anxiety, the trauma of death and loss, but
a communicative relationship that avoids the absence of intersubjectivity –
198 • Kenneth G. MacKendrick