Lifton, R. J. (1979). The Broken Connection: On Death and the Continuity of Life. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Not read. The summary is drawn from the abstract or from what the work is standardly cited for. A reading should check it first.
Why this is here
The source of the notion of symbolic immortality that terror management theory and the legacy research use. Its biological and creative modes are legacy as a self extended in time. For QUESTION-301.
Read in its place
The work cannot be read here, so the record holds it at second hand.
Sturesteps’s thesis (NOTE-1312) gives the five modes and how they were measured by 1991. It reports four points from the book: that the struggle for a sense of immortality is a prime human aim, “immortality hunger” (pp. 17, 284); psychic numbing (pp. 144–145); and Lifton’s claim that the nuclear threat undermines the biological, creative and nature modes and drives interest in experiential transcendence (p. 149). It credits the biological, afterlife and creative modes to Rank (1930) and only nature and experiential transcendence to Lifton (1973). Missing still: Lifton’s own account of the modes, including whether the biological mode reaches beyond one’s children to one’s people, as the LIT summary says; his psychology of death imagery; and the claim that the loss of symbolic immortality underlies psychopathology, which the thesis attributes to Rank, not Lifton.