Descent: The Twisting Path of Death and Dying Psychologist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross.

The good wrought by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (1926-2004) is beyond dispute. The insight she offered on how to psychologically prepare for death, the spaces she created for the terminally ill to talk about their experiences and frustrations, the work that she did to try and bring healing to some of the world’s most neglected populations, were all services on a global scale that we can’t reverence enough. It must be said, however, that, having been so steadfastly right in the realization of those large pursuits caused Kübler-Ross to also dig into other convictions with equal stubbornness in ways that would ultimately destroy her credibility as a scientific figure, and cause disillusionment and trauma for many of those who chose to follow her path. 

That path began in Switzerland, where Elisabeth Kübler was born on July 8, 1926. She was one of three surprise triplets born to her mother that day, and spent her whole early life in the shadow of that fact. Dressed the same as her sisters, and expected to adhere to the same routines and hairstyles, she chaffed at the lack of an identity all her own, and some have placed this early experience as the root of the rebellious streak that, for better and worse, characterized her adult life. Her father was a conservative businessman who expected to get his own way in matters pertaining to his family, and who reacted with rage when Elisabeth announced her intention to pursue a medical career instead of accepting the secretarial work at his firm which he had arranged. 

Rather than give into his demands, Kübler impulsively found a job as a nanny/maid in a household that treated her like a domestic drudge. The situation was not tenable, and she soon escaped and made her way back home, where her father agreed that she could try to work in medical research, and that if she could not find her footing there, she would come work for him. She found work in Feldmeiler in the lab as an assistant to Dr. Hans Braun, whose work was focused on the potential of using plants as a model organism to study certain aspects of cancer instead of animals. It was an interesting idea, but not one practicable in its time, and Dr. Braun’s research center financially folded within a year, leaving Kübler to scramble for a position that would keep her from the dreaded secretarial position still being held open for her by her father.

Her next position was in a dermatology department in the basement of a hospital, working for Dr. Karl Zehnder. She worked here, learning lab techniques and basic patient treatment, while news rolled in of the horrors of World War II. Switzerland was neutral in that conflict, but received news of the death camps, and a steady stream of refugees. Kübler decided to assign herself the task of caring for the children arriving at the hospital, a devotion which a Polish doctor there observed. He told her that her calling was the care of refugee children, and made her promise, as soon as it was possible, to travel to Poland and see what she could do for the children of his native land. This promise served to direct the next few years of Kübler’s life, as she joined the International Voluntary for the Service of Peace (or IVSP) and scrambled through war-torn regions to find a posting in Poland where she could put her medical knowledge and deep need to care for the downtrodden to work rebuilding that devastated region of Europe.

By 1950, Kübler was back in Switzerland, and more engaged than ever with the idea of becoming a full-fledged medical practitioner. She took her Matura exam in 1951, and began her studies at the University of Zurich, where she would meet her future husband, Emmanuel Ross. She received her medical degree in 1957, and she and Manny moved to New York in 1958. She wanted to work with children, but the only position she could find at first was in the psychiatric ward of the Manhattan State Hospital, which at the time was run under the philosophy of “care by way of drugging the patients into a harmless state of numbness.” Kübler thought they could do better. Though she had no psychiatric training, she felt intuitively that a process involving listening to the patients and creating a series of small goals with the ultimate end of allowing them to return to society would work, and in her time she made a specialty of taking the schizophrenic patients written off as Irredeemably Lost by their doctors and stabilizing them to the point that they could carry on regular lives from home under minimal medications.

The work that would define her career, however, did not come her way until 1962, when she began her position at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. Just as her instinct at Manhattan was to find the patients who had been given up on, and try and treat them by connecting with their fundamental humanity, so in Colorado did she seek out those patients who were being regularly neglected or lied to by the hospital - the terminally ill. What she found all around her, both in Colorado, and in Chicago, where she would move in 1965, was a medical culture that denied death. Doctors would not talk about it. Patients were kept from knowledge of the seriousness of their condition. Families were systematically misinformed. All of this to keep the dread specter of Death from floating down the corridors and, presumably, creating a panic. Dying patients were isolated from others, and left to live out their final days alone, without anyone to talk to or share their anxieties with. 

Kübler-Ross found the unwillingness of doctors to engage with their dying patients honestly and humanely as cowardly at best and cruel at worst, and decided to spend time precisely with those patients, sitting with them, and talking about what was on their minds. She sought to understand the psychological state of a person who is dying, and what support it might uniquely need. In Chicago, she began hosting a regular series of standing room only workshops attended by medical students where a terminally ill patient would share their story, and what it was like facing the end of their lives in the modern health care system. These were powerful seminars for all involved - for patients, who finally got to talk about their experiences and fears, for doctors, who realized that they had been instinctively pushing away their patients’ concerns about death, and for Kübler-Ross, who served as the conduit for this process. 

Kübler-Ross’s conversations with the terminally ill, and the growing fame of her Chicago seminars, brought publishers to her door, and in 1967 she began writing the work that would become On Death and Dying, which vaulted to best-seller status in 1969 and brought the world the famous Five Stages of Grief model that has made its way into our global vocabulary: Denial - Anger - Bargaining - Depression - Acceptance. Overnight, Kübler-Ross became an international expert on dying, and powerful spokesperson for the emerging hospice movement, which sought to bring some semblance of dignity and reassuring order to the last stages of life. Millions were helped by Kübler-Ross’s book and public appearances - individuals who were able to face their last days with more awareness of what was happening to them, and more particularly families who were able to know somewhat the worries of their loved ones, and provide care that met those concerns, and allowed them the best possible death.

And here it is, when Kübler-Ross is stepping onto the stage to improve the lives of countless terminally ill patients and their families, that her career took its first great branching. There would always be a through-line in the decades to come centered around this crucial work, but the 1970s would also see, alongside it, a number of more disturbing elements in Kübler-Ross’s thought and publications that would ultimately swallow her career whole. And so, it is now time to talk about the other Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. 

Now, Kübler-Ross was hardly the first person in the psychological community to allow the metaphysical speculations of the 1970s to destroy her credibility with the scientific community. Readers of the Archive will remember that this was largely the story of Virginia Satir. But Kübler-Ross was uniquely positioned, because of her authority as an expert on dying, and her thousands of conversations with those who were facing death, to have her utterances about what happens after you die to be treated with more attention and gravitas than your average 1970s spiritualist. In the years to come, she would lean heavily into theories about reincarnation, out of body experiences, the existence of faeries, spirit channeling, the existence of ghosts, and astral projection, and her opinions on these subjects would be treated, on account of her status, as having the authority of science behind them. 

Her central thesis of these years was that death is not real, it is simply a graduation to the next phase of life, which can be accessed through communication with spirits, such as those summoned for her by noted channeler Jay Barnham, whom multiple women later claimed used his purported mystic ability to summon spirits from another realm as a gateway to demand sexual favors from them. For Kübler-Ross he summoned two particular spirits, Paolo and Salem, whom she later claimed to be able to summon herself to give advice at crucial parts of her life. 

Though she would later leave Barnham’s orbit as the allegations of sexual abuse and fraud grew thicker, she never gave up on the idea of communing with spirits and death as graduation, and this in turn led her to the idea that every stage of the dying process happened for a reason, to teach important lessons to the person who was dying, and that therefore anything which shortened that process was an affront to the individual’s journey. People in constant pain who wanted to choose their own time of death through suicide were, in her opinion, to be prevented from doing so, in order that they could learn the lesson that God wanted to teach them over the course of potentially years of suffering. She disagreed with the goal of Dr. Kevorkian to find humane ways to end a life of misery at a chosen moment through the most dignified method possible, and persisted in claiming that everything that happened to one was part of some god’s larger plan for their ultimate good. 

This was, to be frank, a cruel message. “God is making you suffer for years to teach you something, and your job is to take it, and take it, and take it, until he finally lets you die” is a heavy sentence to live under, and all the heavier as it falls on people who are physically and emotionally at their weakest, which led critics to say that, in sum, taking away the isolation of the dying only to replace it with a theologically motivated series of imperatives about the moral virtue of suffering, was moving one step forwards and two backwards. 

Though her spiritualist instincts led her down some unfortunate pathways in the decades following the 1970s, her core egalitarian beliefs continued to hold true. Hearing about the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, her first reaction was to use her lifetime of experience in terminal illness trauma to help these people facing early deaths. While others shunned AIDS patients, she embraced and worked with them, and brought the ire of an entire community upon her head when she announced the intention of adopting babies born with AIDS to care for them on her farm property (this property was ultimately burned to the ground in the 1990s, and she was convinced for the rest of her life that it was torched by a member of the neighborhood trying to keep her from bringing AIDS victims into their community). 

At an age when many would have been settling into retirement, Kübler-Ross concocted one of her most ambitious projects, to bring the instincts that led her to develop new methods for dealing with schizophrenics, and to build bridges between doctors and the terminally ill, to another neglected community, prison inmates. She felt that most of the individuals in prison had ended up there as a result of deep traumas that needed the strength of communities to engage with and overcome, and experimented in Great Britain with a whole-prison event where everybody, from staff to inmates to guards, slept in the prison over a series of days and worked through all of their traumas and disappointments together, to create a place of mutual comprehension. 

Unfortunately, the last decade and a half of Kübler-Ross’s life brought heartbreak and tribulation that would test to the limit her philosophy that all hardship is part of a larger celestial process of learning. Her home burned down, scientific studies of near-death experiences unveiled the earthly and mundane neurochemistry driving them, and her body suffered a series of strokes that made her, for the last decade of her life, entirely dependent upon the care of others to see to her daily mechanical needs as she allowed herself to complain that god certainly did seem to be “procrastinating” in bringing her the thing she wanted most - her chance to graduate from life, slip the bonds of her body, and head into the infinite beyond before her next rebirth, whatever that might be. 

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross passed away on August 24, 2004, at the age of 78. 

FURTHER READING:

In 1997, Kübler-Ross wrote her autobiography, The Wheel of Life: A Memoir of Living and Dying, which honestly and candidly tells her story. She is completely honest about her character flaws, while expressing no uncertainty whatsoever as to the ultimate validity of her ideas about death and the after-life. In 2003 a Swiss documentary, Facing Death, captured the loneliness of her final years, and there are countless recordings available of her conversations with the terminally ill, and lectures on death and what comes after. Meanwhile, Scribner has done a good job keeping her more timeless works available at a reasonable price, while her more speculative afterlife-centered books have largely receded into the void.