ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a clinical perspective on the psychosocial processes of dying, and focuses on the multiple questions and decisions that are raised during the dying process. It discusses the six issues: the limits to a rational approach toward dying, coping problems throughout the dying period, concerns of the dying about death, definitions of death, coping with dying throughout the life cycle, and help for the dying. The phases of dying are related to several different types of trajectories or "death expectations" that are set up by the crisis of knowledge of death. Social death would be allowing the dying person to withdraw, leading to psychic death, which is usually shortly followed by biological and then physiological death. The dying person should be helped to achieve relative synchrony, so that the social, psychological, physiological and biological dimensions of death tend to merge together in a coherent fashion.
