How Art Can Help Us Cope with Existential Terror
Can a photograph help us manage the threat of our mortality?
Updated January 18, 2025 | Reviewed by Lybi Ma
Take a good look at this photograph by Frank Döring . How does it make you feel?
If you are like me, there is something instantly terrifying in it.
Although a still image, the thick vines of kudzu seem to undulate and advance. The effect is more of a video clip than a photo. Whatever existed underneath this heaving overflow of growth has been asphyxiated and replaced. Another lifeform, huge and containing just enough neural cortex to do what it does, is on the move. The railway tracks, typically a sign of human takeover, are not long for this world. This is the coming age of Kudzu, and there is no stopping it.
I think Döring has achieved something quite extraordinary. Photographs depicting all kinds of horrible things inundate us. How can a single photograph break through the numbing effect of these images and jolt a viewer in a powerful, lasting way?
For me, this is what Döring succeeds in doing. The composition of his photograph heightens a sense that the kudzu is advancing from left to right as it smothers everything and anything. The curve of railway tracks is placed at the far right, defenseless against the flow of green lava. And the image is so sharp and crisp, each leaf a breathing thing, but suffocating and lethal.
Döring uses a deft constraint. He captures doomsday as a slow closing curtain, quite a thing of beauty and well as terrifying. I felt both disturbed and enthralled.
My reaction to the image also reminds me of a provocative, far-reaching theory of human behavior, terror management theory , inspired by Ernest Becker's psychoanalytic ideas and further developed and tested over the last few decades by social psychologists Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski.
The theory is built around the key point that, as human beings, we have an awareness of our own mortality, the sureness of our eventual death. Most of us fear death, perhaps more than anything else. The reality of death threatens our sense of self-importance within the larger cosmic picture, undermining our beliefs about the world and the value of our individual lives. According to the theory, we manage this threat by finding defensive ways of bolstering our self-worth and validating our preferred cultural values and beliefs; thus deflecting attention from the deep anxiety that the threat causes.
Experimental tests of terror management theory use various ways of heightening people's awareness of their mortality and then showing that various defensive tendencies follow as predicted by the theory (for example, enhancing a sense that the religious beliefs of one's group are superior to religious beliefs of other groups; denying obvious existential problems such global warming; engaging in biased actions that seem to boost one's self-esteem ). Clearly, such tendencies can lead to societal problems, such as increased intergroup conflict and the rigid ignoring of basic scientific facts.
However, the threat of death, examined squarely and without defensiveness, can lead to positive choices that help society (for example, combatting climate change ) and healthy, clear-sighted actions that enrich one's life (for example, developing a philosophy of life that moves past the despair caused by seeing life as fleeting and meaninglessness).
To me, artwork, such as Frank Döring's photograph, can inspire such positive actions. I think his restrained approach, so skillfully realized, both reminds us of our mortality and yet keeps us engaged and captivated more than defensive.
Interestingly, terror management research suggests that one positive response to becoming aware of one's mortality is to create art that might grant the creator a modicum of symbolic immortality.
I would say that Döring has done exactly that.
I, for one, will never forget this remarkable entrancing photograph.
Solomon, S., Greenberg, J., & Pyszczynski, T. (2015). The worm at the core: On the role of death in life . New York: Random House.
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Richard H. Smith, Ph.D. , a social psychologist and a writer of nonfiction and fiction, taught at the University of Kentucky.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.