APA Dictionary of Psychology

the belief that death is so dangerous and disturbing a subject that one should not only avoid contact with the dead, the dying, and the recently bereaved but also refrain from talking or even thinking about it. In 1959, U.S. psychologist Herman Feifel (1915–2003) proposed that the United States had such a denying and avoiding attitude toward death that it could be compared with the rigid and extreme patterns observed by anthropologists in many band-and-village societies.