A psychologist, Feifel was interested in what at the time was a taboo subject: the psychology of death. In the Army Air Corps during World War II, he helped select flight crews for combat missions. He found the best pilots were unafraid of death, but was fascinated to find fear of death — or the lack of it — was not part of the official pilot evaluation process.
His research found very little professional literature on death. In 1956 he organized the first professional conference on the subject, and in 1959 he edited a collection of essays, The Meaning of Death *, which in 2001 the American Psychological Foundation called “the most important single work” to bring death into serious study.
Ironically, he found that the group that feared death the most was doctors, so his work was important to show doctors that their reluctance to talk about death was based on their own fears and was causing their patients harm. “In gaining an awareness of death, we sharpen and intensify our awareness of life,” Feifel wrote. He died January 18 at home in Los Angeles at age 87.