Cupio dissolvi

[2]Synechomai de ek tōn dyo, tēn epithymian echōn eis to analysai kai syn Christō einai, pollō gar mallon kreisson to de epimenein tē sarki anankaioteron di' hymas.Coartor autem e duobus desiderium habens dissolvi et cum Christo esse multo magis melius / permanere autem in carne magis necessarium est propter vos.The Douay–Rheims Bible translates: But I am straitened between two: having a desire to be dissolved and to be with Christ, a thing by far the better.

[11][12] In Donne, the use of this phrase is taken as indicative of the strength of his "desire to believe himself among God's elect",[13] while, for the exegesis influenced by Freud, of his being "possessed not only by the 'death wish' but also by a lifetime's struggle against it that this consideration should powerfully, even finally, determine our sense of the overall direction and significance of his work.

[16] Carl Jung, founder of the analytical psychology, quoted him to describe the process of dream interpretation and individuation: "Soul and spirit must be separated from the body, and this is equivalent to death: 'Therefore Paul of Tarsus saith, Cupio dissolvi, et esse cum Christo'.

"[15] The cultural theorist Dominic Pettman explained the twentieth century and the postmodern contemporary society, swung violently between the poles of anticipation and anticlimax, citing a statement expressed by Mario Praz in 1930:[17] "The very ideas of Decadence, [...] of the 'cupio dissolvi', [the desire to dissolve], are perhaps no more than the extreme sadistic refinements of a milieu which was saturated to excess with complications of perversion.

"Cupio dissolvi "is also a theme that we see repeatedly—albeit in a more secular form—in punk lyrics, film, and art, expressed as a provocative and somewhat naïve desire for death", for example in the verses of "Marquee Moon", the 1977 "title track from the American band Television's first album".