Grenzsituationen.

A LIMIT SITUATION, OR BORDER SITUATION (German; Grenzsituationen) is a situation in which a person can be said to have atypical experiences from those arising from ordinary, everyday situations.  Limit situations are like the doctor slapping a baby's bottom to kick-start its autonomous functions.  Through encounters with finitude, by seeing evidence of our mortality, we come alive for the first time.  Limit situations are life lived at the firewall, close to death.   Like torpedoes, running unseen just beneath the depths of The Atlantic, limit situations detonate against the hull of the false self, breaking us from that ego-driven edifice; they rip us from our social bonds.  They are in opposition to our quiescent servitude to the habits of the familiar.