Ernest Becker
The Denial of Death
(1973)
[xvii] The noted anthropologist A.M. Hocart once argued that primitives were not bothered by the fear of death;...that death seemed to be an occasion for celebration rather than fear... Hocart wanted to dispel the notion that (compared to modern man) primitives were childish and frightened by reality; anthropologists have now largely accomplished this rehabilitation... But this argument leaves untouched the fact that fear of death is a universal human condition. To be sure, primitives often celebrate death...because they believe that death is the ultimate promotion... Most modern Westerners have trouble believing this any more, which is what makes the fear of death so prominent a part of our psychological make-up.
[xix] I have had the growing realization over the past few years that the problem of man's knowledge is not to oppose and to demolish opposing views, but to include them in a larger theoretical structure. One of the ironies of the creative process is that it partly cripples itself in order to function. I mean that, usually, in order to turn out a piece of work the author has to exaggerate the emphasis of it, to oppose it in a forcefully competitive way to other versions of truth; and he gets carried away by his own exaggeration, as his distinctive image is built on it. But each honest thinker who is basically an empiricist has to have some truth in his position, no matter how extremely he has formulated it. The problem is to find the truth underneath the exaggeration, to cut away the excess elaboration or distortion and include that truth where it fits.
[2] If you took a blind and dumb organism and gave it a self-consciousness and
[3]
a name, if you made it stand out of nature and know consciously that it was unique, then you would have narcissism. In man, physio-chemical identity and the sense of power and activity have become conscious.
In man a working level of narcissism is inseparable from self-esteem, from a basic sense of self-worth. ... But man is not just a blind glob of idling protoplasm, but a creature with a name who lives in a world of symbols and dreams and not merely matter. His sense of self-worth is constituted symbolically... And this means that man's natural yearning for organismic activity, the pleasures of incorporation and expansion, can be fed limitlessly in the domain of symbols and so into immortality. The single organism can expand into dimensions of worlds and times without moving a physical limb; it can take eternity into itself even as it gaspingly dies.
In childhood we see the struggle for self-esteem at its least disguised. ... We like to speak casually about "sibling rivalry," as though it were some kind of byproduct of growing up, a bit of competitiveness and selfishness of children who have been spoiled, who haven't yet grown into a generous social nature. But it is too all-absorbing and relentless to be an aberration, it expresses the heart of the creature: the desire to stand out, to be the one in creation. ...
[4]
... An animal who gets his feeling of worth symbolically has to minutely compare himself to those around him, to make sure he doesn't come off second-best. Sibling rivalry is a critical problem that reflects the basic human condition: it is not that children are viscious, selfish, or domineering . It is that they so openly express man's tragic destiny: he must desperately justify himself as an object of primary value in the universe...
When we appreciate how natural it is for man to strive to be a hero, how deeply it goes in his evolutionary and organismic constitution, how openly he shows it as a child, then it is all the more curious how ignorant most of us are, consciously, of what we really want and need. In our culture anyway, especially in modern times, the heroic seems too big for us. ... We disguise our struggle by piling up figures in a bank book to reflect privately our sense of heroic worth. ... But underneath throbs the ache of cosmic specialness, no matter how we mask it in concerns of smaller scope. Occasionally someone admits that he takes his heroism seriously, which gives most of us a chill... We may shudder at the crassness of earthly heroism, of both Caesar and his imitators, but the fault is not theirs, it is in the way society sets up its hero system and in the people it allows to fill its roles. The urge to heroism is natural, and to admit it honest. For everyone to admit it would probably release such pent-up force as to be devastating to societies as they now are.
The fact is that this is what society is and always has been: a symbolic action system, a structure of statuses and roles, customs and rules for behavior, designed to serve as a vehicle for earthly heroism. Each script is somewhat unique, each culture has a dif-
[5]
ferent hero system. What the anthropologists call "cultural relativity" is thus really the relativity of hero-systems the world over. But each cultural system is a dramatization of earthly heroics; each system cuts out roles for performances of various degrees of heroism: from the "high" heroism of a Churchill, a Mao, or a Buddha, to the "low" heroism of the coal miner, the peasant, the simple priest; the plain, everyday, earthy heroism wrought by gnarled hands guiding a family through hunger and disease.
It doesn't matter whether the cultural hero-system is frankly magical, religious, and primitive or secular, scientific, and civilized. It is still a mythical hero-system in which people serve in order to earn a feeling of primary value, of cosmic specialness, of ultimate usefulness to creation, of unshakable meaning. ... The hope and belief is that the things that man creates in society are of lasting worth and meaning, that they outlive or outshine death and decay, that man and his products count.
...
[6] the truth about the need for heroism is not easy for anyone to admit, even the very ones who want to have their claims recognized. There's the rub. ...to become conscious of what one is doing to earn his feeling of heroism is the main self-analytic problem of life. Everything painful and sobering in what psychoanalytic genius and religious genius have discovered about man revolves around the terror of admitting what one is doing to earn his self-esteem. This is why human heroics is a blind drivenness that burns people up; in passionate people, a screaming for glory as uncritical and reflexive as the howling of a dog. In the more passive masses of mediocre men it is disguised as they humbly and complainingly follow out the roles that society provides for their heroics and try to earn their promotions within the system: wearing the standard uniforms—but allowing themselves to stick out, but ever so little and so safely, with a little ribbon or a red boutonniere, but not with head and shoulders.
If we were to peel away this massive disguise...we would arrive at the potentially most liberating question of all, the main problem of human life: How empirically true is the cultural hero system that sustains and drives men? We mentioned the meaner side of man's urge to cosmic heroism, but there is obviously the noble side as well. Man will lay down his life for his country, his society, his family. He will choose to throw himself on a grenade to save his comrades; he is capable of the highest generosity and self-sacrifice. But he has to feel and believe that what he is doing is truly heroic , timeless, and supremely meaningful. The crisis of modern society is precisely that the youth no longer feel heroic in the plan for action that their culture has set up.
[16] Zilboorg points out that this fear [of death] is actually an expression of the instinct of self-preservation, which functions as a constant drive to maintain life and to master the dangers that threaten life:
Such constant expenditure of psychological energy on the business of preserving life would be impossible if the fear of death were not as constant. The very term "self-preservation" implies an effort against some force of disintegration; the affective aspect of this is fear, fear of death.[17]
If this fear were as constantly conscious, we should be unable to function normally. It must be properly repressed to keep up us living with any modicum of comfort. We know very well that to repress means more than to put away and to forget that which was put away and the place where we put it. It means also to maintain a constant psychological effort to keep the lid on and inwardly never relax our watchfulness.
...
The argument from biology and evolution is basic and has to be taken seriously; I don't see how it can be left out of any discussion. Animals in order to survive have had to be protected by fear-responses... They had to see the real relationship of their limited powers to the dangerous world in which they were immersed. Reality and fear go together naturally.
...it is foolish to assume that the fear response of animals would have disappeared in such a weak and highly sensitive species [as humans]. It is more reasonable to think that it was instead heightened, as some of the early Darwinians thought: early men who were most afraid were those who were most realistic about their situation in nature... The result was the emergence of man as we know him: a hyperanxious animal who constantly invents reasons for anxiety even where there are none.
Well, my sources tell me that selection pressures exert themselves only up to a minimum fitness, not an ideal or maximum fitness. i.e. Our
fear-responses
are just barely enough to allow us to relax some of the time. This cuts somewhat against both of the above theses.
...
[18]
... We could say that fear is programmed into the lower animals by ready-made instincts; but an animal who has no instincts has no programmed fears. Man's fears are fashioned out of the ways in which he perceives the world.
Totally apart from the quite radical departure from Freud's fixation on "instincts" or "drives," this explanation seems much too "environmental." To say humans have no instincts seems to overstate the case.
...
[27] The animals don't know that death is happening and continue grazing placidly while others drop alongside them. The knowledge of death is reflective and conceptual, and animals are spared it. They live and they disappear with the same thoughlessness: a few minutes of fear, a few seconds of anguish, and it is over. But to live a whole lifetime with the fate of death haunting one's dreams and even the most sun-filled days—that's something else.
It is only if you let the full weight of this paradox sink down on your mind and feelings that you can realize what an impossible situation it is for an animal to be in. I believe that those who speculate that a full apprehension of man's condition would drive him insane are right, quite literally right . ...Pascal's chilling reflection: "Men are so necessarily mad that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness." Necessarily because the existential dualism makes an impossible situation, an excruciating dilemma. Mad because, as we shall see, everything that man does in his symbolic world is an attempt to deny and overcome his grotesque fate. He literally drives himself into a blind obliviousness with social games, psychological tricks, personal preoccupations so far removed from the reality of his situation that they are forms of madness—agreed madness, shared madness, disguised and dignified madness, but madness all the same. "Character-traits" , said Sandor Ferenczi,... "are secret psychoses." This is not a smug witticism offered in passing by a young science drunk with its own explanatory power and success; it is a mature scientific judgment of the most devastating self-revelatory kind ever fashioned by man trying to understand himself.
[50] The great boon of repression is that it makes it possible to live decisively in an overwhelmingly miraculous and incomprehensible world, a world so full of beauty, majesty, and terror that if animals perceived it all they would be paralyzed to act.
...
[51] The historic value of Freud's work is that it came to grips with the peculiar animal that man was, the animal that was not programmed by instincts to close off perception and assure automatic equanimity and forceful action. Man had to invent and create out of himself the limitations of perception and the equanimity to live on this planet. And so the core of psychodynamics, the formation of the human character, is a study in human self-limitation and in the terrifying costs of that limitation. The hostility to psychoanalysis in the past, today, and in the future, will always be a hostility against admitting that man lives by lying to himself about himself about himself and about his world, and that character, to follow Ferenczi and Brown, is a vital lie.
...
[55] we understand that if the child were to give in to the overpowering character of reality and experience he would not be able to act with the kind of equanimity we need in our non-instinctive world. So one of the first things a child has to do is to learn to "abandon ecstasy," to do without awe, to leave fear and trembling behind. Only then can he act with a certain oblivious self-confidence, when he has naturalized his world. We say "naturalized" but we mean unnaturalized, falsified, with the truth obscured, the despair of the human condition hidden... This despair he avoids by building defenses; and these defenses allow him to feel a basic sense of self-worth, of meaninfulness, of power. They allow him to feel that he controls his life and his death, that he really does live and act as a willful and free individual, that he has a unique and self-fashioned identity, that he is somebody—not just a trembling accident germinated on a hothouse planet... We called one's life style a vital lie, and now we can understand better why we said it was vital: it is a necessary and basic dishonesty about oneself and one's whole situation. This revelation is what the Freudian revolution in thought really ends up in and is the basic reason that we still strain against Freud. We don't want to admit that we are fundamentally dishonest about reality, that we do not really control our own lives. We don't want to admit that we do not stand alone, that we always rely on something that transcends us, some system of ideas and powers in which we are embedded and which support us. ...
[56]
...
The defenses that form a person's character support a grand illusion, and when we grasp this we can understand the full drivenness of man. He is driven away from himself, from self-knowledge, self-reflection. He is driven toward things that support the lie of his character, his automatic equanimity. But he is also drawn precisely toward those things that make him anxious, as a way of skirting them masterfully, testing himself against them, controlling them by defying them. As Kirekegaard taught us, anxiety lures us on, becomes the spur to much of our energetic activity: we flirt with our own growth, but also dishonestly. This explains much of the friction in our lives. We enter symbiotic relationships in order to get the security we need, in order to get relief from our anxieties, our aloneness and helplessness; but these relationships also bind us, they enslave us even further because they support the lie we have fashioned. So we strain against them in order to be more free. The irony is that we do this straining uncritically, in a struggle within our own armor, as it were; and so we increase our drivenness, the second-hand quality of our struggle for freedom. Even in our flirtations with anxiety we are unconscious of our motives. We seek stress, we push our own limits, but we do it with our screen against despair and not with despair itself. ... Hence the complicated and second-hand quality of our entire drivenness. Even in our passions we are nursery children playing with toys that represent the real world. Even when these toys crash and cost us our lives or our sanity, we are cheated of the consolation that we were in the real world instead of the playpen of our fantasies. We still did not meet our doom on our own manly terms, in contest with objective reality. It is fateful and ironic how the lie we need in order to live dooms us to a life that is never totally ours.
...
[57] Freud summed it up beautifully when he somewhere remarked that psychoanalysis cured the neurotic misery in order to introduce the patient to the common misery of life. Neurosis is another word for describing a complicated technique for avoiding misery.
Lasch renders it this way:
It is through love and work, as Freud noted in a characteristically pungent remark, that we exchange crippling emotional conflict for ordinary unhappiness.
(The Culture of Narcissism, p. 248)
Ernest Becker
The Denial of Death
(1973)
On Kierkegaard:
[81] Most people, of course, avoid the psychotic dead ends out of the existential dilemma. They are fortunate enough to be able to stay on the middle ground of "philistinism." Breakdown occurs either because of too much possibility or too little...
...philistinism is what we would call "normal neurosis." ... The Philistine trusts that by keeping himself at a low level of personal intensity he can avoid being pulled off balance by experience...
[82]
There is [additionally] the type of man who has great contempt for "immediacy," who tries to cultivate his interiority, base his pride on something deeper and inner, create a distance between himself and the average man. Kierkegaard calls this type of man the "introvert." He is a little more concerned with what it means to be a person, with individuality and uniqueness. He enjoys solitude and withdraws periodically to reflect... What is one's true talent, his secret gift, his authentic vocation? In what way is one truly unique...? In adolescence, most of us throb with this dilemma, expressing it either with words and thoughts or with simple numb pain and longing. But usually life sucks us up into standardized activities. ...
[83]
I am not saying that Kierkegaard's "introvert" keeps this inner quest fully alive or conscious, only that it represents somewhat more of a dimly aware problem than it does with the swallowed-up immediate man. Kierkegaard's introvert feels that he is something different from the world, has something in himself that the world cannot reflect, cannot in its immediacy and shallowness appreciate; and so he holds himself somewhat apart from that world. But not too much, not completely. It would be so nice to be the self he wants to be, to realize his vocation, his authentic talent, but it is dangerous, it might upset his world completely. He is after all, basically weak, in a position of compromise: not an immediate man, but not a real man either, even though he gives the appearance of it. ...
...he lives in a kind of "incognito," content to toy—in his periodic solitudes—with the idea of who he might really be; content to insist on a "little difference," to pride himself on a vaguely-felt superiority.
[84]
But this is not an easy position to maintain with equanimity. It is rare, says Kierkegaard, to continue on in it. Once you pose the problem of what it means to be a person, even dumbly, weakly, or with a veneer of pride about your imagined difference from others, you may be in trouble. Introversion is impotence, but an impotence already self-conscious to a degree, and it can become troublesome. It may lead to chafing at one's dependency on his family and his job, an ulcerous gnawing as a reaction to one's embeddedness, a feeling of slavery in one's safety. For a strong person it may become intolerable, and he may try to break out of it, sometimes by suicide, sometimes by drowning himself desperately in the world and in the rush of experience.
And this brings us to our final type of man: the one who asserts himself out of defiance of his own weakness...
...
[86] Kierkegaard was hardly a disinterested scientist. He gave his psychological description because he had a glimpse of freedom for man. He was a theorist of the open personality, of human possibility. In this pursuit, present-day psychiatry lags far behind him. Kierkegaard had no easy idea of what "health" is. But he knew what it was not: it was not normal adjustment — anything but that , as he has taken such excruciating analytical pains to show us. To be a "normal cultural man" is, for Kierkegaard, to be sick—whether one knows it or not: "there is such a thing as fictitious health." Nietzsche later put the same thought: "Are there perhaps—a question for psychiatrists—neuroses of health?" But Kierkegaard not only posed the question, he also answered it. If health is not "cultural normality," then it must refer to something else, must point beyond man's usual situation, his habitual ideas. Mental health , in a word, is not typical , but ideal-typical . It is something far beyond man, to be achieved, striven for, something that leads man beyond himself. The "healthy" person, the true individual, the self-realized soul, the "real" man, is the one who has transcended himself.
How does one transcend himself; how does he open himself to new possibility? By realizing the truth of his situation, by dispelling the lie of his character, by breaking his spirit out of its conditioned prison. The enemy, for Kierkegaard as for Freud, is the Oedipus complex. The child has built up strategies and techniques for keeping his self-esteem in the face of the terror of his situation. These techniques become an armor that hold the person prisoner. The very defenses that he needs in order to move about with self-confidence and self-esteem become his life-long trap. In order to transcend himself he must break down that which he needs in order to live. Like Lear he must throw off all his "cultural lendings" and stand naked in the storm of life. Kierkegaard had no illusions about man's urge to freedom. He knew how comfortable people were inside the prison of their character defenses. Like many prisoners they
[87]
are comfortable in their limited and protected routines, and the idea of a parole into the wide world of chance, accident, and choice terrifies them. We have only to glance back at Kierkegaard's confession in the epigraph to this chapter to see why. In the prison of one's character one can pretend and feel that he is somebody, that the world is manageable, that there is a reason for one's life, a justification for one's action. To live automatically and uncritically is to be assured of at least a minimum share of the programmed cultural heroics—what we might call "prison heroism": the smugness of insiders who "know."
Kierkegaard's torment was the direct result of seeing the world as it really is in relation to his situation as a creature. ... Anxiety is the result of the perception of the truth of one's condition. What does it mean to be a self-conscious animal? The idea is ludicrous, if it is not monstrous. ... It seems like a hoax, which is why one type of cultural man rebels openly against the idea of God. What kind of deity would create such complex and fancy worm food? Cynical deities, said the Greeks, who use man's torment for their own amusement.
But now Kierkegaard seems to have led us into an impasse, and impossible situation. He has told us that by realizing the truth of our condition we can transcend ourselves. And on the other hand he tells us that the truth of our condition is our complete and abject creatureliness, which seems to push us down still further on the scale of self-realization, further away from any possibility of self-transcendence. But this is only an apparent contradiction. The flood of anxiety is not the end for man. It is, rather, a "school" that provides man with the ultimate education, the final maturity. It is a
[88]
better teacher than reality, says Kierkegaard, because reality can be lied about, twisted, and tamed by the tricks of cultural perception and repression. But anxiety cannot be lied about. Once you face up to it, it reveals the truth of your situation; and only by seeing that truth can you open a new possibility for yourself.
He who is educated by dread [anxiety] is educated by possibility. . . . When such a person, therefore, goes out from the school of possibility, and knows more thoroughly than a child knows the alphabet that he demands of life absolutely nothing, and that terror, perdition, annihilation, dwell next door to every man, and has learned the profitable lesson that every dread which alarms may the next instant become a fact, he will then interpret reality differently. . . .No mistake about it: the curriculum in the "school" of anxiety is the unlearning of repression, of everything that the child taught himself to deny so that he could move about with a minimal animal equanimity. Kierkegaard is thus placed directly in the Augustinian-Lutheran tradition. Education for a man means facing up to his natural impotence and death. As Luther urged us: "I say die, i.e., taste death as though it were present." It is only if you "taste" death with the lips of your living body that you can know emotionally that you are a creature who will die.
What Kierkegaard is saying, in other words, is that the school of anxiety leads to possibility only by destroying the vital lie of character. It seems like the ultimate self-defeat, the one thing that one should not do, because then one will have truly nothing left. But rest assured, says Kierkegaard, "the direction is quite normal. . . . the self must be broken in order to become a self. . . ." William James summed up beautifully this Lutheran tradition, in the following words:
This is the salvation through self-despair, the dying to be truly born, of Lutheran theology, the passage into nothing of which Jacob Behmen [Boehme] writes. To get to it, a critical point must usually be passed, a corner turned within one. Something must give way, a native hardness must break down and liquefy. . . .Again—as we saw in the last chapter—this is the destruction of the emotional character armor of Lear, of the Zen Buddhists, of modern[89]
psychotherapy, and in fact of self-realized men in any epoch.
Ernest Becker
The Denial of Death
(1973)
[96] It is clear to us today...that Freud was wrong about the dogma, just as Jung and Adler knew right at the beginning. Man has no innate instincts of sexuality and aggression. Now we are seeing something more, the new Freud emerging in our time, that he was right in his dogged dedication to revealing man's creatureliness. His emotional involvement was correct. It reflected the true intuitions of genius, even though the particular intellectual counterpart of that emotion—the sexual theory—proved to be wrong. Man's body was "a curse of fate," and culture was built on repression—not because man was a seeker only of sexuality, of pleasure, of life and expansiveness, as Freud thought, but because man was also primarily an avoider of death. Consciousness of death is the primary repression, not sexuality.
...
[135] Redl saw that in some groups there is indeed what he perfectly calls the "infectiousness of the unconflicted person." There are leaders who seduce us because they do not have the conflicts that we have; we admire their equanimity where we feel shame and humiliation. Freud saw that the leader wipes out fear and permits everyone to feel omnipotent. Redl refined this somewhat by showing how important the leader often was by the simple fact that it was he who performed the "initiatory act" when no one else has the daring to do it. Redl calls this beautifully the "magic of the initiatory act." This initiatory act can be anything from swearing to sex or murder. As Redl points out, according to its logic only the one who first commits murder is the murderer; all others are followers. Freud has said in Totem and Taboo that acts that are illegal for the individual can be justified if the whole group shares responsibility for them. But they can be justified in another way: the one who initiates the act takes upon himself both the risk and the guilt. The result is truly magic: each member of the group can repeat the act without guilt. They are not responsible, only the leader is. Redl calls this, aptly, "priority magic." But it does something even more than relieve guilt: it actually transforms the fact of murder. This crucial point initiates us directly into the phenomenon of group transformation of the everyday world. ...
...
[136] All of which leads us to muse wistfully on how unheroic is the average man, even when he follows heroes. He simply loads them
[137]
up with his own baggage; he follows them with reservations, with a dishonest heart. The noted psychoanalyst Paul Schilder had already observed that man goes into the hypnotic trance itself with reservations. He said penetratingly that it was this fact that deprived hypnosis of the "profound seriousness which distinguishes every truly great passion." And so he called it "timid" because it lacked "the great, free, unconditional surrender." I think this characterization is beautifully apt to describe the timid heroisms of group behavior. There is nothing free or manly about them. Even when one merges his ego with the authoritarian father, the "spell" is in his own narrow interests. People use their leaders almost as an excuse. When they give in to the leader's commands they can always reserve the feeling that these commands are alien to them, that they are the leader's responsibility, that the terrible acts they are committing are in his name and not theirs. This, then, is another thing that makes people feel so guiltless, as Canetti points out: they can imagine themselves as temporary victims of the leader. ... It is all so neat, this usage of the leader;... men can play the hero, all the while that they are avoiding responsibility for their own acts in a cowardly way.
...
[139]
The Larger View of Transference From this discussion of transference we can see one great cause of the large-scale ravages that man makes on the world. He is not just a naturally and lustily destructive animal who lays waste around him because he feels omnipotent and impregnable. Rather, he is a trembling animal who pulls the world down around his shoulders as he clutches for protection and support and tries to affirm in a cowardly way his feeble powers. The qualities of the leader, then, and the problems of people fit together in a natural symbiosis. ...
...
[140]
[massive whole-page footnote begun the previous page]... [The leader] gets a really coercive hold on the members of the group precisely because they follow his lead in committing outrageous acts. He can then use their guilt against them, binding them closer to himself. He uses their anxiety for his purposes, even arousing it as he needs to; and he can use their fear of being found out and revenged by their victims as a kind of blackmail that keeps them docile and obedient for further atrocities.
...
[142] [The] complicated mixture of specific error and correct generalization has made it a difficult and lengthy task for us to separate out what is true and what is false in psychoanalytic theory. But as we said earlier with Rank, it seems fairly conclusive that if you accent the terrors of external nature—as Freud did in his later work—then you are talking about the general human condition and no longer about specific erotic drives. We might say that the child would then seek merger with the parental omnipotence not out of desire but out of cowardice. And now we are on a wholly new terrain.
...
Transference as Fetish Control If transference relates to cowardice we can understand why it goes all the way back to childhood; it reflects the whole of the child's attempts to create an environment that will give him safety and satisfaction; he learns to act and to perceive his environment in such a way that he banishes anxiety from it. But now the fatality of transference: when you set up your perception-action world to eliminate what is basic to it (anxiety), then you fundamentally falsify it . This is why psychoanalysts have always understood transference as a regressive phenomenon, uncritical, wishful, a matter of automatic control of one's world. ...
[144]
... We can establish our basic organismic footing with hate as well as by submission. In fact, hate enlivens us more, which is why we see more intense hate in the weaker ego states. The only thing is that hate, too, blows the other person up larger than he deserves.
[150]
The Twin Ontological Motives ...One thing that has always amazed man is his own inner yearning to be good, an inner sensitivity about the "way things ought to be," and an excruciatingly warm and melting attraction toward the "rightness" of beauty, goodness, and perfection. We call this inner sensitivity "conscience." For the great philosopher Immanuel Kant it was one of the two sublime mysteries of creation, this "moral law within" man, and there was no way to explain it—it was just given. Nature carries feeling right in her own "heart," in the interiors of striving organisms. This self-feeling in nature is more fantastic than any science-fiction fact. Any philosophy or any science that is going to speak intelligently about the meaning of life has to take it into account and treat it with the highest reverence—as 19th-century thinkers like Vincenzo Gioberti and Antonio Rosmini understood.
[151]
Curiously, this vital ontology of organismic self-feeling—which was central for thinkers like Thomas Davidson and Henri Bergson—hardly made a rustle in modern science until the appearance of the new "humanistic psychology." This fact alone seems to me to explain the unbelievable sterility of the human sciences in our time and, more especially, their willingness to manipulate and negate man. I think that the true greatness of Freud's contribution emerges when we see it as directly related to this tradition of ontological thought. Freud showed how the particular rules for goodness or conscience were built into the child in a given society, how he learns the rules for feeling good. By showing the artificiality of these social rules for feeling good, Freud mapped out the dream of freedom of the Enlightenment: to expose artificial moral constraints on the expansive self-feeling of the life force.
But the recognition of such social constraints still leaves unexamined the inner urge of the human being to feel good and right—the very thing that awed Kant seems to exist independent of any rules: as far as we can tell—as I put it elsewhere—"all organisms like to 'feel good' about themselves." They push themselves to maximize this feeling. As philosophers have long noted, it is as though the heart of nature is pulsating in its own joyful self-expansion. When we get to the level of man, of course, this process acquires its greatest interest. It is most intense in man and in him relatively undetermined—he can pulsate and expand both organismically and symbolically. This expansion takes the form of man's tremendous urge for a feeling of total "rightness" about himself and his world. This perhaps clumsy way to talk seems to me to sum up what man is really trying to do and why conscience is his fate. Man is the only organism in nature fated to puzzle out what it actually means to feel "right."
But on top of this special burden nature has arranged that it is impossible for man to feel "right" in any straightforward way. Here we have to introduce a paradox that seems to go right to the heart of organismic life and that is especially sharpened in man. The paradox takes the form of two motives or urges that seems to be part of creature consciousness and that point in two opposite direction. On the one hand the creature is impelled by a powerful desire to identify with the cosmic process, to merge himself with the rest of
[152]
nature. On the other hand he wants to be unique, to stand out as somethign different and apart. The first motive—to merge and lose oneself in something larger—comes from man's horror of isolation, of being thrust back upon his own feeble energies alone; he feels tremblingly small and impotent in the face of transcendent nature. If he gives in to his natural feeling of cosmic dependence, the desire to be part of something bigger, it puts him at peace and at oneness, gives him a sense of self-expansion in a larger in a larger beyond, and so heightens his being, giving him truly a feeling of transcendent value. This is the Christian motive of Agape—the natural melding of created life in the "Creation-in-love" which transcends it. As Rank put it, man yearns for a "feeling of kinship with the All." He wants to be "delivered from his isolation" and become "part of a greater and higher whole." The person reaches out naturally for a self beyond his own self in order to know who he is at all, in order to feel that he belongs in the universe. Long before Camus penned the words of the epigraph to this chapter, Rank said: "For only by living in close union with a god-ideal that has been erected outside one's own ego is one able to live at all."
The strength of Rank's work, which enabled him to draw such an unfailing psychological portrait of man in the round, was that he connected psychoanalytic insight with the basic ontological motives of the human creature. In this way he got as deep into human motives as he could and produced a group psychology that was really a psychology of the human condition. For one thing, we could see that what the psychoanalysts call "identification" is a natural urge to join in the overwhelming powers that transcend one. Childhood identification is then merely a special case of this urge: the child merges himself with the representatives of the cosmic process—what we have called the "transference focalization" of terror, majesty, and power. When one merges with the self-transcending parents or social group he is, in some real sense, trying to live in some larger expansiveness of meaning. We miss the complexity of heroism if we fail to understand this point; we miss its complete grasp of the person—a grasp not only in the support of power that self-transcendence gives to him but a grasp of his whole being in joy and love. The urge to immortality is not a simple reflex of the death-anxiety but a reaching out by one's whole being
[153]
toward life. Perhaps this natural expansion of the creature alone can explain why transference is such a universal passion.
From this point of view too we understand the idea of God as a logical fulfillment of the Agape side of man's nature. Freud seems to have scorned Agape as he scorned the religion that preached it. He thought that man's hunger for a God in heaven represented everything that was immature and selfish in man: his helplessness, his fear, his greed for the fullest possible protection and satisfaction. But Rank understood that the idea of God has never been a simple reflex of superstitious and selfish fear, as cynics and "realists" have claimed. Instead it is an outgrowth of genuine life-longing, a reaching-out for a plenitude of meaning—as James taught us. It seems that the yielding element in heroic belongingness is inherent in the life force itself, one of the truly sublime mysteries of created life. It seems that the life force reaches naturally even beyond the earth itself, which is one reason why man has always placed God in the heavens.
We said it is impossible for man to feel "right" in any straightforward way, and now we can see why. He can expand his self-feeling not only by Agape merger but also by the other ontological motive Eros, the urge for more life, for exciting experience, for the development of the self-powers, for developing the uniqueness of the individual creature, the impulsion to stick out of nature and shine. Life is, after all, a challenge to the creature, a fascinating opportunity to expand. Psychologically it is the urge for individuation: how do I realize my distinctive gifts, make my own contribution to the world through my own self-expansion?
Now we see what we might call the ontological or creature tragedy that is so peculiar to man: If he gives in to Agape he risks failing to develop himself, his active contribution to the rest of life . If he expands Eros too much he risks cutting himself off from natural dependency, from duty to a larger creation ; he pulls away from the healing power of gratitude and humility that he must naturally feel for having been created, for having been given the opportunity of life experience.
Man this has the absolute tension of the dualism. Individuation means that the human creature has to oppose itself to the rest of nature. It creates precisely the isolation that one can't stand—and
[154]
yet needs in order to develop distinctively. It creates the difference that becomes such a burden; it accents the smallness of oneself and the sticking-outness at the same time. This is natural guilt. The person experiences this as "unworthiness" or "badness" and dumb inner satisfaction. And the reason is realistic. Compared to the rest of nature man is not a very satisfactory creation. He is riddled with fear and powerlessness .
The problem becomes how to get rid of badness, of natural guilt, which is really a matter of reversing one's position vis-à-vis the universe. It is a matter of achieving size, importance, durability: how to be bigger and better than one really is. The whole basis of the urge to goodness is to be something that has value, that endures. ... You might say that the urge to morality is based entirely on the physical situation of the creature.
Convincing, actually. But now there is no basis for genuinely held belief, and all the basis in the world for explaining away other
creatures' genuinely-held beliefs as
based entirely on the[ir]
physical situation
.
Man is moral because he senses his true situation and what lies in store for him, whereas other animals don't. He uses morality to try to get a place of special belongingness and perpetuation in the universe, in two ways. First, he overcomes badness (smallness, unimportance, finitude) by conforming to the rules made by the representatives of natural power (the transference-objects); in this way his safe belongingness is assured. This too is natural: we tell the child when he is good so that he doesn't have to be afraid. Second, he attempts to overcome badness by developing a really valuable heroic gift, becoming extra-special.
Do we wonder why one of man's chief characteristics is his tortured dissatisfaction with himself, his constant self-criticism? It is the only way he has to overcome the sense of hopeless limitation inherent in his real situation. Dictators, revivalists, and sadists know that people like to be lashed with accusations of their own basic unworthiness because it reflects how they truly feel about themselves . The sadist doesn't create a masochist; he finds him ready-made. Thus people are offered one way of overcoming unworthiness: the chance to idealize the self, to lift it onto truly heroic levels. In this way man sets up the complementary dialogue with himself that is natural to his condition. He criticizes himself be-
[155]
cause he falls short of the heroic ideals he needs to meet in order to be a really imposing creation.
You can see that man wants the impossible: He wants to lose his isolation and keep it at the same time. He can't stand the sense of separateness, and yet he can't allow the complete suffocating of his vitality . He wants to expand by merging with the powerful beyond that transcends him, yet he wants while merging with it to remain individual and aloof, working out his own private and smaller-scale self-expansion. But this feat is impossible because it belies the real tension of the dualism. One obviously can't have merger in the power of another thing and the development of one's personal power at the same time, at any rate not without ambivalence and a degree of self-deception. But one can get around the problem in one way: one can, we might say, "control the glaringness of the contradiction." You can try to choose the fitting kind of beyond, the one in which you find it most natural to practice self-criticism and self-idealization. In other words, you try to keep your beyond safe . The fundamental use of transference, of what we could better call "transference heroics," is the practice of a safe heroism. In it we see the reach of the ontological dualism of motives right into the problem of transference and heroism, and we are now in a position to sum up this matter.
Transference as the Urge to Higher Heroism The point of our brief discursus on ontological motives is to make compellingly clear how transference is connected to the foundations of organismic life. We can now understand fully how wrong it would be to look at transference in a totally derogatory way when it fulfills such vital drives toward human wholeness. Man needs to infuse his life with value so that he can pronounce it "good." The transference-object is then a natural fetishization for man's highest yearnings and strivings. Again we see what a marvelous "talent" transference is. It is a form of creative fetishism, the establishment of a locus from which our lives can draw the powers they need and want. What is more wanted than immortality-power? How wonder-
[156]
ful and how facile to be able to take our whole immortality-striving and make it part of a dialogue with a single human being. We don't know, on this planet, what the universe wants from us or is prepared to give us. We don't have an answer to the question that troubled Kant of what our duty is, what we should be doing on earth. ... What is more natural, then, than to take this unspeakable mystery and dispel it straightaway by addressing our performance of heroics to another human being, knowing thus daily whether this performance is good enough to earn us eternity. If it is bad, we know that it is bad by his reactions and so are able to instantly change it. ...
If transference heroics were safe heroism we might think it demeaning. Heroism is by definition defiance of safety. But the point that we are making is that all the strivings for perfection, the twistings and turnings to please the other, are not necessarily cowardly or unnatural. What makes transference heroics demeaning is that the process is unconscious and reflexive, not fully in one's control. Psychoanalytic therapy directly addresses itself to this problem. Beyond that, the other person is man's fate and a natural one. He
[157]
is forced to address his performance to qualify for goodness to his fellow creatures, as they form his most compelling and immediate environment, not in the physical or evolutionary sense..., but more in the spiritual sense. Human beings are the only things that mediate meaning, which is to say that they give the only human meaning we can know. ...
The meaning of this need for other men to affirm oneself was seen beautifully by the theologian Martin Buber. He called it "imagining the real": seeing in the other person the self-transcending life process that gives to one's self the larger nourishment it needs. In terms of our earlier discussion we could say that the transference object contains its own natural awesomeness, which infects us with the significance of our own lives if we give in to it. Paradoxically, then, transference surrender to the "truth of the other," even if only in his physical being, gives us a feeling of heroic self-validation. No wonder that Jung could say that it is "impossible to argue away."
No wonder too, for a final time, that transference is a universal passion. It represents a natural attempt to be healed and to be whole, through heroic self-expansion in the "other." Transference represents the larger reality that one needs, which is why Freud and Ferenczi could already say that transference represents psycho-
[158]
therapy, the "self-taught attempts on the patient's part to cure himself." People create the reality they need in order to discover themselves . The implications of these remarks are perhaps not immediately evident, but they are immense for a theory of the transference. If transference represents the natural heroic striving for a "beyond" that gives self-validation and if people need this validation in order to live, then the psychoanalytic view of transference as simply unreal projection is destroyed. Projection is necessary and desirable for self-fulfillment. Otherwise man is overwhelmed by his loneliness and separation and negated by the very burden of his own life. ... Technically we say that transference is a distortion of reality. But now we see that this distortion has two dimensions: distortion due to the fear of life and death and distortion due to the heroic attempt to assure self-expansion and the intimate connection of one's inner self to surrounding nature. In other words, transference reflects the whole of the human condition and raises the largest philosophical question about that condition.
Ernest Becker
The Denial of Death
(1973)
[159]CHAPTER EIGHT
Otto Rank and the Closure of
Psychoanalysis on Kierkegaard
...
[161] In case we are inclined to forget how deified the romantic love object is, the popular songs continually remind us. ... These songs reflect the hunger for real experience, a serious emotional yearning on the part of the creature. The point is that if the love object is divine perfection, then one's own self is elevated by joining one's destiny to it . One has the highest measure for one's ideal-striving; all of one's inner conflicts and contradictions, the many aspects of guilt—all these one can try to purge in a perfect consummation with perfection itself. This becomes a true "moral vindication in the other." ...
Understanding this, Rank could take a great step beyond Freud. Freud thought that modern man's moral dependence on another was a result of the Oedipus complex. But Rank could see that it was the result of a continuation of the causa-sui project of denying creatureliness. ...
[162]
... Sexuality, which Freud though was at the heart of the Oedipus complex, is now understood for what it really is: another twisting and turning, a groping for the meaning of one's life. If you don't have a God in heaven, an invisible dimension that justifies the visible one, then you take what is nearest at hand and work out your problems on that .
As we know from our own experience this method gives great and real benefits. Is one oppressed by the burden of his life? Then he can lay it at his divine partner's feet. ... Is one weighted down by the guilt of his body, the drag of his animality that haunts his victory over decay and death? But this is just what the comfortable sex relationship is for: in sex the body and the consciousness of it are no longer separated; the body is no longer something we look at as alien to ourselves. As soon as it is fully accepted as a body by the partner, our self-consciousness vanishes;...
But we also know from experience that things don't work so smoothly or unambiguously. The reason is not far to seek: it is right at the heart of the paradox of the creature. Sex is of the body, and the body is of death. As Rank reminds us, this is the meaning of the Biblical account of the ending of paradise, when the discovery of sex brings death into the world. As in Greek mythology too, Eros and Thanatos are inseparable; death is the natural twin brother of sex. Let us linger on this for a moment because it is so central to
[163]
the failure of romantic love as a solution to human problems and is so much a part of modern man's frustration. When we say that sex and death are twins, we understand it on at least two levels. The first level is philosophical-biological. Animals who procreate, die. Their relatively short life span is somehow connected with their procreation. Nature conquers death not by creating eternal organisms but by making it possible for ephemeral ones to procreate. Evolutionarily this seems to have made it possible for really complex organisms to emerge in the place of simple—and almost literally eternal—self-dividing ones.
But now the rub for man. If sex is a fulfillment of his role as an animal in the species, it reminds him that he is nothing himself but a link in the chain of being, exchangeable with any other and completely expendable in himself. Sex represents, then, species consciousness and, as such, the defeat of individuality, of personality. But it is just this personality that man wants to develop: the idea of himself as a special cosmic hero with special gifts for the universe. He doesn't want to be a mere fornicating animal like any other—this is not a truly human meaning... From the very beginning, then, the sexual act represents a double negation : by physical death and of distinctive personal gifts . ... With the complex codes for sexual self-denial, man was able to impose the cultural map for personal immortality over the animal body. He brought sexual taboos into being because he needed to triumph over the body, and he sacrificed the pleasures of the body to the highest pleasure of all: self-perpetuation as a spiritual being through all eternity. ...
This explains why people chafe at sex, why they resent being reduced to the body, why sex to some degree terrifies them: it represents two levels of the negation of oneself. Resistence to sex is
[164]
a resistance to fatality. Here Rank has written some of his most brilliant lines. He saw that the sexual conflict is thus a universal one because the body is a universal problem to a creature who must die . One feels guilty toward the body because the body is a bind, it overshadows our freedom. Rank saw that this natural guilt began in childhood and led to the anxious question of the child about sexual matters. He wants to know why he feels guilt; even more, he wants the parents to tell him that his guilt feeling is justified. ... The questions about sex that the child asks are thus not—at a fundamental level—about sex at all. They are about the meaning of the body, the terror of living with a body. ... He is asking about the ultimate mystery of life, not about the mechanics of sex. ...
[165]
After this reminder of the fundamental problems of the child and the adult..., I hope we can better understand the roots of Rank's critique of the "romantic" psychological type that has emerged in modern times. It then becomes perfectly clear what he means when he says that "personality is ultimately destroyed by and through sex." In other words the sexual partner does not and cannot represent a complete and lasting solution to the human dilemma. The partner represents a kind of fulfillment in freedom from self-consciousness and guilt; but at the same time he represents the negation of one's distinctive personality. We might say the more guilt-free sex the better, but only up to a certain point. In Hitlerism, we saw the misery that resulted when man confused two worlds, when he tried to get a clear-cut triumph over evil, a perfection in this world that could only be possible in some more perfect one. Personal relationships carry the same danger of confusing the real facts of the physical world and the ideal images of spiritual realms . The romantic love "cosmology of two" may be an ingenious and creative attempt, but because it is still a continuation of the causa-sui project in this world, it is a lie that must fail. If the partner becomes God he can just as easily become the Devil ; the reason is not far to seek. For one thing, one becomes bound to the object in dependency. One needs it for self-justification. One can be utterly dependent whether one needs the object as a source of strength, in a masochistic way, or whether one needs it to feel one's own self-expansive strength, by manipulating it sadistically. In either case one's self-development is restricted by the object, absorbed by it. It is too narrow a fetishization of mean-
[166]
ing, and one comes to resent it and chafe at it. If you find the ideal love and try to make it the sole judge of good and bad in yourself, the measure of your strivings, you become simply the reflex of another person. You lose yourself in the other, just as obedient children lose themselves in the family. No wonder that dependency, whether of the god or the slave in the relationship, carries with it so much underlying resentment. ...
... No human relationship can bear the burden of godhood, and the attempt has to take its toll in some way on both parties. The reasons are not far to seek. The thing that makes God the perfect spiritual object is precisely that he is abstract —as Hegel saw. He is not a concrete individuality, and so He does not limit our development by His own personal will and needs . When we look for the "perfect" human object we are looking for someone who allows us to express our will completely, without any frustration or false notes. We want an object that reflects a truly ideal image of ourselves. But no human object can do this;...
...
[168]
Rank saw too, with the logic of his thought, that the spiritual burdens of the modern love relationship were so great and impossible on both partners that they reacted by completely despiritualizing or depersonalizing the relationship. The result is the Playboy mystique: over-emphasis on the body as a purely sensual object. ...we can quickly conclude how self-defeating this solution is because it brings us right back to the dreaded equation of sex with inferiority and death, with service to the species and the negation of one's distinctive personality, the real symbolic heroism. No wonder the sexual mystique is such a shallow creed... No wonder too that the people who practise it become just as confused and despairing as the romantic lovers. To want too little from the love object is as self-defeating as to want too much .
...
[169] Sometimes, it is true, Rank seems so intent on calling our attention to problems that transcend the body that one gets the impression that he failed to appreciate the vital place that it has in our relationships to others and to the world. But that is not at all true. The great lesson of Rank's depreciation of sexuality was not that he played down physical love and sensuality, but that he saw— like Augustine and Kierkegaard —that man cannot fashion an absolute from within his condition , that cosmic heroism must transcend human relationships . ...
...people need a "beyond," but they reach for the nearest one; this gives them the fulfillment they need but at the same time limits and enslaves them. ...
[170]
... Most people play it safe: they choose the beyond of standard transference objects like parents, the boss, or the leader; they accept the cultural definition of heroism and try to be a "good provider" or a "solid" citizen. ... Most people live this way, and I am hardly implying that there is anything false or unheroic about the standard cultural solution to the problems of men. It represents both the truth and the tragedy of man's condition: the problem of the consecration of one's life, the meaning of it, the natural surrender to something larger—these driving needs that inevitably are resolved by what is nearest at hand.
Women are particularly caught up in this dilemma, that the now surging "feminine liberation movement" has not yet conceptualized. Rank understood it, both in its necessary aspect and in its constrictive one. The woman, as a source of new life, a part of nature, can find it easy to willingly submit herself to the procreative role in marriage, as a natural fulfillment of the Agape motive. At the same time, however, it becomes self-negating or masochistic when she sacrifices her individual personality and gifts by making the man and his achievements into her immortality-symbol. The Agape surrender is natural and represents a liberating self-fulfillment; but the reflexive internalization of the male's life role is a surrender to one's own weakness, a blurring of the necessary Eros motive of one's own identity. The reason that women are having such trouble disentangling the problems of their social and female roles from that of their distinctive individualities is that these things are intricately confused. The line between natural self-surrender, in wanting to be a part of something larger, and masochistic or self-negating surrender is thin indeed, as Rank saw. The problem is further complicated by something that women — like everyone else —are loathe to admit : their own natural inability to stand alone in freedom . This is why almost everyone consents to earn his immortality in the popular ways mapped out by societies everywhere, in the beyonds of others and not their own.
[175] If [the critic] thinks Rank is not hard-headed or empirical enough it is because he has not really come to grips with the heart of Rank's whole work—his elaboration of the nature of neurosis. This is Rank's answer to those who imagine that he stopped short in his scientific quest or went soft out of personal motives. Rank's understanding of the neurotic is the key to his whole thought. It is of vital importance for a full post-Freudian understanding of man and at the same time represents the locus of the intimate merger of Rank's thought with Kierkegaard's, on terms and in language that Kierkegaard himself would have found comfortable. ...
[176]
CHAPTER NINE
The Present Outcome of Psychoanalysis
Rank wrote about neurosis all through his work, a line or a paragraph here, a page or two there; and he gave many different and even contradictory definitions of it. Sometimes he made it seem universal and normal, at other times he saw it as unhealthy and private; sometimes he used the term for small problems of living, at others he used it to include actual psychosis. This elasticity of Rank's is not due to confused thinking: the fact is...that neurosis sums up all the problems of a human
[177]
life. But Rank could have helped his own work enormously by putting conceptual order into his insight on mental illness. ...
Neurosis has three independent aspects. In the first place it refers to people who are having trouble living with the truth of existence; it is universal in this sense because everybody has some trouble living with the truth of life and pays some vital ransom to that truth. In the second place, neurosis is private because each person fashions his own peculiar stylistic reaction to life. Finally, beyond both of these is perhaps the unique gift of Rank's work: that neurosis is also historical to a large extent, because all the traditional ideologies that disguised and absorbed it have fallen away and modern ideologies are just too thin to contain it. So we have modern man: increasingly slumping onto analysts' couches, making pilgrimages to psychological guru-centers and joining therapy groups. ...
[178]
... We cannot repeat too often the great lesson of Freudian psychology: that repression is normal self-protection and creative self-restriction—in a real sense, man's natural substitute for instinct. Rank has a perfect, key term for this natural human talent: he calls it "partialization" and very rightly sees that life is impossible without it. What we call the well-adjusted man has just this capacity to partialize the world for comfortable action. ...the "normal" man bites off what he can chew and digest of life, and no more. ...men aren't built to be gods, to take in the whole world; they are built like other creatures, to take in the piece of ground in front of their noses. Gods can take in the whole of creation because they alone can make sense of it... But as soon as a man lifts his nose from the ground and starts sniffing at eternal problems like life and death, the meaning of a rose or a star cluster—then he is in trouble. ...
... In order to function normally, man has to achieve from the beginning a serious constriction of the world and of himself. We can say that the essence of normality is the refusal of reality . What we call neurosis enters precisely at this point: Some people have more trouble with their lies than others .
[179]
... Generally speaking, we may call neurotic any life style that begins to constrict too much, that prevents free forward momentum, new choices, and growth that a person may want and need. For example, a person who is trying to find his salvation only in a love relationship but who is being defeated by this too narrow focus is neurotic. ... In terms we used earlier we could say that his "safe" heroics is not working out; it is choking him, poisoning him with the dumb realization that it is so safe that it is not heroic at all. To lie to oneself about one's own potential development is another cause of guilt. It is one of the most insidious daily inner gnawings a person can experience. Guilt, remember, is the bind that man experiences when he is humbled and stopped in ways that he does not understand, when he is overshadowed in his energies by the world. But the misfortune of man is that he can experience this guilt in two ways: as bafflement from without and from within—by being
[180]
stopped in relation to his own potential development. Guilt results from unused life, from "the unlived in us."
...
[182] ...how the problem of neurosis can be laid out along the lines of the twin ontological motives: on the one hand, one merges with the world around him and becomes too much a part of it and so loses his own claim to life . On the other hand, one cuts oneself off from the world in order to make one's own complete claim and so loses the ability to live and act in the world on its terms . As Rank put it, some individuals are unable to separate and others are unable to unite. ... The neurotic represents precisely "an extreme at one end or the other"; he feels that one or the other is a burden.
...
[183] It may seem courageous to take in the whole world, instead of just biting off pieces and acting on them, but as Rank points out, this is also precisely a defense against engagement in it:
. . . . this apparent egocentricity originally is just a defense mechanism against the danger of reality. . . . [The neurotic] seeks to complete his ego constantly . . . without paying for it.To live is to engage in experience at least partly on the terms of the experience itself. One has to stick his neck out in the action without any guarantees about satisfaction or safety. One never knows how it will come out or how silly he will look, but the neurotic type wants these guarantees. ...
We can see that neurosis is par excellence the danger of a symbolic animal whose body is a problem to him. Instead of living biologically, then, he lives symbolically. Instead of living in the part-way that nature provided for he lives in the total way made possible by symbols . One substitutes the magical, all-inclusive world of the self for the real, fragmentary world of experience. Again, in this sense, everyone is neurotic, as everyone holds back from life in some ways and lets his symbolic world-view arrange things: this is what cultural morality is for. In this sense, too, the artist is the most neurotic because he too takes the world as a totality and makes a largely symbolic problem out of it .
Time for a clarification of the word "symbolic," and also an inventory of the "symbolic"-ness of different "art"-forms, no?
[186] From all this we can see how interchangably we can talk about neurosis, adolescence, normality, the artist—with only varying degrees of difference or with a peculiar additive like "talent" making all the difference. Talent itself is usually largely circumstantial , the result of luck and work, which makes Rank's view of neurosis true to life. Artists are neurotic as well as creative; the greatest of them can have crippling neurotic symptoms and can cripple those around them as well as by their neurotic demands and needs. ... There is no doubt that creative work is itself done under a compulsion often indistinguishable from a purely clinical obsession. In this sense, what we call a creative gift is merely the social license to be obsessed . And what we call "cultural routine" is a similar license: the proletariat demands the obsession of work in order to keep from going crazy. I used to wonder how people could stand the really demonic activity of [so many odd jobs]... The answer is so simple that it eludes us: the craziness of these activities is exactly that of the human condition. They are "right" for us because the alternative is natural desperation. The daily madness of these jobs is a repeated vaccination against the madness of the asylum. Look at the joy and eagerness with which workers return from vacation to their compulsive routines.
There is something to this. I can vouch for that. But he does risk flattening out the distinction between welcome diversion and wage slavery!
...
[187] Rank makes a special type out of the hypersensitive, open neurotic; and if we put him on the schizoid continuum this is probably true. But it is very risky to try to be hard and fast about types of personality; there are all kinds of blends and combinations that defy precise compartmentalization. ...if we say that the average man narrows down "just about right," we have to ask who this average man is. He may avoid the psychiatric clinic, but somebody around has to pay for it. ... Even if the average man lives in a kind of obliviousness of anxiety, it is because he has erected a massive wall of repressions to hide the problem of life and death. His anality may protect him, but all through history it is the "normal, average men" who, like locusts, have laid waste to the world in order to forget themselves .
Wasn't the point made in the very opening that culture itself, by this time, has evolved to do a pretty good job of insulating many types of people from that
reality
which must otherwise be repressed? Hence that the seeming profusion of
average men
owes something more to structure and less to agency? Also that "reality" in this case need not break through anything so powerful as "repression" but in fact meets no readymade resistance at all when,
circumstantially (we might say this here as also with
talent
above), it inevitably asserts itself after a long and blissful absence? And hence that this as much as anything, at least now if not also
all throughout history
, explains the normie-as-locust
?
[188] Some people are more sensitive to the lie of cultural life, to the illusions of the causa-sui project that others are so thoughtlessly and trustingly caught up in. The neurotic is having trouble with the balance of cultural illusion and natural reality; the possible horrible truth about himself and the world is seeping into his consciousness. ...
...the neurotic isolates himself from others, cannot engage freely in their partialization of the world, and so cannot live by their deceptions about the human condition. He lifts himself out of the "natural therapy" of everyday life, the active, self-forgetful engagement in it; and so the illusions that others share seem unreal to him. This is forced. Neither can he, like the artist, create new illusions. ... Man must always imagine and believe in a "second" reality or a better world than the one that is given him by nature. In this sense, the neurotic symptom is a communication about truth: that the illusion that one is invulnerable is a lie. ...
[189] ... The neurotic opts out of life because he is having trouble maintaining his illusions about it, which proves nothing less than that life is possible only with illusions.
And so, the question for the science of mental health must become an absolutely new and revolutionary one, yet one that reflects the essence of the human condition: On what level of illusion does one live? ...we must remind ourselves that when we talk about the need for illusion we are not being cynical. True, there is a great deal of falseness and self-deception in the cultural causa-sui project, but there is also the necessity of this project . Man needs a "second" world, a world of humanly created meaning, a new reality that he can live, dramatize, nourish himself in. "Illusion" means creative play at its highest level. Cultural illusion is a necessary ideology of self-justification, a heroic dimension that is life itself to the symbolic animal. To lose the security of heroic cultural illusion is to die—that is what "deculturation" of primitives means and what it does. It kills them or reduces them to the animal level of chronic fighting and fornication. ... Many of the older American Indians were relieved when the Big Chiefs in Ottawa and Washington took control and prevented them from warring and feuding. It was a relief from the constant anxiety of death for their loved ones, if not for themselves. But they also knew, with a heavy heart, that this eclipse of their traditional hero-systems at the same time left them as good as dead.
So, the illusion business...
Giving the Devil's Advocate the floor for a moment, dare I suggest that there must be an opening here, somewhere, for something like escape(ism); this not only in its current/colloquial usage but also in specific and direct opposition NOT to "reality" but to "illusion", opposition to precisely the kind of "illusion" Becker is on about here.
As against the notion of creating "symbolic" reality-substitutes, there is the (opposing!!) notion of merely taking one's mind off of reality WITHOUT (necessarily)
creating illusions of reality,
dealing in meaning or symbol,
consciously denying anything in particular about the fundamental
trembling-ness
of one's own (humanity's general) condition.
This trembling condition, the basic existential dread of human existence, or whatever we're calling it at the moment...
Seems to me that Becker takes the "universal"-ity of this condition to (also) indicate that it is constant throughout the conscious life experience. Similarly, it is often said that men think about sex every 8 seconds or some such thing. Being one myself, I find that the reality this saying seeks to describe is very much real, but also that rendering it in this fashion is misleading, as if men could not concentrate on anything for more than 8 seconds without becoming distracted from all conceivable tasks-at-hand but the one named. The point is more than a formality, since this does seem to be precisely the accusation of the more strident recourses to the 8-second rule.
In quite similar fashion, escapism rarely means anything as simple as its derivation would suggest. The "escape" here is not an escape from universal matters like existential dread, rather from particular ones like mindfulness of the environment or the ability to name one's U.S. Representative. This is escape with the hope (perhaps the intention) of permanent withdrawal from important social or cultural obligations. I am deliberately presenting the concept one-sidedly in order to make a point. Not all deployments of "escapist" are like this, but those many that are have something to tell us: namely that "escape" could as easily mean something more like "relax" as like "deny." And that distinction, for whatever it is worth, is lost a bit in the course of Becker's argument if we are reading with the eye of a living, breathing artist hoping to salvage something from among the wreckage of our own "hero system." Ignoring something is not quite/necessarily the same as denying it. And I would put Becker's "illusions" in the deny category; not necessarily the same for those immortality projects which deal in diversion or escape.
Of course it is unsatisfying to advocate quite so bluntly for mere diversion. Essentially it is a return of the nose to the ground after having raised it for a good while. Besides having clear downsides, this is easier said than done.
I am merely looking for some way, any way, around the enshrining of "illusion" per se as a necessary way of living, because this seems totally untenable nowadays. It seems to be creating problems for us faster than it can solve them.
[190]Neurosis as Historical
Our third general approach to the problem of neurosis is that of the historical dimension. It is the most important of all, really, because it absorbs the others. We saw that neurosis could be looked at at a basic level as a problem of character and, at another level, as a problem of illusion, of creative cultural play. The historical level is a third level into which these two merge. The quality of cultural play, of creative illusion, varies with each society and historical period. In other words, the individual can more easily cross the line into clinical neurosis precisely where he is thrown back on himself and his own resources in order to justify his life. ... If history is a succession of immortality ideologies, then the problems of men can be read directly against those ideologies—how embracing they are, how convincing, how easy they make it for men to be confident and secure in their personal heroism. What characterizes modern life is the failure of all traditional immortality ideologies to absorb and quicken man's hunger for self-perpetuation and heroism. Neurosis today is a widespread problem because of the disappearance of convincing dramas of heroic apotheosis of man . The subject is summed up succinctly in Pinel's famous observation on how the Salpêtriére mental hospital got cleared out at the time of the French Revolution. All the neurotics found a ready-made drama of self-transcending action and heroic identity . It was as simple as that. ...
[191]
Rank saw that this hyper-self-consciousness had left modern man to his own resources, and he called him aptly "psychological man." It is a fitting epithet in more than one sense. Modern man became psychological because he had become insulated from protective collective ideologies. He had to justify himself from within himself. But he also became psychological because modern thought itself evolved that way when it developed out of religion. The inner life of man had always been portrayed traditionally as the area of the soul. But the 19th century scientists wanted to reclaim this last domain of superstition from the Church. ... They gradually abandoned the word "soul" and began to talk about the "self" and to study how it develops in the child's early relationship with his mother. The great miracles of language, thought, and morality could now be studied as social products and not divine interventions. It was a great breakthrough in science that culminated only with the work of Freud; but it was Rank who saw that this scientific victory raised more problems than it solved. Science thought that it had gotten rid forever of the problems of the soul by making the inner world the subject of scientific analysis. But few wanted to admit that this work still left the soul perfectly intact as a word to explain the inner energy of organisms, the mystery of the creation and sustenance of living matter. It really doesn't matter if we discover that man's inner precepts about himself and his world, his very self-consciousness in language, art, laughter, and tears, are all socially built into him. We still haven't explained the inner forces of evolution that have led to the development of an animal capable of self-consciousness, which is what we still must mean by "soul"—the mystery of the meaning of organismic awareness, of the inner dynamism and pulsations of nature. From this point of view the hysterical reaction of 19th-century believers against Darwin only shows the thinness and unimaginativeness of their faith. They were not open to plain and ordinary awe and wonder; they took life too much for granted; and when Darwin stripped them of their sense of "special wondrousness" they felt as good as dead.
But the triumph of scientific psychology had more equivocal
[192]
effects than merely leaving intact the soul that it set out to banish. When you narrow down the soul to the self, and the self to the early conditioning of the child, what do you have left? You have the individual man, and you are stuck with him. I mean that the promise of psychology, like all of modern science, was that it would usher in the era of the happiness of man, by showing him how things worked, how one thing caused another. Then, when man knew the causes of things, all he had to do was to take possession of the domain of nature, including his own nature, and his happiness would be assured. But now we come up against the fallacy of psychological self-scrutiny that Rank, almost alone among the disciples of Freud, understood. The doctrine of the soul showed man why he was inferior, bad, and guilty; and it gave him the means to get rid of that badness and be happy. Psychology also wanted to show man why he felt this way; the hope was that if you found men's motives and showed to man why he felt guilty and bad, he could then accept himself and be happy. But actually psychology could only find part of the reason for feelings of inferiority, badness, and guilt— the part caused by the objects —trying to be good for them, fearing them, fearing leaving them, and the like. We don't want to deny that this much is a lot. It represents a great liberation from what we could call "false blindness," the conflicts artificially caused by one's own early environment and the accidents of birth and place. As this research reveals one part of the causa-sui lie, it does unleash a level of honesty and maturity that puts one more in control of oneself and does make for a certain level of freedom and the happiness that goes with it.
But now the point that we are driving at: early conditioning and conflicts with objects, guilt toward specific persons, and the like are only part of the problem of the person. The causa-sui lie is aimed at the whole of nature , not only at the early objects. As the existentialists have put it, psychology found out about neurotic guilt or circumstantial, exaggerated, unscrutinized personal guilts ; but it did not have anything to say about real or natural creature guilt . It tried to lay a total claim on the problem of unhappiness, when it had only a part-claim on the problem. ...
[194] ... There is no way to answer Rank's devastating relativization of modern psychology. We have only to look around at the growing number of psychological gurus in the marketplace in order to get the lived historical flavor of the thing. Modern man started looking inward in the 19th century because he hoped to find immortality in a new and secure way. He wanted heroic apotheosis as did all other historical men—but now there is no one to give it to him except the psychological guru. He created his own impasse. In this sense, as Rank said (with what has to be a touch of ironic humor): psychotherapists "are, so to say, the neurotic's product due to his illness." Modern man needs a "thou" to whom to turn for the spiritual and moral dependence, and as God was in eclipse, the therapist has had to replace Him... For generations now, the psychoanalysts, not understanding this historical problem, have been trying to figure out why the "termination of the transference" in therapy is such a devilish problem in many cases. Had they read and understood Rank, they would quickly have seen that the "thou" of the therapist is the new God who must replace the old collective ideologies of redemption. As the individual cannot serve as God he must give rise to a truly devilish problem.
...
[198] the plight of modern man: a sinner with no word for it or, worse, who looks for the word for it in a dictionary of psychology and thus only aggravates the problem of his separateness and hyper-consciousness. ...
Health as an Ideal
... Men avoid clinical neurosis when they can trustingly live their heroism in some kind of self-transcending drama. Modern man lives his contradictions for the worse, because the modern condition is one in which convincing dramas of heroic apotheosis, of creative play, or of cultural illusion are in eclipse. ...
[199] ... The myth-ritual complex is a social form for the channelling of obsessions. We might say that it places creative obsession within the reach of everyman... This function is what Freud saw when he talked about the obsessive quality of primitive religion and compared it to neurotic obsession. But he didn't see how natural this was, how all social life is the obsessive ritualization of control in one way or another . It automatically engineers safety and banishes despair by keeping people focussed on the noses in front of their faces. ... As Goethe put it, we must plunge into experience and then reflect on the meaning of it. All reflection and no plunging drives us mad; all plunging and no reflection, and we are brutes. Goethe wrote maxims like these precisely at the time when the individual lost the protective cover of traditional society and daily life became a problem for him. He no longer knew what were the proper doses of experience. This safe dosage of life is exactly what is prescribed by traditional custom, wherein all the important decisions of life and even its daily events are ritually marked out. Neurosis is the contriving of private obsessional ritual to replace the socially-agreed one now lost by the demise of traditional society . ...
It is one thing to imagine this "cure" [a "living illusion" to replace those that have been lost], but it is quite another thing to "prescribe" it to modern man. How hollow it must ring in his ears. For one thing, he can't get living myth-ritual complexes...on a prescription from the corner pharmacy. He can't even get them in mental hospitals or therapeutic communities. The
[200]
modern neurotic cannot magically find the kind of world he needs, which is one reason he tries to create his own. In this very crucial sense neurosis is the modern tragedy of man; historically he is an orphan.
A second reason for the hollowness of our prescription... If there are no ready-made traditional world-views into which to fit oneself with dependency and trust, religion becomes a very personal matter—so personal that faith itself seems neurotic, like a private fantasy and a decision taken out of weakness. The one thing modern man cannot do is what Kierkegaard prescribed: the lonely leap into faith, the naïve personal trust in some kind of transcendental support for one's life. This support is now independent of living external rituals and customs: the church and the community do not exist, or do not carry much conviction. This situation is what helps make faith fantastic. In order for something to seem true to man, it has to be visibly supported in some way—lived, external, compelling. Men need pageants, crowds, panoplies, special days marked off on calendars—an objective focus for obsession,...
A third problem is that modern man is the victim of his own disillusionment; he has been disinherited by his own analytic strength. The characteristic of the modern mind is the banishment of mystery, of naïve belief, of simple-minded hope. We put the accent on the visible, the clear, the cause-and-effect relation, the logical... We know the difference between dreams and reality, between facts and fictions, between symbols and bodies. But right away we can see that these characteristics of the modern mind are
[201]
exactly those of neurosis. What typifies the neurotic is that he "knows" his situation vis-à-vis reality. He has no doubts; there is nothing you can say to sway him, to give him hope or trust. He is a miserable animal whose body decays, who will die... It was G.K. Chesterton who kept alive the spirit of Kierkegaard and naïve Christianity in modern thought, as when he showed with such style that the characteristics the modern mind prides itself on are precisely those of madness. There is no one more logical than the lunatic , more concerned with the minutiae of cause and effect. Madmen are the greatest reasoners we know, and that trait is one of the accompaniments of their undoing. All their vital processes are shrunken into the mind. What is the one thing they lack that sane men possess? The ability to be careless, to disregard appearances, to relax and laugh at the world. They can't unbend, can't gamble their whole existence, as did Pascal on a fanciful wager. They can't do what religion has always asked: to believe in a justification of their lives that seems absurd. The neurotic knows better: he is the absurd, but nothing else is absurd; it is "only too true." But faith asks that man expand himself trustingly into the nonlogical, into the truly fantastic. This spiritual expansion is the one thing that modern man finds most difficult, precisely because he is constricted into himself and has nothing to lean on, no collective drama that makes fantsy seem real because it is lived and shared.
Let me hasten to assure the reader that I am not developing an apologia for traditional religion but only describing the impoverishment of the modern neurotic and some of the reasons for it. ... As we have learned from Huizenga and more recent writers like Josef Pieper and Harvey Cox, the only secure truth men have is that which they themselves create and dramatize. The upshot of this whole tradition of thought is that it
[202]
teaches us once and for all that childlike foolishness is the calling of mature men. Just this way Rank prescribed the cure for neurosis: as the "need for legitimate foolishness." The problem of the union of religion, psychiatry, and social science is contained in this one formula.
We said earlier that the question of human life is: on what level of illusion does one live? This question poses an absolutely new question for the science of mental health, namely: What is the "best" illusion under which to live? Or, what is the most legitimate foolishness? If you are going to talk about life-enhancing illusion, then you can truly try to answer the question of which is "best." You will have to define "best" in terms that are directly meaningful to man, related to his basic condition and his needs. I think the whole question would be answered in terms of how much freedom, dignity, and hope a given illusion provides. These three things absorb the problem of natural neurosis and turn it to creative living.
Beautiful. But even such big-picture, seemingly noncontroversial values as
freedom, dignity, and hope
have proven impossible to nail down as universals. When/how can we be sure we have outflanked all possible
relativizations? Either someone will be right and someone else wrong, or else even "hope," e.g., is a chimera, even when everything else about the illusion-du-jour seems to be in Beckerian order.
We have to look for the answer to the problem of freedom where it is most absent: in the transference, the fatal and crushing enslaver of men. The transference fetishizes mystery, terror, and power; it holds the self bound in its grip. Religion answers directly to the problem of transference by expanding awe and terror to the cosmos where they belong. It also takes the problem of self-justification and removes it from the objects near at hand. ... Our life ceases to be a reflexive dialogue with the standards of our wives, husbands, friends, and leaders and becomes instead measured by standards of the highest heroism, ideals truly fit to lead us on and beyond ourselves. In this way we fill ourselves with independent values, can make free decisions, and, most importantly, can lean on powers that really support us and do not oppose us.
The parallel with Lasch's "impersonal public order" is striking. The differences among the "public" democratic order and any "private" religious ones are also bound to be striking and meaningful; and, I would conjecture, fatal to Becker's project here, for there is also something lethal in transcending the "standards" of one's immediate social surroundings in favor of some "illusion"-ary belief system.
Ditto with "expanding awe and terror to the cosmos." Some people arrive there unprompted, others cannot have the proverbial Fear of God put into them even by the most violent threats to their physical safety. There would seem to be little hope of everyone (perhaps even most people) achieving (or being thought capable of achieving) anything like what is being laid out here, and the relative fitness or unfitness for this achievement would seem quite oblique to the scales of neuroticism, "mental health," etc.
And yet, there are bits and pieces, at least, of the
prescription
which art can provide. The weight of tradition can be suffocating and/or it can look absurd to outsiders, but there is no denying that it does have precisely the above effect on its truest believers.
[205] If we are talking about the "best" ideal, then we should also talk about the costs of lesser ideals. What is the toll taken on the human personality by a failure to fully meet the twin ontological needs of man? ... Rank posed the basic question: he asked whether the individual is able at all "to affirm and accept himself from himself." But he quickly sidestepped it by saying that it "cannot be said." Only the creative type can do this
[206]
to some extent, he reasoned, by using his work as a justification for his existence. ... I think [this] can be answered as Rank himself elsewhere answered it...: even the creative type should ideally surrender to higher powers than himself . It was Jung, with his analytical penetration, who saw also the reason, which is that the unusual person takes his transference projections back into himself. As we said in the last chapter, one reason for his creativity is that he sees the world on his own terms and relies on himself. But this leads to a dangerous kind of megalomania because the individual becomes too full with his own meanings. Furthermore, if you don't fetishize the world by transference perceptions, totalities of experience put a tremendous burden on the ego and risk annihilating it. The creative person is too full both of himself and of the world . Again, as the creative person has the same personality problems as the neurotic and the same biting off of the wholeness of experience, he needs some kind of resolution in a new and greater dependency—ideally a freely chosen dependency, as Rank said.
Ernest Becker
The Denial of Death
(1973)
[208]CHAPTER TEN
A General View of Mental Illness
...
[213] even if one is a very guilty hero he is at least a hero in the same hero-system. The depressed person uses guilt to hold onto his objects and to keep his situation unchanged. Otherwise he would have to analyze it or be able to move out of it and transcend it. Better guilt than the terrible burden of freedom and responsibility, especially when the choice comes too late in life fore one to be able to start over again. Better guilt and self-punishment when you cannot punish the other—when you cannot even dare to accuse him, as he represents the immortality ideology with which you have identified. If your god is discredited, you yourself die;...
...
[215] the woman's experience of a repetition of castration at menopause is a real one—not in the narrow focus that Freud used, but rather in the broader sense of Rank, the existentialists, and Brown. ...menopause simply reawakens the horror of the body, the utter bankruptcy of the body as a viable causa-sui project... The woman is reminded in the most forceful way that she is an animal thing; menopause is a sort of "animal birthday" that specifically marks the physical career of degeneration. ... To paraphrase Goethe's aphorism, death doesn't keep knocking on her door only to be ignored (as men ignore their aging), but kicks it in the show himself full in the face.*
[footnote]
* We might interject here that from this point of view, one of the crucial projects of a person's life, of true maturity, is to resign oneself to the process of aging. It is important for the person to gradually assimilate his true age, to stop protesting his youth, pretending that there is no end to his life. ...[216]
... One must, so to speak, work himself out of his own system. By a study of these dynamics we see how important it is for man to resign himself to his earthly condition, his creatureliness; and we seem to have put full scientific closure on James's early insight on the place of inner emotional collapse in personal growth... We might say that in this sense Freud developed the dynamics for the total resignation that he could not himself quite manage. His ingenious discovery of the process called "mourning labor" can now be understood as basic to the resignation of the person himself. ... We can also better understand how cultural forces conspire to produce menopausal depression in any society that lies to the person about the stages of life, that has no provision in its world-view for the mourning of one's creatureliness, and that does not provide some kind of larger heroic design into which to resign oneself securely...
...
[230]
The Problem of Personal Freedom
versus Species DeterminismMost people, then, avoid extreme fetishism because somehow they get the power to use their bodies "as nature intended." They fulfill the species role of intercourse with their partner without being massively threatened by it But when the body does present a massive threat to one's self, then, logically, the species role becomes a frightening chore , a possibly annihilating experience. If the body is so vulnerable, then one fears dying by participating fully in its acts. I think this idea sums up simply what the fetishist experiences. From this vantage point we could look at all perversion as a protest against the submergence of individuality by species standardization.
Rank developed this idea all through his work. The only way in which mankind could actually control nature and rise above her was to convert sexual immortality into individual immortality. ...
[231]
In other words, perversion is a protest against species sameness, against submergence of the individuality into the body . It is even a focus of personal freedom vis-à-vis the family, one's own secret way of affirming himself against all standardization. ...
...
[232]
Routine perversions are protests out of weakness rather than strength; they represent the bankruptcy of talent rather than the quintessence of it. ...
...
[236] Fetishism exists on a gamut running from pills all the way to furs, leather, silks, and shoes. ...men use the fabrications of culture, in whatever form, as charms with which to transcend natural reality. This is really the extension of the whole problem of childhood: the abandonment of the body as causa-sui project, in favor of the new magic of cultural transcendence . ...
[237]
... To control the body, then, it [the fetish object] must show some intimate relationship to the body—have an impress of its form, possess some of its smell,... This is why, I think, the shoe is the most common fetish. It is the closest thing to the body and yet is not the body, and it is associated with what almost always strikes fetishists as the most ugly thing: the despised foot with its calloused toes and yellowed toenails. ...it [the foot] is accompanied by its own striking and transcending denial and contrast—the shoe. ...[which] has straps, buckles, the softest leather, the most elegant curved arch, the hardest, smoothest, shiniest heel. There is nothing like the spiked heel in all of nature, I venture. In a word, here is the quintessense of cultural contrivance and contrast, so different from the body that it takes one a safe world away from it even while remaining intimately associated to it.
Also, if the fetish is a charm it has to be a very personal and secret charm... We have long known, from sociology and the writings of Simmel, how important the secret is for man. The secret ritual, the secret club, the secret formula —these create a new reality for man, a way of transcending and transforming the everyday world of nature, giving it dimensions it would not otherwise possess and controlling it in arcane ways. The secret implies, above all, power to control the given by the hidden and thus power to transcend the given —nature, fate, animal destiny. ...
The secret, in other words, is man's illusion par excellence, the
[238]
denial of the bodily reality of his destiny. No wonder man has always been in search of fountains of youth, holy grails, buried treasures—some kind of omnipotent power that would instantly reverse his fate and change the natural order of things. ...
The final characteristic of mysterious rituals is that they be dramatized... They stage a complicated drama in which their gratification depends on a minutely correct staging of the scene; any small detail or failure to conform to the precise formula spoils the whole thing. ... The fetishist prepares for intercourse in just the right way to make it safe. ... This pattern sums up the whole idea of ritual—and again, of all of culture: the manmade forms of things prevailing over the natural order and taming it, transforming it, and making it safe.
It is unfortunate (is that putting it strongly enough?) that "homosexuality" and "tranvestitism" are here taken to be mere "perversions" and "fetishes." Certainly there is a massive confounding factor here vis-a-vis
secrecy
.
Are there actual "perversions" and "fetishes" which operate in the above-given ways? I would certainly think so.
[240] somewhere we have to draw the line between creativity and failure [the immediately preceding example is foot-binding], and nowhere is this line more clear than in fetishism. The anal protest of culture can be self-defeating, especially if we like
[241]
our women to walk or if we want to relate to them as full human beings. That is precisely what the fetishist cannot do. Secret magic and private dramatization may be a hold on reality, the creation of a personal world, but they also separate the practitioner from reality, just as cultural contrivances do on a more standardized level. Greenacre has understood this very acutely, remarking that the secret is Janus-faced, a subterfuge that weakens the person's relationships to others.
...
[247] If, then, sado-masochism reflects the human condition, the acting out of our twin ontological motives, we can truly talk about honest masochism, or mature masochism, exactly as Rank did in his unusual discussion in Beyond Psychology. ... [Freud] was so impressed by the intensity, depth, and universality of sadism and masochism that he termed them instincts. ...[he saw] these drives as remnants of an evolutionary condition and
[248]
as tied to specific sexual appetites. Rank, who saw more truly, could transform sadism and masochism from clinically negative to humanly positive things. The maturity of masochism, then, would depend on the object toward which it was directed, on how much in possession of himself the mature masochist was. In Rank's view, a person would be neurotic not because he was masochistic but because he was not really submissive, but only wanted to make believe that he was.
...
[251] The desire to affirm oneself and to yield oneself are, after all, very neutral: we can choose any path for them, any object, any level of heroics. The suffering and the evil that stems from these motives are not a consequence of the nature of the motives themselves, but our stupidity about satisfying them. ...
[Rank in a 1937 letter]... I began to think that it [stupidity] is even more powerful than badness, meanness—because many actions or reactions that appear mean are simply stupid and even calling them bad is a justification.Finally, then, we can see how truly inseparable are the domains of psychiatry and religion, as the both deal with human nature and the ultimate meaning of life. To leave behind stupidity is to become aware of life as a problem of heroics, which inevitably becomes a reflection about what life ought to be in its ideal dimenstions. From this point of view we can see that the perversions of "private religions" are not "false" in comparison to "true religions." They are simply less expansive, less humanly noble and responsible . All living organisms are condemned to perversity, to the narrowness
[252]
of being mere fragments of a larger totality that overwhelms them, which they cannot understand or truly cope with—yet must still live and struggle in. We must still ask, then,...what kind of perversity is fitting for man?
Ernest Becker
The Denial of Death
(1973)
[255]CHAPTER ELEVEN
Psychology and Religion:
What Is the Heroic Individual?
...
[259] I am talking matter-of-factly about some of the surest giants in the history of humanity only to say that in the game of life and death no one stands taller than any other,... My point is that for man not everything is possible. What is there to choose between religious creatureliness and scientific creatureliness? The most one can achieve is a certain relaxedness, an openness to experience that makes him less of a driven burden on others. And a lot of this depends on how much talent he has, how much of a daimon is driving him; it is easier to lay down light burdens than heavy ones. How does a man create from all his living energies a system of thought, as Freud did, a system directed wholly to the problems of this world, and then just give it up to the invisible one? How, in other words, can one be a saint and still organize scientific movements of world-historical importance? How does one lean on God and give over everything to Him and still stand on his own feet as a passionate human being? These are not rhetorical questions, they are real ones that go right to the heart of the problem of "how to be a man"—a problem that no one can satisfactorily advise anyone else on, as the wise William James knew. The whole thing is loaded with ambiguity impossible to resolve. As James said, each person sums up a whole range of very personal experiences so that his life is a very unique problem needing very individual kinds of solutions. Kierkegaard had said the same thing when he answered those who objected to his life style: he said it was singular because it was the one singularly designed to be what he needed in order to live; it is as simple and as final as that.
...
[262] [Norman O.] Brown is not the first to claim to see that evolution of the human animal is some kind of mishap; he has prominent predecessors... , and now he has to be included with them for the nonsense as well as the good things they have written. How can we say that evolution has made a mistake with man, that the development of
[263]
the forebrain, the power to symbolize, to delay experience, to bind time, was not "intended" by nature and so represents a self-defeat embodied in an improbable animal? The ego, on the contrary, represents the immense broadening of experience and potential control, a step into a true kind of sub-divinity in nature. Life in the body is not "all we have" if we have an ego. And the ego represents, as far as we can judge, a natural urge by the life force itself toward an expansion of experience, toward more life. If the urge toward more life is an evolutionary blunder, then we are calling into question all of creation and fitting it into the narrow mold of our own preferences about what "more-life" ought to be. Admittedly, when evolution gave man a self, an inner symbolic world of experience, it split him in two , gave him an added burden. But this burden seems to be the price that had to be paid in order for organisms to attain more life, for the development of the life force on the furthest reach of experience and self-consciousness. Brown claims that the "reunification of the ego and the body is not a dissolution but a strengthening of the human ego." But this one phrase in passing rings hollow because it is truly empty chatter that avoids facing everything we know about the ego. To talk about a "new man" whose ego merges wholly with his body is to talk about a subhuman creature, not a superhuman one.
The ego, in order to develop at all, must bind time, must stop the body. In other words, the kind of new man that Brown himself wants would have to have an ego in order to experience his body, which means that the ego has to disengage itself from the body and oppose it. That is another way of saying that the child must be blocked in his experience in order to be able to register that experience. If we don't "stop" the child he develops very little sense of himself, he becomes an automaton, a reflex of the surface of his world playing upon his own surface. Clinically we have huge documentation for this character type whom we call the psychopath; phenomenologically we have understood this since Dewey's Experience and Nature. Brown's whole thesis falls, then, on a twin failure: not only on his failure to understand the real psychodynamics of guilt, but also his turning his back on how the child registers experience on his body: the need to develop in a dualistic way in order to be a rich repository of life.
[264]
For a thinker of Brown's breadth and penetration these failures are rather uncanny, and we realize them with a sense of reluctance, of unwillingness to find such glaring lapses in what is really a thinker of heroic dimensions. I am less upset when I find similar lapses in Marcuse, who is a much less daring reinterpreter of Freud but who puts forth a similar call for a new kind of unrepressed man. On the one hand Marcuse calls for a revolution of unrepression because he knows that it is not enough to change the structure of society in order to bring a new world into being; the psychology of man also has to be changed. But on the other hand, he admits that unrepression is impossible, because there is death: "The brute fact of death denies once and for all the reality of a non-repressive existence." The closing pages of his book are a realistic and regretful admission that the ego has to spread itself beyond the pleasures of the body in order for men to be men. But the dedicated social revolutionary who wants a new world and a new man more than anything else can't accept the reality that he himself sees. He still believes in the possibility of some kind of "final liberation," which also rings like the hollow, passing thought that it is. Marcuse even turns his back wholly on living experience and gets carried away by his abstractions: "Men can die without anxiety if they know that what they love is protected from misery and oblivion [by the new utopian society]." As if men could ever know that,...
Why do brilliant thinkers become so flaccid, dissipate so carelessly their own careful arguments? Probably because they see their task as a serious and gigantic one: the critique of an entire way of life; and they see themselves in an equally gigantic prophetic role: to point to a way out once and for all, in the most uncompromising terms. This is why their popularity is so great: they are prophets and simplifiers . Like Brown, Marcuse wants a sure indicator of alienation, a focal point in nature, and finds it in the ideology and fear of death. Being a true revolutionary he wants to change this in his lifetime , wants to see a new world born. He is so committed to this fulfillment that he cannot allow himself to stop in midstream and follow out the implication of his own reservations on unrepres-
[265]
sion, his own admissions about the inevitable grip of death; fear of death is obviously deeper than ideology. To admit this would make his whole thesis ambiguous—and what revolutionary wants that? He would have to put forth a program that is not totally revolutionary, that allows for repression, that questions what men may become, that sees how inevitably men work against their own better interests, how they must shut out life and pleasure, follow irrational hero-systems—that there is a demonism in human affairs that even the greatest and most sweeping revolution cannot undo. With an admission like this Marcuse would be an anomaly—a "tragic revolutionary"—and would dissipate his role as a straighforward prophet. Who can expect him to do that?
There is no point in lingering on the fallacies of the revolutionaries of unrepression; one could go on, but everything would come back to the same basic thing: the impossibility of living without repression. No one has argued this impossibility with more authority and style than Philip Rieff in his recent work, and so far as I can see it should lay the matter to rest. He turns the whole movement on end: repression is not falsification of the world, it is "truth"—the only truth that man can know, because he cannot experience everything. Rieff is calling us back to basic Freudianism, to a stoical acceptance of the limits of life, the burdens of it and of ourselves. In a particularly beautiful phrase, he puts it this way:
The heaviest crosses are internal and men make them so that, thus skeletally supported, they an bear the burden of their flesh. Under the sign of this inner cross, a certain inner distance is achieved from the infantile desire to be and have everything.Rieff's point is the classical one: that in order to have a truly human existance there must be limits; and what we call culture or the superego sets such limits. Culture is a compromise with life that makes human life possible. He quotes Marx's defiant revolutionary phrase: "I am nothing and should be everything." For Rieff this is the undiluted infantile unconscious speaking. Or, as I would prefer to say with Rank, the neurotic consciousness—the "all or nothing" of the person who cannot "partialize" his world. One bursts out in boundless megalomania, transcending all limits, or bogs down into
[266]
wormhood like a truly worthless sinner. There is no secure ego balance to limit the intake of reality or to fashion the output of one's own powers.
If there is a tragic limitation in life there is also possibility. What we call maturity is the ability to see the two in some kind of balance into which we can fit creatively. As Rieff put it: "Character is the restrictive shaping of possibility." It all boils down, again, to the fact that the prophets of unrepression simply have not understood human nature ; they envisage a utopia with perfect freedom from inner constraint and from outer authority. This idea flies in the face of the fundamental dynamism of unfreedom that we have discovered in each individual: the universality of transference. This fact is hardly lost on Rieff, who realizes that men need transference because they like to see their morality embodied, need some kind of points of support in the endless flux of nature:
Abstractions will never do. God-terms have to be exemplified. . . . Men crave their principles incarnate in enactable characters, actual selective mediators between themselves and the polytheism of experience.This failure to push the understanding of psychodynamics to its limits is the hurdle that none of the utopians can get over; it finally vitiates their best arguments. ...
...[in seeking to "abolish death," e.g.] the modern utopians continue the one-sided Enlighten-
[267]
ment dream. Condorcet had already had the identical vision in 1794:
. . . . a period must one day arrive when death will be nothing more than the effect either of extraordinary accidents, or of the slow and gradual decay of the vital powers: and that the duraion of the interval between the birth of man and his decay will have itself no assignable limit.But Choron offers a caution on this vision that goes right to heart of it and demolishes it: that the "postponement of death is not a solution to the problem of the fear of death . . . there still will remain the fear of dying prematurely." The smallest virus or the stupidest accident would deprive a man not of 90 years but of 900—and would be then 10 times more absurd . Condorcet's failure to understand psychodynamics was forgivable, but not Harrington's today. If something is 10 times more absurd it is 10 times more threatening. In other words, death would be "hyperfetishized" as a source of danger, and men in the utopia of longevity would be even less expansive and peaceful than they are today!
I see this utopia in one way resembling the beliefs of many primitive societies. They denied that death was the total end of experience and believed instead that it was the final ritual promotion to a higher form of life. This meant too that invisible spirits of the dead had power over the living, and if someone died prematurely it was thought to be the result of malevolent spirits or the breach of taboos. Premature death did not come as an impersonal accident. This reasoning meant that primitive man put the highest priority on ways to avoid bad will and bad action, which is why he seems to have circumscribed his activities in often compulsive and phobic ways.
It's impolite but unavoidable to observe here a certain resonance with the ultra-modern, politically centrist Progressive, with scientific rationality standing in for "primitive" animism, to be sure, but leaving all else here, somehow, intact. The point being (donning Becker's hat for a moment) not that rationality is no better or no different than irrationality but that the human motivations underlying the relationship to death remain unchanged under either (or any other) epistemological regime.
Rationality per se is, in this instance, merely another vehicle in the desperate lurch to outrun fate, this time not by abandoning control to spirits and demons but by forcibly wresting control from nature. The only problem being that human beings are not good stewards even of perfect rationality: we "satifice" for the nearest-at-hand way too often. And Becker has mentioned and explained this too, earlier on, reaching similar conclusions as Kahnemann et al by way of totally different scientific (pseudoscientific?) avenues.
...
[275] The fusion of psychology and religion is thus not only logical, it is necessary if the religion is to work. There is no way of standing on one's own center without outside support, only now this support is made to seem to come from the inside. The person is conditioned to function under his own control, from his own center, from the spiritual powers that well up within him. Actually, of course, the support comes from the transference certification by the guru that what the disciple is doing is true and good. Even reconditioning body-therapies like that of the once-noted F.M. Alexander today liberally sprinkle their therapy with ideas from Zen and cite their affinity to people like Gurdjieff. There seems no way to get the body to reintegrate without giving it some kind of magical sustaining power; at least, there is no better way to win full discipleship to a religion than by making it frankly religious.
...
[276]
...there is no need for us to take up the metaphysical aspects of this problem. It is now the center of a passionate and at the same time coolly intellectual review by some of our best minds... It can all be summed up in the simplest and sharpest terms: how can an ego-controlled animal change his structure; how can a self-conscious
[277]
creature change the dilemma of his existence? There is simply no way to transcend the limits of the human condition or to change the psychological structural conditions that make humanity possible. What can it mean for something new to emerge from such an animal and triumph over his nature? Even though men have repeated such a notion since the most ancient times and in the most subtle and weightiest ways, even though whole movements of social action as well as thought have been inspired by such ideas, still they are mere fancy...
If psychotherapists and scientists lapse into metaphysics so easily, we should not blame theologians for doing the same. But ironically, theologians today are often the most sober about immanence and its possibilities. Consider Paul Tillich: he too had his metaphysic of New Being... But Tillich had fewer illusions about this New Being than most of the psychotherapeutic religionists. He saw that the idea was actually a myth, an ideal that might be worked toward and so partly realized. It was not a fixed truth about the insides of nature. This point is crucial. And he so honestly put it: "The only argument for the truth of this
[278]
Gospel of New Being is that the message makes itself true." Or, as we would say in the science of man, it is an ideal-typical enjoinder.
I think the whole question of what is possible for the inner life of man was nicely summed up by Suzanne Langer in the phrase "the myth of inner life." She used this term in reference to the experience of music, but it seems to apply to the whole metaphysic of the unconscious, of the emergence of new energies from the heart of nature. But let us quickly add that this use of the term "myth" is not meant to be disparaging or to reflect simply "illusion." As Langer explained, some myths are vegetative, they generate real conceptual power, real apprehension of a dim truth, some kind of global adumbration of what we miss by sharp, analytic reason.
I am developing a fondness for this general idea. Tellingly, I am most fond of it regarding the things I know the least about. Meanwhile, everyone is an expert in
the experience of music
, and so it is the same old
dim truths
of the essentially literary orientation that are clung to dimly. This gives me pause. More to the point, perhaps, Rank himself drops plenty of bread crumbs that lead away from from the pillars of literary epistemology, so there is a peculiar irony that the exaltation of the
vegetative
"myth" would merely lead us back to where we started.
Most of all, as William James and Tillich have argued, beliefs about reality affect people's real actions: they help introduce the new into the world. Especially is this true for beliefs about man, about human nature, and about what man may yet become. If something influences our efforts to change the world, then to some extent it must change that world. This helps explain one of the things that perplex us about psychoanalytic prophets like Erich Fromm; we wonder how they can so easily forget about the dilemmas of the human condition that tragically limit man's efforts. The answer is, on one level, that they have to leave tragedy behind as part of a program to awaken some kind of hopeful creative effort by man. Fromm has nicely argued the Deweyan thesis that, as reality is partly the result of human effort, the person who prides himself on being a "hard-headed realist" and refrains from hopeful action is really abdicating the human task. This accent on human effort, vision, and hope in order to help shape reality seems to me largely to exonerate Fromm from the charges that he really is a "rabbi at heart" who is impelled to redeem man and cannot let the world be. If the alternative is fatalistic acceptance of the present human condition, then each of us is a rabbi—or had better be.But once we say this, once we make a pragmatic argument for creative myth, it does not let us off the hook so easily about the nature of the real world. It only makes us more uncomfortable with the therapeutic religionists . If you are going to have a myth of New Being, then, like Tillich, you have to use this myth as a call to the
[279]
highest and most difficult effort—and not to simply joy. A creative myth is not simply a relapse into comfortable illusion; it has to be as bold as possible in order to be truly generative .
Well, sure. The literary imperative is far too
comfortable
. But for a time it was radical. We can't just keep trying to outrun the old ideologies with newer,
bolder
ones.
...
[281] the second great problem raised by the therapeutic revolution, namely, So What? Even with numerous groups of really liberated people, at their best, we can't imagine that the world will be any pleasanter or less tragic a place. It may even be worse in still unknown ways. As Tillich warned us, New Being, under the conditions and limitations of existence, will only bring into play new and sharper paradoxes, new tensions, and more painful disharmonies—a "more intense demonism." Reality is remorseless because gods do not walk upon the earth; and if men could become noble repositories of great gulfs of nonbeing, they would have even less peace that we oblivious and driven madmen have today. Besides, can any idea of therapeutic revolution touch the vast masses of this globe,...? When one lives in the liberation atmosphere of Berkeley, California, or in the intoxication of small doses of unconstruction in a therapeutic group in one's home town, one is living in a hothouse atmosphere that shuts out the reality of the rest of the planet, the way things really are in this world. It is this therapeutic megalomania that must quickly be seen through if we are not to be perfect fools.
...
[283] The soberest conclusion that we could make about what has actually been taking place on the planet for about three billion years is that it is being turned into a vast pit of fertilizer. But the sun distracts our attention, always baking the blood dry, making things grow over it,...
Science and religion merge in a critique of the deadening of perception of this kind of truth, and science betrays us when it is willing to absorb lived truth all into itself. Here the criticism of all behaviorist psychology, all manipulations of men, and all coercive utopianism comes to rest. These techniques try to make the world other than it is, legislate the grotesque out of it, inaugurate a "proper" human condition. The psychologist Kenneth Clark...[recently] called for a new kind of chemical to deaden man's aggressiveness and so make the world a less dangerous place. The Watsons, the Skinners, the Pavlovians—all have their formulas for smoothing things out. Even Freud—Enlightenment man that he was, after all—wanted to see a saner world and seemed willing to absorb lived truth into science if only it were possible. He once mused that in order to really change things by therapy one would have to get at the masses of men; and that the only way to do this would be to mix the copper of suggestion into the pure gold of psychoanaysis. In other words, to coerce, by transference, a less evil world. But Freud knew better, as he gradually came to see that the evil in the world is not only in the insides of people but on the outside, in nature—which is why he became more realistic and pessimistic in his later work.
The problem with all the scientific manipulators is that somehow they don't take life seriously enough ; in this sense, all science is "bourgeois," an affair of bureaucrats. I think that taking life seriously means something such as this: that whatever man does on this planet has to be done in the lived truth of the terror of creation,
[284]
of the grotesque, of the rumble of panic underneath everything. Otherwise it is false. Whatever is achieved must be achieved from within the subjective energies of creatures, without deadening, with the full exercise of passion, of vision, of pain, of fear, and of sorrow. How do we know—with Rilke—that our part of the meaning of the universe might not be a rhythm in sorrow? Manipulative, utopian science, by deadening human sensitivity, would also deprive men of the heroic in their urge to victory. And we know that in some very important way this falsifies our struggle by emptying us, by preventing us from incorporating the maximum of experience. It means the end of the distinctively human—or even, we must say, the distinctively organismic.
Stray thought 11/22/22: the basic idea that "we're the heroes of our own story" makes it dubious for anyone to sincerely endorse an affirmatively Darwinistic worldview, since this would mean truly giving oneself over to the good of the group at one's own expense (quite literally the expense of death, at least as the Darwinist slant is most crudely rendered). This is what I was trying to get at in calling out Taleb's Darwinist posturing. If there's a suitable passage from Becker, it would be worth appending it to that Taleb thread. https://fickleears.blogspot.com/2021/04/chasing-over-hundred-prize.html
I've forgotten for sure, but the search query was probably something like:
"becker denial death site:blogspot.com"
At some point I wrote:
early assessment from blogspotting:
people are REALLY hung up on the psa/Freud stuff, as if Becker's argument(s) here are called into question in direct proportion to how (admittedly profoundly) the psa enterprise as a whole can be called into question. This would be worth teasing apart. The too-obvious rejoinder is that Becker's main source is a dissident and the first use this dissident work it put to is to show the "closure" of psa upon a PRIOR body of knowledge. But there must be more to it also.
This from donemmerichnotes seems like a good/useful summary of DoD's "companion" work
Also,
this from socratific.
This from New Savanna hints at some actual scientific research in Becker's wake
The terror management theorists turned Becker’s sweeping analysis into a scientific theory amenable to empirical testing. ...
...hundreds of further experiments have explored the much broader effects that thinking about death has on our desire to achieve some form of immortality. For example, studies have demonstrated that thinking about death increases our desire to have children and even to name our children after ourselves. It also increases our desire for fame,...
(rtwt)
Also
this
from Integral Options Cafe.
This
post from Half an Hour
responds and links to
Dave Pollard
"A Paean to Activists"
Some people think my beliefs make no sense. They tell me that if they were as pessimistic as I claim to be, they would kill themselves.
And then I tell them that I believe in the inherent good nature of every human, that I think all the problems we have created in this world are the unintended consequences of well-intentioned actions .
Then they tell me they think I’m crazy.
...
The community is at a scale within our control , and it can be rescued from stupid, unimaginative, greedy, uninformed people and the parochial systems and processes that they have put in place, and which can be changed for the better. ...
As much as I rail against corporatists and lawyers and real estate speculators and other reprobates, at the community level they’re an awful lot like us, doing what they’ve been taught is right or necessary or useful or productive or beneficial. In some cases we can educate them, persuade them, show them a better way. In other cases we need to mobilize, connect, reframe, intervene and subvert. So, to all the local activists in the world, bravo! You really do make a difference, and you are making the world a better place than it would be without you.
But if you believe that the sum of a million local efforts is somehow more than the sum of a million local efforts, I must beg to differ . For every local success there are many local failures, dozens of errors of stupidity and unimaginativeness and greed and ignorance and disinformation, that will need us to act to educate and persuade and mobilize and connect and reframe and intervene and subvert, next week and next year, to undo the damage that grows everywhere and every day. The battle of the local activist is always a heroic but rear-guard action, a minimizing of cumulative losses.
So, a scale-Becker nexus.
Commenter Jon Husband adds:
A real dyed-in-the-wool pessimist would (probably) not blog as prolifically, with as much advice and “solutions” to the problems, as do you…in my opinion. ... I think you are an activist, merely by the practice of writing regularly about the range of wicked challenges upon which you are supremely well-informed,...
Commenter David Parkinson:
One of the most surprising things I’ve learned is that a deeply pessimistic attitude is not necessarily an impediment to living a happy life and being effective. In fact, it almost strikes me as a precondition to a clear understanding of the limits of our powers and what we can reasonably expect to accomplish...
Amen.
More from Half an Hour:
the explanation for why we (as a species, as a network) die isn't that we were not "fit". It's the other way around. We evolve because we die; we do not die because we failed to evolve.
Also interesting:
I think it is uncontroversial to agree that, if there is an intervention by a third party, whether that party be a computer programmer or the hand of nature, then there will be a change in the way something learns. This is also true with students - if we feed them better, they learn better. If we give them Seroquel, there will be other changes. And we can call this learning, if we want. But it's not clear what we gain from that. Not all change is an instance of learning. The connectivist perspective, as I understand it, describes network-based changes in connectivity to explain learning. True, there is a different sort of learning that is created through the use of a sledge hammer. But that is not the sort of learning we are talking about.
And, against "the pragmatist suggestion that it doesn't matter whether or not a theory is true or right, so long as it works"...
we can (and do) talk of how to die a meaningful death. And if we just use whatever theory we want to explain these things, with no regard to whether they are right or true, then there will be cases in which it is useful (even if literally false) to speak of a meaningful death.
We might even begin to use this language to teach people (if you will) 'how to die'. Of course, they don't really need instruction in how to die - every person will accomplish this feat eventually. But we can with our theory talk about right ways and wrong ways to die. We can talk of a "fitting end" using the same language and metaphors of evolution. We can speak of a person's death being 'meaningful' if this, that or the other condition is attached to it.
This is what Dron is saying about learning. The very idea of teaching someone how to learn presupposes that there must be some purpose to learning. But really, what he means is something like 'how to meaningfully learn'. And meaningful learning presupposes a purpose. As a theory of living, the theory of 'meaningful death' is internally inconsistent. Yes, you can teach people how to live by teaching them that their death is meaningful. But such teaching can (and often does) result in people seeking death, or risking death, resulting in the ending of their lives. A consistent theory of living would truthfully reflect that a person's death has no meaning, and that the purpose if life (if the concept has any meaning at all) has everything to do with what is done during a lifetime, and very little with the manner in which it ends.
The same is true with a theory of learning.
From where I sit, a theory of learning which tells people 'how to learn' is essentially telling them that the way to learn is to not learn. It is a way of telling them to subsume their own best interests under those stipulated by some third party (where the authority of this third party is inevitably an appear to a black box or magical mechanism).
It is, in the end, a way of saying that learning is not actually a network phenomenon at all.
Now of course we know that actual evolutionary theory is nothing like what has been described in this post at all. Actual evolutionary theory doesn't trade in needs and wants and desires - it doesn't even presuppose on the part of the species a will to live or any such motivations at all. It says, simply, that mutations occur, and that some species that mutate continue to exist, and other species do not continue to exist, and this process is what explains the diversity of life today.
If you just think of 'evolution' as a 'family of ideas' that brings together every thought and theory related to selection and survival and the rest, it's not a leap to start describing things like 'survival of the fittest' as a part of evolution, and not far from that to describing things like eugenics as a socially worthwhile activity. It's the sort of thing that happened to Nietzsche, it's the sort of thing that happened to Darwin, and it shows that actually getting the theory right matters.
More
from donemmerichnotes,
linking to
on Becker's The Birth and Death of Meaning
Becker pointed out that people view the natural sciences positively because the fruits of their investigations make us feel powerful: they enable us to take control of our environment, cure and control diseases, build better cars, better cellular phones, more potent weapons, etc, and that feels good. There are usually clear, useful, and profitable applications of knowledge gained from the natural sciences.
In contrast, by studying ourselves, the social sciences often make us feel exposed and reveal things about ourselves, our fears, our flaws and limitations that we perhaps don’t want to know. In addition, because of political, moral, and practical issues, its not always clear what we should do with the knowledge gained about ourselves.
Dare I say this dynamic is palpable even in so sober a commentator as Lasch, and certainly also in some of the drunker things I've written here. Still, with sociologies of art there is usually plenty of room for asking, "What have we actually learned here?"
The Schimel doc seems like a decent alternative to actually reading this Becker book, given some very mixed opinions of the book on Goodreads.
I do have some questions though:
Becker saw one big distinction in the type of worldview that a culture can have. It can be one in which there is either a strong belief in the invisible world (a spiritual world beyond what one can see) or one in which belief in the visible world (the physical and material world) dominates. ...
Based on anthropological evidence, Becker posited that if you believe in the invisible world then that typically becomes primary and the material world becomes secondary because the former is where the power comes from. ...
This immersion in an invisible world allows for cosmic heroism wherein your heroism is potentially on a higher plane - it is on a larger, cosmic scale because your existence is in the service of something much greater than yourself. ...
In contrast, within the visible world, people strive for material bases of self-worth and identify with more fragile things (i.e., car, job, relationships, etc.). Meaning and purpose is less shared and less grand. Because the bases of self-worth are totally material, they also have the potential to be lost or destroyed.
Somehow visible gets equated both to material and to relationships ?
The materialistic visible world focus also leads to us to think that we know everything; that we know the causes of all things; but as Otto Rank pointed out, we really don’t. For example, we think we know where babies come from. We can provide a fairly detailed answer about how the sperm fertilizes an egg, which then forms into a cell, etc. But what motivates the movement of the sperm and the dividing of the cell? What energy and design motivates and directs the transformation of a blob of cells into a complex highly differentiated organism? We are still left with the miracle of life.
... The point Becker makes is that we may be too quick to dismiss the invisible inexplicable forces because even if we accept a scientific worldview, our explanations always ultimately rest on an invisible world of power that we can not directly see or fully explain.
While I'm all for living within one's epistemological means, and for scaling back our "efforts to try and control nature" (17), the above also seems to calculatedly elide the crucial concept of predictive power, and in its place to proffer the indeed much broader-but-weaker explanatory power.
True predictive power is the rarest of epistemological elements. It does, however, manifest from time to time, and at that point, within the scope of the given enterprise, I would think that the extent of our absolute understanding of invisible forces like electromagentism, subatomic particles, and epiphenomena of relativity would be irrelevant to the properly social-psychological issues raised by Becker et al.
We think that our perceptions, beliefs, interests, values, and customs are inherently true, right, and meaningful when in fact, as already noted in the section on cultural relativity, they are largely creations by people for people that are meaningful only because we all agree that they are. ...
If you like hockey and you are lucky enough to get tickets to an Edmonton Oiler’s game, you’ll probably cheer wildly, jump out of your seat, yell and scream as if it is the most important thing in life. But would you be doing that if you were the only one in the stands watching the game?
If the apostrophe in the team name didn't give away that the writer doesn't actually know anything about sports, this last faux-rhetorical question sure does.
Admittedly, sports do seem to be taking the same relational turn as the rest of mass culture, but I would conjecture that we are not quite there yet, and we that set out on the journey more recently than dyed-in-the-wool relationalists think.
It takes so little, so infinitely little, for a person to cross the border beyond which everything loses meaning: love, convictions, faith, history. Human life—and herein lies its secret—takes place in the immediate proximity of that border, even in direct contact with it; it is not miles away, but a fraction of an inch.
Milan Kundera
And so,
coming back around to matters bearing more directly on our long-term project here,
in the assertion of Christopher Small,
e.g.,
that
"The act of musicking establishes in the place where it is happening
a set of relationships,
and it is in those relationships that the meaning of the act lies,"
we understand,
in light of Becker here,
both
the motivation for thinking so
and
the vehemence with which contrary assertions are denied.
On the one hand, we have an unparalleled capacity for terror and for understanding the human existential dilemma, and on the other hand, we have an unparalleled capacity for awe and creativity. Becker notes, however, that they are both overwhelming if left controlled -- we can’t really handle the awesomeness of reality --being a living creature among billions on a big rock full of plants and animals hurtling around one of millions of stars in a galaxy etc... so in socialization we necessarily mute the child in both directions; mute the terror and along with that, we also mute the awe.
If the world is irrevocably headed for connectivity and interdependence,
then,
the smaller the population
the lesser the anxiety.
At by least a little bit.
Just sayin'.
Becker struggles with the problem of what is the ideal meaning system, perhaps because there is no answer. ... However, Becker’s musings on this are worth thinking about. Becker notes that although religion, religious leaders, and social scientists come from very different perspectives, they converge on some basic points. They generally acknowledge human limitations and the contradictions of human existence and recognize that we need to be humble as there are things out there beyond our control -- and basic fears we all share. In addition, social scientists and religious prophets converge in their critiques of cultural fictions: they realize that most people invest in false cultural fictions in order to feel meaningful and valuable and that this leads to idol worship,...to prizing artificial things, and to defending these cultural fictions to the detriment of ourselves and others.
It is only the odder, in light of this, that Lasch, that prophet of "a sense of limits" and "a realistic appraisal of life's possibilities" as cornerstones of a just "populism", also vehemently defended certain "fictions" and sought to make a pathology of the "cool, detached, and realistic outlook on the world" which was in the process of superseding parental authority and making impossible "the affective identification of the younger generation with the older".
Becker felt that these cultural fictions lead the potentially “most free” creatures on the planet into a new kind of enslavement, that out of freedom people fashion a prison. Becker calls this symbolic reinstinctivisation. ...
One way to say this is that we give up freedom for security -- we give up the pure freedom of action to buy into a cultural worldview (or meaning system) so that we can feel secure. ...Becker’s analysis suggests we can never truly be self-reliant. Maybe that is okay,... But Becker wanted to find a way around this dilemma and considered 4 levels of power by which we can derive meaning...1. Personal meaning : “the secret hero of one’s inner scenario”...
2. Social meaning :consists of close family relations, friends, and pets
3. Secular meaning : refers to identification with something greater than ourselves...
4. Sacred meaning : the invisible and unknown sources of power, spirits and deities
... Becker argued that we rarely get to ask [where we fit into this scheme] because, when born...we lack the cognitive complexity to think of it, and by the time we mature, it has already been answered for us...
Becker then asks: What is the psychological value of the different levels of meaning? He offers these answers:1. Personal meaning : Being truly alone is unsustainable or pathological -- one can’t sustain it in the absence of social validation.
2. Social meaning: Depending on others is too limited and fragile
3. Secular meaning : This third level is typically used by most -- it is broad and grand enough to serve our needs for meaning and self-esteem, and death transcendence through symbolic immortality,... However, Becker claims it is falling short of ultimate reality and consists of living in a world of idols in which the bottom can drop out at any time.
4. Sacred meaning: Becker argued that the fourth level is the truest heroism -- cosmic heroism-- the most comforting and the one that can best serve the needs for security. With this, you link your own personal, invisible mystery of your depth and subjectivity to the highest power which is also personal, invisible, and a mystery -- and you have the possibility of literal immortality.
Well,
on which of these levels does Small's admonition operate?
And,
according to the above,
what is the particular limitation of this solution?
From Becker’s perspective, sacred meaning potentially allows for freedom from control by material and cultural influences because they are not your ultimate bases of heroism and security. Thus, spirituality can enhance individuality, self-reliance, and openness. However, there are two down sides:
1. The paradox of individuality-within-finitude is still there and haunts us. ...
2. Organized religion does not always lead to openness but can be automatic, reflexive, obsessive, and authoritarian. ...
Yep.
Becker argued that [sustain[ing] personal, spiritual faith without transforming that faith into rigid belief systems and idol worship] is very difficult to do. People tend to fall back into idol worship and can’t sustain the spiritual element. People construct statues and build churches and make distinctions..., thereby concretizing something that is really abstract. When these symbols are threatened, people respond defensively. ...people tend to protect the symbols more than the ideals the symbols were created to represent. So...Becker ends up recommending a personal spirituality not dependent on material trappings or social affiliations.
Oddly, without knowing much of anything or having thought through any of this in the ways it demands to be thought through, all it took for me to start to question the fitness of social affiliations for the weight customarily heaved onto them were some chance encounters with Social Theories Of Art. I continue to think this is an excellent lens through which to consider all of this.
He concluded by arguing that if we could sustain this, then maybe it could provide a basis for security that would lead to true openness and self-reliance.
Let's hope so.
But certain pessimistic conclusions are unavoidable.
a personal spirituality not dependent onmost certainly is, as Fox says of Lasch,
material trappings or social affiliations
cognizant of the moral opportunities with which modern subjectivitybut it is not quite so
and the liberation of the individual self had made possible,
insistent upon the need to never valorize suchIn fact, these
liberal possibilities as foundational
.
possibilitescome to look
foundational
.
we rarely get to askwhich of the
4 levels of power by which we can derive meaningwe would like to pursue
has already been answered for usthen there's no point at all
,
the psychological value of the different levels of meaning
.
individuality, self-reliance, and opennesscan only end in accusations
automatic, reflexive, obsessive, and authoritarianideology,
the service of a divine cause .
our own cultural realityis
just as arbitrary as the one we are judgingthen we might as well all go our separate ways.
,
Right on cue, from torpedo the ark:
a fantasy of immortality remains just that and, ultimately, no life matters and no great work will be remembered.
In other words, in the grand scheme of things, there is no grand scheme and Becker's privileging of religious illusion in which our animal and mortal nature is given spiritual significance - over what he dismisses as hedonistic pursuits and petty concerns - is just conventional moral prejudice
Also a link to this from THE GEMSBOK.
I'm not sure I agree with most of these criticisms, but the bit on "structuralism" may be helpful. This bit may be "reductive and dismissive," as the author grants, but goddamn it if anything less "reductive" could be halfway comprehensible.
And so, a yet further reduction:
a movement in Theory known as structuralism, whereby cultural objects...could be analyzed in terms of their overall structural content. What this often meant...was that people would approach analysis...as the search for big oppositional concepts...on which the object of analysis was apparently commenting. ...if you found the key oppositions and mapped their relationships, then you would have revealed the structure of that thing,... From a broader perspective, the project of structuralism was to discover common structures underlying all human thought and activity.
...
...critics...point out that the structures one might possibly draw in structuralist analysis are arbitrary...thus each analyzed work lacks a unifying center that holds the structure in place. Instead, there are as many possible centers that can be substituted for each other as there are possible structures...
To believe that one can map a definite, final structure for each analyzable thing is to buy into a couple very old (and very persistent) mistaken beliefs: that one can gain access to true objectivity (completely external positioning relative to an object of study) and that one can gain access to things-in-themselves (not as they are perceived by people, but as they truly are). But a human can never escape their own point-of-view, and will always only be able to see things as they appear to be.
A Rank/Becker Group from Comox Valley, BC!
Here is another useful summary of Escape From Evil.
(This was the final entry on the seventh page of search results. What more do you need to know about search engines?)
Many mentions of sports as an example of an "immortality-ideology" and of "moieties" a la Becker. I think we see less and less of this in sports today as it has become increasingly fashionable to "root for players, not for teams," i.e. as we continue to take the "relational turn" I referred to above. News flash for people veering around this turn: team sports are competed in teams, and there's no "I" in "team."
This comes from Imperfect Cognitions.
Ironic to say of a manifesto of negativity that it sounds promising or some such compliment.
Browing the archives, this caught my eye.
Can our sense of smell be a source of aesthetic perception? The majority of opinions in aesthetic studies will give you a negative verdict or ignore the sense of smell altogether. ... These reasons were largely twofold. First, aesthetic experience is commonly considered to be about features of objects, not personal preferences (Carroll 2001). In this context, the assessment of odor quality is held as being heavily subjective. Odors seem to represent phenomenological 'feels' instead of objects (Batty 2010). Second, aesthetic perception has a strong cognitive load. By contrast, olfactory percepts may not possess sufficient differentiation in their content. Rather, they are seen as presenting us with a synthetic experience of an immediate but undifferentiated sensation (Lycan 2000).
Fundamental to the aesthetic experience of odors is observational refinement. Contrary to popular opinion, we can indeed distinguish and assess different perceptual layers and qualitative dimensions in olfactory objects (like perfumes or wines). This often requires perceptual and verbal training, both involving cognitive or top-down influences. In fact, recent studies on the neural basis of smell have been increasingly supportive of these explanations, for example, regarding the impact of expertise on olfactory experience (Royet et al. 2013). In this context, I showed that an active perceptual engagement with odor objects shapes our phenomenological content, meaning that the perceptual structure between trained and untrained smellers can differ radically.
A good Populist might chafe at the top-down aspects of all this. And yet,
Overall, my argument about smell as an aesthetic sense emphasized an active, not a passive understanding of perceiving. Aesthetic perception rests on the refinement of attention in order to deliberately analyze, compare, and judge distinctive features of objects, further linking them to previous experiences.Indeed, it takes at least a minimal refinement of attention to be able to link present experiences with previous ones. Certainly this is so in an art gallery or a concert hall. But it is true everywhere else too! When anti-aesthetic deconstructionists rail against this process, they rail not merely against "refinement" but actually against the very possibility of forming the granules out of which analytic thought is built up. Which is absurd.
High-level takeaway: there is an awful lot of blogging by religious people!
Becker explicitly embraces a "dualism" which many have taken issue with. Here is something from Eastern Christian Books which touches on the d-word:
My understanding is that God created us with bodies for a reason. Man was created for an intimate relationship with the creator unlike any of the angels or heavenly hosts. The image in Genesis where God breathed life and spirit into Adam’s nostrils is the picture of a very intimate relationship.
According to scripture, this is the living temple where our creator dwells. It is washed in the sacred waters of Baptism, anointed with Holy Chrism and nourished with the Body and Blood of Christ. It is a temple beyond price. Yet, through pride and jealousy we throw away that intimate relationship and desecrate the temple daily. In the history of the early church and the Lives of the Saints we read that the faithful would “rush” to retrieve the bodies of the martyrs, often at the risk of their own lives. They would kiss and caress them, clean and anoint them and give them an honorable burial. The physical remains of the martyrs and all the saints had, and have, value beyond price. We have never thought of the body as a disposable container for the soul. We have never had a dualistic understanding of the body and spirit as separate pieces of the human puzzle. Human beings were created to be a whole being, body and soul. It is sin and death that causes the rupture. The Lord said, “My Holy One shall not see decay.” We have evidence from every age, all around the world that his words are true. All over the world there are incorrupt, often wonder-working remains of saints. Obviously, these are very valuable relics that would not be with us today if they had been destroyed by cremation. As an Orthodox Christian, my entire life is supposed to be a reflection of our Lord’s own extreme humility. It is to be lived humbly and selflessly as an offering of love. Each day I try to place my whole life completely in God’s hands and trust Him to guide me in the way wherein I should walk. I trust Him with my life, my breath and my heart beat. Can I not trust Him to properly dispose of His own earthly temple? In that regard, cremation is my final act of pride. By choosing to have my body burned, I decide what will happen to my remains, not God.
Really good discussion here from The Splintered Mind.
This from Essay-eh:
The author's idea about pursuing of happiness is simple: Don't. "The desire for more positive experience is in itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one's negative experience is itself a positive experience." ...
..."the 'backwards law' -- the idea that the more you pursue feeling better all the time, the less satisfied you become, as pursuing something only reinforces the fact that you lack it in the first place." ..."The more you want to be spiritually enlightened, the more self-centred and shallow you become in trying to get there."
... Polish psychiatrist Kazimierz Dabrowski developed the Theory of Positive Disintegration. Studying people who'd survived horrific experiences during WWII, he was surprised to learn that after the war his subjects felt more confident and grateful. They were no longer fazed "by life's trivialities and petty annoyances." This was true even though many carried lifelong emotional scars.
Manson also reports fascinating stories from the lives of famous people who overcame failure and despair, then went on to make great social contributions. Psychologist and philosopher William James turned away from suicide by deciding to accept responsibility for everything in his life. Failed university professor Ernest Becker described the psychology of human "immortality projects." On his death bed, he wrote a Pulitzer Prize winning book called The Denial of Death.
Finally,
this
from
Wit's End
is REALLY good.