Becker—The Denial of Death (v)

Ernest Becker
The Denial of Death
(1973)

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CHAPTER TEN

A General View of Mental Illness

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[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;...

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[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. ...

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... 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...

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The Problem of Personal Freedom
versus Species Determinism

Most 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. ...

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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. ...

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Routine perversions are protests out of weakness rather than strength; they represent the bankruptcy of talent rather than the quintessence of it. ...

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[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 . ...

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... 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

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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

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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.

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[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

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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.

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[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

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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?