Ernest Becker
The Denial of Death
(1973)
[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,... ...if the love object is divine perfection, then one's own self is elevated by joining one's destiny to it. ...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]
... 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.
... 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;... 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. ... Sex is of the body, and the body is of death. ... As in Greek mythology too, Eros and Thanatos are inseparable;...
[163]
... When we say [this], we understand it on at least two levels. The first level is philosophical-biological. Animals who procreate, die. ... Nature conquers death not by creating eternal organisms but by making it possible for ephemeral ones to procreate. ...
... If sex is a fulfillment of [man's] 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.
...
[165] 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;... ...one becomes bound to the object in dependency. ...
[166] 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. ... 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. .... 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. ... 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.
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