Ernest Becker
The Birth and Death of Meaning
(1970)
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Chapter Four
THE INNER WORLD
Introduction to the Birth of Tragedy
"The great fundamental . . . Doctrines . . . are . . . taught so early, under such circumstances, and in such close and vital association with whatever makes or marks reality for our infant minds, that the words ever after represent sensations, feelings, vital assurances, sense of reality—rather than thoughts, or any distinct conception. Associated, I had almost said identified, with the parental Voice, Look, Touch, with the living warmth and pressure of the Mother, on whose lap the Child is first made to kneel, within whose palms its little hands are folded, and the motion of whose eyes its eyes follow and imitate—(yea, what the blue sky is to the Mother, the Mother's upraised Eyes and Brow are to the Child, the Type and Symbol of an invisible Heaven!)—from within and without, these great First Truths, these good and gracious Tidings, these holy and humanizing Spells, in the preconformity to which our very humanity may be said to consist, are so infused, that it were but a tame and inadequate expression to say, we all take them for granted."
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
(1825, p. 207)
...
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...theoretically all objects in nature have some "interiority" even though we experience only their outside. Gustav Fechner... wrote a widely read book on this topic a century ago, a book that influenced a thinker of the stature of William James. Fechner, in his scientific work, wanted to prove that there is an equal part of soul for every particle of matter—something today's laboratory psychologists conveniently forget about the great man. He said that all objects have interiority, even trees. Why not say that a tree leans on a fence because it feels weak, or soaks up water because it is thirsty; or that it grows crookedly because it is stretching toward the sun? ...
Indeed, why not say so? Apparently there is not reason not to :
mentalistic expressions from everyday language, such as thinking, knowing, believing, desiring, intending, and so on. How can we be sure that these terms are appropriate? Do they correspond to the actual intentional states held by others around us? ... According to Dennett (1983; 1987) we do not need to be sure. He argues that in order to understand phenomena in the world, one can adopt various strategies or “stances”, corresponding to different levels of theorising...
...“that fox digs a hole because it wants to build a nest” or “bird X believes that bird Y is hiding food”. Dennett argues that usage of everyday language is not problematic in such cases, as long as one keeps to the appropriate level of theorising. ... one can perfectly well make use of everyday mentalistic vocabulary as long as one is dealing with questions of some beings’ behaviour in their social environments, and not with the “lower level” mechanisms and physical processes underlying social living.
(Max van Duijn, The Lazy Mindreader, p. 35)
How very...dualistic!
... When you get up the scale to man, the great dualism of nature... is carried to its furthest extreme. And it presents a poignant problem that dogs us all our life. We come into contact with people only with our exteriors—physically and externally; yet each of us walks about with a great wealth of interior life, a private and secret self. ... The child learns very quickly to cultivate this private self because it puts a barrier between him and the demands of the world. ...it seems that the outer world has every right to penetrate into his self and that the parents could automatically do
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so if they wished... But then he discovers that he can lie and not be found out: it is a great and liberating moment, this anxious first lie—it represents the staking out of his claim to an integral inner self, free from the prying eyes of the world.
By the time we grow up we become masters at dissimulation, at cultivating a self that the world cannot probe. But we pay a price. ...we find that we are hopelessly separated from everyone else. ... We touch people on the outsides of their bodies, and they us, but we cannot get at their insides and cannot reveal our insides to them. This is one of the great tragedies of our interiority—it is utterly personal and unrevealable.
Well, don't tell that to sentimental musicians and listeners who believe in precisely this ultimate
revealability!
It's no coincidence that the medium which actually is furthest of all from revealing much of anything is not the least but most prone to fanciful ascriptions of
interior
revelation. Those "abstract" qualities of music which make even simple "communication" difficult are the same qualities which carve out a niche for this hogwash merely by failing to proffer strong enough correctives. Meanwhile, in words, as above, any idiot can see that the pretense itself is nonsensical regardless of the medium. Musical self-"communication" is then reduced to an echo chamber of clattering
exteriors
while the really interesting and personal stuff remains locked away, here as elsewhere.
Often we want to say something unusually intimate to a spouse, a parent, a friend, communicate something of how we are really feeling about a sunset, who we really feel we are—only to fall strangely and miserably flat. ... People seem to keep bumping up against each other with their exteriors and falling away from each other. ... Take even the sexual act—... ...a melting is not a communication. It is a physical overcoming of separateness, not a symbolic revelation and justification of one's interior. Many people pursue sex precisely because it is a mystique of the
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overcoming of the separateness of the inner world ; and they go from one partner to another because they can never quite achieve "it." So the endless interrogations: "What are you thinking about right now—me? Do you feel what I feel? Do you love me?"
Only during one period in our lives do we normally break down the barriers of separateness, and that is during the time that the psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan called the "pre-adolescent chumship." ... Remember that time? Sitting around on the curbstone with your friend and communicating so directly in what you are thinking and feeling,... Unhappily, the years pass and one goes into the late teens and into the career world. The "outer" or public aspect of our lives takes over:... One of the reasons that youth and their elders don't understand one another is that they live in "different worlds": the youth are striving to deal with one another in terms of their insides, the elders have long since lost the magic of the chumship. ...
...
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...
The point is, as the writer James Baldwin so well put it, "mirrors can only lie." A mirror shows only your external aspects, it stops at the face , but the face is not what one feels himself to be ... We find ourselves in the ironic situation of having to transact with others with the part of ourselves—our exteriors—that we value least. And we are all placed in the position of having to judge others on this least important aspect. ...it is like trying to appraise the books in the library of a castle by detailing the underside of the draw-bridge. ...
The Protean Self
The self is not physical, it is symbolic. It is "in" the body but it is rarely completely integrated with the body;... Consider the following touching example, an interview of Joan, aged three years, eight months;
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"Who are you?"
"Joan." (The child was well known to the interviewer and the question was designed to serve as a baseline.)
"Who is Joan?"
"Me."
"Is this Joan (pointing and touching bed alongside)?"
"No."
"Touching the various objects as we proceeded, we drew such responses as: slipper—no, sweater—no, leg—no, head—no [!] body—yes, neck—no, etc. She seemed to localize Joan quite definitely in the abdomen and lower thorax; the back was not Joan, appendages and head were described as hers, but not her . . . five days after the original exploration, a retest was made of Joan and she was found to be still in the same place, the belly and lower chest, but not in head, neck, arms, legs, nor back, nor dress, nor shoes" (Murphy, 1947, p. 483).
This example is not meant to show the misguided explorations of a child but the real perceptions of a self-reflexive animal. A person is where he believes himself to be; or, more technically, the body is an object in the field of the self. It is one of the things we inhabit.
...one of the things in which our true feelings are located, but it is not the only one, and it may not even be the principal one... Least of all is the self limited to the body. ...William James... : A man's "Me" is the sum total of all that he can call his, not only his body and his mind, but his clothes and house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends,... ...an individual's house in
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a posh neighborhood can be more a part of his self-image than his own arm—his life-pulse can be inseparable from it.
... Generally, the more anxious and insecure we are, the more we invest in these symbolic extensions of ourselves. In the United States today, ridden by social change and crisis, "desecrating the flag" has become a major offense. It is not that the flag has risen in value, but that the selves are more anxious about their own. ... You get a good feeling for what the self "looks like" in its extensions if you imagine the person to be a cylinder with a hollow inside, in which is lodged his self. Out of this cylinder the self overflows and extends into the surroundings,... ...a huge invisible amoeba spread out
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over the landscape,... Tear and burn the flag, find and destroy the flower in the book, and the amoeba screams with soul-searing pain.
Usually we extend these pseudopods not only to things we hold dear, but also to silly things;... Interior decorators confide that many people have somatic symptoms or actual nervous breakdowns when they are redecorating. ...
We call precisely those people "strong" who can withdraw a pseudopod at will from trifling parts of their identity, or especially from important ones. Someone who can say "it is only a scratch on a Ferrari,"... Financiers who can say of a several million dollar loss: "well, it's only paper." ...
...
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...
This simplified discussion of the ego and its boundaries takes us right into the heart of psychoanalytic theory, and to one of its truly great and lasting discoveries: the famous "mechanisms of defense." These mechanisms have to do, largely, with where and how the child stakes out the contents and extensions of his self. ..."introjection," or with Schilder "appersonization"—the taking of parts of other persons into our image of ourselves. Or the child places his thoughts and desires out into other persons, and we call this "projection." ...each of us is in some Ways a grotesque collage, a composite of injected and ejected parts
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over which we have no honest control. ... Little wonder that we spend our lives searching in mirrors to find out who we "really are."
Finally, the protean character of the self helps us already to understand another great fruit of psychological and psychoanalytic investigation, the "character types." We can see that people spread their selves differently, invest them in different areas; and so people derive their sense of value from different activities. ...
...
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...
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Chapter Five
SOCIALIZATION:
THE CREATION OF
THE INNER WORLD
"It is not our parents' loins, so much as our parents' lives, that enthrals and blinds us."
Thomas Traherne
(c. 1672, p. 114)
Jules Henry once observed, poetically, that among the Brazilian Indian Kaingang tribe, "Children lie like cats absorbing the delicious stroking of adults" (1941). ... Probably the basis for this clinging attachment was laid down among the mammals, and especially our subhuman primate cousins. ...there is a marked disposition among the primates to be handled and manipulated by others, most evident in the grooming instinct that allows chimps to sit stoically while others carefully examine them...
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... Clinging had survival value, and it evidently still does. René Spitz did another famous study of children in a foundling home, and he observed that the ones who got handling and closeness flourished, whereas those who got mechanical, cold, and merely sanitary and nourishing treatment did not. ...
The child is dependent on the mother not only for nutrition andnsurvival, but, as we saw, also for the discovery of himself, the symbols he learns, his perception of the world. ...
The forbidding technical word "socialization" refers to this training period, and to the fact that the child has to disentangle himself from the mother in order to function on his own as a member of a social group. ...
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... The ego as a self-governing organ can come into being only by passing through a succession of frustrations that make it possible for him to survive on his own.
And so, beginning with small early frustrations and deprivations, the child is helped to govern himself. ... ...he makes a bitter discovery: that he no longer gets the cooing support from the mother just by expressing himself... The child finds that he has to "earn" the mother's love by performing in a certain way. ... This is what Alfred Adler meant when he spoke of the child's need for affection as the "lever" of his education. The child learns to accept frustrations so long as the total relationship is not endangered. This is what the psychoanalytic word "ambivalence" so nicely covers... ...he is caught in the bind, as we all are, between new and uncertain rewards and tried and tested ones.
...
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...
The Fundamental Role of Anxiety in Child Development
... Anxiety pervades the organism when it feels completely powerless to overcome a danger. Except in the smallest of doses it is overwhelming. ... As Kurt Goldstein so well observed, the ability to withstand anxiety is heroic. Probably it is the only genuine heroism given to man.
I wonder if this ability to withstand comes down to the same illusion as does "willpower," which expertise researchers now tell us isn't a real thing. If I achieved it, maybe it wasn't a sacrifice? And if I "withstood" it, maybe it wasn't anxiety ?
...
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Kierkegaard was one of the greatest modern theorists of anxiety, and saw it as a basic response to man's condition—... Thinkers after Darwin saw anxiety as a stimulus to the growth of intellect, as something that itself grew up in evolution, and was passed on because it had survival value:...
If we combine these thoughts with the situation of the child, we can understand something of his proneness to anxiety. ...when he sees unwanted objects flushed down the toilet he has no reason to believe that he may not also be flushed away into oblivion...
Psychoanalysts have very convincingly reminded us of this world of the child, of how primitive his perceptions are. It is a
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world where the talion principle governs:... ...the major adaptation of the child is to master anxiety by controlling the conduct and situations that threatened to awaken it.
... The whole psychoanalytic theory of neurosis is, as we shall see, basically a study of how the child comes to control anxiety. ... We saw in Chapter Three that human reactivity is under the control of a unique adaptive mechanism... We noted that the ego delays responses in order to permit a richer reaction... Therefore, if the human organism is to be free of a slavish stimulus-response reactivity to the environment, it follows that the ego has to overcome the most overwhelming stimulus of all: the anxiety of object-loss. How does the ego do this? Simply by becoming, as Freud postulated, the site of anxiety, that is, by housing it for the organism. ...
Freud understood this process of the ego taking over anxiety as a sort of "vaccination" of the total organism. As the central perceptual sphere learns what the organism gets anxious about, it uses an awareness of this anxiousness in small doses, to regulate behavior. ...
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... The "anxieties of the ego's world" are at first the anxieties the child experiences with his trainers. A good many of them are the anxieties of his trainers. And so we see in microcosm how the child earns his own control, his own central perceptions, his humanness, by a fundamental adaptation to his social world. ...
The Great Debate Over Freud's View of Anxiety
As we might expect, the merger of the psychoanalytic theory of humanization with the sociological one was not smooth. The fault here was largely Freud's,... ...Freud was never clear about the nature of anxiety for the child. In his early work he saw two major sources of anxiety: the trauma of birth... ; and the fear of castration... ...the child is baffled by his world: most of all, he must not lose the mother's support, no matter how strong his dawning desires, and in order to keep that support he must fight against his own urges. Thus his major anxiety, over the loss of the protective and loving mother, is a problem stemming from his relentless search for pleasure. ...
This is why Freud's thought lingers on events that happened way back in evolution;...
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... What is crucial in the life of subhuman primates? Continual sexuality and aggressive competition between dominant males and subordinate ones... To sum up the weight of this inheritance Freud postulated a hypothetical event... —the famous Primal-Horde Theory:... Freud sometimes wrote as though he wanted us to believe that the Primal-Horde murder was an actual pre-historical event, and that the memory of it was passed down in evolution, in our genes as a racial inheritance of indelible feelings. This complex of feelings Freud termed the "Oedipus Complex"... This was the age-old human condition just waiting to spring out, unless controlled by the ego. In Freud's view, the child was right to have castration fears: he had desires that justified retribution;... The goal of psychoanalytic therapy was to get the individual to admit these universal truths to his own consciousness,... ; he would be a sadder but wiser person:...
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...
Freud... saw that the infant was not at first a real sexual competitor for the mother, but he had nevertheless the erotic drives that are part of his primate inheritance. These drives sought outlet as the child matured, in whatever way the child could "possess" the mother:... Whatever successive orifice came in contact with the succoring mother was the focus of the basic erotic desire. Thus Freud termed the infant "polymorphous perverse,"... The process of socialization was one in which the child progressed through the satisfaction of desire at each phase and zone, and then the frustration of desire at each phase. ... He has to learn to perform in a new way, getting his satisfaction by controlling himself with social symbols and new kinds of mastery, instead of expressing himself biologically. ...the parents' values become the touchstone for the child's conduct. He gets approval for a new kind of symbolic conduct and control. ...
...
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...
Now that we have briefly sketched Freud's theory of the nature of anxiety, we can pinpoint exactly where he went wrong. After some decades of observation and research there is general agreement that the infant is not driven by instincts of sexuality and destructive aggression. ... ...the Man-Apes took a step away from baboons by making new social inventions over sexuality and aggressive competition. ... There is absolutely no evidence that this new type of animal carries over the viciously competitive instincts of the subhuman primates. ...
The major revision of Freudian theory, then, is a complete carrying-out of what Freud failed to accomplish fully: an
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abandonment of phylogenetic thinking in favor of general developmental and interpersonal thinking. Anxiety is based on the child's helplessness, but this is not a helplessness in the face of instincts in its own id, but in the child's life situation and in his social world. ...
... "Be like father, but don't do like father"—as Freud put it. But this, as Adler knew, is hardly common. He saw that Freud's term "polymorphous perverse" was not correct, precisely because it reversed the order of things. The child does not bring to his relationship with the mother any basic desires that have to find their outlet at the body orifices. Rather, he brings a generalized need for physical
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closeness and support. If the family dramatizes this closeness and support while lingering on any one orifice... then we can say that the child is perverted by the adult,...
Yet "infantile sexuality" is something we observe—the question is what to make of it if it is not an autochthonous drive. ...what is at stake is not what we would be experiencing as adults, but rather the child's experience of stimulating contact with a pleasure-giving maternal omnipotence. ... The appendages of our bodies are secondary to the grandiose ambitions of our inner world and to our billowing emotions. ... The body seems to us an arbitrary delimitation of the protean psychological world of the self; it is a casing that frustrates our inner aggrandizement... This is part of the drama of a self-reflexive animal. We discover our genital appendages not always as an opportunity, but often as an alien kind of restraint: they tell us what kind of conduct we are entitled to. ...sex does not dominate the child as sex, even if it shows itself as sex, as Rank reasoned with such penetrating brilliance (see his Modern Education). The main anxieties of the child are frankly existential from the beginning,...
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...
... His natural problems are complicated by his relationship to an adult, by a process of adaptation to someone else. Technically we say that the "libido is object-oriented" rather than pleasure-oriented. We know now that a child becomes passive and "'oral" not because of a rigorous weaning from the breast, but because of a whole atmosphere... We understand that a child becomes tense, mechanical and "anal" not because of strictly scheduled toilet-training... but because of a lack of joy and spontaneity in the child's environment,...
Admittedly, by putting things this simply we do not do justice to the complex context of experience,... But it gives us something of a picturesque feeling for the adult as "perverter." The adaptation that the child makes to his early training is basically a kind of "standardized confusion" about what the world wants of him, and what is possible for him in it. ...
The crux of this confusion is that the child has only his body, he is only a body,...
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... He is not yet a fully symbolic animal. His body is the coin by which he tries to successfully transact his love relationship to his mother,... This is the reason that psychoanalysts have been concerned with facts that seem professionally precious, trivial or irrelevant—facts way back in early infancy... We have to understand these matters not as narrow questions of body zones, or as
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routine matters of child discipline that are completely forgotten in a few years,... The matter is quite important because it is part of a general reorientation of the child's whole sense of being in the world:...
...the experience of child socialization is not a narrow problem of the anxieties of the Oedipus Complex, but rather of a natural confusion in the self-body and self-other dualisms of the human condition. ...each successful humanization of an exquisitely sensitive, slowly developing higher primate infant, is also a failure in a sense. The very fact that there has at all been frustration, confusion between the body and symbols, in a hypersensitive, affection-hungry animal, leaves an undigested residue. ...
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... The child is a "museum of antiquities"—to use W. H. Gantt's fine phrase—of nervous conditionings and archaic messages that are unrelated to the straightforward experience of the adult world.
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Chapter Six
THE NEW MEANING
OF THE OEDIPUS COMPLEXThe Dispossession of the Inner World
". . . we can extend the content of the Oedipus complex to include all the child's relations to both parents . . ."
Sigmund Freud
(1931, p. 253)
...
What is Durable in Freud
...
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... Remember in Chapter Four we said that fexibility of the self was the achievement of a rare maturity: the ability to relinquish objects, reorganize the boundaries of the ego, take command of one's pseudopods and extend and withdraw them at will. It seems like a simple enough thing—why not just do it? we may ask.
The answer is that we cannot, and the reason lies in the development of the ego itself. ... ...the ego "vaccinates itself" with small doses of anxiety;... But now look what happens. The freedom from anxiety that makes possible a sort of aloof action by the human animal is bought at a price. And this price is the heaviest that an animal has to pay: namely, the restriction of experience. The ego, the unique "psychological organ" of the higher primates, develops by skewing perceptions and by limiting action . ...
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... The ego grows by a dispossession of the child's own inner world. ...
And this is the fateful paradox that we call neurosis:... The whole of psychoanalytic theory, and the genius of Freud's formulation, is summed up in one sentence,... ...the thought of the child when he becomes humanized and social, and says: "You no longer have to punish me, Father; I will punish myself now." ... ...in words the child would not admit to himself: "I am a social person because I am no longer mine; because I am yours."
The terrible conclusion that we draw from Freud's work is that the humanization process itself is the neurosis:...
When all the dust has settled around Freud's theories... they will still hold an awesome fascination and a feeling of terror,... because of the universality of the human slavery and blindness that we call neurosis. This is Freud's durable contribution, and the real meaning of the universality of the "Oedipus." Freud himself prevented us from seeing this... because he was not clear about the sources of anxiety. Another way of looking at Freud's ambiguity is to point out that he did not discover exactly what he thought he was discovering. ...
...
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... Kant had marvelled that the inner world of conscience was a miracle implanted by God; Freud wanted to show that it was a reflex of frustrated desire... Where exactly was the truth in all this? Well, we saw that Freud was wrong about the Oedipus Complex, about the motives of the human condition. The child was not born with motives but instead developed motives in interaction with his parents. ... Freud didn't discover the universal conscience of man, but instead, the universal mechanism of the implantation of consciences. With his theory of the ego and anxiety, and the body as the focus of confusion, Freud laid bare the reason that the sense of conscience was so obstinate in the face of experience and aging, why it was so deep-rooted. ... The fact that one's motives are buried deep in the unconscious does not mean that they are buried in the recesses of evolution, but instead that they are veiled by ignorance of oneself ... One's motives reside in his skewed perceptions, in the way he dispossesses himself of genuine self-reliance, in the easy way that the child learns to keep satisfying action moving by accommo-
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dating to his social world. In other words, Freud discovered conscience as limited vision and as dishonest control over oneself . This is what is awesome about his work.
The Basic Dynamics of Neurosis
And what is dishonest control, if not another word for neurotic style of living? ...
The process of socialization is characterized by one fundamental and recurring fact: the child's natural urge to move freely forward, manipulate, experiment, and exercise his own assimilative powers is continually blocked. ... Some of the time this blockage is for his own good,... But much of the time this interference takes place because of the parents' fears, because of their irritability and temper, because of their own discomfort. ... In Perls' view the process
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of identification takes place only after the child's attempt to carry through satisfying action is blocked by the parent ... As his action is stopped he literally doubles up on himself, and can no longer continue the forward momentum of energy by completing an external act. ... The only way he can keep moving is to make a compromise that allows him some kind of action, even though it is now not his own. The blockage of action in the external world has now been incorporated into his own personality;...
It is in this process of frustrated action blockage, and the ambivalence that surrounds it, that the mechanisms of defense take root with all the dishonesty about oneself and one's real satisfaction that they represent... ...he becomes dishonest as he is forced to disavow the satisfaction of his own closure on action. ...
As Adler so well put it, the child is in a position of physical
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and psychological inferiority to the adults—he is encompassed by their whole world. ... The child learns that his own vital sense of self-expansion is secondary to a broken china plate, a soiled tablecloth, a smeared wall. If he is to expand and grow in such a world he has to replace his own authentic movement with a fictional framework of value.
Even more directly, as Fromm insisted, the child's life quest is acted out in a world of power-relations: he is inferior to powers that are tyrannical in many ways. ...
If we look at neurosis in these basic terms of action blockage in a power-context in which the child has an inferior status, we can appreciate the full generality of Freud's discoveries. We can also understand an even further cause to find these discoveries morally repugnant. I mean that if slavery and blindness are what we call neurosis, and this neurosis is caused simply by a blockage of the child's independent discovery of the world according to his own pleasureful action, then traumas are not important in the causation of neurosis . Even if we avoid violent shocks , even if we are kind and loving , generous and warm, we can still create slavish and blind children . What I am saying is that the contest of power that represents child socialization is not necessarily a contest of blatant power , but more generally a contest of disguised and benign power . The child loses his aegis over himself as much by "smother love," as we know, as by any other means. Here we understand the full radicalism of psychoanalysis. As psychoanalysts have so well put it, in the simplest, most biting formula: the avoidance of external conflicts (with the parents) creates internal con-
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flicts (the neurotic de-centering, fragmentation and cluttering up of the self with alien images).
This is what makes Ronald Laing's recent work so devastating a social criticism: he has made astonishingly subtle cataloguings of the kinds of interactions and situations which strip the child of his own powers in the most benign and loving ways, all the while the parents pretending in be operating for his own good: the "double-binds"...
This is part of the "natural sense of conscience" we might say—or better, at this point, "'natural neurosis": it checks the
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child's free aegis over himself. He simply does not feel it is "proper" to assert himself freely. Often this kind of benign taming by the "proper" is conveyed by the simple atmosphere in the family. ...
There is yet a final sense in which the child loses the governance over himself, where he comes to be at the mercy of external things, and it is at the polar opposite of the ways we have been considering: it is when he is not interfered with enough, not frustrated enough . We might say that he has been stripped of the potential of his own powers by not having them sufficiently tested and hardened in the reality of the external world;... The result is that such a child is as stripped of the aegis over himself as if he had been overly prohibited: he is dependent on external things for his support and easy satisfaction and has to manipulate them reflexively in order to avoid the frustration that he never learned to tolerate. ...the mother who does not permit the child to cultivate this
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aegis by wisely teaching him the limits of his powers, the rights of others, and the natural difficulty of experience, is preventing him from becoming an individual.
From all of this we can understand one final thing about Freud and psychoanalysis: of all the things it has taught us, it has instructed us least about one of the most important—guilt. And this is logical. If Freud did not discover the nature of conscience but only the mechanism of its implantation, then he could not be correct about why people felt guilty. ... Today we understand that guilt is due to the human condition, to the sense of being bound, overshadowed, feeling powerless. And we understand this guilt in these ways: in the sense that the body is a drag on human freedom, on the limitless ambitions for movement and expansion of the inner self. ...this is what Freud sensed... , but it is hardly as specific as he wanted us to believe: ...it is rather a sense of futility, general limitation, natural inferiority. Furthermore, as the existentialists have taught us, a person can even feel guilt in relationship to the blockage of his own development:...
In the more relative sense that we have been discussing, man's social experience can lead to an immense increase in his natural guilt. If neurosis is the result of the benign blockage of free movement, then guilt can be as superficial as the interference with action,...
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...
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