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.
...
