Ernest Becker: The Denial of Death

The Jewish-American cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker published The Denial of Death in 1973. This is not an article but a summary of the book chapter by chapter, without comment. Gendered and other language is Becker’s own. Blockquotes are Becker’s own text, not his citations. These notes are not a substitute for reading Becker’s book, which though it’s long-winded and reduces all human experience and history to psychology, is of course much richer. Along the way Becker makes some remarks on the nature of artists.

Preface

The main thesis:

the idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity – activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for man. 

Primitives celebrate death as a promotion to a higher form of life, the enjoyment of eternity. Most modern Westerners have trouble believing this. Fear of death makes human actions intelligible that are otherwise obscured.

There is today a great abundance of facts; Becker aims for a synthesis of the best thought, trying to incorporate opposing views into a broader theoretical structure. Every honest position has some truth in it, if you can find it. He thinks he has succeeded in distilling modern psychology, linking Freud back to Kierkegaard and making heavy use of the work of Otto Rank, whom Becker enthusiastically praises. Becker favours Rank over Jung because Rank is less well-known, and unlike Jung is ‘always right on the central problems’.

Chapter 1: Introduction: Human Nature and the Heroic

There is great pressure to come up with concepts that help human beings understand their condition. One is the idea of heroism. William James: ‘mankind’s common instinct for reality... has always held the world to be essentially a theatre for heroism.’ Philosophers of all ages have known it.

Our central calling, our main task on this planet, is the heroic.

Social science since Marx, and psychology since Freud, can be seen as the study of human heroism, giving us a scientific underpinning for understanding it.

Freud contributed the idea of narcissism: we are hopelessly absorbed with ourselves. At heart, no one feels he will die, only the next man. We feel immortal. This comes through our animal nature.

Through countless ages of evolution the organism has had to protect its own integrity...  If you took a blind and dumb organism and gave it self-consciousness and a name, if you made it stand out of nature and know consciously that it was unique, then you would have narcissism.

A working level of narcissism and self-esteem are inseparable. Humans live in a world of symbols and dreams; our self-worth is constituted symbolically, on an abstract idea, in the mind. Our activity can be fed into symbols and thus into immortality. The struggle for self-esteem is most open in children. Man’s tragic destiny:

he must desperately justify himself as an object of primary value in the universe; he must stand out, be a hero, make the biggest possible contribution to world life, show that he counts more than anything or anyone else.

Society is a symbolic action system, setting customs and rules for heroism. Every culture has its own hero-system through which people get timeless meaning, e.g. by building a cathedral or totem.

The hope and belief is that the things that man creates in society are of lasting worth and meaning, that they outlive or outshine death and decay, that man and his products count.

We find it hard to admit this. The main problem of human life: how empirically true is the hero system? In modern society the idea of heroism is in crisis. All our systems are myths of meaning and thus kinds of religion. Otto Rank, Kierkegaard, Freud and a couple of other authors showed us this. Hopefully knowing ourselves will ‘tilt the balance of things in our favour.’

Chapter 2: The Terror of Death

Terror of death is one of the main things that moves man, especially after Darwin. Heroism is a reflex of this terror. We admire the courage to face death, and elevate it to a cult. Religions tried to address the problem of how to deal with death. They celebrated the man who could come back from the dead, such as Christ resurrected at Easter. Since Darwin the literature on this fear – from religion, philosophy, science – has piled up.

The ‘healthy-minded’ argument says we are not born with the fear; children lack it. (But that’s only because it is too removed from their experience. It comes eventually, and the child has other anxieties e.g. dependency.) The anxieties come from nurture, not nature, and the fear is created by society to control people. It is a cultural mechanism (Moloney) or ideology (Marcuse). The people most fixated on death had bad early experiences. Why aren’t life, love and joy also basic?

Another argument is the ‘morbidly-minded’ one. Yes, experience is important, but the fear of death is natural and universal. As William James said: it is ‘the worm at the core’; Freud was of this view. We maybe can never know for sure if the fear is basic or not, but Becker sides with this view. He cites Gregory Zilboorg: death is always present in our psychology, an instinct of self-preservation behind all our functioning, that we repress this so we can live in comfort. This creates a paradox of 1) fear 2) obliviousness to the fear.

Biology and evolution are basic:

Animals in order to survive have had to be protected by fear-responses, in relation not only to other animals but to nature itself. They had to see the real relationship of their limited powers to the dangerous world in which they were immersed.

Fear had a high survival/selective value, giving us a ‘hyperanxious’ humanity. Human children can’t be sure their destructive feelings of frustration won’t result in actual effects; they have fear of their own wishes, of lack of control. They are therefore are prone to ‘inner chaos’ unknown to other animals, and have no choice but to live with it.

As we grow up we mostly get over these nightmares and the terror fades thanks to repression. Repression can use our energies creatively through ‘expansive organismic striving’.

Nature seems to have built into organisms an innate healthy-mindedness; it expresses itself in self-delight, in the pleasure of unfolding one’s capacities in the world, in the incorporation of things in that world, and in feeding on its limitless experiences. This is a lot of very positive experience, and when a powerful organism moves with it, it gives contentment.

Thus the terror can be absorbed in positive processes. A child that is well-fed and loved can feel indestructible, eternal.

His repression of the idea of his own death is made easy for him because he is fortified against it in his very narcissistic vitality.

A secure childhood tends to give a surer sense of self. Man uses techniques to make life manageable, to take refuge in other people or culture, to map out his life, so he can drive forward and not fear death. When death nears, the repression fails, the forward momentum stalls... the fear emerges again.

The ‘environmental’ and ‘innate’ viewpoints are thus different approaches to the same picture.

Chapter 3: The Recasting of Some Basic Psychoanalytic Ideas

Becker wants more detail and asks, why is the world so terrible for us?

We always knew that there was something peculiar about man, something deep down that characterised him and set him apart from other animals. 

Philosophers called it his ‘essence’, fixed deep in his core. In fact it is his paradoxical nature as half-animal, half-symbolic being. This existential paradox was introduced by Kierkegaard, who was then followed by many others. We might call it

the condition of individuality within finitude. Man has a symbolic identity that brings him sharply out of nature. He is a symbolic self, a creature with a name, a life history. He is a creator with a mind that soars out to speculate about atoms and infinity, who can place himself imaginatively at a point in space and contemplate bemusedly his own planet. This immense expansion, this dexterity, this ethereality, this self-consciousness gives to man literally the status of a small god in nature.

At the same time, man is food for worms. He is hopelessly trapped in his animal body. He sticks out of nature only to end up rotting in the ground.

It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with.

Animals are spared this and act reflexively; they don’t live with awareness of death. Humanity lives with it for a lifetime. It is an impossible situation and could drive us mad. Everything we do in our symbolic world is to deny our ‘grotesque fate’. We enter blindly on activities far removed from this reality; ‘character-traits are secret psychoses’ (Sandor Ferenczi).

The child is overwhelmed as it tries to understand a world full of symbols, frustrations, rules and challenges. Its character emerges from a struggle it is ill-equipped for and can’t understand.

His insides are full of nightmarish memories of impossible battles, terrifying anxieties of blood, pain, aloneness, darkness; mixed with limitless desires, sensations of unspeakable beauty...

The body and the self/symbols cannot be reconciled seamlessly. We pretend we are not mad so we can deny our condition.

Putting Freud into an existential framework allows his best ideas full scientific insight. E.g. Norman O. Brown reinterpreted anality = it reflects the duality of self and body. The body has demands and needs that bring him back from his flights of fancy. Having an anus and its repulsive product is strange and degrading. ‘On the highest throne in the world man sits on his arse’ (Montaigne). It represents our duality and tragedy. Hence also menstruation taboos. Someone who is ‘anal’ is trying to use culture to protect himself against death. Jonathan Swift was horrified that the sublime went with bodily functions. The miracle of humanity seems nonsensical when chained to a defecating anus – as if nature is mocking us. What bothers us is life as it is.

Freud’s Oedipus complex too needs reconfiguring. Our deep guilt is not about a narrow sexual competitiveness of wanting to possess our mother, but our horror at our animal condition. (Brown again.) Will a child be passive or active in his own destiny? The Oedipal project is to become the father of oneself i.e. to take control of one’s life. First the child is oral: the mother is everything and delivers whatever he needs. Then he is anal: he attends to his own body and wants to master the world. He turns against the parents to gain independence and bring himself up as a controller of his destiny – an impossible aim.

As the child realises he is doomed to failure, he encounters the castration complex (or penis envy in girls). The mother becomes a threat to his independence; he notices her body is very different and creates a fantasy around it as something to set himself against. The mother reveals the existence of sexes, and this makes our bodies seem arbitrary: we could easily have been born the other sex. We feel a horror at biological fact, because it undermines the idea that our bodies can be a narcissistic fortress against the world.

Sexuality is inseparable from our existential paradox. Are we our self or our body?

The child gradually learns that his freedom as a unique being is dragged back by the body and its appendages which dictate ‘what’ he is.

During sex we are pushed by our bodies into a biologically determined role, which contradicts our sense of freedom and of our real self. Our personality is dispensable during the animal act. Love allows us to have sex with the trust that our selves will not be negated.

The last Freudian staple that Becker discusses and reframes is the trauma of the ‘primal scene’ i.e. when a child sees its parents having sex. If the parents cannot transcend their bodies, how can the child? The scene is about horror of the body and the child’s inability to understand what he’s seeing.

The body, then, is one’s animal fate that has to be struggled against in some ways. At the same time it offers experiences and sensations, concrete pleasure that the inner symbolic world lacks. No wonder man is impaled on the horns of sexual problems...

Sex is bound up with our confusion over having a mind/symbols/freedom and a body/fate. We try to use it positively, to affirm privacy over society and its determinism. Some seek a personal existence through secret perversity that gets set in a mould. It must be kept secret, because society fears perversity: undermining the standard morality and behaviours is an attack on our control over death. To be socialised and ‘mature’ means to give up having a personal project and submitting oneself to society, but like the child's project, this one is impossible too: ‘maturity’ is a practiced self-deceit.

Chapter 4: Human Character as a Vital Lie

If heroism is about courage, why are we not courageous? Partly, because what we are is grafted on from outside. But it goes deeper. Abraham Maslow’s Jonah Syndrome: we fear greatness and evade the full intensity of life in case it is too much for us. Rudolf Otto: we feel awe and fear in the face of creation, and feel inferior to it.

We repress this sense of awe so that we can go about our lives. Unlike animals, humanity, the ‘impossible creature’, is aware of the universe – a great experiential burden. Again, we are gods with anuses. Human character is about self-limitation and its costs; it is a ‘vital lie’. We live by lying about ourselves and the world. Fear of knowledge of oneself (failure, inadequacy, frustration, anxiety, anality) is parallel to fear of knowledge of the world (making us feel inferior, small, weak). To feel secure we must repress.

A couple of generations after Freud, we understand humanity’s two great fears: the fear of death and the fear of life. Otto Rank based his system of thought on them, and Heidegger brought them into existential philosophy.

The whole of early experience is an attempt by the child to deny the anxiety of his emergence, his fear of losing his support, of standing alone, helpless and afraid.

To live with equanimity, the child must leave awe and fear behind and falsify his world, avoiding despair by building defences.

These defences allow him to feel a basic sense of self-worth, of meaningfulness, of power. They allow him to feel that he controls his life and his death, that he really does live and act as a willful and free individual, that he has a unique and self-fashioned identity, that he is somebody.

The lie is vital because it is necessary. We do not really control our lives, and look for support to systems of ideas and powers that transcend us. This support could be a god, a stronger person, a passion, sexual conquests, a flag, money etc that buoys us up.

We are also drawn toward things that make us anxious, to test ourselves against them. We flirt with anxiety. Symbiotic relationships give us security but we also strain against them, to be more free. We push our limits but via our screen against despair, not against despair itself: via money success or the family and so on, like playing with toys that represent the real world.

It is fateful and ironic how the lie we need in order to live dooms us to a life that is never really ours.

Our character is a defence against our condition. Poets and religious geniuses have long known: to shed the armour of character is to risk madness.

Neuroses are complicated techniques for avoiding misery, but reality is the misery.

To be reborn (Tolstoy, Péguy) without armour subjects us to terror. It is impossible to face our condition without anxiety.

On child development: Freud thought the child was an antagonist driven by frustrated innate instincts. Post-Freudians thought the child was neutral and malleable, shaped by environment and upbringing – also the Enlightenment view. Now we see the child as caught in an impossible situation and trying to survive in it. It is a corrected Freudianism with a new consciousness of the tragedy of human life. Harold Searles: schizophrenia is the inability to shut out terror, a failure to confidently deny man's real situation. Schizophrenics lack the usual, secure cultural programming. Extra creativity

springs from the inability to accept the standardised cultural denials of the real nature of human experience. And the price of this kind of almost ‘extra human’ creativity is to live on the brink of madness, as men have long known.

The irony of our condition: our deepest need is to be free of anxiety and death, but it’s life that makes us anxious, so we must shrink from being fully alive. To be unrepressed is to be mad. Character traits are psychoses, but not to have them also means psychosis. There is no way out.

Chapter 5: The Psychoanalyst Kierkegaard

We may see Kierkegaard as a psychoanalyst: he merges religion and psychiatry, which grow out of each other historically. We needed Freud to really appreciate him. The best existential analysis of the human condition leads to problems of God and faith. Becker thinks Kierkegaard’s understanding of man is almost exactly the same as the clinical picture so far described.

The foundation of Kierkegaard is the Fall from the Garden of Eden. Man is a union of opposites, of body and mind. His self-awareness makes known to him his part-divinity and also terror of the world and of death. This paradox is the true essence of man. Unlike animals, we feel anxiety/dread; knowledge of one’s own death is the ‘peculiar sentence on man alone’. Character is a structure built to avoid perceiving the terror.

Becker describes various ways in which Kierkegaard’s view mirrors the modern psychological view. ‘Shut-upness’ is repression. We should let a child explore the world and develop self-confidence in the face of experience, so that his repression is of the better-adjusted sort. Repression leaves a seemingly-intact personality fragmented and discontinuous. Kierkegaard talks of ‘inauthentic men’ who follow automatic, uncritical ways of living: they are one-dimensional and do not belong to themselves, unable to rise above the games of society. The ‘automatic cultural’ man

is protected by the secure and limited alternatives his society offers him, and if he does not look up from his path he can live out his life with a certain dull security.

We accept this because freedom, too much possibility, is dangerous. Our personality needs to grow from a fixed centre that unites mind and body. If our character lie flaunts reality too much, we can end up in psychosis: the complete breakdown of character. In schizophrenia, the symbolic self splits from a grounding in the body and real experience; in depression, there is too much limitation of the person’s body and behaviours, e.g. constraints of demands of chores, family et al, not allowing freedom for the inner self. The schizophrenic is not built into his world, the depressive is built in too much.

The ‘culturally normal’ man [is] one who dares not stand up for his own meanings because this means too much danger, too much exposure. Better not to be oneself, better to live tucked into others, embedded in a safe framework of social and cultural obligations and duties.

The depressive clings to a network of crushing obligations because he cannot find the strength within himself to face up to life. Possibility and freedom mean extricating yourself from your family/social/other duties. Once you choose slavery, for the security, you fear to move out of it, and so you justify your depression.

Kierkegaard has three broad alternatives: 1) schizophrenia 2) depression 3) most of us find a Philistine middle ground of ‘normal neurosis’: living safely within a set of social rules. Another type is 4) the introvert. The introvert enjoys solitude and reflects on his unique self and what he can give the world. Most adolescents experience this until they are sucked up into standardised hero pathways and instead of working out their inner mysteries they forget them. The introvert is content to toy impotently, in occasional solitudes, with ideas of who he might really be while his actual life chafes him. The final type 5) is a self-creator who tries to be master of his fate; he refuses to suffer passively but plunges into life.

Kierkegaard asks: what would we be like if we did not lie? The ‘normal cultural man’ is sick. The self-realised man throws off the lies about his character; this exposes us to our terrible paradox (the god-who-shits); by facing this we open up new possibilities for ourselves. The self must be destroyed: this is the Lutheran or Buddhist idea of dying to be truly born. Accept the truth of our lives and we can find firm ground through self-transcendence. We rethink all our crutches and arrive at faith, a relationship to a Creator.

One goes through it all to arrive at faith, the faith that one’s very creatureliness has some meaning to a Creator; that despite one’s true insignificance, weakness, death, one’s existence has meaning in some ultimate sense because it exists within an eternal and infinite scheme of things brought about and maintained to some kind of design by some creative force.

The progression goes:

Man breaks through the bounds of merely cultural heroism; he destroys the character lie that had him perform as a hero in the everyday social scheme of things; and by doing so he opens himself up to infinity, to the possibility of cosmic heroism, to the very service of God. His life thereby acquires ultimate value in place of merely social and cultural, historical value. He links his secret inner self, his authentic talent, his deepest feelings of uniqueness, his inner yearning for absolute significance, to the very ground of creation.

We can do nothing, but God can do everything. We can never banish anxiety; faith is a new life task, not a cure. In Kierkegaard, religion and psychology merge.

Chapter 6: The Problem of Freud’s Character, Noch Einmal

Freud also pushed the limits of psychology but did not arrive at faith. He had no high opinion of religion and insisted on our creatureliness as instinctive behaviour. Sex was the most essential thing. Anything that lied about our creatureliness and tried to make us lofty and spiritual was ‘occult’. Freud was right about our creatureliness but wrong about sex.

Consciousness of death is the primary repression, not sexuality.

This is the new perspective in psychoanalysis, as in Rank and Brown. Freud later tried to address death through the ‘death instinct’ or drive towards death, which explained aggression and hate. Thus he kept using instincts to explain behaviour. It makes more sense to explain aggression and killing as a protest against one’s death, not an urge toward it. We have a death fear, not a death instinct. We must untangle Freud’s ideas and put his mistakes in the bin.

Becker spends much time on Freud’s own personal psychology as a man aware of his own historical importance and devoting all his energy to achieving immortality through the psychoanalysis movement; he treats Freud as a case study of someone with a causa sui project, i.e. when people assign purpose to themselves through symbols and heroic dramas to transcend our animal vulnerability.

Human meanings are fragile and short-lived, so we try to connect them to something higher and transcendental.

Chapter 7: The Spell Cast by Persons – the Nexus of Unfreedom

We have a fascination with people who hold or symbolise power, an effect like a spell. (Jung: the mana-personality.) This is an illusion in the eyes of the beholder. As we are all Homo sapiens, how do we explain this fascination? Part of the world-historical importance of psychoanalysis lies in explaining this.

Freud called the patient’s intense attachment to the analyst ‘transference’ – the patient transfers to the analyst the feeling he had for his parents as a child, looking to him for protection and to relieve his helplessness. It is a passive surrender to a superior power. We ignore the slavishness of our soul to avoid admitting the lie of self-sufficiency and free self-determination. We are not really in command of ourselves – one look can change our lives.

Ferenczi: the analyst must be imposing and confident. Hypnosis works because we are predisposed to it anyway. As we get older the need to be subject to someone remains, and we transfer awe for our parents to other figures: ‘teachers, superiors, impressive personalities...’ Fenichel: people want to get back to the magical protection they enjoyed from their parents. Freud saw that groups don’t fear danger, as we are no longer alone with our helplessness. Why people follow leaders into danger = because they demand illusions, they want to feel important and immortal. Also:

[The leader] makes possible a new experience, the expression of forbidden impulses, secret wishes, and fantasies. In group behaviour anything goes because the leader okays it... In the group each man seems an omnipotent hero who can give full vent to his appetites under the approving eye of the father. And so we understand the terrifying sadism of group activity.

Fromm: narcissism inflates one’s own life and belittles those of outsiders. We fear leaving the symbiosis of a family to try to survive alone, hence the mystique of groups, nations etc.

Redl: Leaders do not necessarily dominate via a strong personality. They let us express secret wishes; have an equanimity we admire; release us from fear; perform the initiatory act no one else dared to, taking on the risk and guilt so others may follow suit (‘priority magic’). Thus a murder is no longer murder but a ‘holy aggression’. Group violence is not just following orders but a ‘magical hero transformation’.

Leaders can serve as an excuse for people to avoid guilt and responsibility for their actions. Joint implication in atrocities binds the group together and, for fear of reprisals from the victims, commits the members even more blindly. The Charles Manson circle: a self-assured leader gave permission for people to drop their inhibitions. It was not inhuman, but exaggerated normal human dispositions.

One direct way, then, of understanding homocidal communities like the Manson family is to view them as magical transformations, wherein passive and empty people, torn with conflicts and guilt, earn their cheap heroism, really feeling that they can control fate and influence life and death. 

Large-scale ‘ravages’ happen because man is a ‘trembling animal’ who pulls the world down around him as he clutches for support.

As usual, Freud reduced it to sex. Adler knew better: transference is about lack of courage. Various authorities: Transference is about wanting to exert control; reflects our alienation; is an object onto which we project positive qualities we have failed to realise in ourselves; is worship of an object. It reflects childhood attempts to create a satisfying environment without anxiety. It is a kind of fetishism: we anchor our problems to one narrow spot.

Rank: our fear of life and death is global and total. Transference is a taming of terror.

Realistically the universe contains overwhelming power. Beyond ourselves we sense chaos. We can't really do much about this unbelievable power, except for one thing: we can endow certain persons with it. The child takes natural awe and terror and focusses them on individual beings, which allows him to find the power and the horror all in one place... The transference object, being endowed with the transcendent powers of the universe, now has in himself the power to control, order, and combat them.

Now we can face our fate. But the transference object is ambivalent: it becomes our new fate. We worry about losing or displeasing it. Such is the irony of being human. ‘Transference proves that everyone is neurotic, as it is a universal distortion of reality by the artificial fixation of it.’ The weaker and more afraid we are, the more desperately we worship the object, and the more omnipotent the object gets.

We put people on pedestals, admire celebrities, and hope their powers rub off on us, help us share in immortality. Mass grief at the death of a leader reflects our loss of a bulwark against death. If our locus of power can die, we can die too. Or: we are threatened with death, let’s kill.

Transference is cowardice but also an urge to heroism. Humans also have a yearning to be good, for beauty, goodness and perfection. We call it conscience. It is an urge to rightness in the world and ourselves. It comes from a paradox: 1) we desire to identify ourselves with a cosmic process (Agape), 2) we want to be unique and apart (Eros). The first comes from our fear of isolation, smallness and self-reliance. Being part of something bigger offers us transcendent value, e.g. the Christian Agape where we meld into a loving creation. Joining a group is to try and live in a larger, expansive meaning. God is a reaching-out for meaning. Or we could find larger meaning through Eros: urge for life, experience, self-development, uniqueness. Becker calls these the twin ontological motives.

But here is man’s tragedy. If we prefer Agape we risk our self-development. If we prefer Eros we risk the larger creation.

As individuals we must be opposed to wider nature. This creates a terrible isolation. We are small yet stand out at the same time, making us feel unworthy. We want to reverse this position in relation to the universe, to find importance and durability. The desire for goodness is the desire for enduring value and safety, a special immunity against evil. Morality is a way, by conforming to the rules made by transference objects, of becoming special.

Man wants the impossible: He wants to lose his isolation and keep it at the same time. He can’t stand the sense of separateness, and yet he can’t allow the complete suffocating of his vitality. He wants to expand by merging with the powerful beyond that transcends him, yet he wants while merging with it to remain individual and aloof, working out his own private and smaller-scale self-expansion. But this feat is impossible because it belies the real tension of the dualism.

Transference is essential: we need it to give our life value and call it good. The transference-object is a creative fetishisation of our yearnings and strivings, a place from which to draw power and validation. We address our heroics to another person and assess their value by whether they please the person, thus we need other people to affirm ourselves. Such projection is necessary for self-fulfillment, a necessary unburdening. Instead of living for himself man must project meaning outward.

This distortion has two dimensions: distortion due to the fear of life and death and distortion due to the heroic attempt to assure self-expansion and the intimate connection of one’s inner self to surrounding nature. In other words, transference reflects the whole of the human condition and raises the largest philosophical question about that condition. 

Chapter 8: Otto Rank and the Closure of Psychoanalysis on Kierkegaard

Culture opposes and transcends nature. This was easier under a religious world picture e.g. the Judaeo-Christian: man lives his life through God and is rewarded with immortality. The miseries of the real world did not matter, as our cosmic heroism was assured, even for cripples, the poor, etc.

Otto Rank: we may seek higher spiritual meaning in a love-object instead of God/religion. Our romantic love-object is deified – see the language of popular songs – and we are raised by association. This can give real relief. We can share burdens, lose our individuality in the partner, forget ourselves in sex; we are less self-conscious about our body when it is accepted by another.

But our paradox remains. Sex is of the body, and the body is creaturely and dies. In Greece: Eros and Thanatos are brothers. Animals pro-create to conquer death for the species but each individual dies. Sex reminds us we are an expendable individual, whereas for humans being a procreating animal is not enough. Thus we use sexual taboos to impose human culture on our animal bodies. Sex reminds us of our mortality, the negation of our personality, so to some degree we resist it.

We feel guilty about our fallible bodies because they are a curb on our freedom. We have to live with bodies and they remind us of death. A sexual partner therefore cannot solve our human dilemma – it is another form of causa-sui project and must fail. We are bound to the love-object, dependent, and thus restricted. Hence the bitterness and recrimination in our family lives when the object falls short. We deflate the partner to overcome the unrealistic investment we have made in them, or we deflate ourselves to keep the relationship going, despite the slavishness required, because we have no replacement god lined up (thus prompting depression). We seek redemption in partners who cannot supply it; they are finite, doomed humans too. Rank: redemption only comes from admitting we are animals and giving up individuality – intolerable to a partner who wants us to be God.

Pornography over-emphasises the body as a sensual object. If we can’t have God, we can have pleasure. Sexual mystique is shallow, a narrowing-down from cosmic heroism to a body. The love-object becomes a thing, no longer a source of strength, so the sensualist must find strength in himself and his virility.

The problem of a human life: we need an absolute or ‘beyond’, reach for the nearest one, and are enslaved by it. The standard response is to play safe. Personal heroism takes a courage most of us don’t have. When we separate ourselves from the herd we risk isolation. Rank: this is the artist/creative type.

There is something in his life experience that makes him take in the world as a problem; as a result he has to make personal sense out of it... when you no longer accept the collective solution to the problem of existence, then you must fashion your own. The work of art is, then, the ideal answer of the creative type to the problem of existence as he takes it in... He has to answer to the burden of his extreme individuation, his so painful isolation. He wants to know how to earn immortality as a result of his own unique gifts.

Sticking out so much that you must create your own justification poses a problem, however great your work. Like you, it is meaningless before nature, needs justification from outside.

The work of art is the artist’s attempt to justify his heroism objectively, in the concrete creation... Whatever he does he is stuck with himself, can’t get securely outside and beyond himself. He is also stuck with the work of art itself. Like any material achievement it is visible, earthly, impermanent. No matter how great it is, it still pales in some ways next to the transcending majesty of nature; and so it is ambiguous, hardly a solid immortality symbol. In his greatest genius man is still mocked. No wonder that historically art and psychosis have had such an intimate relationship...

The artist creates his work with all his passion but must renounce it as it won’t save him.

Rank: the only way to conquer death is to renounce oneself to religion. Our heroic validation does not lie in others or the things of this world. Man is a ‘theological being’. The scientist baulks at Rank’s conclusion but it is consistent with the psychoanalysis.

Chapter 9: The Present Outcome of Psychoanalysis

Rank said there are three aspects to neurosis. 1) People having trouble with existence – this is universal. Neurosis as a problem of character. 2) People create their personal responses to life through illusion and creative cultural play. 3) Neurosis is historical because the old ideologies that absorbed it are falling away and modernity has nothing to replace it.

1) Life for a conscious animal is overwhelming. We protect ourselves by narrowing experience and shutting out death: repression is normal self-protection, our substitute for instinct. Normality is the refusal of reality. Neurosis is normal and we only call it neurosis when it becomes noticeable – fear of the outdoors, compulsions, phobias, etc. The neurotic takes control of his destiny by reducing the world to one task that must be observed, to keep him safe and to distract him from death and meaninglessness. Ironically, in taking control he isolates and diminishes himself. We cannot avoid life and death, and if we try too hard to do so, we destroy ourselves.

2) Creative people are neurotic in a different way. Feeling their isolation, they have imagination and take in experience. Back to the ontological urges (defined p150+): some people narrow themselves down, others are too open. The ideal is a balance, but how it goes depends on our history.

Man does not live in a partial, biological way but symbolically:

One substitutes the magical, all-inclusive world of the self for the real, fragmentary world of experience... 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.

The artist is a prime candidate for neurosis but often avoids it by reworking the world through his personality. He takes a bite off the world and objectifies it as ‘an external, active work-project’. The neurotic, however, has no creative outlet, so when he takes a bite he chokes on it.

The more totally one takes in the world as a problem, the more inferior or bad one is going to feel inside oneself. He can try to work out this ‘badness’ by striving for perfection, and then the neurotic symptom becomes his ‘creative’ work; or he can try to make himself perfect by means of his partner. But it is obvious to us that the only way to work on perfection is in the form of an objective work that is fully under your control and is perfectible in some real ways... In this sense, some kind of objective creativity is the only answer man has to the problem of life. In this way he satisfies nature, which asks that he live and act objectively as a vital animal plunging into the world; but he also satisfies his own distinctive human nature because he plunges in on his own symbolic terms and not as a reflex of the world as given to mere physical sense experience. He takes in the world, makes a total problem out of it, and then gives out a fashioned, human answer to that problem. This, as Goethe saw in Faust, is the highest that man can achieve.

The difference between the artist and the neurotic is their response to a similar experience. We cannot justify our heroism from inside ourselves, it has to come from outside. Artists just happen to have a talent, though that is another sort of compulsion. People love to lose themselves in routine activity as it protects us from reality and madness.

The causa sui project is a lie, is illusions. We ascribe meaning when really there is none and ‘all is vanity’. We must believe in an alternative, illusory reality that is better than in nature.

Man needs a ‘second’ world, a world of humanly created meaning, a new reality that he can live, dramatise, nourish himself in. ‘Illusion’ means creative play at its highest level... To lose the security of heroic cultural illusion is to die.

On what level of illusion does one live?

3) The first two approaches merge into the historical.

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 characterises modern life is the failure of all traditional immortality ideologies...

This is why neurosis is widespread today: the loss of secure communal spirituality that offered redemption. We moved instead to a scientific model that studied the self. Now we are left with only the individual man with no means to overcome meaninglessness. Psychology looks for the cause of unhappiness in the life-history of the individual, but in fact the cause is universal – it is a larger historical problem of our relationship to the natural world as a symbolic animal. Rank: psychology wants to supplant religion but is too partial and negative to replace it.

We used to turn to God, now we turn to gurus and therapists.

Modern man is condemned to seek the meaning of his life in psychological introspection, and so his new confessor has to be the supreme authority on introspection, the psychoanalyst. 

Man wants to focus on an absolute other of meaning and mystery, whereas the analyst tells him everything is down to his own early life-conditioning and can be clinically explained.

Rank and Kierkegaard came to the same conclusions. Man can only cope with his smallness when he can relate it to a larger meaning. Rank: neurosis is the striving for an individual religion/immortality. The more we individualise, the more isolated and anxious we become. The classical sinner could turn to God and translate his inferiority into heroism; the modern neurotic has no embracing heroic drama to merge with.

Those are the three approaches to neurosis.

Rank: the only thing that can ‘cure’ neurosis is an affirmative, collective world-view – in anthropological language, a myth-ritual complex – to channel our obsessions. Social life ritually marks out life’s events, offering safety and defeating despair. Defeating despair is not an intellectual problem but about stimulation and movement. Goethe: we must plunge into experience and then reflect upon it. All reflection makes us mad; all plunging makes us brutes. Social myths offer us meaning. To be cured, the neurotic must accept a ‘living illusion’.

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...

Kierkegaard’s lonely leap into personal religion is not enough.

Scientific analysis, by dismissing mystery, has merely revealed our true situation to us. Becker does not mean to apologise for traditional religion, just to explain modern neurosis. Rank’s cure for neurosis: a ‘need for legitimate foolishness.’ What is the best, most legitimate illusion under which to live? The answer lies in how much ‘freedom, dignity and hope’ the illusion offers. Religion offers all three. It offers mystery and a bigger meaning.

What is the ideal for mental health, then? A lived, compelling illusion that does not lie about life, death and reality...

The ideal illusion does not spare us from problems. It addresses the question of what we can achieve in our lives. But to what end?

Chapter 10: A General View of Mental Illness

Mental illness is diverse but Becker makes some general statements. Mental illness is the failure of heroism. Psychology has to be broadened to consider the fear of death. How can someone with no resources become heroic?

Melancholia/depression is a fear of life, a shrinking into oneself. Fear of life leads to excessive fear of death; we end up as if dead. The depressed person exaggerates his guilt (over unlived life, over worthlessness) and gets those around him to pity and take care of him – his self-pity becomes a form of control.

Schizophrenia arises when someone is especially anxious. William James: the right reaction to the terrors of living is psychosis. The schizophrenic is a realist who sees things as they are, without illusion. He is crippled by fear of life and creates a fantasy to save himself, using the same defences the rest of us do, only more blatantly. The human experience gets split into two – the body and the symbolic self – and the schizophrenic sees his body as alien to him. We all sense that our body is a potential menace to us, and schizophrenia takes this to the furthest point. The schizophrenic vs the genius: neither are programmed into automatic social meanings, but the genius has enough ego to give his personal meanings a creative form, whereas the schizophrenic ends up controlled by them.

The ‘perversions’ (for Becker these include homosexuality) reveal human behaviour in its essentials. Becker places importance on the ‘hermaphroditic image’. Humans are dualistic: we find our minds encased in a body that is impermanent and animal. Whether we are male or female is an accident of chance, yet ties us to a one-sided sexual role. The hermaphroditic image is the desire for unity, completeness, healing of divisions of self/body, self/other, self/world: the mother becomes omnipotent, godlike, beyond accidents of the body. When we realise she too is animal, the young child is forced to become a philosopher.

The fetishist has low body-confidence, a sense of inadequacy, and fear of the male role, all rooted in his early development. There are three ways a child wins high self-esteem. 1) A supportive mother who does not interfere too much with one’s activity, and a strong father. 2) Secure possession of one’s body as a safe centre under one’s control. 3) The causa sui project.

As long as we are reasonably adjusted to our bodies we avoid extreme fetishism. But our biological/sexual/species role means standardisation that threatens our individuality. Perversion becomes a protest against species sameness, an affirmation of our individuality. The physical/bodily aspect is given, whereas our symbolic/mental aspect is personal. Sexual reproduction is an animal way of perpetuating one’s body that does not perpetuate our self; therefore humans seek to raise their self beyond the body, to suppose it immortal. Sexual taboos spiritualise brute reproduction. Perversions are protests of weakness, of lack of strength/talent, a striving for a counter-illusion; the schizophrenic tries to free the mind completely from the body. The ideal way to overcome the fear of standardisation is through love: one identifies with the partner, overcomes isolation and helplessness, and the species is no longer a threat to our inner self.

A fetishist’s object acts as a magical charm to transform our animality into something transcendent, giving him the courage to perform sex as a personality rather than a standardised body. Sex becomes spiritualised. Like in magic, the object has some properties of the thing it seeks to control, e.g. shoes, corsets, furs = cultural contrivances connected to the body but also distanced from it. It is also a secret:

We have long known... 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.

Hence the mythic searches for Holy Grails etc that will transform us beyond our bodily reality. All of this is ritualised:

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.

The transvestite too wants to transcend animality through culture. He seeks to overcome the arbitrary division into sexes by appearing as a woman while keeping his male parts. It is a sexual relationship with oneself, dispensing with a female partner, achieving hermaphroditic completeness. Chinese foot-binding: the triumph of culture over the animal foot.

Sado-masochism is human normality. Masochism – we are by nature humble, guilty, suffering, pitiful, and seeking a power beyond us; we want to identify and take control of our pain by taking it in ritualised doses. Sadism – our drive to activity, experience, mastery of the world. Sado-masochism is a way of controlling and thus transcending pain (i.e. death) and changing it into pleasure.

Rape – a feeling of personal power over another. Necrophilia – extreme fear of life and others; corpses are totally passive and cannot hurt you.

Culture really can transform nature. It is a symbol system that helps us to recreate ourselves. But culture also distances us from reality. Low-level fetishism is common: we look for standardised cues of attractiveness like breasts or underwear to make the object less powerful and easier to relate to. Perversion is like a private religion, based on fear not faith, an attempt to ‘heroically transcend the human condition’ and find satisfaction. It offers a heightened vitality. Rank: experience is too big and we must narrow it down.

There is no way to surely transcend and avoid death, for all organisms perish. The biggest, warmest, most secure, courageous spirits can still only bite off pieces of the world; the smallest, meanest, most frightened ones merely bite off the smallest possible pieces.

Mental illness is a failure to transcend death: failed heroics. The mentally ill lack the courage to take responsibility for their own independent lives and are especially afraid of life and death. Thus the personality is unable to perform the normal cultural heroics and puts the burden onto others, even comes to fear the freedom of being in good health.

We are brought once again to the great questions: What is the highest reality, the true ideal, the really great adventure? What kind of heroism is called for, in what kind of drama, submission to what kind of god?

Mental illness is about our failure in dealing with our natural urges. The mentally ill do not know what heroics to adopt, or how to keep their heroics from crippling narrowness. Rank: it is stupidity, i.e. ignorance about how to behave.

All living organisms are condemned to perversity, to the narrowness 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 still must ask, then... what kind of perversity is fitting for man.

Chapter 11: Psychology and Religion: What is the Heroic Individual?

The young are often puzzled by how many different answers there are to the problem of how to live. Each offers certainty, yet the views often contradict each other. Psychology knows these are a series of immortality formulas.

Kierkegaard’s formula was the ‘knight of faith’: a man who hands the meaning of life to his Creator. He accepts the visible world on its own terms and is unafraid of death. He does not therefore unburden himself on others. This creative illusion is an ideal of mental health, found in most religions in one way or another. Becker: ‘the ideal of the knight of faith is surely one of the most beautiful and challenging ideals ever put forth by man.’

Some may prefer a more scientific formula. Either way all we can achieve is a relaxed approach to experience that minimises the burden we put on on others. The problem of being human: how to give yourself up to God (or whatever) and still stand on your own feet? It is impossible to resolve. No one can advise anyone else on this question. Each life is a unique problem and needs its own singular solution. William James: ‘Son of man, stand on your own feet so that I may speak with you’, i.e. you must be a man first and lean on God second. The organisms that consume their own energies most relentlessly are best placed to accomplish things.

We cannot evolve beyond human nature. Becker criticises Norman Brown’s prophetic ideas on how to transcend death through the unrepressed life as a fallacious non sequitur. Marcuse: a political revolution is not enough, we need a psychological revolution too. How can a revolutionary call for something ambiguous and irresolveable? But he admits that we cannot end repression because death makes that impossible. Thus his calls for a final liberation sound hollow.

Such thinkers believe they must provide a prophetic solution, and finding one requires simplification. Unrepression is impossible. ‘Culture is a compromise with life that makes human life possible.’

The prophets of unrepression simply have not understood human nature; they envisage a utopia with perfect freedom from inner constraint and from outer authority. This idea flies in the face of the fundamental dynamism of unfreedom that we have discovered in each individual: the universality of transference.

Transference = we seek support from a power outside ourselves (the child, its parents; the patient, his analyst). The claim we can conquer the fear of death by prolonging life indefinitely through science is utopian because we would still fear death through disease or accident. Our struggle for transcendency, our commitment to greater meanings, is what gives mankind its nobility. Removing these would leave us with sterility.

Recall the dilemma of human life:

[There really is] no way to overcome the real dilemma of existence, the one of the mortal animal who at the same time is conscious of his mortality. A person spends years coming into his own, developing his talent, his unique gifts, perfecting his discriminations about the world, broadening and sharpening his appetite, learning to bear the disappointments of life, becoming mature, seasoned – finally a unique creature in nature, standing with some dignity and nobility and transcending the animal condition: no longer driven, no longer a complete reflex, not stamped out of any mould. And then the real tragedy, as André Malraux wrote in The Human Condition: that it takes sixty years of incredible suffering and effort to make such an individual, and then he is good only for dying. This painful paradox is not lost on the person himself – least of all himself. He feels agonisingly unique, and yet he knows that this doesn’t make any difference as far as ultimates are concerned. He has to go the way of the grasshopper, even though it takes longer.

We cannot escape this dilemma. It calls psychotherapy itself into question: it can help people, but we cannot resolve the problem; neurosis is normal; life is insurmountable. Freud: ‘he cured the miseries of the neurotic only to open him up to the normal misery of life.’ Self-knowledge through psychology cannot give us the immortality we want. Psychology’s best recourse is to become a religious belief system with the psychotherapist as powerful guru, the object of transference, with the inner self labelled with some name taken from mystical religion. Psychotherapy needs the magical external power. This leads to mysticism and impossible promises of a harmonious new being. We cannot triumph over our nature.

We can make a pragmatic argument for a creative myth that can drive human effort and change the world. Paul Tillich: realised his new, harmonious person was a myth or ideal, not a truth. Man has to stand up and take on as much as he can of the problem of existence. Rejecting gods, he centres on his own energies to find new courage.

Life on Earth is grotesque:

Creation is a nightmare spectacular taking place on a planet that has been soaked for millions of years in the blood of all its creatures. 

Science and religion falsify the human condition – utopian efforts to remove our struggle would remove our heroism and what is distinctively human. Why organisms are vital for no known reason is mysterious, as is our urge to heroism. We need new heroisms, dedication to a vision. We need bold, creative myths to urge us on while being hard-headed about our condition. Whatever we do has to be done from our subjective energies while acknowledging the truth of the terror of creation.