Becker: Denial of Death

 

1. One of the fundamental struggles of life is recognizing we have a body and a mind. If you can’t handle the dual, you’re in trouble. The body is “creatureliness”, yet you are ‘A worm and a God’ 
2. Need to be important not to die -> need to be important for this most important person (parent, lover, culture). Feeling important -> self esteem -> feeling good about oneself.

Death concentrates the mind

‘that we have buried under mountains of fact’

The man of knowledge in our time is bowed down under a burden he never imagined he would ever have: the overproduction of truth that cannot be consumed. For centuries man lived in the belief that truth was slim and elusive and that once he found it the troubles of mankind would be over. And here we are in the closing decades of the 20th century, choking on truth. There has been so much brilliant writing, so many genial discoveries, so vast an extension and elaboration of these discoveries—yet the mind is silent as the world spins on its age-old demonic career ‘’

The world is a theater for heroism

Our organism is ready to fill the world all alone, even if our mind shrinks at the thought. This narcissism is what keeps men marching into point-blank fire in wars: at heart one doesn’t feel that he will die, he only feels sorry for the man next to him. Freud’s explanation for this was that the unconscious does not know death or time: in man’s physiochemical, inner organic recesses he feels immortal.

What man needs most is his sense of self worth / self-esteem. In childhood we see the struggle for self-esteem at its least disguise. But his natural narcissism is too all absorbing and relentless to be an aberration, it expresses the heart of the creature: the desire to stand out, to be the one in creation.

This is the reason for the daily and usually excruciating struggle with siblings: the child cannot allow himself to be second-best or devalued, much less left out. “You gave him the biggest piece of candy!” “You gave him more juice!” “Here’s a little more, then.” “Now she’s got more juice than me!” “You let her light the fire in the fireplace and not me.” “Okay, you light a piece of paper.” “But this piece of paper is smaller than the one she lit.”

He is a creature with a name who lives in a world of symbols and dreams and not merely matter. His sense of self-worth is constituted symbolically, his cherished narcissism feeds on symbols, on an abstract idea of his own worth, an idea composed of sounds, words, and images, in the air, in the mind, on paper

When we appreciate how natural it is for man to strive to be a hero, how deeply it goes in hi evolutionary and organismic constitution, how openly he shows it as a child, then it is all the more curious how ignorant most of us are, consciously, of what we really want and need.

We disguise our struggle by piling up figures in a bank book to reflect privately our sense of heroic worth. Or by having only a little better home in the neighborhood, a bigger car, brighter children. But underneath throbs the ache of cosmic specialness

It doesn’t matter whether the cultural hero-system is frankly magical, religious, and primitive or secular, scientific, and civilized. It is still a mythical hero-system in which people serve in order to earn a feeling of primary value, of cosmic specialness, of ultimate usefulness to creation, of unshakable meaning

The question that becomes then the most important one that man can put to himself is simply this: how conscious is he of what he is doing to earn his feeling of heroism?

to become conscious of what one is doing to earn his feeling of heroism is the main self-analytic problem of life. Everything painful and sobering in what psychoanalytic genius and religious genius have discovered about man revolves around the terror of admitting what one is doing to earn his self-esteem. This is why human heroics is a blind drivenness that burns people up; in passionate people, a screaming for glory as uncritical and reflexive as the howling of a dog. In the more passive masses of mediocre men it is disguised as they humbly and complainingly follow out the roles that society provides for their heroics and try to earn their promotions within the system: wearing the standard uniforms—but allowing themselves to stick out, but ever so little and so safely, with a little ribbon or a red boutonniere, but not with head and shoulders

peel away this massive disguise, the blocks of repression over human techniques for earning glory

it is based on organismic narcissism and on the child’s need for self-esteem as the condition for his life. Society itself is a codified hero system, which means that society everywhere is a living myth of the significance of human life, a defiant creation of meaning

heroism is first and foremost a reflex of the terror of death. We admire most the courage to face death; we give such valor our highest and most constant adoration; it moves us deeply in our hearts because we have doubts about how brave we ourselves would be. When we see a man bravely facing his own extinction see the greatest victory

our primate ancestors deferred to others who were extrapowerful and courageous and ignored those who were cowardly

We might call this existential paradox 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, as the Renaissance thinkers knew. 

Yet, at the same time, as the Eastern sages also knew, man is a worm and food for worms. This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heartpumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it.

The lower animals are, of course, spared this painful contradiction, as they lack a symbolic identity and the selfconsciousness that goes with it. They merely act and move reflexively as they are driven by their instincts. If they pause at all, it is only a physical pause; inside they are anonymous, and even their faces have no name. They live in a world without time, pulsating, as it were, in a state of dumb being

Mad because, as we shall see, everything that man does in his symbolic world is an attempt to deny and overcome his grotesque fate. He literally drives himself into a blind obliviousness with social games, psychological tricks, personal preoccupations so far removed from the reality of his situation that they are forms of madness—agreed madness, shared madness, disguised and dignified madness, but madness all the same.

Name, identity, traits are forever. Your body is almost nothing. How to reconcile the two?

The child is overwhelmed by experiences of the dualism of the self and the body from both areas, since he can be master of neither. He is not a confident social self, adept manipulator of symbolic categories of words, thoughts, names, or places,—or especially of time, that great mystery for him; he doesn’t even know what a clock is. Nor is he a functioning adult animal who can work and procreate, do the serious things he sees happening around him: he can’t “do like father” in any way. He is a prodigy in limbo. In both halves of his experience he is dispossessed, yet impressions keep pouring in on him and sensations keep welling up within him, flooding his body. He has to make some kind of sense out of them, establish some kind of ascendancy over them. Will it be thoughts over body, or body over thoughts?

when they try to master the body, pretend it isn’t there, act “like a little man,” the body suddenly overwhelms them, submerges them in vomit or excrement—and the child breaks down in desperate tears over his melted pretense at being a purely symbolic animal. 

Often the child deliberately soils himself or continues to wet the bed, to protest against the imposition of artificial symbolic rules: he seems to be saying that the body is his primary reality and that he wants to remain in the simpler physical

It’s the most unequal struggle any animal has to go through; a struggle that the child can never really understand because he doesn’t know what is happening to him, why he is responding as he does, or what is really at stake in the battle. 

The victory in this kind of battle is truly Pyrrhic: character is a face that one sets to the world, but it hides an inner defeat. The child emerges with a name, a family, a play-world in a neighborhood, all clearly cut out for him. But 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, majesty, awe, mystery; and fantasies and hallucinations of mixtures between the two, the impossible attempt to compromise between bodies and symbols.

all these things reflect man’s horror of his own basic animal condition, a condition that he cannot—especially as a child—understand and a condition that—as an adult—he cannot accept. The guilt that he feels over bodily processes and urges is “pure” guilt: guilt as inhibition, as determinism, as smallness and boundness. It grows out of the constraint of the basic animal condition, the incomprehensible mystery of the body and the world.

The Oedipal complex is the project of becoming God. 

Rather, the Oedipus complex is the Oedipal project, a project that sums up the basic problem of the child’s life: whether he will be a passive object of fate, an appendage of others, a plaything of the world or whether he will be an active center within himself—whether he will control his own destiny with his own powers or not

The child triumphantly controls his world by controlling the mother.

The child at this time, is simply “full of himself,” an unflinchable manipulator and champion of his world. He lives suffused in his own omnipotence and magically controls everything he needs to feed that omnipotence. He has only to cry to get food and warmth, to point to demand the moon and get a delightful rattle in its place.

The “anal stage” is another way of talking about the period when the child begins to turn his attention to his own body as an object in his phenomenal field. He discovers it and seeks to control it. His narcissistic project then becomes the mastery and the possession of the world through self-control.

at first, the mother is his world. The child cannot survive without her, yet in order to get control of his own powers he has to get free of her

She must appear as the goddess of beauty and goodness, victory and power; this is her “light” side, we might say, and it is blindly attractive. But on the other hand the child has to strain against this very dependency, or he loses the feeling that he has aegis over his own powers. That is another way of saying that the mother, by representing secure biological dependence, is also a fundamental threat

What troubles neurotics—as it troubles most people—is their own powerlessness; they must find something to set themselves against

Her genitals are used as a convenient focus for the child’s obsession with the problem of physicalness.

Both the boy and girl turn away from the mother as a sort of automatic reflex of their own needs for growth and independence

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. Sex is an inevitable component of man’s confusion over the meaning of his life, a meaning split hopelessly into two realms— symbols (freedom) and body (fate).

Anyone who couldn’t overcome death and become God themselves looks to society. If they are using society, they see individualism as a threat.

If there is going to be a victory over human incompleteness and limitation, it has to be a social project and not an individual one. Society wants to be the one to decide how people are to transcend death; it will tolerate the causa-sui project only if it fits into the standard social project. Otherwise there is the alarm of “Anarchy!” This is one of the reasons for bigotry and censorship of all kinds over personal morality: people fear that the standard morality will be undermined—another way of saying that they fear they will no longer be able to control life and death.

A person is said to be “socialized” precisely when he accepts to “sublimate” the body-sexual character of his Oedipal project. Now these euphemisms mean usually that he accepts to work on becoming the father of himself by abandoning his own project and by giving it over to “The Fathers.” The castration complex has done its work, and one submits to “social reality”; he can now deflate his own desires and claims and can play it safe in the world of the powerful elders. He can even give his body over to the tribe, the state, the embracing magical umbrella of the elders and their symbols; that way it will no longer be a dangerous negation for him. But there is no real difference between a childish impossibility and an adult one; the only thing that the person achieves is a practiced self-deceit—what we call the “mature” character

Take stock of those around you and you will… hear them talk in precise terms about themselves and their surroundings, which would seem to point to them having ideas on the matter. But start to analyze those ideas and you will find that they hardly reflect in any way the reality to which they appear to refer, and if you go deeper you will discover that there is not even an attempt to adjust the ideas to this reality. Quite the contrary: through these notions the individual is trying to cut off any personal vision of reality, of his own very life. For life is a chaos in which one is lost. The individual suspects this, but he is frightened at finding himself face to face with this terrible reality, and tries to cover it over with a curtain of fantasy, where everything is clear. It does not worry him that his “ideas” are not true, he uses them as trenches for the defense of his existence, as scarecrows to frighten away reality

This fear of realizing one’s own fullest powers. He understood the syndrome as the evasion of the full intensity of life: We are just not strong enough to endure more! So often people in… ecstatic moments say, “It’s too much,” or “I could die”…. Delirious happiness cannot be borne for long. Our organisms are just too weak for any large doses of greatness…. The Jonah Syndrome, then, seen from this basic point of view, is “partly a justified fear of being torn apart, of losing control, of being shattered and disintegrated, even of being killed by the experience.” The result is what we would expect a weak organism to do: to cut back the full intensity of life

Otto talked about the terror of the world, the feeling of over-whelming awe, wonder, and fear in the face of creation—the miracle of each single thing, of the fact that there are things at all. Man has a natural feeling of inferiority in the face of the massive transcendence of creation; this real creature feeling before the crushing and negating miracle of Being

As a child, the world is as it is - he cannot create.

He can contemplate not only what is edible for him, but everything that grows. He not only lives in this moment, but expands his inner self to yesterday, his curiosity to centuries ago, his fears to five billion years from now when the sun will cool, his hopes to an eternity from now.

Man’s body is a problem to him that has to be explained. Not only his body is strange, but also its inner landscape, the memories and dreams. Man’s very insides—his self—are foreign to him. He doesn’t know who he is, why he was born, what he is doing on the planet, what he is supposed to do, what he can expect. His own existence is incomprehensible to him, a miracle just like the rest of creation, closer to him, right near his pounding heart. Each thing is a problem, and man can shut out nothing

“It is precisely the godlike in ourselves that we are ambivalent about, fascinated by and fearful of, motivated to and defensive against. This is one aspect of the basic human predicament, that we are simultaneously worms and gods.” There it is again: gods with anuses.

Worm problem, Worm repression. God problem, God repression. 

The great cause of much psychological illness is the fear of knowledge of oneself—of one’s emotions, impulses, memories, capacities, potentialities, of one’s destiny. We have discovered that fear of knowledge of oneself is very often isomorphic with, and parallel with, fear of the outside world.

This fear is a protection of our self-esteem, of our love and respect for ourselves. We tend to be afraid of any knowledge that could cause us to despise ourselves or to make us feel inferior, weak, worthless, evil, shameful. 

The individual has to repress globally from the entire spectrum of his experience if he wants to feel a warm sense of inner value and basic security.

This sense of value and support is something that nature gives to each animal by the automatic instinctive programming and in the pulsating of the vital processes. But man has to build and earn inner value and security.

• He must repress his smallness in the adult world, his failures to live up to adult commands and codes. 
• He must repress his own feelings of physical and moral inadequacy, not only the inadequacy of his good intentions but also his guilt and his evil intensions: the death wishes and hatreds that result from being frustrated and blocked by the adults. 
• He must repress his parents’ inadequacy, their anxieties and terrors, because these make it difficult for him to feel secure and strong. 
• He must repress his own anality, his compromising bodily functions that spell his mortality, his fundamental expendability in nature. 
• And with all this, he must repress the primary awesomeness of the external world which poses a threat to him

The thing that really bothers the child is the nature of his world, not so much his own inner drives. “Human perplexity and helplessness in the face of nature’s dreaded forces”. Anxiety was now seen largely as a matter of the reaction to global helplessness, abandonment, fate. 

The powers of destiny put an end to security against every danger. 

Thus the child has to avoid too much thought, too much perception, too much life. And at the same time, how he has to avoid the death that rumbles behind and underneath every carefree activity, that looks over his shoulder as he plays. The result is that we now know that the human animal is characterized by two great fears that other animals are protected from: the fear of life and the fear of death.

Heidegger argued that the basic anxiety of man is anxiety about being-in-the-world, as well as anxiety of being-in-the-world.

As an animal organism man senses the kind of planet he has been put down on, the nightmarish, demonic frenzy in which nature has unleashed billions of individual organismic appetites of all kinds—not to mention earthquakes, meteors, and hurricanes, which seem to have their own hellish appetites. Each thing, in order to deliciously expand, is forever gobbling up others. Appetites may be innocent because they are naturally given, but any organism caught in the myriad cross-purposes of this planet is a potential victim of this very innocence—and it shrinks away from life lest it lose its own.

Terror of the world and miracle of creation

The mother is the first miracle. How else could she appear? 

The only way he could securely oppose them would be to know that he is as godlike as they, but he can never know this straightforwardly and unambiguously.

One’s own face may be godlike in its miraculousness, but one lacks the godlike power to know what it means, the godlike strength to have been responsible for its emergence

one of the first things a child has to do is to learn to “abandon ecstasy,” to do without awe, to leave fear and trembling behind.

In order to control your life and death you must at least be somebody - not just a trembling accident germinated on a hothouse planet. Need control to control life and death.

We don’t want to admit that we are fundamentally dishonest about reality, that we do not really control our own lives. We don’t want to admit that we do not stand alone, that we always rely on something that transcends us, some system of ideas and powers in which we are embedded and which support us

It need not be overtly a god or openly a stronger person, but it can be the power of an all-absorbing activity, a passion, a dedication to a game, a way of life, that like a comfortable web keeps a person buoyed up and ignorant of himself, of the fact that he does not rest on his own center. All of us are driven to be supported in a self-forgetful way, ignorant of what energies we really draw on. Man could strut and boast all he wanted, but that he really drew his “courage to be” from a god, a string of sexual conquests, a Big Brother, a flag, the proletariat, and the size of a bank balance.

Like a tree that needs a rock to grow on

You’re climbing up music, and career, and value-adding, and games, and etc. etc. to be a tall tree. A woman might climb up you to be herself and that may be ok Like two vines climbing up eathother to get higher. Or a vine on a wall - nature splits itself to play with and support itself. 

I think both can be true. That without it you can be nothing. And in this environment you have all of these things to be a great fit. Your everything would be wiped away and you would be nothing without x and y and z that your tree is built on BUT your tree is great and erect with x and y and z in this environment to build on. In another environment you would be building on other things and be different, or without an environment you would be nothing, AND in this environment you are THIS. 

You have to be able to sit there and visualize all your values sliding off and you becoming nothing, or someone completely different, without those things that ‘you’ are built on. But you are also that tree built high on those things and that’s ok. Your mind must be ok with both

We enter symbiotic relationships in order to get the security we need, in order to get relief from our anxieties, our aloneness and helplessness; but these relationships also bind us, they enslave us even further because they support the lie we have fashioned.

We seek stress, we push our own limits, but we do it with our screen against despair and not with despair itself.

If character is a neurotic defense against despair and you shed that defense, you admit the full flood of despair, the full realization of the true human condition, what men are really afraid of, what they struggle against, and are driven toward and away from. Freud summed it up beautifully when he somewhere remarked that psychoanalysis cured the neurotic misery in order to introduce the patient to the common misery of life. Neurosis is another word for describing a complicated technique for avoiding misery, but reality is the misery

Without the shield:

• Burden of aloneness
• The powerlessness of those he thought most powerful
• Stripped of internal complications, Who could regard the sun except with fear?

The child’s fall from natural perception into the artificialities of the cultural world - Souls to souls are like apples to apples, one being rotten rots another. So I began among my playfellows to prize a drum, a fine coat, a penny, a gilded book,…. As for the Heavens and the Sun and Stars they disappeared, and were no more unto me than the bare walls. So that the strange riches of man’s invention quite overcame the riches of Nature, being learned more laboriously and in the second place.

the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive

“inauthentic” men, men who avoid developing their own uniqueness; they follow out the styles of automatic and uncritical living in which they were conditioned as children.

they do not belong to themselves, do not act from their own center, do not see reality on its terms; they are the one-dimensional men totally immersed in the fictional games being played in their society, unable to transcend their social conditioning

the “automatic cultural man”—man as confined by culture, a slave to it

Man lulled by the daily routines of his society, content with the satisfactions that it offers him. He imagines that he has an identity if he pays his insurance premium, that he has control of his life if he guns his sports car or works his electric toothbrush

Why does man accept to live a trivial life? Because of the danger of a full horizon of experience, of course. Philistinism celebrates the triumph over possibility, over freedom

If there’s freedom, anything could happen - even bad things. The more afraid we are of bad things happening, the more we become slaves. 

The depressed person is so afraid of being himself, so fearful of exerting his own individuality, of insisting on what might be his own meanings, his own conditions for living, that he seems literally stupid. He cannot seem to understand the situation he is in, cannot see beyond his own fears, cannot grasp why he has bogged down.

If we don’t have the omnipotence of gods, we at least can destroy like gods.

The child has built up strategies and techniques for keeping his self-esteem in the face of the terror of his situation. These techniques become an armor that hold the person prisoner. The very defenses that he needs in order to move about with self-confidence and self-esteem become his life-long trap.

Stand naked in the storm of life

Like many prisoners they are comfortable in their limited and protected routines, and the idea of a parole into the wide world of accident and choice terrifies them

In the prison of one’s character one can pretend and feel that he is somebody, that the world is manageable, that there is a reason for one’s life, a ready justification for one’s action. To live automatically and uncritically is to be assured of at least a minimum share of the programmed cultural heroics—what we might call “prison heroism”: the smugness of the insiders who “know.” 

The prison of one’s character is painstakingly built to deny one thing and one thing alone: one’s creatureliness. The creatureliness is the terror.

What does it mean to be a self-conscious animal? The idea is ludicrous, if it is not monstrous. It means to know that one is food for worms. This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression—and with all this yet to die.

Once you expose the basic weakness and emptiness of the person, one can begin to posit creatureliness vis-à-vis a Creator who is the First Cause of all created things, not merely the second-hand, intermediate creators of society, the parents and the panoply of cultural heroes. Once the person begins to look to his relationship to the Ultimate Power, to infinitude, and to refashion his links from those around him to that Ultimate Power, he opens up to himself the horizon of unlimited possibility, of real freedom.

Anxiety is always a body problem, which means a death problem

Man can never banish anxiety; what he can do instead is to use anxiety as an eternal spring for growth into new dimensions

One can face up to real danger (e.g., of a known disease, as Freud did), because it gives one an object, an adversary, something against which to marshal one’s courage; disease and dying are still living processes in which one is engaged. But to fade away, leave a gap in the world, disappear into oblivion—that is quite another matter.

the attempt to father himself—the “Oedipal project.”

What, then, is the problem of yielding? It represents nothing less than the abandonment of the causa-sui project, the deepest, completest, total emotional admission that there is no strength within oneself, no power to bear the superfluity of experience. To yield is to admit that support has to come from outside oneself and that justification for one’s life has to come totally from some selftranscending web in which one consents to be suspended—as a child in its hammock-cradle, glaze-eyed in helpless, dependent admiration of the cooing mother. If the causa-sui project is a lie that is too hard to admit because it plunges one back to the cradle, it is a lie that must take its toll as one tries to avoid reality

^Seems like reality is sometimes God and sometimes baby, and that’s ok. It’s only avoiding reality when you’re a baby thinking you’re God. Would be the same if you were God thinking you were a baby. 

“As I was carrying him, he half came to, and I shall never forget the look he cast at me as if I were his father.” How sweet it must be to let go of the colossal burden of a self-dominating, self-forming life, to relax one’s grip on one’s own center, and to yield passively to a superordinate power and authority—and what joy in such yielding: the comfort, the trust, the relief in one’s chest and shoulders, the lightness in one’s heart, the sense of being sustained by something larger, less fallible

One of the main reasons that it is so easy to march men off to war is that deep down each of them feels sorry for the man next to him who will die.

This is how we know the character defense if fully formed. 

the same jealousy against all those connected with him

The patient transfers the feelings he had towards his parents as a child to the person of the physician. He blows the physician up larger than life just as the child sees the parents. He becomes as dependent on him, draws protection and power from him just as the child merges his destiny with the parents, and so on. In the transference we see the grown person as a child at heart, a child who distorts the world to relieve his helplessness and fears, who sees things as he wishes them to be for his own safety, who acts automatically and uncritically

what men did with their judgment and common sense when they got caught up in groups: simply became dependent children again, blindly following the inner voice of their parents, which now came to them under the hypnotic spell of the leader. They abandoned their egos to his, identified with his power, tried to function with him as an ideal.

people have a “longing for being hypnotized” precisely because they want to get back to the magical protection, the participation in omnipotence, the “oceanic feeling” that they enjoyed when they were loved and protected by their parents. And so, as Freud argues, it is not that groups bring out anything new in people; it is just that they satisfy the deep-seated longings that people constantly carry around unconsciously

The real world is simply too terrible to admit; it tells man that he is a small, trembling animal who will decay and die. Illusion changes all this, makes man seem important, vital to the universe, immortal in some way

he makes possible a new experience, the expression of forbidden impulses, secret wishes, and fantasies. In group behavior anything goes because the leader okays it

There are leaders who seduce us because they do not have the conflicts that we have; we admire their equanimity where we feel shame and humiliation.

n it is no longer murder: it is “holy aggression. In other words, participation in the group redistills everyday reality and gives it the aura of the sacred—just as, in childhood, play created a heightened reality.

groups “use” the leader sometimes with little regard for him personally, but always with regard to fulfilling their own needs and urges.

When they give in to the leader’s commands they can always reserve the feeling that these commands are alien to them, that they are the leader’s responsibility, that the terrible acts they are committing are in his name and not theirs. This, then, is another thing that makes people feel so guiltless, as Canetti points out: they can imagine themselves as temporary victims of the leader.The more they give in to his spell, and the more terrible the crimes they commit, the more they can feel that the wrongs are not natural to them.

Leaders need followers as much as they are needed by them: the leader projects onto his followers his own inability to stand alone, his own fear of isolation. It’s a symbiotic relationship

the child’s longing for a powerful father as a “protection against strange superior powers,” as a consequence of “human weakness” and “childish helplessness.”For Freud, “eros” covered not only specific sexual drives but also the child’s longing for omnipotence, for the oceanic feeling that comes with a merger with the parental powers We might say that the child would then seek merger with the parental omnipotence not out of desire but out of cowardice

[transference]… is basically a maneuver or tactic by which the patient seeks to perpetuate his familiar mode of existence that depends on a continuing attempt to divest himself of power and place it in the hands of the “Other.”

“hate” transference: helps us to fix ourselves in the world. hate, too, blows the other person up larger than he deserves. As Jung put it, the “negative form of transference in the guise of resistance, dislike, or hate endows the other person with great importance from the start….” We need a concrete object to control us, and we get one in whatever way we can.

We can even use our own body as a transference object. The pains we feel, the illnesses that are real or imaginary give us something to relate to, keep us from slipping out of the world, from bogging down in the desperation of complete loneliness and emptiness. In a word, illness is an object.

We take our helplessness, our guilt, our conflicts, our cares, and we fix them to a spot in the environment. If we look at the basic problems of human slavishness it is always them that we see.

Interesting that parental death can be devastating because of destruction of the transference object - if you were using your parents to feel immortal or powerful against life’s terror you’re going to be in for an extra hard time. You’re going to lose your parents and lose what they meant to you.

Interesting idea that grief over famous people deaths shows a profound state of shock at losing one’s bulwark against death. The people apprehend, at some dumb level of their personality: “Our locus of power to control life and death can himself die; therefore our own immortality is in doubt.” All the tears and all the tearing is after all for oneself, not for the passing of a great soul but for one’s own imminent passing.

When the leader dies the device that one has used to deny the terror of the world instantly breaks down; what is more natural, then, than to experience the very panic that has always threatened in the background?

when we console our children after their nightmares and other frights, we tell them not to worry, that they are “good” and nothing can hurt them, and so on: goodness = safety and special immunity. Man is moral because he senses his true situation and what lies in store for him. He overcomes badness (smallness, unimportance, finitude) by conforming to the rules made by the representatives of natural power (the transference-objects); in this way his safe belongingness is assured. He also attempts to overcome badness by developing a valuable heroic gift - by becoming extra special. 

His constant self-criticism is the only way he has to overcome the sense of hopeless limitation inherent in his real situation. Dictators, revivalists, and sadists know that people like to be lashed with accusations of their own basic unworthiness because it reflects how they truly feel about themselves. The sadist doesn’t create a masochist; he finds him ready-made. He criticizes himself because action is needed as he falls short of the heroic ideals he needs to meet in order to be a really imposing creation

You can see that 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. One obviously can’t have merger in the power of another thing and the development of one’s own personal power at the same time

This was the most remarkable achievement of the Christian world picture/ culture: Little did it matter that the earth was a vale of tears, of horrid sufferings, a place where man felt he did not belong, because it served God and so would serve the servant of God. Man’s cosmic heroism was assured, even if he was as nothing. Christianity took creature consciousness—the thing man most wanted to deny—and made it the very condition for his cosmic heroism.

If he no longer had God, how was he to do this? The “romantic solution” - The self-glorification that he needed in his innermost nature he now looked for in the love partner. The love partner becomes the divine ideal within which to fulfill one’s life. All spiritual and moral needs now become focused in one individual. 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 “moral vindication for the other” “If he accepts me my existence is utilized” Sexuality is a groping for the meaning of life. Need to be important not to die -> need to be important for this most important person (parent, lover, culture). Feeling important -> self esteem -> feeling good about oneself. 

He cannot stand the burden of godhood, and so he must resent the slave. Besides, the uncomfortable realization must always be there: how can one be a genuine god if one’s slave is so miserable and unworthy?

Interesting that if you need a story to be immortal, you need something to struggle against for a story. Most people struggle against the body - which is the reason they needed the story to be immortal. 

If you need a reason for being, you need a story. For a story you need struggle

there is no way for the artist to be at peace with his work or with the society that accepts it. The artist’s gift is always to creation itself, to the ultimate meaning of life, to God.

everybody has some trouble living with the truth of life and pays some vital ransom to that truth.

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, know what it is all about and for. 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. Most men spare themselves this trouble by keeping their minds on the small problems of their lives just as their society maps these problems out for them. These are what Kierkegaard called the “immediate” men and the “Philistines.” They “tranquilize themselves with the trivial”—and so they can lead normal lives

Regarding obsessions, compulsions, phobias of all kinds: Here we see the result of too much fetishization or partialization, too much narrowing-down of the world for action. The result is that the person gets stuck in the narrowness. No wonder that one cannot give it up: that would release all by itself the whole flood of terror that one is trying to deny and overcome. When you put all your eggs in one basket you must clutch that basket for dear life. It is as though one were to take the whole world and fuse it into a single object or a single fear

It must be clear that the despair and anguish of which the patient complains is not the result of such symptoms but rather are the reasons for their existence.

The particular phobia or obsession is the very means by which man eases the burden of his life’s tasks and is able to assuage his sense of insignificance…. Neurotic symptoms serve to reduce and narrow—to magically transform the world so that he may be distracted from his concerns of death, guilt, and meaninglessness. The neurotic is preoccupied with his manufactured central task of confrontation with his particular obsession or phobia. Neurosis allows him to take control of his destiny by transforming the whole of life’s meaning into the simplified meaning emanating from his self-created world

Another way of approaching neurosis is from the opposite end of the problem. There is a type of person who has difficulty fetishizing and narrowing-down; he has a vivid imagination, takes in too much experience, too large a chunk of the world. Creative people feel their isolation, stick out, and are less securely programmed for automatic cultural action. To have difficulty partializing experience is to have difficulty living. Not to be able to fetishize makes one susceptible to the world as a total problem. They can’t lose themselves thoughtlessly in the games that others play. One reason is that they have trouble relating to others; they haven’t been able to develop the necessary interpersonal skills. Playing the game of society with automatic ease means playing with others without anxiety.

The neurotic exhausts himself not only in self-preoccupations like hypochondriacal fears and all sorts of fantasies, but also in others: those around him on whom he is dependent become his therapeutic work project; he takes out his subjective problems on them. But people are not clay to be molded; they have needs and counter-wills of their own. The neurotic’s frustration as a failed artist can’t be remedied by anything but an objective creative work of his own. Another way of looking at it is to say that the more totally one takes in the world as a problem, the more inferior or “bad” one is going to feel inside oneself. Either you eat up yourself and others around you, trying for perfection; or you objectify that imperfection in a work, on which you then unleash your creative powers. 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

If the neurotic feels vulnerable in the face of the world he takes in, he reacts by criticizing himself to excess. He still needs to be a hero, still needs to earn immortality on the basis of his unique qualities, which means that he still must glorify himself in some ways. But he can glorify himself only in fantasy, as he cannot fashion a creative work that speaks on his behalf by virtue of its objective perfection. One simply cannot justify his own heroism in his own inner symbolic fantasy, which is what leads the neurotic to feel more unworthy and inferior. There is really no conviction possible for man unless it comes from others or from outside himself in some way.

The neurotic perceives himself as unreal and reality as unbearable, because with him the mechanisms of illusion are known and destroyed by self consciousness. He can no longer deceive himself about himself and disillusions even his own ideal of personality. He perceives himself as bad, guilt laden, inferior, as a small, weak, helpless creature, which is the truth about mankind.

Talent is the only difference between adolescent who has not yet discovered his inner gifts, neurosis, and artist. Luck and work make skill. 

What we call “cultural routine”: 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 working behind those hellish ranges in hotel kitchens, the frantic whirl of waiting on a dozen tables at one time, the madness of the travel agent’s office at the height of the tourist season, or the torture of working with a jackhammer all day on a hot summer street. 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. They plunge into their work with equanimity and lightheartedness because it drowns out something more ominous.

The causa-sui project is a pretense that one is invulnerable because protected by the power of others and of culture, that one is important in nature and can do something about the world. But in back of the causa-sui project whispers the voice of possible truth: that human life may not be more than a meaningless interlude in a vicious drama of flesh and bones that we call evolution; that the Creator may not care any more for the destiny of man or the selfperpetuation of individual men than He seems to have cared for the dinosaurs or the Tasmanians.

The question is what degree of illusion will you choose about the world. 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.

Neurosis as a problem of character is the talent vs. no talent question. Neurosis as a question of illusion is a question of narrowing, creating, or playing. Neurosis is also a question of unsolved history (meaning): a line of creation from God, a meaningless evolutionary chainlink, or a special cultural story. 

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.

Psychology wanted to show 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.

Psychology narrows the cause for personal unhappiness down to the person himself, and then he is stuck with himself. But we know that the universal and general cause for personal badness, guilt, and inferiority is the natural world and the person’s relationship to it as a symbolic animal who must find a secure place in it. All the analysis in the world doesn’t allow the person to find out who he is and why he is here on earth, why he has to die, and how he can make his life a triumph. Psychology has not understood how much individual unhappiness is itself a historical problem in the larger sense

psychotherapists “are, so to say, the neurotic’s product due to his illness.” Modern man needs a “thou” to whom to turn for spiritual and moral dependence, and as God was in eclipse, the therapist has had to replace Him—just as the lover and the parents did.

Man wants to find and experience the marvelous, the absolute mystery of the world. 

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, something to give form and body to internal fantasy, something external to yield oneself to

Sin and neurosis are both man making the meaning of life HIM

not only their unreal self-inflation in the refusal to admit creatureliness but also a penalty for intensified self-consciousness: the failure to be consoled by shared illusions. The result is that the sinner (neurotic) is hyper-conscious of the very thing he tries to deny: his creatureliness, his miserableness and unworthiness.

Men are naturally neurotic and always have been, but at some times they have it easier than at others to mask their true condition. Men avoid clinical neurosis when they can trustingly live their heroism in some kind of self-transcending drama

The defeat of despair is mainly a problem of self-stimulation via movement. Beyond a given point man is not helped by more “knowing,” but only by living and doing. 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

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.

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.

the only secure truth men have is that which they themselves create and dramatize; to live is to play at the meaning of life

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. We no longer have to please those around us, but the very source of creation—the powers that created us, not those into whose lives we accidentally fell. 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,

Low self-esteem is the central problem of mental illness.

Mental illness is a way of talking about people who have lost courage, which is the same as saying that it reflects the failure of heroism. When does the person have the most trouble with his self-esteem? Precisely when his heroic transcendence of his fate is most in doubt, when he doubts his own immortality, the abiding value of his life; when he is not convinced that his having lived really makes any cosmic difference. Mental illness represents bogging-down in the denial of creatureliness.

One must pay with life and consent daily to die, to give oneself up to the risks and dangers of the world, allow oneself to be engulfed and used up. Otherwise one ends up as though dead (depressed) in trying to avoid life and death.

The melancholic patient which has failed to take responsibility for all those possibilities of relating to the world which actually would constitute his own genuine self. Consequently, such an existence has no independent standing of its own but continually falls prey to the demands, wishes and expectations of others. Such patients try to live up to these foreign expectations as best they can, in order not to lose the protection and love of their surroundings, but they go more deeply into debt. Hence the terrible guilt feelings of the melancholic…

reminding his patients that “they were not in the world to please their partner, nor he to please them.” It was a way of cutting into the morality of “personal-performance for immortality.”

Probably no male human being is spared the terrifying shock of threatened castration at the sight of the female genitals…

the fetish is a substitute for the woman’s (mother’s) phallus which the little boy once believed in. The “reason” is that the female genitals prove the reality of castration and awaken the horror of it for oneself. The only way to triumph over this threat is to “give” the woman a phallus, however artificially and symbolically; and the fetish is precisely the “token of triumph over the threat of castration and a safeguard against it…

the masochist doesn’t “want” pain, he wants to be able to identify its source, localize it, and so control it.

an ego is needed in order to experience his body, which means that the ego has to disengage itself from the body and oppose it. That is another way of saying that the child must be blocked in his experience in order to be able to register that experience. If we don’t “stop” the child he develops very little sense of himself, he becomes an automaton, a reflex of the surface of his world playing upon his own surface. How the child registers experience on his body: the need to develop in a dualistic way in order to be a rich repository of life

primitive man put the highest priority on ways to avoid bad will and bad action, which is why he seems to have circumscribed his activities in often compulsive and phobic ways. Tradition has laid a heavy hand over men everywhere

there really was 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

She has a little stomach trouble; why not keep it, I tell her, because if we are able to take away those attacks that come once in a fortnight or so, we do not know what problem we shall discover beneath it. Probably this defense mechanism is her adjustment, probably that is the price she has to pay. One cannot ever have everything, probably she has to pay.