BR_Denial of Death_Opinion excerpts from the elite psychologists of the 19th and 20th Centuries Flashcards
- Reference: Denial of Death by Ernest Becker
- Opinion on Ernest Becker:
Of all things that move man, one of the principal ones is his terror of death.
All historical religions addressed themselves to this same problem of how to bear the end of life.
A child has no knowledge of death until about the age of three to five. Only gradually does he recognize that there is a thing called death that takes some people away forever. Very reluctantly he comes to admit that it sooner or later takes everyone away. The fear of death is something that society creates and at the same time uses against the person to keep him in submission.
The fear of death must be repressed to keep us living with any modicum of comfort. The emergence of man as we know him: a hyper-anxious animal who constantly invents reasons for anxiety even where there are none.
[MN: Theme of the book. Man has a lot of fear and uncertainty. He uses repression so he doesn’t have to face these fears, such as death being the endgame. //Other animals do not think about fears and uncertainties to the degree humans do. Humans think about past and future fears and events, such as dying after learning a “lifetime of experiences”.
To help repress these fears, humans develop logical constructs such as gods, saviors and religions to help them cope with life as a human.]
Man cuts out for himself a manageable world: he throws himself into action uncritically, unthinkingly.
He doesn’t bite the world off in one piece as a giant would, but in small manageable pieces. He uses all kinds of techniques, which we call the “character defenses”.
He has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground to rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with.
“Man 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.” – Jose Ortega Y Gasset The Revolt of the Masses 1957.
The great boon of repression is that it makes it possible to live decisively in an overwhelmingly miraculous and incomprehensible world.
We protect ourselves by repression and similar defenses, which are essentially techniques by which we avoid becoming conscious of unpleasant or dangerous truths. eg: “She is in a better place now.
Freud summed it up when he remarked that psychoanalysis cured the neurotic misery in order to introduce the patient to the common misery of life.
- Opinions of Kierkegaard, pronounced as KEER-ka-guard.
(1813-1855) Danish philosopher, theologian, social critic and religious author.
We find that psychiatric and religious perspectives on reality are intimately related. Even more importantly for now, they reinforce one another.
The best existential analysis of the human condition leads directly into the problems of God and faith.
Death is man’s peculiar and greatest anxiety. Kierkegaard’s whole understanding of man’s character is that it is a structure built up to avoid perception of the “terror, perdition and annihilation that dwells next door to every man. He understood psychology that its task is to discover the strategies that a person uses to avoid anxiety.
Kierkegaard understood that the lie of character is built up because the child needs to adjust to the world, to the parents, and to his own existential dilemmas. Thus character defenses are automatic and unconscious. The problem is that the child becomes dependent on them and comes to be encased in his own character armor.
The child grows into a man willing to accept living a trivial life? Because of the danger of a full horizon of experience. This he calls “Philistinism”.
Philistinism knows its real enemy: freedom is dangerous. The safest thing is to toe the mark of what is socially possible. //Kierkegaard understands that psychosis is neurosis pushed to its extreme. [MN: for example, a new convert becomes a terrorist.]//[MN: The philistine. Recall the Philistine is Kierkegaard’s pet analysis of built in repression. The person must go with the flow of what society has laid out for him. This is man’s normal strategy of repression to protect himself from his fears! As a result, man ends up “living a lie”. He forms his custom “Character armor” as a useful tool to repress his inherent fears of this personal life.]
[Ambulatory Schizophrenia. Disconfirmation paradigm, a lesser form of ambulatory schizophrenia.] //[MN: Ambulatory Schizophrenia, ie daydreaming. A fun vacation into fantasy, like being the super golfer. It is a controlled vacation from reality that I can enjoy.]//Sometimes a man forgets himself … does not dare to believe in himself, finds it too venturesome a thing to be himself, far easier to be like the others, to become an imitation, a number, a cipher in the crowd.
[MN: Explains the need for religion. We just want to fit in the crowd.]
The depressed person is so afraid of being himself.
- Philistinism is what we would call “normal neurosis.” Most men figure out how to live safely within the probabilities of a given set of social rules.
Kierkegaard’s analysis was written almost a century before freud spoke of the possibility of “social neuroses”, the pathology of whole cultural communities.
There is a type of man who has contempt for “immediacy”, who tries to cultivate his interiority, base his pride on something deeper and inner, create a distance between himself and the average man. Kierkegaard calls this type of man the “introvert” . He enjoys solitude and withdraws periodically to reflect, perhaps to nurse ideas about his secret self. {MN: this is me!]
Kierkegaard had no illusions about man’s urge to freedom. He knew how comfortable people were inside the prison of their character defenses. Like many prisoners they are comfortable in their limited and protected routines.
Mankind knows 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, and excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression, and with all this yet to die. It seems like a hoax.
[MN: Another reason for belief in God. People cannot accept that their lifetime, experiences, education and learning will in the end all be deleted as they turn into worm food. They use ambulatory schizophrenia to repress this fact and live in a world that they will be saved from death and not end up as worm food. Everyone wants to believe they will go to a better place and continue with life forever and ever. I never realized that gods and religions were immortality tools to repress psychological fears of a cold ending in death.]
- Sigmund Freud’s opinions//Freud made psychoanalysis the competitor of religion.//Freud’s sexual theory was proven incorrect. Man was primarily an avoider of death. //The death instinct represents the desire to die, but the organism can save itself from its own impulsion toward death by redirecting it outward. The desire to die, then, is replaced by the desire to kill, and man defeats his own death instinct by killing others. Killing is a symbolic solution of a biological limitation. The death fear of the ego is lessened by the killing, the sacrifice, of the other; through the death of the other, one buys oneself free from the penalty of dying, of being killed.//Freud fainted. Fainting represents, as we know the most massive denial, the refusal or inability to remain conscious in the face of a threat. //Freud had to create a whole new family–the psychoanalytic movement–that would be his distinctive immortality-vehicle.
Freud was looking for an heir, and it was Jung who was to be the “son” whom he had proudly chosen as his spiritual successor and who would assure the success and continuation of psychoanalysis.//Freud hated helplessness and fought against it.//Man is the only animal who can often willingly embrace the deep sleep of death, even while knowing that it means oblivion.//If you are one of the few who admits the anxiety of death then you must question the fantasy of immortality./It is hard for a man to work steadfastly when his work can mean no more than the digestive noises, wind-breakings, and cries of dinosaurs–noises now silenced forever.//[MN: I can understand this. Here all the working of man are compared with the importance of a dinosaur fart. How depressing. No wonder people want to believe in fantasies, their immortality tools. //Meaning of life in a nutshell: //So all of my accomplishments, hard work, and all my efforts and successes, at the end of history, will be of no more importance than a dinosaur fart.]//This is what makes man strong and true–that he defies the illusory comforts of religion. Human illusions prove that men do not deserve any better than oblivion. So Freud must have reasoned as he made psychoanalysis the competitor of religion.
- Otto Rank
Otto Rank Opinions Otto Rank 1884-1939. Austrian psychoanalyst, writer and teacher. Born in Vienna, he was one of Sigmund Freud’s closest colleagues for 20 years a prolific writer on psychoanalytic themes. Had a successful career as a lecturer, writer, and therapist in France and the United States./If man no longer had god, what would he use for his immortality tool?
The “Romantic solution”. He fixed his urge to cosmic heroism onto another person in the form of a love object. 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.
If the love object is divine perfection, then one’s own self is elevated by joining one’s destiny to it.
Nature conquers death not by creating eternal organisms but by making it possible for ephemeral ones to procreate.
The thing that makes God the perfect spiritual object is precisely that he is abstract.
We turn to the love partner for the experience of the heroic, for perfect validation; we expect them to make us good through love. Needless to say, human partners can’t do this.
Freud was anti-religious because he somehow could not personally give the gift of his life to a religious ideal. He saw such a step as weakness, a passivity that would defeat his own creative urge for more life.
Rank wrote about neurosis all through his work. The fact is–as we shall shortly see–that neurosis sums up all the problems of a human life.
When we say neurosis represents the truth of life we again mean that life is an overwhelming problem for an animal free of instiinct.
Here we look at each of the three aspects of neurosis in more detail.
The Neurotic Type
We cannot repeat too often the great lesson of Freudian psychology: That repression is normal self-protection and creative self-restriction–in a real sense, man’s natural substitute for instinct. Rank has a perfect, key term for this natural human talent; he calls it “Partialization” and very rightly sees that life is impossible without it.
The normal man bites off what he can chew and digest of life, and no more. Men are not built to be gods, to take in the whole world; they are built to take in the piece of ground in front of their noses. 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. This is Kierkegaard’s Philistines. They tranquilize themselves with the trivial, and so they can lead normal lives.
We can say that the essence of normality is the refusal of reality.
No wonder that one cannot give it up: (Neurosis) 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. We immediately recognize this the same creative dynamic that the person uses in transference, when he fuses all the terror and majesty of creation in the transference object. This is what Rank meant when he said that neurosis represents creative power gone astray and confused. The person doesn’t really know what the problem is, but he hits on an ingenious way to keep moving past it.[MN: I think this explains why people cling to religion. They want to fit in and are scared to death of life and this is the way they could put it in a small package which they could handle in bit size pieces. A form of transference.]
[MN: a good definition of the psychotic] The psychotic is the one who cannot shut out the world, whose repressions are all on the surface, whose defenses no longer work; and so he withdraws from the world and into himself and his fantasies.
The Problem of Illusion
To be able to live one needs illusions, not only outer illusions such as art, religion, philosophy, science and love afford, but inner illusions which first condition the outer [ie a secure sense of one’s active powers, and of being able to count on the powers of others.]
Neurosis as Historical
Modern man became psychological because he became isolated from protective collective ideologies. He also became psychological because modern thought itself evolved that way when it developed out of religion. The inner life of man had always been portrayed traditionally as the area of the soul. But in the 19th century scientists wanted to reclaim this last domain of superstition from the Church.
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.
- Transference
Back to Chapter 7: A great chapter about Transference
[MN: Transference N. The action of transferring something or the process of being transferred: education involves the transference of knowledge. Churches use transference as a tool to gain more followers. Terrorist use transference to indoctrinate and gain followers.]
We know that all through history masses have followed leaders because of the magic aura they projected, because they seemed larger than life. Men worship and fear power and so give their loyalty to those who dispense it.
If all people are more or less alike, why do we burn with such all consuming passions for some of them?
[MN: Transference is the method for gaining a following, especially with supernatural beings or if the transference provides a workable solution.]Freud saw that transference was just another form of the basic human suggestibility that makes hypnosis possible. It was the same passive surrender to superior power.//
In our innermost soul we are still children, and we remain so throughout life.
As the highest ambition of the child is to obey the all powerful parent, to believe in him, and to imitate him, what is more natural than an instant, imaginary return to childhood via the hypnotic trance?
[MN: In transference, adults become obedient children again with the leader being a surrogate father.]
Freud saw right away how transference works. The people 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.
People want to get back to the magical protection, the participation in omnipotence, that they enjoyed when they were loved and protected by their parents.
For Freud, this was the life force that held groups together. It functioned as a kind of psychic cement that locked people into mutual and mindless interdependence.
Why are groups so blind and stupid? Because they demand illusions, answered Freud. They “constantly give what is unreal precedence over what is real.” And we know why. 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.
Just like the people who blindly followed Charles Manson. Why should they feel guilt or remorse? The leader takes responsibility for the destructive act, and those who destroy on his command are no longer murderers, but “holy heroes.”
The qualities of the leader, then, and the problems of people fit togetheer in a natural symbiosis.
- Transference is fundamentally a problem of courage.
Transference may be regarded as the enduring monument of man’s profound rebellion against reality and his stubborn persistence in the ways of immaturity.
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”.
We can understand the essence of transference as a taming of terror.
Freud is right about tyrannical fathers: the more terrifying the object, the stronger the transference.
This is the Christian motive of Agape–As Rank put it, man yearns for a “feeling of kinship with the All.”
People create the reality they need in order to discover themselves.
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- Religion
p. 273. If one senses therapeutic religion as a cultural need, then it is the highest idealism to try and fill that need with one’s heart and soul. On the other hand, even with the best intentions, transference is, willy-nilly, a process of indoctrination.
The thing about transference is that it takes root very subtly, all the while that the person seems to be squarely on his own feet. A person can be indoctrinated into a world-view that he comes to believe without suspecting that he may have embraced it because of his relationship to someone.
P. 275. Man must reach out for support to a dream, a metaphysic of hope that sustains him and makes his life worthwhile. [MN: otherwise man lives the dinosaur fart reality.
