MapsOfTheMind15 Freud and Ranke

7/28/2019 MapsOfTheMind15 Freud and Ranke

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MAP 15The Death-DenyingMind:Otto Rankand ErnestBecker pI~~

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In the process of humanperception we usually distinguish'figure' from 'ground' (orbackground). Although we selecta figure to focus on automatical ly,this choice is arbitrarily governedby our motives or expectationsand is not given by the objectitself. Otto Rank and ErnestBecker proposed that we denydeath to rid ourselves of thepainful, paradox of life-in-death.Accordingly we focus obsessivelyon 'the white angel of life' whilerepressing 'the black devil ofdeath' deep into the recesses ofunconsciousness. We inventimmortality systems, which stressHeaven, Heroism, Romanticism,Corporatism, the State andRevolutionary Immortality. Thecruel reali ty is that during ournatural lives the dark backgroundis moving inexorably forward. Wecannot stand this and so createsymbolic visions of 'all whiteness',which so swathe the ground inmiasmic mist that we literallystumble into the abyss to ultimatedeaths. 'We give birth astride agrave, the light gleams an instantand it's night once more.'

Otto Rank was a close pupil of Freud (see Map 9), who encouraged the former toattend university and helped pay for his studies. Rank later dissented from hismaster, but his reformulation remains respectful yet profoundly original. In 1974 thesociologist Ernest Becker won a Pulitzer Prize for his rehabilitation and elaborationof Rank in The Denial of Death. The book had a special poignancy, for Becker washimself dying of cancer.Rank and Becker take as their point of departure that the human being is uniquein the animal kingdom. We alone are alive while consciously aware that we shalldie. Our symbolizing capacities provide endless food for thought, yet our bodieswill be food for worms. It is vain to search for a 'basic essence' of humanity toattempt to reduce mind to a unitary source, for we are suspended in paradox,seething with vitality against the back-drop of obliteration. We exist between thelife fear and the death fear, of feeling overwhelmed by potential and excitement, andof feeling abandoned to limitation and lassitude.It was Freud who noted that the unconscious and id impulses seem not to knowof death and time. In our inner recesses we feel immortal and like Narcissus see theworld as reflections of ourselves. It is the ego and the reality principle which warn uswe are doomed, and while we believe this of others, our private impulses'cry outagainst the sentence of death and will, in the words of Dylan Thomas, 'Rage, rageagainst the dying of the light'.An entirely fresh understanding is thrown upon Freud's insights if we assume thatwhat is being repressed is not sexuality so much as the terror of death. For example,the anxiety aroused by sex, nakedness, bodily functions, etc, is now seen as anunwelcome reminder of mortality. Oral, anal and phallic stages of development areinfantile attempts to swallow, expel and penetrate a 'world' shrunk to manageablesize. The young child has no direct knowledge of death, but has many experiencesof paradox, which has the same structure as death. For example, the child may feelomnipotent since by the simple act of yelling nurturance comes at his command.Then comes the dawning realization that his 'power' is a tribute paid to impotence.The baby's very life hangs upon the thread of parental solicitude. 'Castration fear' isthus focused on the mother, not the father. The boy yearns to be independent yetfears to be alone and rejected. The mother, like the legendary sphinx, has aparadoxical aspect, she can nurture through dependence, yet destroy throughoverdependence. The cradle, seemingly so warm and safe, rocks upon a darkocean. This paradox of infancy yields to the larger paradox of adult existence itself,in which another encapsulated shell rocks on another ocean. The child has nomeans of articulating this fear of paradox, save by symbols close at hand, hence thefear of long-legged beasties and things that go bump in the night.

The Oedipal complex becomes, in this view, the project of attempted self-creation. Oedipus sought to confound death by becoming the father of himself, themotive and sin for which th~ gods cast him down (and for which Satan was expelledfrom heaven). Oedipus had grown to manhood by solving the riddle of the sphinx,that 'man' emerges from the conflict between nurturance and destruction. But thatsolution had been verbal and symbolic only, so that Oedipus then stumbled intothe greater paradox, that which lies between the symbolizing power of heroes andkings and the underlying limitations of mortal flesh. He knew 'everything' save theorigin and fate of his own body.

Mankind has sought numerous solutions to the paradox that 'in life we are in themidst of death'. Rank and Becker have distinguished religious, heroic, romantic,philistine and creative solutions, without which we become neurotic or evenpsychotic and end up as 'psychological man', continually in therapy. All these64


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MAP 15/LEVEL2

'Letsanguine ealthy-mindednessdo its best with its strange powerof living for the moment andignoring and forgetting. . . theskull will grin at the banquet'.'Varieties of Religious Experience'WilliamJames'For life is at the start a chaos inwhich one is lost. The individualsuspects his, but he is frightenedof finding himself face to face withthis terrible reality, and tries tocover it over with a curtain offantasy,where everything is clear.It does not worry him that hisideas are not true, he uses themas trenches for the defence of hisexistence, as scarecrows ofrighten away reality.''The Revolt of the Masses'

OrtegaE.Casset

solutions attempt to create a universe of symbols woven like illusions aroundcadaverous reality. 'For man,' says Rank, is a theological being.'The historic solution appealed to 'other worldly' religion. What is this. brutishexistence of ours, this vale of tears compared with life and joy everlasting amidangels (who, as St Augustine reminded us, have no fundamental orifices!)? TheEastern raditions similarly invite us to dissolve paradox by mystic selflessness ndceasing o strive. The whole world of oppositions recedes nto the realm of no-mind,save hat here the concentration is on the concrete; eg the breathing of one's ownbody. The result is the same: the sensation of timelessnessand transcendence, animmortal oneness with the universe. Death is put aside awhile and the paradox ofthe koan (a verse riddle) is used to anaesthetize us against the larger paradox ofexistence.Heroism also promises immortality. Traditionally the hero faced death andconquered it by killing his country's foes. He left on long odysseys,as if dead, andreturned with life-enhancing knowledge or substance. Those who partake of thehero's aura will share his apparent immunity to death as he survives miraculouslyamid the slaughter. To be stronger than enemies who wish your death is to bestronger than death itself. We are still today under the spell cast by persons,whether holy warriors or the newer breed of pop-stars, gurus and daredevils.Millions seek o be pulled into cloud-cuckoo land on the coat-tails of FredAstaire orthe wall-to-wall noise of rock bands.The romantic solution attempts to make a religion of love relationships.Romanticism, he tradition of courtly love, historically challenged the institution ofChristian (arranged)marriage with a passionate cosmology of two'. The ove objectis celestial, sublime, perfect, and because she accepts me, I am redeemed fromdeath by her grace. Of course I must avoid her body and the relaxation that comesfrom consummated love. That is why romanticism feeds on frustration, why it singsto the lady within the castle wall of unrequited love, and leaves a symbolic roseupon the battlements. To encounter a real woman would be a profound anticlimax,a dangerous mingling of heaven with halitosis. Jonathan Swift, who was torturedby such anomalies, laments:

'No wonder that I lost my witsFor Caelia, Caelia, Caelia shits!'The philistine solution finds refuge in compromise, mediocrity and shrinking theworld to bite-sized pieces.The bourgeois aspires o becoming deputy supervisor incharge of yogurt at the office of his grocery chain. Rank called this 'partialization',the reduction of human existence o manageable objectives. In sexual relationships

it becomes a fetish, a whole woman reduced to boots or suspenders. t is he adult'sequivalent to the child's oral and anal fixation.Rank placed most of his hope in the creative resolution of the life-death paradoxthrough the work of artists. Freud, he noted, was an agnostic, desperately warninghis disciples against straying into 'the occult', but then creativity was Freud'sprivatereligion. When reproving his followers for straying from the fold, he would besubject to fainting fits. His own immortality was at stake! Creative persons aremore comfortable with paradox because hey tend to see ife itself as a problem orquestion that evokes a personal synthesis. Art is the attempted objectification ofour subjective yearning for immortality. For the act of creation is never reallycompleted, the artist must await in desperate vulnerability for the answer to hisoffering. Nor will popular acceptance suffice. Since creativity aspires o immortality,it craves he acknowledgement f immortal authorities,be they god, culture orhh


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LEVEL2!MAP 15

'What will become of my wholelife?. . . 15 here any meaning inmy life that the inevitable deathawaiting me does not destroy?''Confession'Leo Tofstoy'The history of mankind dividesinto two great periods, oneexisted from time immemorial. . .and was characterized by theritualist view of nature. Thesecond began with. . . themodern machine age. . . . In bothperiods men wanted to controllife and death, but in the first theyhad to rely on non-machinetechnology. . . by building a ritualaltar and making that the locus ofthe transfer and renewal of life-power.''Escape rom Evil' Ernest Becker

posterity. The true creator must combine the highest level of self-expressionwithtotal self-surrender, Eros married to Agape. Rank would have agreed with IngmarBergman that the world's greatest art was.offered to god. The modern cult of thecreative person takes its theme from Norman Mailer's Advertisements for Myself;this overly self-conscious creativity inflates its self-importance as it elbows to gainprecedence at the pearly gates.Rank saw the symptoms of neuroses and psychoses as breakdowns in thecapacity to deny death. These people were 'artistes manque', tortured by theparadoxes hey could not resolve and confronted by death-in-life. This accountedfor typical neurotic symptoms, ambivalence, hesitation, stammering, anxiety, innerconflict, chronic indecision, with intimate relationships equally conflicted. Oftenthere was an underlying disgust with the mortal coil, evidenced by depression,rituals of decontamination, rage turned inwards or outwards, with extremes ofhyperactivity or nervous prostration. The psychotic has totally split the death fearfrom the life fear, babbling to himself n a symbolic world divorced from social reality,or suffering beneath the weight of his body in rigid, foetal and immobile postures.Before he died Becker came close to a major contribution to our comprehensionof genocidal man. His last, unfinished, book, Escape or Evil, reveals the lethalconsequences of immortality systems. Religious dogmas rigidify and become soemotionally charged in their futile battles with death that they fall upon each otherin religious wars. Human sacrifices,warlord ism and the ritual slaughter of captivesare public demonstrations of the hero's power over death. Armies, tribes andhordes seek immersion in the aura that surrounds their leaders or in therevolutionary immortality of collective purpose. Romantic lovers like Tristan andIsolde, Romeo and Juliet escalate their passion as the forces frustrating it escalatetoo. In a grand climax they prove the immortality of their love by dying for it. Theidol 'love' is venerated, only the people perish! Before death can come for us werush to lay our lives at the feet of idols, History, Providence, God, Romance, TheParty, Patriotism, LSD.But as Aldous Huxley warned, 'All idols, sooner or later,become Molochs hungry for human sacrifice'.The mounting tolls of war sharpen the pains of paradox, and human beingstypically respond with even more powerful repressions.For example, in the GreatWar, we refused o countenance that thousands of young men could be cut down intheir prime. 'Youth wasted' was a paradox too sharp to bear. We had to give itmeaning. 'The war to end all wars' we said to ourselves; 'Greater love hath no manthan this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.' Yet it is absurd to pretend thatsuch elevated and improbable sentiments were crossing the minds of ordinarysoldiers as bullets struck them. Such rhetoric is for us, the survivors, who arethreatened by our own mortality and the meaninglessnessof existence. As wecomfort the bereaved and ourselves by gathering around war memorials, are wenot laying the foundations for the next slaughter, readying another generation tocharge 'heroically' into the jaws of paradox?The different forms of death denial share a common structure. The life-in-deathparadox is converted into life-and-after-life, an altogether more comfortable andconsistent proposition, but one that dangerously obscures the choice of living outour span in this life. We shall survive death, we say, n heaven, on war memorials, nthe annals of romantic love, in the future of the corporation, in some final 'fix', indeathless art or prose. But death denied by abstract ideals will come upon us inconcrete reality, as we perish sooner rather than later, and earn for the humanspecies ts reputation as he most murderous animal the world has known. 'Man,' asEli Wiesel said, 'is not human.'

MAP REFERENCESCreativity, 13, 2&-31, 51, 54, 59;Death, 11-13, 37, 50, 59; Oedipalproject, 9, 40, 58; Paradox, seealso contradiction, 13, 52-7;Theological being, 4, 6, 10, 24,26,59; War, 22, 24, 34, 39-40,43,47,50, 56.

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MapsOfTheMind15 Freud and Ranke