MAP 15

The Death-DenyingMind:

Otto Rankand ErnestBecker

Otto Rank was a close pupil of Freud (see Map 9), who encouraged the former to attend university and helped pay for his studies. Rank later dissented from his master, but his reformulation remains respectful yet profoundly original. In 1974 the sociologist Ernest Becker won a Pulitzer Prize for his rehabilitation and elaboration of Rank in The Denial of Death. The book had a special poignancy, for Becker was himself dying of cancer. Rank and Becker take as their point of departure that the human being is unique in the animal kingdom. We alone are alive while consciously aware that we shall die. Our symbolizing capacities provide endless food for thought, yet our bodies will be food for worms. It is vain to search for a 'basic essence' of humanity to attempt 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 the life fear and the death fear, of feeling overwhelmed by potential and excitement, and of feeling abandoned to limitation and lassitude. It was Freud who noted that the unconscious and id impulses seem not to know of death and time. In our inner recesses we feel immortal and like Narcissus see the world as reflections of ourselves. It is the ego and the reality principle which warn us we are doomed, and while we believe this of others, our private impulses'cry out against the sentence of death and will, in the words of Dylan Thomas, 'Rage, rage against the dying of the light'. An entirely fresh understanding is thrown upon Freud's insights if we assume that what 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 an unwelcome reminder of mortality. Oral, anal and phallic stages of development are infantile attempts to swallow, expel and penetrate a 'world' shrunk to manageable size. The young child has no direct knowledge of death, but has many experiences of paradox, which has the same structure as death. For example, the child may feel omnipotent 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' is thus focused on the mother, not the father. The boy yearns to be independent yet fears to be alone and rejected. The mother, like the legendary sphinx, has a paradoxical aspect, she can nurture through dependence, yet destroy through overdependence. The cradle, seemingly so warm and safe, rocks upon a dark ocean. 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 no means of articulating this fear of paradox, save by symbols close at hand, hence the fear of long-legged beasties and things that go bump in the night. The Oedipal complex becomes, in this view, the project of attempted selfcreation. Oedipus sought to confound death by becoming the father of himself, the motive and sin for which th~ gods cast him down (and for which Satan was expelled from heaven). Oedipus had grown to manhood by solving the riddle of the sphinx, that 'man' emerges from the conflict between nurturance and destruction. But that solution had been verbal and symbolic only, so that Oedipus then stumbled into the greater paradox, that which lies between the symbolizing power of heroes and kings and the underlying limitations of mortal flesh. He knew 'everything' save the origin and fate of his own body. Mankind has sought numerous solutions to the paradox that 'in life we are in the midst of death'. Rank and Becker have distinguished religious, heroic, romantic, philistine and creative solutions, without which we become neurotic or even psychotic and end up as 'psychological man', continually in therapy. All these
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In the process of human perception we usually distinguish 'figure' from 'ground' (or background). Although we select a figure to focus on automatically, this choice is arbitrarily governed by our motives or expectations and is not given by the object itself. Otto Rank and Ernest Becker proposed that we deny death to rid ourselves of the painful, paradox of life-in-death. Accordingly we focus obsessively on 'the white angel of life' while repressing 'the black devil of death' deep into the recesses of unconsciousness. We invent immortality systems, which stress Heaven, Heroism, Romanticism, Corporatism, the State and Revolutionary Immortality. The cruel reality is that during our natural lives the dark background is moving inexorably forward. We cannot stand this and so create symbolic visions of 'all whiteness', which so swathe the ground in miasmic mist that we literally stumble into the abyss to ultimate deaths. 'We give birth astride a grave, the light gleams an instant and it's night once more.'

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healthy-mindedness solutions attempt to create a universe of symbols woven like illusions around 'Let sanguine do its best with its strange power cadaverous reality. 'For man,' says Rank, 'is a theological being.' The historic solution appealed to 'other worldly' religion. What is this. brutish of living for the moment and existence of ours, this vale of tears compared with life and joy everlasting amid ignoring and forgetting. . . the skull will grin at the banquet'. angels (who, as St Augustine reminded us, have no fundamental orifices!)? The 'Varieties of Religious Experience' Easterntraditions similarly invite us to dissolve paradox by mystic selflessness and WilliamJames ceasingto strive. The whole world of oppositions recedesinto the realm of no-mind, savethat here the concentration is on the concrete; eg the breathing of one's own 'For life is at the start a chaos in body. The result is the same: the sensation of timelessnessand transcendence, an which one is lost. The individual immortal oneness with the universe. Death is put aside awhile and the paradox of suspectsthis, but he is frightened the koan (a verse riddle) is used to anaesthetize us against the larger paradox of of finding himself face to face with this terrible reality, and tries to existence. Heroism also promises immortality. Traditionally the hero faced death and cover it over with a curtain of fantasy,where everything is clear. conquered it by killing his country's foes. He left on long odysseys,as if dead, and It does not worry him that his returned with life-enhancing knowledge or substance. Those who partake of the ideas are not true, he uses them hero's aura will share his apparent immunity to death as he survives miraculously as trenches for the defence of his amid the slaughter. To be stronger than enemies who wish your death is to be existence,as scarecrows to stronger than death itself. We are still today under the spell cast by persons, frighten away reality.' 'The Revolt of the Masses' whether holy warriors or the newer breed of pop-stars, gurus and daredevils. OrtegaE.Casset Millions seekto be pulled into cloud-cuckoo land on the coat-tails of FredAstaire or the wall-to-wall noise of rock bands. The romantic solution attempts to make a religion of love relationships. Romanticism, the tradition of courtly love, historically challenged the institution of Christian (arranged)marriage with a passionate'cosmology of two'. The love object is celestial, sublime, perfect, and because she accepts me, I am redeemed from death by her grace. Of course I must avoid her body and the relaxation that comes from consummated love. That is why romanticism feeds on frustration, why it sings to the lady within the castle wall of unrequited love, and leaves a symbolic rose upon the battlements. To encounter a real woman would be a profound anticlimax, a dangerous mingling of heaven with halitosis. Jonathan Swift, who was tortured by such anomalies, laments: 'No wonder that I lost my wits For Caelia, Caelia, Caelia shits!' The philistine solution finds refuge in compromise, mediocrity and shrinking the world to bite-sized pieces.The bourgeois aspiresto becoming deputy supervisor in charge of yogurt at the office of his grocery chain. Rank called this 'partialization', the reduction of human existence to manageable objectives. In sexual relationships it becomes a fetish, a whole woman reduced to boots or suspenders.It is the adult's equivalent to the child's oral and anal fixation. Rank placed most of his hope in the creative resolution of the life-death paradox through the work of artists. Freud, he noted, was an agnostic, desperately warning his disciples against straying into 'the occult', but then creativity was Freud'sprivate religion. When reproving his followers for straying from the fold, he would be subject to fainting fits. His own immortality was at stake! Creative persons are more comfortable with paradox because they tend to see life itself as a problem or question that evokes a personal synthesis. Art is the attempted objectification of our subjective yearning for immortality. For the act of creation is never really completed, the artist must await in desperate vulnerability for the answer to his offering. Nor will popular acceptance suffice. Since creativity aspiresto immortality,

it cravesthe acknowledgement of immortal authorities,be they god, culture or

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posterity. The true creator must combine the highest level of self-expressionwith total self-surrender, Erosmarried to Agape. Rank would have agreed with Ingmar Bergman that the world's greatest art was.offered to god. The modern cult of the creative person takes its theme from Norman Mailer's Advertisements for Myself; this overly self-conscious creativity inflates its self-importance as it elbows to gain precedence at the pearly gates. 'The history of mankind divides Rank saw the symptoms of neuroses and psychoses as breakdowns in the into two great periods, one capacity to deny death. These people were 'artistes manque', tortured by the existed from time immemorial. . . and was characterized by the paradoxes they could not resolve and confronted by death-in-life. This accounted ritualist view of nature. The for typical neurotic symptoms, ambivalence, hesitation, stammering, anxiety, inner second began with. . . the conflict, chronic indecision, with intimate relationships equally conflicted. Often modern machine age. . . . In both there was an underlying disgust with the mortal coil, evidenced by depression, periods men wanted to control rituals of decontamination, rage turned inwards or outwards, with extremes of life and death, but in the first they hyperactivity or nervous prostration. The psychotic has totally split the death fear had to rely on non-machine from the life fear, babbling to himself in a symbolic world divorced from social reality, technology. . . by building a ritual or suffering beneath the weight of his body in rigid, foetal and immobile postures. altar and making that the locus of Beforehe died Beckercame close to a major contribution to our comprehension the transfer and renewal of lifeof genocidal man. His last, unfinished, book, Escapefor Evil, reveals the lethal power.' 'Escapefrom Evil' ErnestBecker consequences of immortality systems. Religious dogmas rigidify and become so emotionally charged in their futile battles with death that they fall upon each other in religious wars. Human sacrifices,warlord ism and the ritual slaughter of captives are public demonstrations of the hero's power over death. Armies, tribes and hordes seek immersion in the aura that surrounds their leaders or in the revolutionary immortality of collective purpose. Romantic lovers like Tristan and Isolde, Romeo and Juliet escalate their passion as the forces frustrating it escalate too. In a grand climax they prove the immortality of their love by dying for it. The idol 'love' is venerated, only the people perish! Before death can come for us we rush to lay our lives at the feet of idols, History, Providence, God, Romance, The Party, 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 beings typically respond with even more powerful repressions.For example, in the Great War, we refusedto countenance that thousands of young men could be cut down in their prime. 'Youth wasted' was a paradox too sharp to bear. We had to give it meaning. 'The war to end all wars' we said to ourselves; 'Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.' Yet it is absurd to pretend that such elevated and improbable sentiments were crossing the minds of ordinary soldiers as bullets struck them. Such rhetoric is for us, the survivors, who are threatened by our own mortality and the meaninglessnessof existence. As we comfort the bereaved and ourselves by gathering around war memorials, are we not laying the foundations for the next slaughter, readying another generation to charge 'heroically' into the jaws of paradox? The different forms of death denial share a common structure. The life-in-death paradox is converted into life-and-after-life, an altogether more comfortable and MAP REFERENCES consistent proposition, but one that dangerously obscures the choice of living out Creativity, 13, 2&-31, 51, 54, 59; our span in this life. We shall survive death, we say, in heaven, on war memorials, in Death, 11-13, 37, 50, 59; Oedipal the annals of romantic love, in the future of the corporation, in some final 'fix', in project, 9, 40, 58; Paradox, see deathless art or prose. But death denied by abstract ideals will come upon us in also contradiction, 13, 52-7; concrete reality, as we perish sooner rather than later, and earn for the human Theological being, 4, 6, 10, 24, speciesits reputation as the most murderous animal the world has known. 'Man,' as 26,59; War, 22, 24, 34, 39-40, 43,47,50, 56. Eli Wiesel said, 'is not human.'
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'What will become of my whole life? . . . 15there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy?' 'Confession'Leo Tofstoy