The Denial of Death (11 page)

But the chilling reality behind this truth is even more upsetting, and there doesn’t seem to be much that we can do with it or will ever be able to do with it: I mean that
without
character-traits there has to be full and open psychosis. At the very end of this book I want to sum up the basic contradictions of Brown’s argument for new men without character defenses, his hope for a rebirth of mankind into a “second innocence.” For now, it is enough to invoke Marcia Lee Anderson’s complete scientific formula: “Stripped of subtle complications [i.e., of all the character defenses—
repression, denial, misperception of reality], who could regard the sun except with fear?”

Today we can call Kierkegaard a “psychoanalyst” without fear of being laughed at—or at least with confidence that the scoffers are uninformed. In the last few decades a new discovery of Kierkegaard has been taking place, a discovery that is momentous because it links him into the whole structure of knowledge in the humanities in our time. We used to think that there was a strict difference between science and belief and that psychiatry and religion were consequently far apart. But now we find that psychiatric and religious perspectives on reality are intimately related. For one thing
they grow out of one another historically, as we shall see in a later section. Even more importantly for now, they reinforce one another. Psychiatric experience and religious experience cannot be separated either subjectively in the person’s own eyes or objectively in the theory of character development.

Nowhere is this merger of religious and psychiatric categories clearer than in the work of Kierkegaard. He gave us some of the best empirical analyses of the human condition ever fashioned by man’s mind. But ironically, it was not until the epoch of the scientific atheist Freud that we could see the scientific stature of the theologian Kierkegaard’s work. Only then did
we have the clinical evidence to support it. The noted psychologist Mowrer summed it up perfectly two decades ago: “Freud had to live and write before the earlier work of Kierkegaard could be correctly understood and appreciated.”
²
There have been several good attempts to show how Kierkegaard anticipated the data of modern clinical psychology. Most of the European existentialists have had something to say about this, along with theologians like Paul Tillich.
³
The meaning of this work is that it draws a circle around psychiatry and religion; it shows that the best existential analysis of the human condit
ion leads directly into the problems of God and faith, which is exactly what Kierkegaard had argued.

I am not going to attempt to repeat and decode Kierkegaard’s breathtakingly penetrating and often difficult-to-understand analysis of the human condition. What I want to do instead is to try to present a summing-up of the main argument contained in his psychological works, as pointedly and sparingly as possible, so that the reader can see “in a nutshell” what Kierkegaard was driving at. If I can do this without getting too involved because fascinated by Kierkegaard’s genius, the reader should be struck by the result. The structure of Kierkegaard’s understanding of man
is almost exactly a r
ecap of the modern clinical picture of man that we have sketched in the first four chapters of this book
. The reader can then judge for himself how congruent the two pictures are at basic points (even though I don’t present Kierkegaard in his stunning detail), why it is that we are today comparing Kierkegaard’s stature in psychology to Freud’s, and why I and others are prepared to call Kierkegaard as great a student of the human condition as was Freud. The fact is that, although writing in the 1840’s he was really post-Freudian, which conveys the eternal uncanniness of genius.

The Existential Paradox as the Beginning of
Psychology and Religion

The foundation stone for Kierkegaard’s view of man is the myth of the Fall, the ejection of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. In this myth is contained, as we saw, the basic insight of psychology for all time: that man is a union of opposites,
of self-consciousness and of physical body. Man emerged from the instinctive thoughtless action of the lower animals and came to reflect on his condition. He was given a consciousness of his individuality and his part-divinity in creation, the beauty and uniqueness of his face and his name. At the same time he was given the consciousness of the terror of the world and of his own death and decay. This paradox is the really constant thing about man in all periods of history and society; it is thus the true “essence” of man, as Fromm said. As we saw, the leading modern psychologists have them
selves made it the cornerstone of their understanding. But Kierkegaard had already counseled them: “Further than this psychology cannot go … and moreover it can verify this point again and again in its observation of human life.”
⁴

The fall into self-consciousness, the emergence from comfortable ignorance in nature, had one great penalty for man: it gave him
dread,
or anxiety. One does not find dread in the beast, says Kierkegaard, “precisely for the reason that by nature the beast is not qualified by spirit.”
⁵
For “spirit” read “self” or symbolic inner identity. The beast has none. It is ignorant, says Kierkegaard, therefore innocent; but man is a “synthesis of the soulish and bodily”
⁶
and so experiences anxiety. Again, for “soulish” we must read “self-conscious.”

If a man were a beast or an angel, he would not be able to be in dread. [That is, if he were utterly unself-conscious or totally un-animal] Since he is a synthesis he can be in dread … man himself produces dread.
⁷

Man’s anxiety is a function of his sheer ambiguity and of his complete powerlessness to overcome that ambiguity, to be straightforwardly an animal or an angel. He cannot live heedless of his fate, nor can he take sure control over that fate and triumph over it by being outside the human condition:

The spirit cannot do away with itself [i.e., self-consciousness cannot disappear]… . Neither can man sink down into the vegetative life [i.e., be wholly an animal]… . He cannot flee from dread.
⁸

But the real focus of dread is not the ambiguity itself, it is the result of
the judgment
on man: that if Adam eats of the fruit of the tree of knowledge God tells him “Thou shalt surely die.” In other wor
ds, the final terror of self-consciousness is the knowledge of one’s own death, which is the peculiar sentence on man alone in the animal kingdom. This is the meaning of the Garden of Eden myth and the rediscovery of modern psychology: that death is man’s peculiar and greatest anxiety.
^*

Kierkegaard’s Characterology

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] dwell next door to every man.”
⁹
He understood psychology the way a contemporary psychoanalyst does: that its task is to discover the strategies that a person uses to avoid anxiety. What style does he use to function automatically and uncritically in the world, and how does this style cripple his true growth and freedom of action and choice? Or, in words that are almost Kierkegaard’s: how is a person being enslaved by his c
haracterological lie about himself?

Kierkegaard described these styles with a brilliance that today seems uncanny and with a vocabulary that sums up much of the psychoanalytic theory of character defenses. Whereas today we talk about the “mechanisms of defense” such as repression and denial, Kierkegaard talked about the same things with different terms: he referred to the fact that most men live in a “half-obscurity” about their own condition,
¹⁰
they are in a state of “shut-upness” wherein they block off their own perceptions of reality.
¹¹
He understood the compulsive character, the rigidity of the person who has had to b
uild extra-thick defenses against anxiety, a heavy character armor, and he described him in the following terms:

A partisan of the most rigid orthodoxy … knows it all, he bows before the holy, truth is for him an ensemble of ceremonies, he talks about presenting himself before the throne of God, of how many times one must bow, he knows everything the same way as does the pupil who is able to demonstrate a mathematical proposition with the letters ABC, but not when they are changed to DEF. He is therefore in dread whenever he hears something not arranged in the same order.
¹²

There is no doubt that by “shut-upness” Kierkegaard means what we today refer to by repression; it is the closed personality, the one who has fenced himself around in childhood, not tested his own powers in action, not been free to discover himself and his world in a relaxed way. If the child is not burdened by too much parental blocking of his action, too much infection with the parents’ anxieties, he can develop his defenses in a less monopolizing way, can remain somewhat fluid and open in character. He is prepared to test reality more in terms of his own action and experimentation
and less on the basis of delegated authority and prejudgment or preperception. Kierkegaard understood this difference by making a distinction between “lofty” shut-upness and “mistaken” shut-upness. He went on to give a Rousseau-like enjoinder for raising children with the right kind of character orientation:

It is of infinite importance that a child be brought up with a conception of the lofty shut-upness [reserve], and be saved from the mistaken kind. In an external respect it is easy to perceive when the moment has arrived that one ought to let the child walk alone; … the art is to be constantly present and yet not be present, to let the child be allowed to develop itself, while nevertheless one has constantly a survey clearly before one. The art is to leave the child to itself in the very highest measure and on the greatest possible scale, and to express this apparent abandonm
ent in such a way that, unobserved, one at the same time knows everything… . And the father who educates or does everything for the child entrusted to him, but has not prevented him from becoming shut-up, has incurred a great accountability.
¹³

Just as Rousseau and Dewey, Kierkegaard is warning the parent to let the child do his own exploration of the world and develop his own sure experimental powers. He knows that the child has
to be protected against dangers and that watchfulness by the parent is of vital importance, but he doesn’t want the parent to obtrude his own anxieties into the picture, to cut off the child’s action before it is absolutely necessary. Today we know that such an upbringing alone gives the child a self-confidence in the face of experience that he would not have if he were overly blocked: it gives him an “inner sustainment.” And it is precisely this inner sustainment that allows the child to develop a “lofty” shut-upness, or reserve: that is, an ego-controlled and self-confident appraisal of the worl
d by a personality that can open up more easily to experience. “Mistaken” shut-upness, on the other hand, is the result of too much blockage, too much anxiety, too much effort to face up to experience by an organism that has been overburdened and weakened in its own controls: it means, therefore, more automatic repression by an essentially
closed
personality. And so, for Kierkegaard, the “good” is the opening toward new possibility and choice, the ability to face into anxiety; the closed is the evil, that which turns one away from newness and broader perceptions and experiences; th
e closed shuts out revelation, obtrudes a veil between the person and his own situation in the world.
¹⁴
Ideally these should be transparent, but for the closed person they are opaque.

It is easy to see that shut-upness is precisely what we have called “the lie of character,” and Kierkegaard calls it the same thing:

It is easy to see that shut-upness
eo ipso
signifies a lie, or, if you prefer, untruth. But untruth is precisely unfreedom … the elasticity of freedom is consumed in the service of close reserve… . Close reserve was the effect of the negating retrenchment of the ego in the individuality.
¹⁵

This is a perfectly contemporary psychoanalytic description of the costs of repression on the total personality. I am omitting Kierkegaard’s more detailed and penetrating analysis of how the person becomes fragmented within himself by the repression, how the real perception of reality dwells under the surface, close at hand, ready to break through the repression, how the repression leaves the personality seemingly intact, seemingly functioning as a whole, in continuity—but how that continuity is broken, how the personality is really at the mercy of the discontinuity expres
sed by the repression.
¹⁶
To a modern, clinically-trained mind such an analysis must be truly marvelous.

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. It is built up before the child has a chance to learn about himself in an open or free way, and 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, unable to see freely beyond his own prison or into himself, into the defenses he is using, the things that are determining his unfreedom.
¹⁷
The best that the ch
ild can hope is that his shut-upness will not be of the “mistaken” or massive kind, in which his character is too fearful of the world to be able to open itself to the possibilities of experience. But that depends largely on the parents, on accidents of the environment, as Kierkegaard knew. Most people have parents who have “incurred a great accountability,” and so they are obliged to shut themselves off from possibility.