The Denial of Death (23 page)

Now we see what we might call the ontological or creature tragedy that is so peculiar to man: If he gives in to Agape he risks failing to develop himself, his active contribution to the rest of life. If he expands Eros too much he risks cutting himself off from natural dependency, from duty to a larger creation; he pulls away from the healing power of gratitude and humility that he must naturally feel for having been created, for having been given the opportunity of life experience.

Man thus has the absolute tension of the dualism. Individuation means that the human creature has to oppose itself to the rest of nature. It creates precisely the isolation that one can’
t stand—and yet needs in order to develop distinctively. It creates the difference that becomes such a burden; it accents the smallness of oneself and the sticking-outness at the same time. This is
natural
guilt. The person experiences this as “unworthiness” or “badness” and dumb inner dissatisfaction.
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And the reason is realistic. Compared to the rest of nature man is not a very satisfactory creation. He is riddled with fear and powerlessness.

The problem becomes how to get rid of badness, of natural guilt, which is really a matter of reversing one’s position
vis-à-vis
the universe. It is a matter of achieving size, importance, durability: how to be bigger and better than one really is. The whole basis of the urge to goodness is to be something that has value, that endures.
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We seem to know it intuitively 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. You might say t
hat the urge to morality is based entirely on the physical situation of the creature. Man is moral because he senses his true situation and what lies in store for him, whereas other animals don’t. He uses morality to try to get a place of special belongingness and perpetuation in the universe, in two ways. First, 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. This too is natural: we tell the child when he is good so that he doesn’t have to be afraid. Second
, he attempts to overcome badness by developing a really valuable heroic gift, becoming extra-special.

Do we wonder why one of man’s chief characteristics is his tortured dissatisfaction with himself, his constant self-criticism? It 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. Thus people are offered one way of overcoming unworthiness: the chance to idealize the self, to lift it onto truly heroic lev
els. In this way man sets up the complementary dialogue with himself that is natural to his condition. He criticizes himself b
ecause 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 p
ersonal power at the same time, at any rate not without ambivalence and a degree of self-deception. But one can get around the problem in one way: one can, we might say, “control the glaringness of the contradiction.” You can try to choose the fitting kind of beyond, the one in which you find it most natural to practice self-criticism and self-idealization.
⁶⁰
In other words, you try to keep your beyond safe. The fundamental use of transference, of what we could better call “transference heroics,” is the practice of a safe heroism. In it we see the reach of the ontological dualism of motives right in
to the problem of transference and heroism, and we are now in a position to sum up this matter.

Transference as the Urge to Higher Heroism

The point of our brief discursus on ontological motives is to make compellingly clear how transference is connected to the foundations of organismic life. We can now understand fully how wrong it would be to look at transference in a totally derogatory way when it fulfills such vital drives toward human wholeness. Man needs to infuse his life with value so that he can pronounce it “good.” The transference-object is then a natural fetishization for man’s highest yearnings and strivings. Again we see what a marvelous “talent” transference is. It is a form of creative fetishism,
the establishment of a locus from which our lives can draw the powers they need and want. What is more wanted than immortality
-power? How wonderful and how facile to be able to take our whole immortality-striving and make it part of a dialogue with a single human being. We don’t know, on this planet, what the universe wants from us or is prepared to give us. We don’t have an answer to the question that troubled Kant of what our duty is, what we should be doing on earth. We live in utter darkness about who we are and why we are here, yet we know it must have some meaning. What is more natural, then, than to take this unspeakable mystery and dispel it straightaway by addressing our performance of heroics to another hu
man being, knowing thus daily whether this performance is good enough to earn us eternity. If it is bad, we know that it is bad by his reactions and so are able instantly to change it. Rank sums up this vital matter in a particularly rich, synthetic paragraph:

Here we come upon the age-old problem of good and evil, originally designating eligibility for immortality, in its emotional significance of being liked or disliked by the other person. On this plane … personality is shaped and formed according to the vital need to please the other person whom we make our “God,” and not incur his or her displeasure. All the twistings of the … self, with its artificial striving for perfection and the unavoidable “relapses” into badness, are the result of these attempts to humanize the spiritual need for goodness.
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As we will see in the next chapters, one can nourish and expand his identity of all kinds of “gods,” on heavens as well as hells. How a person solves his natural yearnings for self-expansion and significance determines the quality of his life. Transference heroics gives man precisely what he needs: a certain degree of sharply defined individuality, a definite point of reference for his practice of goodness, and all within a certain secure level of safety and control.

If transference heroics were safe heroism we might think it demeaning. Heroism is by definition defiance of safety. But the point that we are making is that all the strivings for perfection, the twistings and turnings to please the other, are not necessarily cowardly or unnatural. What makes transference heroics demeaning is that the process is unconscious and reflexive, not fully in one’s control. Psychoanalytic therapy directly addresses itself to this problem. Beyond that, the other person is man’s fate and a natural one. He
is forced to address his performance to qualify for goodness to his fellow creatures, as they form his most compelling and immediate environment, not in the physical or evolutionary sense in which like creatures huddle unto like, but more in the spiritual sense. Human beings are the only things that mediate meaning, which is to say that they give the only human meaning we can know. Jung has written some particularly brilliant and penetrating pages on transference, and he has seen that the urge is so strong and natural that he has even called it an “instinct”—a “kinship libido.”
This instinct, he says, cannot be satisfied in any abstract way:

It wants the
human
connection. That is the core of the whole transference phenomenon, and it is impossible to argue it away, because relationship to the self is at once relationship to our fellow man… .
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A century earlier Hermann Melville had put the same thought into the mouth of Ahab:

Close! stand close to me, Starbuck; let me look into a human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze upon God. By the green land; by the bright hearthstone! this is the magic glass, man; I see my wife and my child in thine eye.
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The meaning of this need for other men to affirm oneself was seen beautifully by the theologian Martin Buber. He called it “imagining the real”: seeing in the other person the self-transcending life process that gives to one’s self the larger nourishment it needs.
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In terms of our earlier discussion we could say that the transference object contains its own natural awesomeness, its own miraculousness, which infects us with the significance of
our
own lives if we give in to it. Paradoxically, then, transference surrender to the “truth of the other,” even if only in his physical being, gives
us a feeling of heroic self-validation. No wonder that Jung could say that it is “impossible to argue away.”

No wonder too, for a final time, that transference is a universal passion. It represents a natural attempt to be healed and to be whole, through heroic self-expansion in the “other.” Transference represents the larger reality that one needs, which is why Freud and Ferenczi could already say that transferenc
e represents psychotherapy, the “self-taught attempts on the patient’s part to cure himself.”
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People create the reality they need in order to discover themselves. The implications of these remarks are perhaps not immediately evident, but they are immense for a theory of the transference. If transference represents the natural heroic striving for a “beyond” that gives self-validation and if people need this validation in order to live, then the psychoanalytic view of transference as simply unreal projection is destroyed.
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Projection is necessary and desirable for self-fulfillment. Otherwise man is overwh
elmed by his loneliness and separation and negated by the very burden of his own life. As Rank so wisely saw, projection is a
necessary unburdening
of the individual; man cannot live closed upon himself and for himself. He must project the meaning of his life outward, the reason for it, even the blame for it. We did not create ourselves, but we are stuck with ourselves. Technically we say that transference is a distortion of reality. But now we see that this distortion has two dimensions: distortion due to the fear of life and death and distortion due to the heroic attempt to assur
e self-expansion and the intimate connection of one’s inner self to surrounding nature. In other words, transference reflects the whole of the human condition and raises the largest philosophical question about that condition.

How big a piece of “reality” can man bite off without narrowing it down distortingly? If Rank, Camus, and Buber are right, man cannot stand alone but has to reach out for support. If transference is a natural function of heroism, a necessary projection in order to stand life, death, and oneself, the question becomes: What is
creative projection?
What is
life-enhancing
illusion? These are questions that take us way beyond the scope of this chapter, but we shall see the reach of them in our concluding section.

One of the things we see as we glance over history is that creature consciousness is always absorbed by culture. Culture opposes nature and transcends it. Culture is in its most intimate intent a heroic denial of creatureliness. But this denial is more effective in some epochs than in others. When man lived securely under the canopy of the Judeo-Christian world picture he was part of a great whole; to put it in our terms, his cosmic heroism was completely mapped out, it was unmistakable. He came from the invisible world into the visible one by the act of God, did his duty to God by
living out his life with dignity and faith, marrying as a duty, procreating as a duty, offering his whole life—as Christ had—to the Father. In turn he was justified by the Father and rewarded with
eternal life in the invisible dimension. Little did it matter that the earth was a vale of tears, of horrid sufferings, of incommensurateness, of torturous and humiliating daily pettiness, of sickness and death, a place where man felt he did not belong, “the wrong place,” as Chesterton said,
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the place where man could expect nothing, achieve nothing for himself. Little did it matter, because it served God and so would serve the servant of God. In a word, man’s cosmic heroism was assured, even if he was as nothing. This is the most remarkable achievement of the Christian world picture: that it co
uld take slaves, cripples, imbeciles, the simple and the mighty, and make them all secure heroes, simply by taking a step back from the world into another dimension of things, the dimension called heaven. Or we might better say that Christianity took creature consciousness—the thing man most wanted to deny—and made it the very
condition for
his cosmic heroism.

The Romantic Solution

Once we realize what the religious solution did, we can see how modern man edged himself into an impossible situation. He still needed to feel heroic, to know that his life mattered in the scheme of things; he still had to be specially “good” for something truly special. Also, he still had to merge himself with some higher, self-absorbing meaning, in trust and in gratitude—what we saw as the universal motive of the Agape-merger. If he no longer had God, how was he to do this? One of the first ways that occurred to him, as Rank saw, was the “romantic solution”: he fixed his urge t
o cosmic heroism onto
another person
in the form of a love object.
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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 focussed in one individual. Spirituality, which once referred to another dimension of things, is now brought down to this earth and given form in another individual human being. Salvation itself is no longer referred to an abstraction like God but can be sought “in the beatification of the other.” We could
call this “transference beatification.” Man now lives in a “cosmology of two.”
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To be sure, all through history there has been some competition between human objects of love and divine ones—we think of Héloïse and Abelard, Alcibiades and Socrates, or even the Song of Solomon. But the main difference is that in traditional society the human partner would not absorb into himself the whole dimension of the divine; in modern society he does.

In case we are inclined to forget how deified the romantic love object is, the popular songs continually remind us. They tell us that the lover is the “springtime,” the “angel-glow,” with eyes “like stars,” that the experience of love will be “divine,” “like heaven” itself, and so on and on; popular love songs have surely had this content from ancient times and will likely continue to have it as long as man remains a mammal and a cousin of the primates. These songs reflect the hunger for real experience, a serious emotional yearning on the part of the creature. The point is
that if the love object is divine perfection, then one’s own self is elevated by joining one’s destiny to it. 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 perfect consummation with perfection itself. This becomes a true “moral vindication in the other.”
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Modern man fulfills his urge to self-expansion in the love object just as it was once fulfilled in God: “God as … representation of our own will does not resist us except when we ourselves want it, and just as little does the lover resist
us who, in yielding, subjects himself to our will.”
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In one word, the love object is God. As a Hindu song puts it: “My lover is like God; if he accepts me my existence is utilized.” No wonder Rank could conclude that the love relationship of modern man is a
religious
problem.
⁷

Understanding this, Rank could take a great step beyond Freud. Freud thought that modem man’s moral dependence on another was a result of the Oedipus complex. But Rank could see that it was the result of a continuation of the
causa-sui
project of denying creatureliness. As now there was no religious cosmology into which to fit such a denial, one grabbed onto a partner. Man reached for a “thou” when the world-view of the great religious community overseen by God died. Modem man’s dependency
on the love partner, then, is a result of the loss of spiritual ideologies, just as is his dependency on his parents or on his psychotherapist. He needs
somebody,
some “individual ideology of justification” to replace the declining “collective ideologies.”
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Sexuality, which Freud thought was at the heart of the Oedipus complex, is now understood for what it really is: another twisting and turning, a groping for the meaning of one’s life. If you don’t have a God in heaven, an invisible dimension that justifies the visible one, then you take what is nearest at hand and work out your problems on that.

As we know from our own experience this method gives great and real benefits. Is one oppressed by the burden of his life? Then he can lay it at his divine partner’s feet. Is self-consciousness too painful, the sense of being a separate individual, trying to make some kind of meaning out of who one is, what life is, and the like? Then one can wipe it away in the emotional yielding to the partner, forget oneself in the delirium of sex, and still be marvellously quickened in the experience. Is one weighed down by the guilt of his body, the drag of his animality that haunts his vi
ctory over decay and death? But this is just what the comfortable sex relationship is for: in sex the body and the consciousness of it are no longer separated; the body is no longer something we look at as alien to ourselves. As soon as it is fully accepted
as a body
by the partner, our self-consciousness vanishes; it merges with the body and with the self-consciousness and body of the partner. Four fragments of existence melt into one unity and things are no longer disjointed and grotesque: everything is “natural,” functional, expressed as it should be—and so it is stilled and justified. All the mo
re is guilt wiped away when the body finds its natural usage in the production of a child. Nature herself then proclaims one’s innocence, how fitting it is that one should have a body, be basically a procreative animal.
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But we also know from experience that things don’t work so smoothly or unambiguously. The reason is not far to seek: it is right at the heart of the paradox of the creature. Sex is of the body, and the body is of death. As Rank reminds us, this is the meaning of the Biblical account of the ending of paradise, when the discovery of sex brings death into the world. As in Greek mythology too, Eros and Thanatos are inseparable; death is the natural twin brother of sex.
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Let us linger on this for a moment because it is so central to
the failure of romantic love as a solution to human problems and is so much a part of modem man’s frustration. When we say that sex and death are twins, we understand it on at least two levels. The first level is philosophical-biological. Animals who procreate, die. Their relatively short life span is somehow connected with their procreation. Nature conquers death not by creating eternal organisms but by making it possible for ephemeral ones to procreate. Evolutionarily this seems to have made it possible for really complex organisms to emerge in the place of simple—and almost literally et
ernal—self-dividing ones.

But now the rub for man. If sex is a fulfillment of his role as an animal in the species, it reminds him that he is nothing himself but a link in the chain of being, exchangeable with any other and completely expendable in himself. Sex represents, then, species consciousness and, as such, the defeat of individuality, of personality. But it is just this personality that man wants to develop: the idea of himself as a special cosmic hero with special gifts for the universe. He doesn’t want to be a mere fornicating animal like any other—this is not a truly human meaning, a truly
distinctive contribution to world life. From the very beginning, then, the sexual act represents a double negation: by physical death and of distinctive personal gifts. This point is crucial because it explains why sexual taboos have been at the heart of human society since the very beginning. They affirm the triumph of human personality over animal sameness. With the complex codes for sexual self-denial, man was able to impose the cultural map for personal immortality over the animal body. He brought sexual taboos into being because he needed to triumph over the body, and he sacrificed the pleasures
of the body to the highest pleasure of all: self-perpetuation as a spiritual being through all eternity. This is the substitution that Roheim was really describing when he made his penetrating observation on the Australian aborigines: “The repression and sublimation of the primal scene is at the bottom of totemistic ritual and religion,”
¹¹
that is, the denial of the body as the transmitter of peculiarly human life.

This explains why people chafe at sex, why they resent being reduced to the body, why sex to some degree terrifies them: it represents two levels of the negation of oneself. Resistance to s
ex is a resistance to fatality. Here Rank has written some of his most brilliant lines. He saw that the sexual conflict is thus a universal one because the body is a universal problem to a creature who must die. One feels guilty toward the body because the body is a bind, it overshadows our freedom. Rank saw that this natural guilt began in childhood and led to the anxious questions of the child about sexual matters. He wants to know why he feels guilt; even more, he wants the parents to tell him that his guilt feeling
is justified
. Here we have to remind ourselves of the perspective we used i
n Part I to introduce the problem of human nature. We saw that the child stands right at the crossroads of the human dualism. He discovers that he has a fallible body, and he is learning that there is a whole cultural world-view that will permit him to triumph over it. The questions about sex that the child asks are thus not—at a fundamental level—about sex at all. They are about the meaning of the body, the terror of living with a body. When the parents give a straightforward biological answer to sexual questions, they do not answer the child’s question at all. He wants to know why he has
a body, where it came from, and what it means for a self-conscious creature to be limited by it. He is asking about the ultimate mystery of life, not about the mechanics of sex. As Rank says, this explains why the adults suffer as much from the sexual problem as the child: the “biological solution of the problem of humanity is also ungratifying and inadequate for the adult as for the child.”
¹²

Sex is a “disappointing answer to life’s riddle,” and if we pretend that it is an adequate one, we are lying both to ourselves and to our children. As Rank beautifully argues, in this sense “sex education” is a kind of wishful thinking, a rationalization, and a pretense: we try to make believe that if we give instruction in the mechanics of sex we are explaining the mystery of life. We might say that modem man ties to replace vital awe and wonder with a “How to do it” manual.
¹³
We know why: if you cloak the mystery of creation in the easy steps of human manipulations you banish th
e terror of the death that is reserved for us as species-sexual animals. Rank goes so far as to conclude that the child is sensitive to this kind of lying. He refuses the “correct scientific explanation” of sexuality, and he refuses too the mandate to guilt-free sex enjoyment that it implies.
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I think that the reason probably is that if he is to grow into an immortal culture hero he must have a clear antagonist, especially at the beginning of his struggles to incorporate the cultural
causa-sui
project. As the body is the clear problem over which he must triumph in order to build a cultural personality at all, he must resist, at some level, the adult’s attempt to deny that the body is an adversary. We might say that the child is still too weak to be able to bear the conflict of trying to be a personality and a species animal at the same time. The adult is, too, but he has been ab
le to develop the necessary mechanisms of defense, repression and denial, that allow him to live with the problem of serving two masters.