The Denial of Death (29 page)

We said earlier that the question of human life is: on what level of illusion does one live? This question poses an absolutely new question for the science of mental health, namely: What is the “best” illusion under which to live? Or, what is the most legitimate foolishness? If you are going to talk about life-enhancing illusion, then you can truly try to answer the question of which is “best.” You will have to define “best” in terms that are directly meaningful to man, related to his basic condition and his needs. I think the whole question would be answered in terms of how much freedom,
dignity, and hope a given illusion provides. These three things absorb the problem of natural neurosis and turn it to creative living.

We have to look for the answer to the problem of freedom where it is most absent: in the transference, the fatal and crushing enslaver of men. The transference fetishizes mystery, terror, and power; it holds the self bound in its grip. Religion answers directly to the problem of transference by expanding awe and terror to the cosmos where they belong. It also takes the problem of self-justification and removes it from the objects near at hand. We no longer have to please those around us, but the very source of creation—the powers that created us, not those into whose lives we accid
entally fell. Our life ceases to be a reflexive dialogue with the standards of our wives, husbands, friends, and leaders and becomes instead measured by standards of the highest heroism, ideals truly fit to lead us on and beyond ourselves. In this way we fill ourselves with independent values, can make free decisions, and, most importantly, can lean on powers that really support us and do not oppose us.
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The personality can truly begin to emerge in religion because God, as an abstraction, does not oppose the individual as others do, but instead provides the individual with all the powers n
ecessary for independent self-justification. What greater security than to lean confidently on God, on the Fount of creation, the most terrifying power of all? If God is hidden and intangible, all the better: that allows man to expand and develop by himself.

The problem of transference is thus—like all things human—partly a value problem, a question of ideals. Freud tried to keep it wholly scientific by showing how exaggerated and false transference perceptions of reality were, which to a great extent is of course true. But what is the norm of “true” perception? Here Freud himself had to hedge. What is more unreal than the perceptions of a normal person in love, who is carried into rapture and expansion of being by his very exaggerations?
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Van der Leeuw, that great psychologist of religion, saw the problem of transference introjections more b
roadly than Freud. He cites an ancient Egyptian text in which a certain Paheri discusses his inner conscience as the voice of God dwelling within man; and then Van der Leeuw says:

Now it is possible, certainly, with Nietzsche and Freud, to ascribe the “strangeness” of the voice, which warns us to avoid, to infantilism; “not the voice of God in the heart of man, but the voice of some men in man” [says Nietzsche].

But Van der Leeuw concludes on a surprising note: “We may however prefer the Egyptian description; on this point phenomenology has no decision to make.”
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In other words, we may prefer it for the larger expansiveness of being that it represents, as more imaginatively it links the person with higher mysterious powers. God-consciousness is not only regressive transference but also creative possibility. But unlike Van der Leeuw we are arguing that on this matter psychology does have a decision to make: it can talk about less-constricting forms of transference.

Best of all, of course, religion solves the problem of death, which no living individuals can solve, no matter how they would support us. Religion, then, gives the possibility of heroic victory in freedom and solves the problem of human dignity at its highest level. The two ontological motives of the human condition are both met: the need to surrender oneself in full to the rest of nature, to become a part of it by laying down one’s whole existence to some higher meaning; and the need to expand oneself as an individual heroic personality. Finally, religion alone gives hope, b
ecause it holds open the dimension of the unknown and the unknowable, the fantastic mystery of creation that the human mind ca
nnot even begin to approach, the possibility of a multidimensionality of spheres of existence, of heavens and possible embodiments that make a mockery of earthly logic—and in doing so, it relieves the absurdity of earthly life, all the impossible limitations and frustrations of living matter. In religious terms, to “see God” is to die, because the creature is too small and finite to be able to bear the higher meanings of creation. Religion takes one’s very creatureliness, one’s insignificance, and makes it a condition of hope. Full transcendence of the human condition means limitless possibility unima
ginable to us.
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What is the ideal for mental health, then? A lived, compelling illusion that does not lie about life, death, and reality; one honest enough to follow its own commandments: I mean, not to kill, not to take the lives of others to justify itself. Rank saw Christianity as a trutly great ideal foolishness in the sense that we have been discussing it: a childlike trust and hope for the human condition that left open the realm of mystery. Obviously, all religions fall far short of their own ideals, and Rank was talking about Christianity not as practiced but as an ideal. Christianity, lik
e all religions, has in practice reinforced the regressive transference into an even more choking bind: the fathers are given the sanction of divine authority. But as an ideal, Christianity, on all the things we have listed, stands high, perhaps even highest in some vital ways, as people like Kierkegaard, Chesterton, the Niebuhrs, and so many others have compellingly argued.
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The curious thing—as we can now fully appreciate—is that Rank, after a lifetime of work, drew the circle of psychoanalysis itself on this tradition of thought. In this he stands side by side with Jung, as Progoff so well showed.
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Finally, if mental health is a problem of ideal illusion, we are left with one large question on the matter of human character. If we are talking about the “best” ideal, then we should also talk about the costs of lesser ideals. What is the toll taken on the human personality by a failure to fully meet the twin ontological needs of man? Again we are back to the problem of Freud’s life: what is the cost of the denial of absolute transcendence, of the attempt to fabricate one’s own religion? When a man fails to draw the powers of his existence from the highest source, what is the cost t
o himself and those around him? We haven’t even begun to discuss questions like this in characterology, but it seems to me that they are basic and necessary, the key questions, without which we cannot even talk about mental health intelligently. Rank posed the basic question: he asked whether the individual is able at all “to affirm and accept himself from himself.” But he quickly sidestepped it by saying that it “cannot be said.” Only the creative type can
do this to some extent, he reasoned, by using his work as a justification for his existence.
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I myself have posed this question as a central one for the science of man, in ignorance of the work of Rank.
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I think it can be answered as Rank himself elsewhere answered it, as we saw in the last chapter: even the creative type should ideally surrender to higher powers than himself.
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It was Jung, with his analytical penetration, who saw also the reason, which is that the unusual person takes his transference projections back into himself. As we said in the last chapter, one reason for his
creativity is that he sees the world on his own terms and relies on himself. But this leads to a dangerous kind of megalomania because the individual becomes too full with his own meanings. Furthermore, if you don’t fetishize the world by transference perceptions, totalities of experience put a tremendous burden on the ego and risk annihilating it. The creative person is too full both of himself and of the world.
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Again, as the creative person has the same personality problems as the neurotic and the same biting off of the wholeness of experience, he needs some kind of resolution in a new and greate
r dependency—ideally, a freely chosen dependency, as Rank said.

As we saw so poignantly with Freud, the strongest among us faint away like children when pushed to take the whole meaning of life on themselves, to support it with their own meager creature powers. We said at the end of Chapter Six that Freud couldn’t take the step from scientific to religious creatureliness. As Jung understood only too well, that would have meant Freud’s abandoning of his own peculiar passion as a genius. Jung must have understood it from within his own experience: he himself could never bring himself to visit Rome because—as he admitted—Rome raised questions “w
hich were beyond my powers to handle. In my old age—in 1949—I wished to repair this omission, but was stricken with a faint while I was buying tickets. After that, the plans for a trip to Rome were once and for all laid aside.”
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What are we to make of all these giants fainting at the prospect of what to us seems simple tourism? Freud, too, had not been able to visit Rome until later in life and turned back each time he approached the city.

I think we can fully understand this problem now that we have discussed Rank’s closure on Kierkegaard, especially his psychology of the artist. These men had problems that no simple t
ourist knows: they were innovators who tried to give a whole new meaning to creation and history, which meant that they had to support and justify all previous meanings and all possible alternative ones on their shoulders alone. Probably Rome epitomized these meanings in herself, her ruins and her history, and so she made their legs quiver. How much human blood was soaked into her soil; how many human dramas were played out there with what must seem, in the perspective of history, such unfeeling and extravagant wastefulness? It raises a problem just like that of the dinosaurs that troubled Freud or of
the deformed infants that mocked Luther, only now on the level of all human beings. We mentioned in Chapter Six that when Freud himself came to analyze his reluctances about Rome and his strange experience on the Acropolis, he saw that somehow the memory of his father stood in judgment of his own achievements; he said he was troubled by a feeling of “piety” for him. I think if we push the analysis to its ultimate point we have to say that each earthly father accuses us of our impotence if we become truly creative personalities; they remind us that we are born of men and not gods. No living pe
rson can give genius the powers it needs to shoulder the meaning of the world.

Yet, what are we to say about this problem if even Jung, who always relied on God, could still faint away with the burden of life? Probably in the last analysis only this: that all men are here to use themselves up and the problem of ideal illusion doesn’t spare any man from that. It only addresses the question of the best quality of work and life that men can achieve, depending on the beliefs they have and the powers they lean on. And this subject, as we said, is a matter for discussion by the empirical science of psychology itself. We have to reason about the highest actual
ization that man can achieve. At its ultimate point the science of psychology meets again the questioning figure of Kierkegaard. What world-view? What powers? For what heroism?

I remember one of my college professors—a man very much admired as a teacher of medieval history—confessing that the more he learned about the period the less he was prepared to say: the epoch was so complex, so diversified that no general statement could safely be made about it. The same thing can surely be said about the theory of mental illness. How dare someone try to write a chapter entitled “A general view” of such a complex and varied phenomenon—especially someone who is not himself a psychiatrist? In fact, I have had an unusually difficult time forcing myself to sit do
wn and write this chapter, even though I feel it belongs in the book. The literature is there for all to see: the record of lifetimes of work by some of the greatest psychologists who ever lived, men possessing the richest personal sensitivities, work reflecting unusual theoretical gifts and based on the most extensive and varied clinical materials. Why should someone try to rake this area over again, in what can only be a superficial and simple-minded way?

Probably for that very reason: today we need simple-mindedness
in order to be able to say anything at all; this is the other side of the coin of the confession of the medievalist. The great characteristic of our time is that we know everything important about human nature that there is to know. Yet never has there been an age in which so little knowledge is securely possessed, so little a part of the common understanding. The reason is precisely the advance of specialization, the impossibility of making safe general statements, which has led to a general imbecility. What I would like to do in these few pages is to run the risk of simple-minded
ness in order to make some dent in the unintended imbecility brought about by specialization and its mountains of fact. Even if I succeed only poorly, it seems like a worthwhile barter. In such a stifling and crushing scientific epoch someone has to be willing to play the fool in order to relieve the general myopia.

Right away the expert will say that it is presumptuous to talk about a general theory of mental illness, that this is something far in the future, a distant and perhaps unattainable goal—as if we didn’t already have such a theory securely lodged in the countless volumes that crowd our libraries and bookstores. The gigantic figures of modern psychology have given us a thorough understanding of human behavior in both its neurotic and psychotic aspects, as well as its perversions of all types. The problem is, as we said, how to put some kind of general order into this wealth o
f insight and knowledge. One way is to make the most general statements about it, the same kind of statements that we have used so far in this book to tie together diverse areas of fact. Is man an animal who fears death, who seeks self-perpetuation and heroic transcendence of his fate? Then, failure for such an animal is failure to achieve heroic transcendence. As Adler put it so succinctly in the epigraph we have borrowed for this part of the book, mental illness is a way of talking about people who have lost courage, which is the same as saying that it reflects the failure of heroism. This conclusion
follows logically from the discussion of the problem of neurosis in the previous chapter. We saw there that the neurotic was one who especially could not stand his own creatureliness, who couldn’t surround his anality with convincing illusion. It was Adler who saw that low self-esteem was the central problem of mental illness. When does the person have the most trouble
with his self-esteem? Precisely when his heroic transcendence of his fate is most in doubt, when he doubts his own immortality, the abiding value of his life; when he is not convinced that his having lived really makes any cosmic difference. From this point of view we might well say that mental illness represents styles of bogging-down in the denial of creatureliness.

Depression

We would not get very far with general statements like these if we could not show how they sum up the specifics of each syndrome. Fortunately, we can do just that. Adler had already revealed how perfectly depression or melancholia is a problem of courage; how it develops in people who are afraid of life, who have given up any semblance of independent development and have been totally immersed in the acts and the aid of others.
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They have lived lives of “systematic self-restriction,” and the result is that the less you do the less you can do, the more helpless and dependent you become.
The more you shrink back from the difficulties and the darings of life, the more you naturally come to feel inept, the lower is your self-evaluation. It is ineluctable. If one’s life has been a series of “silent retreats,”
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one ends up firmly wedged into a corner and has nowhere else to retreat. This state is the bogging-down of depression. Fear of life leads to excessive fear of death, as Boss too reminds us in the epigraph we have borrowed for this chapter. Finally, one doesn’t dare to move—the patient lies in bed for days on end, not eating, letting the housework pile up, fouling the bed.

The moral of this example of failure of courage is that in some way one must pay with life and consent daily to die, to give oneself up to the risks and dangers of the world, allow oneself to be engulfed and used up. Otherwise one ends up
as though dead
in trying to avoid life and death. This is how modern existentialist psychiatrists understand depression, exactly as Adler did at the beginning of this century. Médard Boss sums it up in a few lines:

It is always the whole existence of the melancholic patient which has failed to take over openly and responsibly all those possibilities of relating to the world which actually would constitute his own genuine
self. Consequently, such an existence has no independent standing of its own but continually falls prey to the demands, wishes and expectations of others. Such patients try to live up to these foreign expectations as best they can, in order not to lose the protection and love of their surroundings. [But they go more deeply into debt.] Hence the terrible guilt feelings of the melancholic … derive from his existential guilt.
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The interesting scientific question here is why we have had so much trouble getting agreement on the simple dynamics of depression, when it had been revealed so early and so lucidly by Adler and now again by the school of existential psychiatry. One of the reasons is that the dynamics are not so simple as they appear. They go very deeply into the heart of the human condition, and we have not been able to read this heart in any straightforward or easy way. For one thing, we ourselves had so effectively banished the idea of the fear of death and life; we were not sufficiently impress
ed by the terror of the living creature; and so we could not understand the torturings and turnings of anguished people who were jerked about by these terrors. For example, despite Adler’s excellent and early general theory, he put us off somewhat by talking about the selfishness and the pamperedness of the depressed person, the “spoiled child” who refuses to grow up and accept the responsibility for his life, and so on. Of course these things are true to some extent, and Adler fully realized that nature herself had made man a weakling in the animal kingdom. But the accent is important. Adler
should have stressed more the sheer terror of individuation, of difference, of being alone, of losing support and delegated power. He revealed to us the “life-lie” that people use in order to live, but we tended to overlook how necessary this lie is in some form or other for most men; how men simply do not have their own powers to rely on. When we remind ourselves again how giants like Freud and Jung shrink and faint while buying simple travel tickets, perhaps we can get some correct feeling for the magnitude of the task of poor Mr. Average Man, just daily trying to negotiate a semblance o
f tranquil heroism by embedding himself in the powers of others. When these tactics fail and he is threatened with the exposure of his life-lie, how logical it is that he give way to his own version of fainting by bogging down in a depressive withdrawal.

Another complexity of the dynamics of depression that we overlooked was the one that Rank taught us: the urge to immortalization and self-perpetuation by pleasing the other, by conforming to the code of behavior that he represents.
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People hunger for immortality and get it where they can: in the small family circle or in the single love object. The transference object is the locus of our conscience, of our whole cosmology of good and evil. It is not something we can simply break away from, as it embodies our whole hero-system. We saw how complete and complex the transference can be.
We obey our authority figures all our lives, as Freud showed, because of the anxiety of separation. Every time we try to do something other than what they wanted, we awaken the anxiety connected with them and their possible loss. To lose their powers and approval is thus to lose our very lives. Also, we saw that the transference object in itself embodies the
mysterium tremendum
of existence. It
is
the primary miracle. In its concrete existence it transcends mere symbolic commands, and what is more natural than conforming to this miraculousness? We must add, with Rank, what is more natural than continuin
g to strive for immortality by fulfilling the moral code represented by the object? Transference is the positive use of the object for eternal self-perpetuation. This explains the durability of transference and its strength, even after the death of the object: “I am immortal by continuing to please this object who now may not be alive but continues to cast a shadow by what it has left behind and may even be working its powers from the invisible spirit world.” This is a part of the psychology of ancient ancestor worshippers as well as of moderns who continue to live according to family codes
of honor and conduct.

Depression, then, sums up both the terror of life and death and the hunger for self-perpetuation; how heroic can one get? It is so natural to try to be heroic in the safe and small circle of family or with the loved one, to give in to a “silent retreat” now and then to keep this heroics secure. How many people have an independent gift to give to the cosmos in order to assure their special immortality? Only the creative person can manage that. When the average person can no longer convincingly perform his safe heroics or cannot hide his failure to be his own hero, then he bogs down in the fa
ilure of depression and its terrible guilt. I particularly like
Gaylin’s insight that the bogging-down into total helplessness and dependency in depression is itself the last and most natural defense available to the mammalian animal:

Dependency
is the basic survival mechanism of the human organism. … When the adult gives up hope in his ability to cope and sees himself incapable of either fleeing or fighting, he is “reduced” to a state of depression. This very reduction with its parallel to the helplessness of infancy becomes … a plea for a solution to the problem of survival via dependency. The very stripping of one’s defenses becomes a form of defensive maneuver.
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Boss says that the terrible guilt feelings of the depressed person are existential, that is, they represent the failure to live one’s own life, to fulfill one’s own potential because of the twisting and turning to be “good” in the eyes of the other. The other calls the tune to one’s eligibility for immortality, and so the other takes up one’s unlived life. Relationship is thus always slavery of a kind, which leaves a residue of guilt. A modern therapist like Frederick Perls actively worked against this tyranny by reminding his patients that “they were not in the world to please their pa
rtner, nor he to please them.” It was a way of cutting into the morality of “personal-performance for immortality.” All this is very good, but it can hardly sum up all the guilt that the patient feels, or at least accuses himself of. To judge by his own self-accusations of worthlessness, the patient feels an immense burden of guilt. We have to understand this self-accusation not only as a reflection of guilt over unlived life but also as a
language
for making sense out of one’s situation. In short, even if one is a very guilty hero he is at least a hero in the same hero-system. The depr
essed person uses guilt to hold onto his objects and to keep his situation unchanged. Otherwise he would have to analyze it or be able to move out of it and transcend it. Better guilt than the terrible burden of freedom and responsibility, especially when the choice comes too late in life for one to be able to start over again. Better guilt and self-punishment when you cannot punish the other—when you cannot even dare to accuse him, as he represents the immortality ideology with which you have identified. If your god is discredited, you yourself die; the evil must be in yourself and not in your god,
so that you may live
. With guilt you lose some of your life but avoid the greater evil of death.
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The depressed person exaggerates his guilt because it unblocks his dilemma in the safest and easiest way.
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He also, as Adler pointed out, gets the people around him to respond to him, to pity him, and to value him and take care of him. He controls them and heightens his own personality by his very self-pity and self-hatred.
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All these things, then, make obsessive guilt prominent in the depression syndrome.