The Denial of Death (31 page)

But if the neurotic is the “artiste manqué,” what is the schizophrenic who has no talent, who is not creative? He must be a completely inverted and pathetic failure, as the wards in our mental hospitals attest. An impoverished and powerless person—even when he is a perceiver of truth—has no gift to offer to his fellows or to himself. The uncreative psychotic is simply totally crippled by life-and-death fears. This is not the place to toss off in a few words such a complex matter, so little understood, especially as I have not studied the problem in depth or detail. The plain fact, however, is t
hat the matter revolves around one simple question: whether one has an ego with which to control his subjective experiences, n
o matter how unusual they are. If he does, then he gives form to his unique perceptions; he takes the energetic life process as it functions on the frontier of evolution—in the dualistic mode of human life—and he channels and contains it as a response to that mode. It becomes the work of genius. We seem to be able to pointedly sum up the problem like this: The schizophrenic is not programmed neurally into automatic response to social meanings, but he cannot marshal an ego response, a directive control of his experiences. His own erupting meanings cannot be given any creative form. We might
say that because of his exaggerated helplessness he uses his symbolic inner experiences alone as an experiential anchor, as something to lean on. He exists reflexively toward them, comes to be controlled by them instead of reshaping and using them. The genius too is not programmed in automatic cultural meanings; but he has the resources of a strong ego, or at least a sufficient one, to give his own personal meanings a creative form. No one to my knowledge has understood this difference between the genius and the schizophrenic better than Reich,
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at least in these gross terms.

In schizophrenia, like depression, we see the problem of heroics in its stark nudity. How does one become a hero from a position in which he has hardly any resources at all?—a position from which he sees more clearly than anyone else the menacing dangers of life and death and yet has no solid feeling of inner glory to oppose to them? He has to fabricate such a feeling in the best way he can, which will be a clumsy, crippled, and inverted way. No wonder that psychotic transferences are so total, so intense, so all-absorbing, so frightening (when they are not pathetic). The onl
y way for a lonely cripple to attempt a heroic transcendence of death is through the complete servitude of personal idolatry, the total constriction of the self in the person of the other. One has so little personal “ballast”—to use Adler’s excellent expression
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—that he has to suck in an entire other human being to keep from disappearing or flying away.

Perversion

It would be foolhardy to write about the perversions today if one wanted to say something new; the literature is so immense—big, thick volumes like Reik’s on Masochism, sets of volu
mes like Stekel’s on all the perversions, whole shelves on homosexuality; and in the professional journals, one article after another piling up insights and clinical facts. The problem is covered from all aspects and in a wealth of detail, a century’s accumulation of scientific research. To my mind the best single book, summing up the key arguments of various schools and adding its own brilliant contribution, is Médard Boss’s.
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After Erwin Straus’s lifelong contributions, culminating in his recent essay on “The Miser,”
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we have the clearest and richest general theory that a science
could hope for. But again, the danger is that one can’t see the forest for the trees, that it has become impossible to say anything about the perversions without saying everything. Some kind of simple-minded, general statement is in order, one that is not itself polemical but tries to combine all the major viewpoints into one clear perspective. For the most part the Freudians, the existentialists, the Adlerians, and the behaviorists continue to talk past each other. Let us then see if we can pick out the crucial ingredients of the problem of perversion. It will give us an excellent review and su
mmary of the problem of human nature and the heroic, so that we can finally move on to the conclusion of our study.

The reason that it is worth dwelling on so seemingly an esoteric and marginal matter as the perversions is that they are not marginal at all. So much has been written on them precisely because they are the core problem of human action. They reveal what is at stake in that action better than any other behavior because they narrow it down to its essentials. In this sense the perversions are truly the sub-atomic theory of the human sciences, the nucleus where the basic particles and energies are concentrated. This is why, too, they are usually reserved for the advanced and sophisticat
ed student. But now, after we have covered so much ground, our summary will really be a review of everything we have discussed and so should be understandable with ease.

We saw earlier in several examples that Freud’s genius opened up whole new territories to the understanding, and yet he phrased his formulations in such narrow and single-minded terms that they obscured matters and caused a continued scientific debate long past the need for such debate. Nowhere is this more true than on the problem of the perversions. Freud made possibl
e the conquest of this most difficult terrain, and yet once again he caused us to shrug in disbelief. Take fetishism, which is surely the paradigm of perversion and which Freud himself used as a kind of epitome of his whole theoretical system. Why is it that the fetishist needs some object like a shoe or a corset before he can begin to make love to a woman? Freud answered:

To put it plainly: the fetish is a substitute for the woman’s (mother’s) phallus which the little boy once believed in and does not wish to forego—we know why.
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Note the utter assurance of that last phrase. The “reason” is that the female genitals prove the reality of castration and awaken the horror of it for oneself. The only way to triumph over this threat is to “give” the woman a phallus, however artificially and symbolically; and the fetish is precisely the “token of triumph over the threat of castration and a safeguard against it… .” With it, the fetishist can proceed to have intercourse. The fetish “saves the fetishist from being a homosexual by endowing women with the attribute which makes them acceptable as sexual objects.”
In a word, the fetish gives him the courage to be a man. Freud was so confident of his formulation that he said categorically:

Probably no male human being is spared the terrifying shock of threatened castration at the sight of the female genitals… . [And he concluded triumphantly:] Investigations into fetishism are to be recommended to all who still doubt the existence of the castration complex… .
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When a man of Freud’s stature makes such triumphant closure on his whole work in a writing coming so late in his career, we have to accept that it contains an indubitable truth. But again he has engulfed us in the peculiar paradox of psychoanalysis—the phrasing of the most acute truth in a language of such concrete narrowness as to make that truth unrecognizable. Let us, then, try to pull it apart. The way out of the paradox was shown to us by thinkers like Adler, Jung, Rank, Boss, Straus, and Brown. The horror of castration is not the horror of punishment for incestuous sexuali
ty, the threat of the Oedipus complex; it is rather the existen
tial anxiety of life and death finding its focus on the animal body. This much is secure. But Freud stuck to the idea of the mother’s body, specifically, the idea of the phallic mother that the child wants to believe in. All through the later psychoanalytic literature this idea occurs again and again in the fantasies of patients, and Robert Bak reaffirmed Freud’s basic idea in a most recent writing, in the same categorical terms.

… in all perversions the dramatized or ritualized denial of castration is acted out through the regressive revival of the fantasy of the maternal or female phallus.
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And here is a perfect description of the typical fantasy from May Romm’s rich paper:

At times the patient would fantasy during masturbation that he was able to take his penis in his mouth and in so doing he would be a complete circle. At this period he dreamed that he was looking at his body and discovered that he had breasts like a woman and male genitals… . The Greek priest, in his cassock with his hair flowing over his shoulders, represented to him a neuter person, celibate and bisexual.
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The Hermaphroditic Image

The hermaphroditic image is an idea that goes right to the heart of the human condition and reveals to us the dynamic of the perversions and what is at stake in the desperate efforts of crippled people to find some kind of animal satisfaction in this world. The hermaphroditic symbol is no mystery after the writings of Rank, Jung, and many others. The problem has been, again, to strip it of its narrow sexual connotations; it is not a sexual problem but a human problem. The self finds itself in a strange body casing and cannot understand this dualism. Man is aghast at the arbitrary n
ature of genitality, the accidentality of his separate sexual emergence. He can’t accept the impermanence of the body casing or its incompleteness—now male, now female. The body m
akes no sense to us in its physical thingness, which ties us to a particular kind of fate, a one-sided sexual role. The hermaphroditic image represents a striving for wholeness, a striving that is not sexual but ontological. It is the desire of being for a recapture of the (Agape) unity with the rest of nature, as well as for a completeness in oneself. It is a desire for a healing of the ruptures of existence, the dualism of self and body, self and other, self and world. Add the desire of the self for self-perpetuation outside of and beyond the body, and we can understand how the partialness of the sex
ual identity is a further limitation and danger.

Freud was right to see the centrality of the image of the phallic mother and to connect it directly with the castration complex. But he was wrong to make the sexual side of the problem the central core of it, to take what is derivative (the sexual) and make it primary (the existential dilemma). The wish for the phallic mother, the horror of the female genitals, may well be a universal experience of mankind, for girls as well as boys. But the reason is that the child wants to see the omnipotent mother, the miraculous source of all his protection, nourishment, and love, as a really g
odlike creature complete beyond the accident of a split into two sexes. The threat of the castrated mother is thus a threat to his whole existence in that his mother is an animal thing and not a transcendent angel. The fate that he then fears, that turns him away from the mother in horror, is that he too is a “fallen” bodily creature, the very thing that he fights to overcome by his anal training. The horror of the female genitals, then, is the shock of the tiny child who is all at once—before the age of six—suddenly turned into a philosopher, a tragedian who must be a man long before his time and who mus
t draw on reserves of wisdom and strength that he doesn’t have. Again, this is the burden of the “primal scene”: not that it awakens unbearable sexual desires in the child or aggressive hate and jealousy toward the father, but rather that it thoroughly confuses him about the nature of man. Romm observed on her patient:

His distrust of everyone he attributed mostly to the disappointment consequent to his discovery of the sexual relationship between his parents. The mother, who was supposed to be an angel, turned out to be human and carnal.
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This is perfect: how can you trust people who represent the priority of the cultural code of morality, the “angelic” transcendence of the decay of the body, and yet who cast it all aside in their most intimate relations? The parents are the gods who set the standards for one’s highest victory; and the more unambiguously they themselves embody it, the more secure is the child’s budding identity. When they themselves engage in grunting and groaning animal activities, the child finds it “disgusting”: the experience of disgust arises when straightforward meanings are undermined. This is why—
if he has never witnessed the primal scene—the child often resists the revelation by his street friends that his parents engage in sexual intercourse as everyone else. How apt was Tolstoy’s observation that so much separates him from the newborn babe, and so little from the child of five; in those five years the child must shoulder the whole existential burden of the human condition. There is really little more for him to learn about his basic fate during the remainder of his life.

Jung saw the wishful meaning and centrality of the hermaphroditic image with great clarity and historical sweep,
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as did Rank all through his work, Boss,
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and Brown.
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Nothing is more eloquent and to the point than the words of a psychoanalytic patient, a female fetishist who “condemned the abhorrent envelope of her body” by saying: “I wish I could tear this skin off. If I didn’t have this stupid body, I would be as pure outside as I feel inside.”
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The body is definitely the hurdle for man, the decaying drag of the species on the inner freedom and purity of his self. The basic problem of life, in this sense, is whether the species (body) will predominate over one’s individuality (inner self). This explains all hypochondria, the body being the major threat to one’s existence as a self-perpetuating creature. It explains too such dreams of children as that their hands are turning into claws. The emotional message is that they have no control over their fate, that the accidentality of the body form inhibits and restricts their freedom and
determines them. One of the favorite games of childhood is “pinning the tail on the donkey.” What better way to work off anxiety about the accidentality of the forms of things than to rearrange nature playfully with the same casualness with which she seems to have placed bodily appendages? At heart childr
en are Picassos protesting the arbitrariness of external forms and affirming the priority of the inner spirit.
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Anxiety over the body shows up too in all “anal” dreams, when people find themselves soiled by overflowing toilets, someone’s splashing urine—in the midst of the most important affairs and all dressed up in their social finery. No mistake—the turd is mankind’s real threat. We see this confusion between symbolic transcendence and anal function throughout the psychoanalytic literature. Romm’s patient, “Whenever he felt socially, financially or sexually insecure … developed flatulence and di
arrhea.” Or again: “He dreamed of seeing his father making a speech to an audience. Suddenly he notices that his father’s penis was exposed.”
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