The Denial of Death (35 page)

But again, the limits of the ingenuity of perversion are obvious. If you fix the terror of life and death magically on one person as the source of pain, you control that terror, but you also overinflate that person. This is a private religion that “makes believe” too much and so humiliates the masochist by placing him in the
power of another person. No wonder sado-masochism is ultimately belittling, a hothouse drama of control and transcendence played by pint-sized characters. All heroism is relative to some kind of “beyond”; the question is, which kind? This question reminds us of something we discussed earlier: the problem of too-limited beyonds. From this point of view, perversions are merely a demonstration of the severe limitation of the beyonds one chooses for his drama of heroic apotheosis. The sado-masochist is someone who plays out his drama of heroism
vis-à-vis
one person only; he is exercising his two
ontological motives—Eros and Agape—on the love object alone. On the one hand, he is using that object to expand his sense of his own fullness and power; on the other, giving vent to his need to let go, abandon his will, find peace and fulfillment by a total merger with something beyond him. Romm’s patient showed perfectly this shrinkage of a cosmic problem to the single partner:

In an attempt to relieve his severe tension he struggled between the wish to be a dominant male, aggressive and sadistic toward his wife, and the desire to give up his masculinity, be castrated by his wife and thus return to a state of impotence, passivity and helplessness.
⁸³

How easy it would be if we could satisfy the yearnings of the whole human condition safely in the bedroom of our cottage. As Rank put it, we want the partner to be like God, all-powerful to support our desires, and all-embracing to merge our desires into—but this is impossible.

If, then, sado-masochism reflects the human condition, the acting out of our twin ontological motives, we can truly talk about honest masochism, or mature masochism, exactly as Rank did in his unusual discussion in
Beyond Psychology
.
⁸⁴
It was one of Freud’s limitations that he could not quite push his thought to this kind of conclusion, even though he brushed it repeatedly. He was so impressed by the intensity, depth, and universality of sadism and masochism that he termed them instincts. He saw truly that these drives went right to the heart of the human creature. But he drew a pessim
istic conclusion, lamenting the fact that mankind could not get rid of these drives. Again, he was stuck with his instinct theory, which made him see these drives as remnants of an evolutio
nary condition and as tied to specific sexual appetites. Rank, who saw more truly, could transform sadism and masochism from clinically negative to humanly positive things. The maturity of masochism, then, would depend on the object toward which it was directed, on how much in possession of himself the mature masochist was. In Rank’s view, a person would be neurotic not because he was masochistic but because he was not really submissive, but only wanted to make believe that he was.
⁸⁵
Let us dwell on this type of failure briefly, because it sums up the whole problem of mental illness that we have broached.

Mental Illness as Failed Heroics

One very interesting and consistent conclusion emerges from our overview of mental illness: that Adler was right to say that the mentally ill all have a basic problem of courage. They cannot assume responsibility for their own independent lives; they are hyperfearful of life and death. From this vantage point the theory of mental illness is really a general theory of the failures of death-transcendence. The avoidance of life and the terror of death become enmeshed in the personality to such an extent that it is crippled—unable to exercise the “normal cultural heroism” of other members of
the society. The result is that the person cannot permit himself the routine heroic self-expansion nor the easy yielding to the superordinate cultural world-view that other members can. This is why he becomes a burden on others in some way. Mental illness, then, is also a way of talking about those people who burden others with their hyperfears of life and death, their own failed heroics.

As we have seen, the depressed person is one who has embedded himself so comfortably in the powers and protection of others that he has forfeited his own life. As Adler taught us long ago, the people around the depressed person have to pay for it. Guilt, self-torture, and accusations are also ways of coercing others.
⁸⁶
What is more coercive than the magical transference of the schizophrenic, which reflects so excellently the failure of courage? Or paranoia, where the person is so weak and so alone that h
e creates imaginary objects of hatred in order to have any relationship at all?
⁸⁷
We have to consent to be hated in order that the paranoid can feel some small measure of vitality. This is the ultimate of “laying one’s trip” on someone else. It is truly a “trip” through life and towards death that weak and frightened people lay especially hard upon others The point is that
we
are coerced by the magical transference and the paranoia—and they may not be
our
problems.
^‖

In the specific perversions we see this coercion in an almost pure culture, where it becomes negation of ourselves as whole persons. The reason women object to perverse relationships and are offended at the artificial aid that the fetishist uses is precisely that it denies their existence as whole persons, or as persons at all.
⁸⁸
What links all the perversions is the inability to be a responsible human animal. Erich Fromm had already well described masochism as an attempt to get rid of the burden of freedom.
⁸⁹
Clinically we find that some people are so weak in the face of responsibility that
they even fear the freedom of being in a good state of health and vigor, as Bieber reminded us.
⁹⁰
In the most extreme perversion, necrophilia, we see the most extreme fear of life and of persons, as Fromm has described.
⁹¹
One of Brills’ patients was so afraid of corpses that when he overcame this fear he became a necrophile because he was fascinated by his new-won freedom; we might say that he used necrophilia as his heroics and that undertakers’ parlors were the stage for his drama of apotheosis. Corpses are perfect in their helplessness: they can’t possibly hurt you or disgrace you; you don’
t have to worry about their safety or their responses.
⁹²

Boss has described a coprophiliac whose existence was so shrunken that he could find creative heroics only in the products of the rectum.
⁹³
Here we see perfectly the terror of the species role, the inability to relate to the body of the sexual partner. In this patient they are so great that they risk cutting him off entirely from expressing his desires in an interpersonal relationship. He is in effect “saved” by feces and by his ingenious rationalization that they are the true source of life. Little does it matter to him that the needs of his particular heroics have reduced his wife
to nothing more than a rectum. Nothing could be more graphic than the perversions in showing how fear and weakness lead to unlived life and what crippled heroics result. Straus goes so far as to connect necrophilia with miserliness and involutional depression, as part of the same problem of the general retreat from life.
⁹⁴
We have no argument with this formulation.

At this time with our sure theoretical understanding we can skip lightly and almost anecdotally over the whole spectrum of mental illness and perversion without much risk: they all refer to the terror of the human condition in people who can’t bear up under it. Precisely at this point our discussion of the perversions as failed heroics once again and finally makes a circle on the whole problem of human nature in its ideal dimensions. Heroism, is, after all, an ideal matter. The problem of mental illness, since Kierkegaard and through Scheler, Hocking, Jung, Fromm, and many ot
hers, has been inseparable from the problem of idolatry.
⁹⁵
In what cosmology is one going to perform his heroics? If—as we have argued—even the strongest person has to exercise his Agape motive, has to lay the burden of his life somewhere beyond him, then we ar
e brought once again to the great questions: What is the highest reality, the true ideal, the really great adventure? What kind of heroism is called for, in what kind of drama, submission to what kind of god? The religious geniuses of history have argued that to be really submissive means to be submissive to the highest power, the true infinity and absolute—and not to any human substitutes, lovers, leaders, nation-states.

From this point of view the problem of mental illness is one of not knowing what kind of heroics one is practising or not being able—once one does know—to broaden one’s heroics from their crippling narrowness. Paradoxical as it may sound, mental illness is thus a matter of weakness and stupidity. It reflects ignorance about how one is going about satisfying his twin ontological motives. The desire to affirm oneself and to yield oneself are, after all, very neutral: we can choose any path for them, any object, any level of heroics. The suffering and the evil that stems from these motiv
es are not a consequence of the nature of the motives themselves, but of our stupidity about satisfying them. This is the deeper meaning of one of Rank’s insights, which otherwise would seem flippant. In a letter of 1937 he wrote:

Suddenly … while I was resting in bed it occurred to me what really was (or is) “Beyond Psychology.” You know what? Stupidity! All that complicated and elaborate explanation of human behavior is nothing but an attempt to give a meaning to one of the most powerful motives of behavior, namely stupidity! I began to think that it is even more powerful than badness, meanness—because many actions or reactions that appear mean are simply stupid and even calling them bad is a justification.
⁹⁶

Finally, then, we can see how truly inseparable are the domains of psychiatry and religion, as they both deal with human nature and the ultimate meaning of life. To leave behind stupidity is to becomes aware of life as a problem of heroics, which inevitably becomes a reflection about what life ought to be in its ideal dimensions. From this point of view we can see that the perversions of “private religions” are not “false” in comparison to “true religions.” They are simply less expansive, less humanly noble and responsible. All living organisms are condemned to perversity, to the narrownes
s of being mere fragments of a larger totality that overwhelms them, which they cannot understand or truly cope with—yet must still live and struggle in. We still must ask, then, in the spirit of the wise old Epictetus, what kind of perversity is fitting for man.
^#

When we are young we are often puzzled by the fact that each person we admire seems to have a different version of what life ought to be, what a good man is, how to live, and so on. If we are especially sensitive it seems more than puzzling, it is disheartening. What most people usually do is to follow one person’s ideas and then another’s, depending on who looms largest on one’s horizon at the time. The one with the deepest voice, the strongest appearance, the most authority and success, is usually the one who gets our momentary allegiance; and we try to pattern our ideals after him. But a
s life goes on we get a perspective on this, and all these different versions of truth become a little pathetic. Each person thinks that he has the formula for triumphing over life’s limitations and knows with authority what it means to be a man, and he usually tries to win a following for his particular patent. Today we know that people try so hard to win converts for their point of view because it is more than merely an outlook on life: it is an immortality formula. Not everyone, of course, has the authority of Kant speaking the words we have used in our epigraph to this chapter, but in matters
of immortality everyone has the same self
-righteous conviction. The thing seems perverse because each diametrically opposed view is put forth with the same maddening certainty; and authorities who are equally unimpeachable hold opposite views!

Take, for example, Freud’s seasoned thoughts on human nature, and his idea of where he stood on the pyramid of struggling mankind:

… I have found little that is “good” about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or none at all… . If we are to talk of ethics, I subscribe to a high ideal from which most of the human beings I have come across depart most lamentably.
¹

When perhaps the greatest psychologist who ever lived lets drop the stock phrase “in my experience,” it has the authority of a Papal Bull during medieval times. Of course, he also implies that if most people are trash, some aren’t, and we can surmise who is one of the few exceptions. We are reminded of those once-popular books on eugenics that always carried a handsome frontispiece photograph of the author beaming his vitality and personality as the ideal type for the book’s argument.

As we would expect, Freud’s self-evaluation would hardly be agreed upon by everyone; almost each of his major dissenting disciples could find something to look down upon him for, with a certain condescending pity. Wilhelm Reich once remarked that Freud was caught in the psychoanalytic movement, trapped by his disciples and his own creation, that his very cancer was the result of being shut in upon himself, unable to speak as a free agent.
²
There’s our problem again, you see: Reich’s judgment would have carried more authority if it had come from a god instead of from a man who was even more ca
ught up in his own movement and who was more decisively and ignominiously undone by it. Jung, too, thought Freud had great limitations, but he saw these limitations as a necessary part of Freud’s diamon, of his genius and peculiar message. But maybe this understanding was actually a reflection of Jung’s own demonic drivenness into alchemy, of the almost shamanistic quality of his inner life.
³
No less a student of man than Erich Fromm has written the bitterest lines on Jung,
denouncing him as an enemy of science. Pity the layman scurrying under the feet of all these giants dropping their weighty pronunciamentos on one another.

I haven’t even mentioned Rank’s powerful views on Freud’s limitations. In Rank’s system of thought the most generous judgment that might probably be made about Freud’s limitations was that he shared the human weakness of the neurotic: he lacked the capacity for illusion, for a creative? myth about the possibilities of creation. He saw things too “realistically,” without their aura of miracle and infinite possibility. The only illusion he allowed himself was that of his own science—and such a source is bound to be a shaky support because it comes from one’s own energies and no
t from a powerful beyond. This is the problem of the artist generally: that he creates his own new meanings and must, in turn, be sustained by them. The dialogue is too inverted to be secure. And hence Freud’s lifelong ambivalence about the value of posterity and fame, the security of the whole panorama of evolution. We touched on all these questions in our comparison of Freud and Kierkegaard, and now we are back to it. One can only talk about an ideal human character from a perspective of absolute transcendence. Kierkegaard would say that Freud still had pride, that he lacked the creature consciousn
ess of the truly analyzed man, that he had not fully served his apprenticeship in the school of anxiety. In Kierkegaard’s understanding of man, the
causa-sui
project is the Oedipus complex, and in order to be a man one has to abandon it completely. From this point of view Freud still had not analyzed away his Oedipus complex, no matter how much he and the early psychoanalysts prided themselves that they had. He could not yield emotionally to superordinate power or conceptually to the transcendental dimension. He lived still wholly in the dimension of the visible world and was limited by what
was possible in that dimension only; therefore, all his meanings had to come from that dimension.

Kierkegaard had his own formula for what it means to be a man. He put it forth in those superb pages wherein he describes what he calls “the knight of faith.”
⁴
This figure is the man who lives in faith, who has given over the meaning of life to his Creator, and who lives centered on the energies of his Maker. He accepts whatever happens in this visible dimension without complaint, lives
his life as a duty, faces his death without a qualm. No pettiness is so petty that it threatens his meanings; no task is too frightening to be beyond his courage. He is fully in the world on its terms and wholly beyond the world in his trust in the invisible dimension. It is very much the old Pietistic ideal that was lived by Kant’s parents. The great strength of such an ideal is that it allows one to be open, generous, courageous, to touch others’ lives and enrich them and open them in turn. As the knight of faith has no fear-of-life-and-death trip to lay onto others, he does not cause them t
o shrink back upon themselves, he does not coerce or manipulate them. The knight of faith, then, represents what we might call an ideal of mental health, the continuing openness of life out of the death throes of dread.

Put in these abstract terms the ideal of the knight of faith is surely one of the most beautiful and challenging ideals ever put forth by man. It is contained in most religions in one form or another, although no one, I think, has described it at length with such talent at Kierkegaard. Like all ideals it is a creative illusion, meant to lead men on, and leading men on is not the easiest thing. As Kierkegaard said, faith is the hardest thing; he placed himself between belief and faith, unable to make the jump. The jump doesn’t depend on man after all—there’s the rub: faith is a matter o
f grace. As Tillich later put it: religion is first an open hand to receive gifts (grace) and then a closed hand to give them. One cannot give the gifts of the knight of faith without first being dubbed a knight by some Higher Majesty. The point I am driving at is that if we take Kierkegaard’s life as a believing Christian and place it against Freud’s as an agnostic, there is no balance sheet to draw. Who is to tally up which one caused others to shrink up more or to expand more fully? For every shortcoming that we can point to in Freud, we can find a corresponding one in Kierkegaard. If Freud can
be said to have erred on the side of the visible, then Kierkegaard can surely be said to have equally erred on the side of the invisible. He turned away from life partly from his fear of life, he embraced death more easily because he had failed in life; his own life was not a voluntary sacrifice undertaken in free will, but a pathetically driven sacrifice. He did not live in the categories in which he thought.
⁵

I am talking matter-of-factly about some of the surest giants in the history of humanity only to say that in the game of life and death no one stands taller than any other, unless it be a true saint, and only to conclude that sainthood itself is a matter of grace and not of human effort. My point is that for man not everything is possible. What is there to choose between religious creatureliness and scientific creatureliness? The most one can achieve is a certain relaxedness, an openness to experience that makes him less of a driven burden on others. And a lot of this depends on ho
w much talent he has, how much of a
daimon
is driving him; it is easier to lay down light burdens than heavy ones. How does a man create from all his living energies a system of thought, as Freud did, a system directed wholly to the problems of this world, and then just give it up to the invisible one? How, in other words, can one be a saint and still organize scientific movements of world-historical importance? How does one lean on God and give over everything to Him and still stand on his own feet as a passionate human being? These are not rhetorical questions, they are real ones that go right to the
heart of the problem of “how to be a man”—a problem that no one can satisfactorily advise anyone else on, as the wise William James knew. The whole thing is loaded with ambiguity impossible to resolve. As James said, each person sums up a whole range of very personal experiences so that his life is a very unique problem needing very individual kinds of solutions. Kierkegaard had said that same thing when he answered those who objected to his life style: he said it was singular because it was the one singularly designed to be what he needed in order to live; it is as simple and as final as that.

James, again, knew how difficult it was to live astride both worlds, the visible and the invisible. One tended to pull you away from the other. One of his favorite precepts, which he often repeated, was: “Son of man, stand upon your own feet so that I may speak with you.” If men lean too much on God they don’t accomplish what they have to in this world on their own powers. In order to do anything one must first be a man, apart from everything else. This throws the whole splendid ideal of sainthood into doubt because there are many ways of being a good man. Was Norman Bethune any less a
saint than Vincent de Paul? That, I suppose, is another way of
saying that in this world each organism lives to be consumed by its own energies; and those that are consumed with the most relentlessness, and burn with the brightest flame, seem to serve the purposes of nature best, so far as accomplishing anything on this planet is concerned. It is another way, too—with Rank—of talking about the priority of the “irrational” life force that uses organismic forms only to consume them.

The Impossible Heroism

In the light of all this ambiguity we can take an understanding look at some of the modern prophets on human nature. I have been saying that a man cannot evolve beyond his character, that he is stuck with it. Goethe said that a man cannot get rid of his nature even if he throws it away; to which we can add—even if he tries to throw it to God. Now it is time to see that if a man cannot evolve beyond his character, he surely can’t evolve
without
character. This brings up one of the great debates in contemporary thought. If we talk about the irrational life force living the limitations of o
rganisms, we are not going to take the next step and get carried away into abstractions that are so popular today, abstractions in which the life force suddenly and miraculously seems to emerge from nature without any limits. I am referring, of course, to the new propheticism of people like Marcuse, Brown, and so many others, on what man may achieve, what it really means to be a man. I promised at the beginning of this book to linger a bit on the details of this problem, and now is the time for it.

Take Norman Brown’s
Life Against Death:
rarely does a work of this brilliance appear. Rarely does a book so full of closely reasoned argument, of very threatening argument, achieve such popularity; but like most other foundation-shaking messages, this one is popular for all the wrong reasons. It is prized not for its shattering revelations on death and anality, but for its wholly non-sequitur conclusions: for its plea for the unrepressed life, the resurrection of the body as the seat of primary pleasure, the abolition of shame and guilt. Brown concludes that mankind can only tra
nscend the terrible toll that the fear of death takes if it lives the body fully and does not allow any unlived life to poison existence, to sap pleasure, and to leave a residue of regret. If mankind would do this, says Brown, then the fear of death will not longer drive it to folly, waste, and destruction; men will have their apotheosis in eternity by living fully in the now of experience.
⁶
The enemy of mankind is basic repression, the denial of throbbing physical life and the spectre of death. The prophetic message is for the wholly unrepressed life, which would bring into birth a new man. A few lines of Brown’
s own words give us his key message:

If we can imagine an unrepressed man—a man strong enough to live and therefore strong enough to die, and therefore what no man has ever been, an individual—such a man [would have] … overcome guilt and anxiety… . In such a man would be fulfilled on earth the mystic hope of Christianity, the resurrection of the body, in a form, as Luther said, free from death and filth… . With such a transfigured body the human soul can be reconciled, and the human ego become once more what it was designed to be in the first place, a body-ego and the surface of a body… . The human ego would have to become stro
ng enough to die; and strong enough to set aside guilt… . [F]ull psychoanalytic consciousness would be strong enough to cancel the debt [of guilt] by deriving it from infantile fantasy.
⁷