The Denial of Death (42 page)

Chapter Eleven

1. Freud,
   Psychoanalysis and Faith: Dialogues with the Reverend Oskar Pfister
   (New York: Basic Books, 1963), pp. 61-62.
   
2. Reich Speaks of Freud
   , M. Higgins and C. M. Raphael, eds. (New York: Noonday Press, 1967), pp. 20-21.
   
3. Cf. esp. pp. 192 and 199 of his
   Memories, Dreams, Reflections
   .
   
4. Kierkegaard,
   Fear and Trembling
   , pp. 49 ff.
   
5. Cf. Lev Shestov’s hard commentary in his classic
   Athens
   and
   Jerusalem
   (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1966), pp. 229 ff.
   
6. Cf. LAD, p. 308.
   
7. Ibid.
   , pp. 291-292.
   
8. R. L. Stevenson, quoted in James,
   Varieties
   , p. 85 note.
   
9. Which failure he in fact admits on p. 268.
   
10. Cf. David Bakan’s reaffirmation of this Rankian view:
    Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition
    (New York: Schocken Books, 1965), pp- 275-276.
    
11. LAD, p. 270.
    
12. Ibid.
    , p. 293.
    
13. Ibid.
    , p. 292.
    
14. Cf. Becker,
    Revolution in Psychiatry
    .
    
15. Cf. LAD, pp. 31, 39.
    
16. Marcuse,
    Eros and Civilization
    (New York: Vintage Books, 1962), p. 211.
    
17. Ibid.
    , p. 216.
    
18. Rieff, “
    The Impossible Culture: Oscar Wilde and the Charisma of the Artist
    ,”
    Encounter
    , September 1970, pp. 33-44.
    
19. Ibid.
    , p. 41.
    
20. Ibid.
    , p. 40.
    
21. Ibid.
    , p. 41.
    
22. Harrington,
    The Immortalist
    .
    
23. Quoted in Jacques Choron,
    Death and Western Thought
    , p. 135.
    
24. Ibid.
    , pp. 135-136.
    
25. Ibid.
    , pp. 135-136.
    
26. Harrington,
    The Immortalist
    , p. 288.
    
27. See Rieff,
    The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud
    (New York: Harper and Row, 1966).
    
28. Quoted in Jessie Taft,
    Otto Rank
    , p. 139.
    
29. In private conversation.
    
30. Cf. J. Fagan and I. L. Shepherd, eds.,
    Gestalt Therapy Now
    (Palo Alto: Science and Behavior Books, 1970), pp. 237-38.
    
31. Cf. F. M. Alexander,
    The Use of the Self; Its Conscious Direction in Relation to Diagnosis, Functioning, and the Control of Reaction
    , with an Introduction by John Dewey (New York: Dutton, 1932); and G. D. Bowden,
    F. M. Alexander and the Creative Advance of the Individual
    (London: Fowler, 1965).
    
32. Rieff,
    The Triumph of the Therapeutic
    .
    
33. Fromm,
    The Sane Society
    (New York: Fawcett Books, 1955), p. 34.
    
34. Passmore,
    The Perfectibility of Man
    (London: Duckworth, 1970).
    
35. Tillich, “
    The Importance of New Being for Christian Theology
    ,” in
    Man and the Transformation: Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks
    , vol. V, ed. by Joseph Campbell, translated by Ralph Manheim (New York: Pantheon Books, 1964), p. 172, also p. 164.
    
36. For other careful use of concepts and language about the meaning of immanentism see the important books by George P. Conger,
    The Ideologies of Religion
    (New York: Round Table Press, 1940); and Frank B. Dilley,
    Metaphysics and Religious Language
    (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964).
    
37. Langer,
    Philosophy in a New Key
    (New York: Mentor Books, 1942), P. 199.
    
38. Fromm,
    Man For Himself
    (New York: Fawcett Books, 1947), pp. 95 ff.
    
39. A. Koestler,
    The Lotus and the Robot
    (New York: Macmillan, 1960).
    
40. P. Tillich,
    The Courage to Be
    (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952), pp. 177 ff.
    
41. See E. Jacques, “Death and the Mid-life Crisis,” pp. 148-149.
    
42. Cf. J. V. Neel, “
    Lessons from a ‘Primitive’ People
    ,”
    Science
    , Vol. 170, No. 3960, Nov. 20, 1970, p. 821.
    
43. R. J. Lifton, in the Preface to
    Revolutionary Immortality
    (New York: Vintage Books, 1968). I take this to be the argument, too, of Peter Homans’ recent difficult book,
    Theology After Freud
    (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970).
    

^*
In the following dis
cussion I am obliged
to repeat and sum up
things I have written
elsewhere (
The Birth and Death o
f Meaning,
Second Edition, New
York: Free Press, 197
1) in order to set th
e framework for the o
ther chapters.

^†
Jones’s biogra
phy, for all the weal
th of candid detail i
t reveals about Freud
, is tailored to give
an heroic image of h
im; it is now general
ly agreed that it is
hardly the last word in objectivity about Freud the man. Erich
Fromm has shown this very pointedly in his
Sigmund Freud’s Mission: An Analysis of His Personality a
nd Influence
(New York: Grove Press, 1959). Recently, Paul Roazen has re-examined the Jones arch
ives, along with much other digging, to present a more roundedly “human” picture of Freud. Se
e his important book
Brother Animal,
and compare especially Freud’s comments on Tausk (p. 140) to the quotation on
Adler. We will introduce later more of Roazen’s perspective on Freud’s character. Another ex
cellent human portrait of Freud is Helen Walker Puner’s brilliant critical biography:
Freud, His Life and His Mind
(London: The Grey Walls Press, 1949).

^‡
Erich Fromm, in his important discussion of Freud’s character, also fixes on helplessness and dependency as the underside of Freud and so al
so confirms Jones. But Fromm seems to me to accent it too much as an ambivalent reflex of Freud’s c
hildhood relationship to his mother, whereas I am seeing it more as a universal phen
omenon reacting to Freud’s distinctive heroic ambition and burdens. See Fromm,
Sigmund Freud’s Mission
, Chapter 5.

^*
I am aware of the enormous literature on transference and the extensions, modificat
ions, and debates raging around it; but it would go far beyond my purposes to attempt to reflect the tech
nical literature here. We will see further on some of the crucial ways in which our understanding of tran
sference goes beyond Freud and Ferenczi. But I am not sure that the technical argume
nts among psychoanalysts, on the precise nature of transference, hypnosis, and the like add much to their
basic understanding of the phenomenon. Trigant Burrow’s early attempt to make transference entirel
y a problem of social learning seems to me a clear fallacy, as we will see further o
n. (Trigant Burrow, “The Problem of the Transference,”
British Journal of Medical Psychology,
1927, vol. 7, pp. 19
3-202) Freud seems to me still correct to discount physiological theories of inducti
on into the hypnotic trance, in spite of Kubie and Margolin’s later argument (cf. Freud,
Group Psychology and
the Analysis of the Ego,
1922 (New York: Bantam Books edition, 1960), p. 74; and L. S.
Kubie and Sydney Margolin, “The Process of Hypnotism and the Nature of the Hypnotic State,”
American Journal of P
sychiatry,
1944, vol. 180, pp. 611-622); cf. also Merton M. Gill and Margaret Brenman,
Hypnosis and Related States: Psychoanalytic Studies in Regression
(New York: Science Editions, 1959), pp. 1
43, 196-7. The area where the most meaningful revision of the theory of the transfer
ence has been made is, of course, its use and interpretation in therapy; and this is clearly outside my discussion.

^†
Now that we have sketched some of the highlights of the easy symbiosis of groups an
d leaders, we have to be careful not to leave a one-sided picture; there is another side to show, a very
different one. The guilt of all the followers does not vanish so easily under the sp
ell of a leader, no matter how much he takes upon himself or how godlike he seems. Not everyone can be eq
ually caught up in identification with him, and not everyone’s guilt is so easily overcome. Many people
may feel deeply guilty if they violate longstanding and deep-felt moral codes on his behalf. Yet, ironic
ally, it is just this that puts them even more in the leader’s power, makes them e
ven more willing putty in his hands.

If, as we have seen, the group comes ready-made to the leader w
ith the thirst for servitude, he tries to deepen that servitude even further. If they seek to be free of
guilt in his cause, he tries to load them up with an extra burden of guilt and fear to draw the mesh of h
is immorality around them. He gets a really coercive hold on the members of the grou
p precisely because they follow his lead in committing outrageous acts. He can then use their guilt again
st them, binding them closer to himself. He uses their anxiety for his purposes, even arousing it as he n
eeds to; and he can use their fear of being found out and revenged by their victims
as a kind of blackmail that keeps them docile and obedient for further atrocities. We saw a classic examp
le of this technique on the part of the Nazi leaders. It was the same psychology that criminal gangs and
gangsters have always used: to be bound closer together through the crime itself. Th
e Nazis called it blood cement (
Blutkitt
), and the SS used it freely. For the lower echelons, service i
n the concentration camps accomplished this loyalty; but the technique was also used on the highest level
s, especially with reluctant persons of prominence and talent whom they wanted to re
cruit. These they induced to commit extra atrocities that indelibly identified them with the SS and gave
them a new, criminal identity. (See Leo Alexander’s excellent paper: “Sociopsychologic Structure of the SS,”
Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry,
1948, 59: 622-634.) And, as the Nazi epoc
h wore on and the toll of victims mounted, the leaders played upon the fears of reprisal by those who would revenge the victims the Nazis had made. It was the old gangster trick, this time used to cement togeth
er a whole nation. Thus, what may begin as the heroic mission of a Hitler or a Manso
n comes to be sustained by bullying and threats, by added fear and guilt. The followers find that they ha
ve to continue on with the megalomanic plan because it becomes their only chance of survival in a hostile
world. The followers must do what the leader wants, which becomes what they themsel
ves must want in order to survive. If the leader loses, they too perish; they cannot quit, nor does he al
low them to. And so the German nation fought on until the final destruction of Berlin; the Manson family
held together under persecution and his threats, to flee to the desert and await the
end of the world. This gives an added dimension, too, to our understanding of why people stick with thei
r leaders even in defeat, as the Egyptians did with Nasser. Without him they may feel just too exposed to
reprisal, to total annihilation. Having been baptized in his fire they can no longe
r stand alone. (On all this see Ernst Kris, “The Covenant of the Gangsters,”
Journal of Criminal Psychopathology,
1942-3, 4:441-454; Paul Roazen,
Freud,
pp. 238-242; T. W. Adorno, “Freudian Theory and the Patt
ern of Fascist Propaganda,” in
Psychoanalysis and the Social Sciences,
1951, pp. 298-300; a
nd Ed Sanders,
The Family: The Story of Charles Manson’s Dune Buggy Attack Battalion,
(New York: Dutton, 1
971). Cf. esp. pp. 145, 199, 257.)

^*
We might interject here that from this point of view, one of the crucial projects of a person’s life, of true maturity, is to resign oneself to the process of ag
ing. It is important for the person gradually to assimilate his true age, to stop pr
otesting his youth, pretending that there is no end to his life. Eliot Jacques, in his truly superb littl
e essay “Death and the Mid-Life Crisis,” in H. M. Ruitenbeek, ed.,
Death: Interpretations
(New York: Delta Books, 1969), Chapter 13, beautifully develops the idea of the need for “self-mourning,” the mou
rning of one’s own eventual death, and thus the working of it out of one’s unconscious where i
t blocks one’s emotional maturity. One must, so to speak, work himself out of his own system. By a
study of these dynamics we see how important it is for man to resign himself to his
earthly condition, his creatureliness; and we seem to have put full scientific closure on James’s e
arly insight on the place of inner emotional collapse in personal growth (James,
Varieties
, p. 99). We might sa
y that in this sense Freud developed the dynamics for the total resignation that he
could not himself quite manage. His ingenious discovery of the process called “mourning labor” can now be understoo
d as basic to the resignation of the person himself. (See Perls’s important appreciation in
Ego, Hunger, and Aggression
[New York: Vintage Books], pp. 96-97, which reaffirms the tota
l bodily character of this process.) We can also better understand how cultural forces conspire to produc
e menopausal depression in any society that lies to the person about the stages of life, that has no prov
ision in its world-view for the mourning of one’s creatureliness, and that does not provide some ki
nd of larger heroic design into which to resign oneself securely, as we will see.