The Denial of Death (22 page)

Remember we said the transference did not prove “eroticism,” as Freud earlier thought, but actually a certain “truthfulness” about the terror of man’s condition. The schizophrenic’s extreme transference helps us to understand this statement too. After all, one of the reasons that his world is so terrifying is that he sees it in many ways unblurred by repression. And so he sees, too, the human transference object in all of its awe and splendor—something we talked about in an early chapter. The human face is really an awesome primary miracle; it naturally paralyzes you by its splendor if y
ou give in to it as the fantastic thing it is. But mostly we repress this miraculousness so that we can function with equanimity and can use faces and bodies for our own routine purposes. We may remember that as children there were those we did not dare talk to, or even look at—hardly something that we could carry over into our adult lives without seriously crippling ou
rselves. But now we can point out, too, that this fear of looking the transference object full in the face is not necessarily what Freud said it was: the fear of the terrifying primal father. It is, rather, the fear of the reality of the intense focalization of natural wonder and power; the fear of being overwhelmed by the truth of the universe as it exists, as that truth is focussed in one human face. But Freud is right about tyrannical fathers: the more terrifying the object, the stronger the transference; the more that the powerful object embodies in itself the natural power of the world, the more t
errifying it can be, in reality, without any imagination on our part.

Transference as Fear of Death

If fear of life is one aspect of transference, its companion fear is right at hand. As the growing child becomes aware of death, he has a twofold reason for taking shelter in the powers of the transference object. The castration complex makes the body an object of horror, and it is now the transference object who carries the weight of the abandoned
causa-sui
project. The child uses him to assure his immortality. What is more natural? I can’t resist quoting from another writing Gorki’s famous sentiment on Tolstoi, because it sums up so well this aspect of transference: “I am not bereft on this
earth, so long as this old man is living on it.”
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This comes from the depth of Gorki’s emotion; it is not a simple wish or a comforting thought: it is more like a driving belief that the mystery and solidity of the transference object will give one shelter as long as he lives.

This use of the transference object explains the urge to deification of the other, the constant placing of certain select persons on pedestals, the reading into them of extra powers: the more they have, the more rubs off on us. We participate in their immortality, and so we create immortals.
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As Harrington put it graphically: “I am making a deeper impression on the cosmos because I know this famous person. When the ark sails I will be on it.”
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Man is always hungry, as Rank so well put it, for material for his own immortalization. Groups need it too, which explains the constant hunger for
heroes:

Every group, however small or great, has, as such, an “individual” impulse for eternalization, which manifests itself in the creation of and care for national, religious, and artistic heroes … the individual paves the way for this collective eternity impulse… .
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This aspect of group psychology explains something that otherwise staggers our imagination: have we been astonished by fantastic displays of grief on the part of whole peoples when one of their leaders dies? The uncontrolled emotional outpouring, the dazed masses standing huddled in the; city squares sometimes for days on end, grown people groveling hysterically and tearing at themselves, being trampled in the surge toward the coffin or funeral pyre—how to make sense out of such a massive, neurotic “vaudeville of despair”?
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In one way only: it shows a profound state of shock at losing
one’s bulwark against death. The people apprehend, at some dumb level of their personality: “Our locus of power to control life and death can
himself
die; therefore our own immortality is in doubt.” All the tears and all the tearing is after all for oneself, not for the passing of a great soul but for one’s own imminent passing. Immediately men begin to rename city streets, squares, airports with the name of the dead man: it is as though to declare that he will be immortalized physically in the society, in spite of his own physical death. Compare the recent mournings of the Americans for the Ke
nnedys, the French for De Gaulle, and especially the Egyptians for Nasser, which was a more primitive and elemental outpouring: immediately the cry was raised to renew the war with Israel. As we have learned, only scapegoats can relieve one of his own stark death fear: “
I
am threatened with death—let us kill plentifully.” On the demise of an immortality-figure the urge to scapegoating must be especially intense. So, too, is the susceptibility to sheer panic, as Freud showed.
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When the leader dies the device that one has used to deny the terror of the world instantly breaks down; what is more natural
, then, than to experience the very panic that has always threatened in the background?

The void of immortality-substance that would be left by the absolute abandonment of the leader is evidently too painful to support, especially if the leader has possessed striking mana or h
as summed up in himself some great heroic project that carried the people on. One can’t help musing about how one of the most advanced scientific societies of the 20th century resorted to improvements on ancient Egyptian mummification techniques to embalm the leader of their revolution. It seems as though the Russians could not let go of Lenin even in death and so have entombed him as a permanent immortality-symbol. Here is a supposedly “secular” society that holds pilgrimages to a tomb and that buries heroic figures in the “sacred wall” of the Kremlin, a “hallowed” place. No matter how many
churches are closed or how humanistic a leader or a movement may claim to be, there will never be anything wholly secular about human fear. Man’s terror is always “holy terror”—which is a strikingly apt popular phrase. Terror always refers to the ultimates of life and death.
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The Twin Ontological Motives

Much of what we have said so far about transference puts mankind in an unflattering light; it is now time to shift the tone. True, transference is a reflex of cowardice in the face of both life and death, but it is also a reflex of the urge to heroism and self-unfolding. This puts our discussion of transference on still a different level, and on this new perspective I now want to linger.

One thing that has always amazed man is his own inner yearning to be good, an inner sensitivity about the “way things ought to be,” and an excruciatingly warm and melting attraction toward the “rightness” of beauty, goodness, and perfection. We call this inner sensitivity “conscience.” For the great philosopher Immanuel Kant it was one of the two sublime mysteries of creation, this “moral law within” man, and there was no way to explain it—it was just given. Nature carries feeling right in her own “heart,” in the interiors of striving organisms. This self-feeling in nature is
more fantastic than any science-fiction fact. Any philosophy or any science that is going to speak intelligently about the meaning of life has to take it into account and treat it with the highest reverence—as 19th-century thinkers like Vincenzo Gioberti and Antonio Rosmini understood.
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Curiously, this vital ontology of organismic self-feeling—which was central for thinkers like Thomas Davidson and Henri Bergson—hardly made a rustle in modern science until the appearance of the new “humanistic psychology.” This fact alone seems to me to explain the unbelievable sterility of the human sciences in our time and, more especially, their willingness to manipulate and negate man. I think that the true greatness of Freud’s contribution emerges when we see it as directly related to this tradition of ontological thought. Freud showed how the particular rules for goodn
ess or conscience were built into the child in a given society, how he learns the
rules for feeling
good. By showing the artificiality of these social rules for feeling good, Freud mapped out the dream of freedom of the Enlightenment: to expose artificial moral constraints on the expansive self-feeling of the life force.

But the recognition of such social constraints still leaves unexplained the inner urge of the human being to feel good and right—the very thing that awed Kant seems to exist independent of any rules: as far as we can tell—as I put it elsewhere—“all organisms like to ‘feel good’ about themselves.”
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They push themselves to maximize this feeling. As philosophers have long noted, it is as though the heart of nature is pulsating in its own joyful self-expansion. When we get to the level of man, of course, this process acquires its greatest interest. It is most intense in man and in him rela
tively undetermined—he can pulsate and expand both organismically and symbolically. This expansion takes the form of man’s tremendous urge for a feeling of total “rightness” about himself and his world. This perhaps clumsy way to talk seems to me to sum up what man is really trying to do and why conscience is his fate. Man is the only organism in nature fated to puzzle out what it actually means to feel “right.”

But on top of this special burden nature has arranged that it is impossible for man to feel “right” in any straightforward way. Here we have to introduce a paradox that seems to go right to the heart of organismic life and that is especially sharpened in man. The paradox takes the form of two motives or urges that seem to be part of creature consciousness and that point in two opposite directions. On the one hand the creature is impelled by a powerful desire to identify with the cosmic process, to merge himself wi
th the rest of nature. On the other hand he wants to be unique, to stand out as something different and apart. The first motive—to merge and lose oneself in something larger—comes from man’s horror of isolation, of being thrust back upon his own feeble energies alone; he feels tremblingly small and impotent in the face of transcendent nature. If he gives in to his natural feeling of cosmic dependence, the desire to be part of something bigger, it puts him at peace and at oneness, gives him a sense of self-expansion in a larger beyond, and so heightens his being, giving him truly a feeling of transcendent
value. This is the Christian motive of Agape—the natural melding of created life in the “Creation-in-love” which transcends it. As Rank put it, man yearns for a “feeling of kinship with the All.” He wants to be “delivered from his isolation” and become “part of a greater and higher whole.” The person reaches out naturally for a self beyond his own self in order to know who he is at all, in order to feel that he belongs in the universe. Long before Camus penned the words of the epigraph to this chapter, Rank said: “For only by living in close union with a god-ideal that has been erecte
d outside one’s own ego is one able to live at all.”
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The strength of Rank’s work, which enabled him to draw such an unfailing psychological portrait of man in the round, was that he connected psychoanalytic clinical insight with the basic ontological motives of the human creature. In this way he got as deep into human motives as he could and produced a group psychology that was really a psychology of the human condition. For one thing, we could see that what the psychoanalysts call “identification” is a natural urge to join in the overwhelming powers that transcend one.
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Childhood identification is then merely a special case of this
urge: the child merges himself with the representatives of the cosmic process—what we have called the “transference focalization” of terror, majesty, and power. When one merges with the self-transcending parents or social group he is, in some real sense, trying to live in some larger expansiveness of meaning. We miss the complexity of heroism if we fail to understand this point; we miss its complete grasp of the person—a grasp not only in the support of power that self-transcendence gives
to
him but a grasp
of
his whole being in joy and love. The urge to immortality is not a simple reflex of
the death-anxiety but a reaching out by one’s whole being
toward life. Perhaps this natural expansion of the creature alone can explain why transference is such a universal passion.

From this point of view too we understand the idea of God as a logical fulfillment of the Agape side of man’s nature. Freud seems to have scorned Agape as he scorned the religion that preached it. He thought that man’s hunger for a God in heaven represented everything that was immature and selfish in man: his helplessness, his fear, his greed for the fullest possible protection and satisfaction. But Rank understood that the idea of God has never been a simple reflex of superstitious and selfish fear, as cynics and “realists” have claimed. Instead it is an outgrowth of genuine li
fe-longing, a reaching-out for a plenitude of meaning—as James taught us.
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It seems that the yielding element in heroic belongingness is inherent in the life force itself, one of the truly sublime mysteries of created life. It seems that the life force reaches naturally even beyond the earth itself, which is one reason why man has always placed God in the heavens.

We said it is impossible for man to feel “right” in any straightforward way, and now we can see why. He can expand his self-feeling not only by Agape merger but also by the other ontological motive Eros, the urge for more life, for exciting experience, for the development of the self-powers, for developing the uniqueness of the individual creature, the impulsion to stick out of nature and shine. Life is, after all, a challenge to the creature, a fascinating opportunity to expand. Psychologically it is the urge for individuation: how do I realize my distinctive gifts, make my
own contribution to the world through my own self-expansion?