The Denial of Death (24 page)

After this reminder of the fundamental problems of the child and the adult that we talked about in Part I, I hope that we can better understand the roots of Rank’s critique of the “romantic” psychological type that has emerged in modem times. It then becomes perfectly clear what he means when he says that “personality is ultimately destroyed by and through sex.”
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In other words the sexual partner does not and cannot represent a complete and lasting solution to the human dilemma.
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The partner represents a kind of fulfillment in freedom from self-consciousness and guilt; but at the sa
me time he represents the negation of one’s distinctive personality. We might say the more guilt-free sex the better, but only up to a certain point. In Hitlerism, we saw the misery that resulted when man confused two worlds, when he tried to get a clear-cut triumph over evil, a perfection in this world that could only be possible in some more perfect one. Personal relationships carry the same danger of confusing the real facts of the physical world and the ideal images of spiritual realms. The romantic love “cosmology of two” may be an ingenious and creative attempt, but because it is stil
l a continuation of the
causa-sui
project in this world, it is a lie that must fail. If the partner becomes God he can just as easily become the Devil; the reason is not far to seek. For one thing, one becomes
bound
to the object in dependency. One needs it for self-justification. One can be utterly dependent whether one needs the object as a source of strength, in a masochistic way, or whether one needs it to feel one’s own self-expansive strength, by manipulating it sadistically. In either case one’s self-development is restricted by the object, absorbed by it. It is too narrow a f
etishization of meaning, and one comes to resent it and chafe at it. If you find the ideal love and try to make it the sole judge of good and bad in yourself, the measure of your strivings, you become simply the reflex of another person. You lose yourself in the other, just as obedient children lose themselves in the family. No wonder that dependency, whether of the god or the slave in the relationship, carries with it so much underlying resentment. As Rank put it, explaining the historical bankruptcy of romantic love: a “person no longer wanted to be used as another’s soul even with its attendant compensations.”
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When you confuse personal love and cosmic heroism you are bound to fail in both spheres. The impossibility of the heroism undermines the love, even if it is real. As Rank so aptly says, this double failure is what produces the sense of utter despair that we see in modem man. It is impossible to get blood from a stone, to get spirituality from a physical being, and so one feels “inferior” that his life has somehow not succeeded, that he has not realized his true gifts, and so on.
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No wonder. How can a human being be a god-like “everything” to another? No human relationship can bear the burden of godhood, and the attempt has to take its toll in some way on both parties. The reasons are not far to seek. The thing that makes God the perfect spiritual object is precisely that he is abstract—as Hegel saw.
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He is not a concrete individuality, and so He does not limit our development by His own personal will and needs. When we look for the “perfect” human object we are looking for someone who allows us to express our will completely, without any frustration or fal
se notes. We want an object that reflects a truly ideal image of ourselves.
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But no human object can do this; humans have wills and counterwills of their own, in a thousand ways they can move against us, their very appetites offend us.
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God’s greatness and power is something that we can nourish ourselves in, without its being compromised in any way by the happenings of this world. No human partner can offer this assurance because the partner is real. However much we may idealize and idolize him, he inevitably reflects earthly decay and imperfection. And as he is our ideal measure of value, this imperf
ection falls back upon us. If your partner is your “All” then any shortcoming in him becomes a major threat to
you
.

If a woman loses her beauty, or shows that she doesn’t have the strength and dependability that we once thought she did, or loses her intellectual sharpness, or falls short of our own peculiar needs in any of a thousand ways, then all the investment we have made in her is undermined. The shadow of imperfection falls over our lives, and with it—death and the defeat of cosmic heroism. “She lessens” = “I die.” This is the reason for so much bitterness, shortness of temper and recrimination in our daily family lives. We get back a reflection from our loved objects that is less than the grandeur an
d perfection that we need to nourish ourselves. We feel diminished by their human shortcomings. Our interiors feel empty or anguished, our lives valueless, when we see the inevitable pettinesses of the world expressed through the human beings in it. For this reason, too, we often attack loved ones and try to bring them down to size. We see that our gods have clay feet, and so we must hack away at them in order to save ourselves, to deflate the unreal over-investment that we have made in them in order to secure our own apotheosis. In this sense, the deflation of the over-invested pa
rtner, parent, or friend is a creative act that is necessary to correct the lie that we have been living, to reaffirm our own inner freedom of growth that transcends the particular object and is not bound to it. But not everybody can do this because many of us need the lie in order to live. We may have no other God and we may prefer to deflate ourselves in order to keep the relationship, even though we glimpse the impossibility of it and the slavishness to which it reduces us.
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This is one direct explanation—as we shall see—of the phenomenon of depression.

After all, what is it that we want when we elevate the love partner to the position of God? We want redemption—nothing less. We want to be rid of our faults, of our feeling of nothingness. We want to be justified, to know that our creation has not been in vain. We turn to the love partner for the experience of the heroic, for perfect validation; we expect them to “make us good” through love.
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Needless to say, human partners can’t do this. The lover does not dispense cosmic heroism; he cannot give absolution in his own name. The reason is that as a finite being he too is doomed, and we read tha
t doom in his own fallibilities, in his very deterioration. Redemption can only come from outside the ind
ividual, from beyond, from our conceptualization of the ultimate source of things, the perfection of creation. It can only come, as Rank saw, when we lay down our individuality, give it up, admit our creatureliness and helplessness.
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What partner would ever permit us to do this, would bear us if we did? The partner needs us to be as God. On the other hand, what partner could ever want to give redemption—unless he was mad? Even the partner who plays God in the relationship cannot stand it for long, as at some level he knows that he does not possess the resources that the other needs and claims. He d
oes not have perfect strength, perfect assurance, secure heroism. He cannot stand the burden of godhood, and so he must resent the slave. Besides, the uncomfortable realization must always be there: how can one be a genuine god if one’s slave is so miserable and unworthy?

Rank saw too, with the logic of his thought, that the spiritual burdens of the modern love relationship were so great and impossible on both partners that they reacted by completely despiritualizing or depersonalizing the relationship. The result is the
Playboy
mystique: over-emphasis on the body as a purely sensual object.
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If I can’t have an ideal that fulfills my life, then at least I can have guilt-free sex—so modern man seems to reason. But we can quickly conclude how self-defeating this solution is because it brings us right back to the dreaded equation of sex with inferiori
ty and death, with service to the species and the negation of one’s distinctive personality, the real symbolic heroism. No wonder the sexual mystique is such a shallow creed. It has to be practised by those who have despaired of cosmic heroism, who have narrowed their meanings down to the body and to this world alone. No wonder too that the people who practice it become just as confused and despairing as the romantic lovers. To want too little from the love object is as self-defeating as to want too much.

When you narrow your meanings down to this world you are still looking for the absolute, for the supreme self-transcending power, mystery, and majesty. Only now you must find it in the things of this world. The romantic lover seeks it in the deep interiority of the woman, in her natural mystery. He looks for her to be a source of wisdom, of sure intuition, a bottomless well of continually renewed strength. The sensualist seeks the absolute no longer in the woman, who is a mere thing that one works on. He must then find
the absolute in himself, in the vitality that the woman arouses and unleashes. This is why virility becomes such a predominant problem for him—it is his absolute self-justification in this world. Mike Nichols recently contrasted the romantic and the sensualist in his brilliant film
Carnal Knowledge:
the romantic ends up with an 18-year-old hippie who is “wise beyond her years” and who comes out with unexpected things from the deep of her natural femininity; the sensualist ends a 20-year span of sexual conquests stuck with the problem of his own virility. In the marvelous scene at the end we see t
he well-schooled prostitute giving him an erection by convincing him of his own inner powers and natural strength. Both of these types meet, in the film, on the middle ground of utter confusion about what one should get out of a world of breasts and buttocks and of rebellion against what the species demands of them. The sensualist tries to avoid marriage with all his might, to defeat the species role by making sexuality a purely personal affair of conquests and virility. The romantic rises above marriage and sex by trying to spiritualize his relationship to women. Neither type can
understand the other except on the level of elemental physical desire; and the film leaves us with the reflection that both are pitifully immersed in the blind groping of the human condition, the reaching out for an absolute that can be seen and experienced. It is as though Rank himself had helped write the script; but it was that modern artistic “Rankian” of the love relationship, Jules Feiffer, who did.

Sometimes, it is true, Rank seems so intent on calling our attention to problems that transcend the body that one gets the impression that he failed to appreciate the vital place that it has in our relationships to others and to the world. But that is not at all true. The great lesson of Rank’s depreciation of sexuality was not that he played down physical love and sensuality, but that he saw—like Augustine and Kierkegaard—that man cannot fashion an absolute from within his condition, that cosmic heroism must transcend human relationships.
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What is at stake in all this is, of cours
e, the question of freedom, the quality of one’s life and one’s individuality.

As we saw in the previous chapter, people need a “beyond,” but they reach first for the nearest one; this gives them the fulfillment they need but at the same time limits and enslaves them. You can
look at the whole problem of a human life in this way. You can ask the question: What kind of beyond does this person try to expand in; and how much individuation does he achieve in it? Most people play it safe: they choose the beyond of standard transference objects like parents, the boss, or the leader; they accept the cultural definition of heroism and try to be a “good provider” or a “solid” citizen. In this way they earn their species immortality as an agent of procreation, or a collective or cultural immortality as part of a social group of some kind. Most people live this w
ay, and I am hardly implying that there is anything false or unheroic about the standard cultural solution to the problems of men. It represents both the truth and the tragedy of man’s condition: the problem of the consecration of one’s life, the meaning of it, the natural surrender to something larger—these driving needs that inevitably are resolved by what is nearest at hand.

Women are peculiarly caught up in this dilemma, that the now surging “feminine liberation movement” has not yet conceptualized. Rank understood it, both in its necessary aspect and in its constrictive one. The woman, as a source of new life, a part of nature, can find it easy to willingly submit herself to the procreative role in marriage, as a natural fulfillment of the Agape motive. At the same time, however, it becomes self-negating or masochistic when she sacrifices her individual personality and gifts by making the man and his achievements into her immortality-symbol. Th
e Agape surrender is natural and represents a liberating self-fulfillment; but the reflexive internalization of the male’s life role is a surrender to one’s own weakness, a blurring of the necessary Eros motive of one’s own identity. The reason that women are having such trouble disentangling the problems of their social and female roles from that of their distinctive individualities is that these things are intricately confused. The line between natural self-surrender, in wanting to be a part of something larger, and masochistic or self-negating surrender is thin indeed, as Rank saw.
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The problem is furth
er complicated by something that women—like everyone else—are loathe to admit: their own natural inability to stand alone in freedom. This is why almost everyone consents to earn his immortality in the popular ways mapped out by societies everywhere, in the beyonds of others and not their own.

The Creative Solution

The upshot of all this is that personal heroism through individuation is a very daring venture precisely because it separates the person out of comfortable “beyonds.” It takes a strength and courage the average man doesn’t have and couldn’t even understand—as Jung so well points out.
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The most terrifying burden of the creature is to be isolated, which is what happens in individuation: one separates himself out of the herd. This move exposes the person to the sense of being completely crushed and annihilated because he sticks out so much, has to carry so much in himself. These are the risks whe
n the person begins to fashion consciously and critically his own framework of heroic self-reference.