The Denial of Death (27 page)

[He] perceives himself as unreal and reality as unbearable, because with him the mechanisms of illusion are known and destroyed by self consciousness. He can no longer deceive himself about himself and disillusions even his own ideal of personality. He perceives himself as bad, guilt laden, inferior, as a small, weak, helpless creature, which is the truth about mankind, as Oedipus also discovered in the crash of his heroic fate. All other is illusion, deception, but necessary deception in order to be able to bear one’s self and thereby life.
²⁰

In other words, the neurotic isolates himself from others, cannot engage freely in their partialization of the world, and so cannot live by their deceptions about the human condition. He lifts himself out of the “natural therapy” of everyday life, the active, self-forgetful engagement in it; and so the illusions that others share seem unreal to him. This is forced.
²¹
Neither can he, like the artist,
create new illusions
. As Anaïs Nin put it graphically: “The caricature aspect of life appears whenever the drunkenness of illusion wears off.”
²²
And don’t some people drink to head
off the despair of reality as they sense it truly is? Man must always imagine and believe in a “second” reality or a better world than the one that is given him by nature.
²³
In this sense, the neurotic symptom is a communication about truth: that the illusion that one is invulnerable is a lie. Let me quote another piece of Rank’s powerful summing-up of this problem of illusion and reality:

With the truth, one cannot live. To be able to live one needs illusions, not only outer illusions such as art, religion, philosophy, science and love afford, but inner illusions which first condition the outer
[i.e., a secure sense of one’s active powers, and of being able to count on the powers of others]. The more a man can take reality as truth, appearance as essence, the sounder, the better adjusted, the happier will he be … this constandy effective process of self-deceiving, pretending and blundering, is no psychopathological mechanism… .
²⁴

Rank calls this a paradoxical but deep insight into the essence of neurosis, and he sums it up in the words we have used as an epigraph to this chapter. In fact, it is this and more: it absolutely snakes the foundations of our conceptualization of normality and health. It makes them entirely a relative value problem. The neurotic opts out of life because he is having trouble maintaining his illusions about it, which proves nothing less than that life is possible only with illusions.

And so, the question for the science of mental health must become an absolutely new and revolutionary one, yet one that reflects the essence of the human condition: On what level of illusion does one live?
²⁵
We will see the import of this at the close of this chapter, but right now we must remind ourselves that when we talk about the need for illusion we are not being cynical. True, there is a great deal of falseness and self-deception in the cultural
causa-sui
project, but there is also the necessity of this project. Man needs a “second” world, a world of humanly created meaning, a new realit
y that he can live, dramatize, nourish himself in. “Illusion” means creative play at its highest level. Cultural illusion is a necessary ideology of self-justification, a heroic dimension that is life itself to the symbolic animal. To lose the security of heroic cultural illusion is to die—that is what “deculturation” of primitives means and what it does. It kills them or reduces them to the animal level of chronic fighting and fornication. Life becomes possible only in a continual alcoholic stupor. Many of the older American Indians were relieved when the Big Chiefs in Ottawa and Washington t
ook control and prevented them from warring and feuding. It was a relief from the constant anxiety of death for their loved ones, if not for themselves. But they also knew, with a heavy heart, that this eclipse of their traditional hero-systems at the same time left them as good as dead.
²⁶

Neurosis as Historical

Our third general approach to the problem of neurosis is that of the historical dimension. It is the most important of all, really, because it absorbs the others. We saw that neurosis could be looked at at a basic level as a problem of character and, at another level, as a problem of illusion, of creative cultural play. The historical level is a third level into which these two merge. The quality of cultural play, of creative illusion, varies with each society and historical period. In other words, the individual can more easily cross the line into clinical neurosis precisely where
he is thrown back on himself and his own resources in order to justify his life. Rank could validly raise the issue of neurosis as a historical problem and not a clinical one. If history is a succession of immortality ideologies, then the problems of men can be read directly against those ideologies—how embracing they are, how convincing, how easy they make it for men to be confident and secure in their personal heroism. What characterizes modern life is the failure of all traditional immortality ideologies to absorb and quicken man’s hunger for self-perpetuation and heroism. Neurosis is today a
widespread problem because of the disappearance of convincing dramas of heroic apotheosis of man.
²⁷
The subject is summed up succinctly in Pinel’s famous observation on how the Salpêtrière mental hospital got cleared out at the time of the French Revolution. All the neurotics found a ready-made drama of self-transcending action and heroic identity. It was as simple as that.

It begins to look as though modern man cannot find his heroism in everyday life any more, as men did in traditional societies just by doing their daily duty of raising children, working, and worshipping. He needs revolutions and wars and “continuing” revolutions to last when the revolutions and wars end. That is the price modern man pays for the eclipse of the sacred dimension. When he dethroned the ideas of soul and God he was thrown back hopelessly on his own resources, on himself and those few around him. Even lovers and families trap and disillusion us because they are not substitutes f
or absolute transcendence. We might say that they are poor illusions in the sense that we have been discussing.
²⁸

Rank saw that this hyper-self-consciousness had left modern man to his own resources, and he called him aptly “psychological man.” It is a fitting epithet in more than one sense. Modern man became psychological because he became isolated from protective collective ideologies. He had to justify himself from within himself. But he also became psychological because modern thought itself evolved that way when it developed out of religion. The inner life of man had always been portrayed traditionally as the area of the soul. But in the 19th century scientists wanted to reclaim this last domain o
f superstition from the Church. They wanted to make the inner life of man an area free of mystery and subject to the laws of causality. They gradually abandoned the word “soul” and began to talk about the “self” and to study how it develops in the child’s early relationship with his mother. The great miracles of language, thought, and morality could now be studied as social products and not divine interventions.
²⁹
It was a great breakthrough in science that culminated only with the; work of Freud; but it was Rank who saw that this scientific victory raised more problems than it
solved. Science thought that it had gotten rid forever of the problems of the soul by making the inner world the subject of scientific analysis. But few wanted to admit that this work still left the soul perfectly intact as a word to explain the; inner energy of organisms, the mystery of the creation and sustenance of living matter. It really doesn’t matter if we discover that man’s inner precepts about himself and his world, his very self-consciousness in language, art, laughter, and tears, are all socially built into him. We still haven’t explained the inner forces of evolution that have led to the deve
lopment of an animal capable of self-consciousness, which is what we still must mean by “soul”—the mystery of the meaning of organismic awareness, of the inner dynamism and pulsations of nature. From this point of view the hysterical reaction of 19th-century believers against Darwin only shows the thinness and unimaginativeness of their faith. They wen; not open to plain and ordinary awe and wonder; they took lift; too much for granted; and when Darwin stripped them of their sense of “special wondrousness” they felt as good as dead.

But the triumph of scientific psychology h
ad more equivocal effects than merely leaving intact the soul that it set out to banish. When you narrow down the soul to the self, and the self to the early conditioning of the child, what do you have left? You have the individual man, and you are stuck with him. I mean that the promise of psychology, like all of modern science, was that it would usher in the era of the happiness of man, by showing him how things worked, how one thing caused another. Then, when man knew the causes of things, all he had to do was to take possession of the domain of nature, including his own nature, and his happiness wo
uld be assured. But now we come up against the fallacy of psychological self-scrutiny that Rank, almost alone among the disciples of Freud, understood. The doctrine of the soul showed man
why
he was inferior, bad, and guilty; and it gave him the means to get rid of that badness and be happy. Psychology also wanted to show man why he felt this way; the hope was that if you found men’s motives and showed to man why he felt guilty and bad, he could then accept himself and be happy. But actually psychology could only find
part
of the reason for feelings of inferiority, badness, and guilt—
the part caused by the objects—trying to be good for them, fearing them, fearing leaving them, and the like. We don’t want to deny that this much is a lot. It represents a great liberation from what we could call “false badness,” the conflicts artificially caused by one’s own early environment and the accidents of birth and place. As this research reveals one part of the
causa-sui
lie, it does unleash a level of honesty and maturity that puts one more in control of oneself and does make for a certain level of freedom and the happiness that goes with it.

But now the point that we are driving at: early conditioning and conflicts with objects, guilt toward specific persons, and the like are only part of the problem of the person. The
causa-sui
lie is aimed at the whole of nature, not only at the early objects. As the existentialists have put it, psychology found out about neurotic guilt or circumstantial, exaggerated, unscrutinized personal guilts; but it did not have anything to say about real or natural creature guilt. It tried to lay a total claim on the problem of unhappiness, when it had only a part-claim on the problem. This is
what Rank meant when he said that:

… psychology, which is gradually trying to supplant religious and moral ideology, is only partially qualified to do this, because it is a preponderantly negative and disintegrating ideology… .
³⁰

Psychology narrows the cause for personal unhappiness down to the person himself, and then he is stuck with himself. But we know that the universal and general cause for personal badness, guilt, and inferiority is the natural world and the person’s relationship to it as a symbolic animal who must find a secure place in it. All the analysis in the world doesn’t allow the person to find out
who he is
and why he is here on earth, why he has to die, and how he can make his life a triumph. It is when psychology pretends to do this, when it offers itself as a full explanation of human unha
ppiness, that it becomes a fraud that makes the situation of modern man in impasse from which he cannot escape. Or, put another way, psychology has limited its understanding of human unhappiness to the personal life-history of the individual and has not understood how much individual unhappiness is itself a historical problem in the larger sense, a problem of the eclipse of secure communal ideologies of redemption. Rank put it this way:

In the neurotic in whom one sees the collapse of the whole human ideology of God it has also become obvious what this signifies psychologically. This was not explained by Freud’s psychoanalysis which only comprehended the destructive process in the patient from his personal history without considering the cultural development which bred this type.
³¹

If you fail to understand this you risk making the neurotic even worse off by closing him off from the larger world-view that he needs. As Rank put it:

… it was finally the understanding psychoanalyst who sent the self-conscious neurotic back to the very self-knowledge from which he wanted to escape. On the whole, psychoanalysis failed therapeutically because it aggravated man’s psychologizing rather than healed him of his introspection.
³²

Or better, we would say, psychoanalysis failed therapeutically where it fetishized the causes of human unhappiness as sexuality, and when it pretended to be a total world-view in itself. We can conclude with Rank that religion is “just as good a psychology” as the psychology that pretended to replace it.
³³
In some ways it is of course even better because it gets at the actual causes of universal guilt; in some ways it is much worse, because it usually reinforces the parental and social authorities and makes the bind of circumstantial guilt even stronger and more crippling.

There is no way to answer Rank’s devastating relativization of modern psychology.
³⁴
We have only to look around at the growing number of psychological gurus in the marketplace in order to get the lived historical flavor of the thing. Modern man started looking inward in the 19th century because he hoped to find immortality in a new and secure way. He wanted heroic apotheosis as did all other historical men—but now there is no one to give it to him except his psychological guru. He created his own impasse. In this sense, as Rank said (with what has to be a touch of ironic hum
or): psychotherapists “are, so to say, the neurotic’s product due to his illness.”
³⁵
Modern man needs a “thou” to whom to turn for spiritual and moral dependence, and as God was in eclipse, the therapist has had to replace Him—just as the lover and the parents did. For generations now, the psychoanalysts, not understanding this historical problem, have been trying to figure out why the “termination of the transference” in therapy is such a devilish problem in many cases. Had they read and understood Rank, they would quickly have seen that the “thou” of the therapist is the new God who must replace the old collect
ive ideologies of redemption. As the individual cannot serve as God he must give rise to a truly
devilish
problem.
^36
*
Modern man is condemned to seek the meaning of his life in psychological introspection, and so his new confessor has to be th
e supreme authority on introspection, the psychoanalyst. As this is so, the patient’s “beyond” is limited to the analytic couch and the world-view imparted there.
^†