The Denial of Death (32 page)

What, in other words, is the truth about the human condition? Is it in bodies or in symbols? If it is not straightforward, then there must be some lie somewhere, which is the threat. Another patient collected books, “and always wanted to defecate when he entered a book-shop.”
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His own literary work was inhibited by his bodily fears. As we remarked several times, children really toilet train themselves because of the existential anxiety of the body. It is often pathetic how broken up they get when they accidentally wet their pants, or how quickly and easily they give in to public morali
ty and will not urinate or defecate any more in the street “where someone might see.” They do this quite on their own, even after being raised by the most unashamed parents. It is obvious that they are shamed by their own bodies. We can conclude quite categorically that hypochondrias and phobias are focalizations of the terror of life and death by an animal who doesn’t want to be one.

It was already plain in Freud’s early paper on the “Rat-man” that death and decay are central themes in the syndrome of obsession, and recently this was developed beautifully and with finality in the work of the European existential psychiatrists, notably Straus.
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The psychoanalytic literature on fetishism, after Freud, shows very clearly what Rank had already argued: that the child is really bothered by bodies. Phyllis Greenacre provided the conclusive clinical closure on this in a series of very important papers that agreed that the castration anxiety long precedes the actual Oedipal period;
it is a problem of global vulnerability rather than a specifically sexual one. This is an important deve
lopment out of Freud. In their favorite technical language the psychoanalysts say that the castration anxiety is “specifically weighted … with a strong admixture of oral and anal trends.”
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In other words, it is a problem of the whole bodily orientation to reality. In the history of fetishists we see again and again that they are subjected to early traumas about bodily decay and death.

The traumas which are most significant are those which consist of the witnessing of some particularly mutilating event: a mutilating death or accident, operation, abortion, or birth in the home… . If we take Freud’s 1938 paper in which he outlines the development of a case of fetishism, and emphasizes the sight of the female genitals coincidental with masturbation and threats of castration just at the beginning of the phallic phase, and substitute for “threat of castration” “sight of mutilated and bleeding body,” I think we may envision what happens in a certain number of children.
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This would hold true naturally—and especially—if the child himself had had a traumatic illness or painful operation.
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One of Fenichel’s patients had a prolapsed rectum that his mother had to press back into place each time he moved his bowels. It is no surprise, then, that he was haunted by the fear that his intestine might fall into the lavatory-pan.
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Imagine being so vulnerable as to have to be pressed back into place. No wonder he was obsessed with a fear of death, that his castration anxiety was overwhelming, that he thought that his dead mother or his sister’s penis c
ould have gone down the drain just as turds and bathwater do or just as his intestine might. The world is not particular about what it flushes away of bodies; things just mysteriously disappear. One of Lorand’s patients, a boy of four, could not understand why a girl he had seen at camp had no fingers on her hand or why one of his relatives was missing a leg. He could not enter the same room with the man and ran away screaming at the sound of his voice. He asked the doctor, quietly and with fear in his eyes: “You won’t make me disappear, will you?”
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Here again we see the child as philosopher, voicing the concer
n of Whitehead over one of the two great evils of organismic life: that “things fade.”

One of the main conclusions that Greenacre
arrived at about fetishists was that their faulty early development was due to a number of similar things: excessive traumas, disturbed mother-child relations, ruptured home life with absent fathers, or very weak fathers who present a poor model for the child’s strength. These kinds of disturbance lead to one main disturbance: these people were weak in their body confidence—to put it in nonclinical terms. Simon Nagler, in an important paper, traced the whole problem of fetishism to low self-esteem, the sense of inadequacy, and hence fear of the male role. These accents are important modifications on Freud beca
use they stress the role of development rather than instinct. Freud lacked the rich developmental theory that has accumulated since his time, which is why it had to be a mystery to him why some people become homosexuals and others fetishists and yet the great majority of men become neither, but transcend the horror of the female genitals.
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If the matter was one of instinct relatively unaffected by developmental experience, then truly these things would be a mystery. This focus on uniform instinct rather than differential development was one of the main shortcomings of Freud’s earl
y work. Simon Nagler, in fact, goes so far as to want to throw out the fear of castration entirely; he also questions the idea of the phallic mother.
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I once agreed with him in some of my own immodest and incomplete attempts to understand fetishism;
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but now it is clear that this overemphasis is foolish. A rounded theory of fetishism has to recognize the centrality of the invulnerable phallic mother, the hermaphroditic image; it has to accept the generalized castration fear as the basic sense of vulnerability of the body; and it has to include the developmental history that makes some people weaker a
nd more anxious than others in the face of experience.

The idea of low self-esteem is of course crucial, but we have to remember that self-esteem is not at first a symbolic problem but an active, organismic one. It takes root in the elemental physical experience of the infant, when his experience gives him a confident narcissism, a sense of invulnerability. High self-esteem means such a sense of invulnerability, and one gets it in three basic ways. It derives first from the power of the other—from the mother when she is a dependable support and does not interfere too much with the child’s own activity and from a strong father wi
th whom the child can identify. The second source of power to overcome vulnerability is one we have mentioned, the secure possession of one’s own body as a safe locus under one’s control. We see that this security can be weakened by traumas, as well as by the quality of the early family environment. A third way one obtains power is of course from the cultural
causa-sui
project, the symbols and dramatizations of our transcendence of animal vulnerability. (We will see shortly how important this third source is in fetishism.) Only these three things taken together can give us a coherent view of the
dynamics of fetishism.

The Problem of Personal Freedom
versus Species Determinism

Most people, then, avoid extreme fetishism because somehow they get the power to use their bodies “as nature intended.” They fulfill the species role of intercourse with their partner without being massively threatened by it. But when the body does present a massive threat to one’s self, then, logically, the species role becomes a frightening chore, a possibly annihilating experience. If the body is so vulnerable, then one fears dying by participating fully in its acts. I think this idea sums up simply what the fetishist experiences. From this vantage point we could look at all perversion
as a protest against the submergence of individuality by species standardization.

Rank developed this idea all through his work. The only way in which mankind could actually
control
nature and rise above her was to convert sexual immortality into individual immortality. Rank sums up the implications of this in a very powerful and suggestive way:

… in essence sexuality is a collective phenomenon which the individual at all stages of civilization wants to individualize, that is, control. This explains all [!] sexual conflicts in the individual, from masturbation to the most varied perversions and perversities, above all the keeping secret of everything sexual by individuals as an expression of a personal tendency to individualize as much as possible collective elements in it.
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In other words, perversion is a protest against species sameness, against submergence of the individuality into the body. It is even a focus of personal freedom
vis-à-vis
the family, one’s own secret way of affirming himself against all standardization. Rank even makes the breathtaking speculation that the Oedipus complex in the classic Freudian understanding may be an attempt by the child to resist the family organization, the dutiful role of son or daughter, the absorption into the collective, by affirming his own ego.
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Even in its biological expression, then, the Oedipus complex m
ight be an attempt to transcend the role of obedient child, to find freedom and individuality through sex through a break-up of the family organization. In order to understand it we must once again emphasize the basic motive of man, without which nothing vital can be understood—self-perpetuation. Man is divided into two distinct kinds of experience—physical and mental, or bodily and symbolic. The problem of self-perpetuation thus presents itself in two distinct forms. One, the body, is standardized and given; the other, the self, is personalized and achieved. How is man going to succeed himself,
how is he going to leave behind a replica of himself or a part of himself to live on? Is he going to leave behind a replica of his body or of his spirit? If he procreates bodily he satisfies the problem of succession, but in a more or less standardized species form. Although he perpetuates himself in his offspring, who may resemble him and may carry some of his “blood” and the mystical quality of his family ancestors, he may not feel that he is truly perpetuating his own inner self, his distinctive personality, his spirit, as it were. He wants to achieve something more than a mere animal success
ion. The distinctive human problem from time immemorial has been the need to spiritualize human life, to lift it onto a special immortal plane, beyond the cycles of life and death that characterize all other organisms. This is one of the reasons that sexuality has from the beginning been under taboos; it had to be lifted from the plane of physical fertilization to a spiritual one.

By approaching the problem of succession or self-perpetuation in its fully dualistic nature, Rank was able to understand the deeper meanings of Greek homosexuality:

Seen in this light, boy-love, which, as Plato tells us, aimed perpetually at the improvement and perfection of the beloved youth, appears definitely as … a spiritual perfecting in the other person, who becomes transferred into the worthy successor of oneself here on earth; and that, not on the basis of the biological procreation of one’s body, but in the sense of the spiritual immortality-symbolism in the pupil, the younger.
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In other words, the Greek sought to impress his inner self, his spirit or soul, upon the beloved youth. This spiritual friendship was designed to produce a son in whom one’s soul would survive:

In boy-love, man fertilized both spiritually and otherwise the living image of his own soul, which seemed materialized in an ego as idealized and as much like his own body as was possible.
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This brilliant speculation enables us to understand some of the ideal motives for homosexuality, not only of the Greeks, but of especially individualized and creative persons like Michelangelo. For such a one, apparently, homosexuality has nothing to do with the sex organs of the beloved but rather represents a struggle to create one’s own rebirth in the “closest possible likeness,” which, as Rank says, is obviously to be found in one’s own sex.
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In terms of our discussion we can see that this attempt represents the complete
causa-sui
project: to create all by oneself a spiri
tual, intellectual, and physically similar replica of oneself: the perfectly individualized self-perpetuation or immortality symbol.

If the castration complex represents the admission by the child that his animal body is a bankrupt
causa-sui
project, what better way to defy the body than by abandoning its sexual role entirely? In this sense perversions would equal a total freedom from the castration complex; they are a hyperprotest against species sameness. But Rank was so intent on accenting the positive, the ideal side of perversion that he almost obscured the overall picture. We are no longer ancient Greeks, and very few of us are Michelangelos; in a word, we are not dominated by ideal motives nor do we possess
the highest powers of genius. Routine perversions are protests out of weakness rather than strength; they represent the bankruptcy of talent rather than the quintessence of it. If the neurotic is the “artiste manqué,” all the more is the usual homosexual the
“Greek manqué,” the Michelangelo without secure power and talent. The pervert is the clumsy artist trying desperately for a counter-illusion that preserves his individuality—but from within a limited talent and powers: hence the fear of the sexual role, of being gobbled up by the woman, carried away by one’s own body, and so on. As F. H. Allen—an earlier follower of Rank—pointed out, the homosexual is often one who chooses a body like his own because of his terror of the difference of the woman, his lack of strength to support such a difference.
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In fact, we might say that the pervert re
presents a striving for individuality precisely because he does not feel individual at all and has little power to sustain an identity. Perversions represent an impoverished and ludicrous claim for a sharply defined personality by those least equipped by their early developmental training to exercise such a claim. If, as Rank says, perversions are a striving for freedom, we must add that they usually represent such a striving by those least equipped to be able to stand freedom. They flee the species slavery not out of strength but out of weakness, an inability to support the purely animal side of their
nature. As we saw above, the childhood experience is crucial in developing a secure sense of one’s body, firm identification with the father, strong ego control over oneself, and dependable interpersonal skills. Only if one achieves these can he “do the species role” in a self-forgetful way, a way that does not threaten to submerge him with annihilation anxiety.