The Denial of Death (37 page)

… the children of eternity may worship variations of Luck, or That Which Cannot Be Controlled… . Luck will be … the only thing that can kill them, and for this reason they may go down on their knees before it… . [They] may conduct ceremonies before the future equivalent of a giant slot machine or roulette wheel.
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Some godlike creatures! The fallacy in all this sterile utopianism is that fear of death is not the only motive of life; heroic transcendence, victory over evil for mankind as a whole, for unborn generations, consecration of one’s existence to higher meanings—these motives are just as vital and they are what give the human animal his nobility even in the face of his animal fears. Hedonism is not heroism for most men. The pagans in the ancient world did not realize that and so lost out to the “despicable” creed of Judeo-Christianity. Modern men equally do not realize it, and so they sell
their souls to consumer capitalism or consumer communism or replace their souls—as Rank said—with psychology. Psychotherapy is such a growing vogue today because people want to know why they are unhappy in hedonism and look for the faults within themselves. Unrepression has become the only religion after Freud—as Philip Rieff so well argued in a recent book; evidently he did not realize that his argument was an updating and expansion of exactly what Rank had maintained about the historical role of psychology.
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The Limits of Psychotherapy

As we have already covered this problem in Chapter Four where we first broached the dilemma of life, let us refresh our memories here. We saw that there really was no way to overcome the real dilemma of existence, the one of the mortal animal who at the same time is conscious of his mortality. A person spends years coming into his own, developing his talent, his unique gifts, perfecting his discriminations about the world, broadening and sharpening his appetite, learning to bear the disappointments of life, becoming mature, seasoned—finally a unique creature in nature, standi
ng with some dignity and nobility and transcending the animal c
ondition; no longer driven, no longer a complete reflex, not stamped out of any mold. And then the real tragedy, as André Malraux wrote in
The Human Condition:
that it takes sixty years of incredible suffering and effort to make such an individual, and then he is good only for dying. This painful paradox is not lost on the person himself—least of all himself. He feels agonizingly unique, and yet he knows that this doesn’t make any difference as far as ultimates are concerned. He has to go the way of the grasshopper, even though it takes longer.

We said that the point was that even with the highest personal development and liberation, the person comes up against the real despair of the human condition. Indeed, because of that development his eyes are opened to the reality of things; there is no turning back to the comforts of a secure and armored life. The person is stuck with the full problem of himself, and yet he cannot rely on himself to make any sense out of it. For such a person, as Camus said, “the weight of days is dreadful.” What does it mean, then, we questioned in Chapter Four, to talk fine-sounding phrases like “Being
cognition,” “the fully centered person,” “full humanism,” “the joy of peak experiences,” or whatever, unless we seriously qualify such ideas with the burden and the dread that they also carry? Finally, with these questions we saw that we could call into doubt the pretensions of the whole therapeutic enterprise. What joy and comfort can it give to fully awakened people? Once you accept the truly desperate situation that man is in, you come to see not only that neurosis is normal, but that even psychotic failure represents only a little additional push in the routine stumbling along life
’s way. If repression makes an untenable life liveable, self-knowledge can entirely destroy it for some people. Rank was very sensitive to this problem and talked about it intimately. I would like to quote him at length here in an unusually mature and sober psychoanalytic reflection that sums up the best of Freud’s own stoical world-picture:

A woman comes for consultation; what’s the matter with her? She suffers from some kind of intestinal symptoms, painful attacks of some kind of intestinal trouble. She had been sick for eight years, and has tried every kind of physical treatment… . She came to the co
nclusion it must be some emotional trouble. She is unmarried, she is thirty-five. She appears to me (and admits it herself) as being fairly well adjusted. She lives with a sister who is married; they get along well. She enjoys life, goes to the country in the summer. She has a little stomach trouble; why not keep it, I tell her, because if we are able to take away those attacks that come once in a fortnight or so, we do not know what problem we shall discover beneath it. Probably this defense mechanism is her adjustment, probably that is the price she has to pay. She never married, she never loved, and
so never fulfilled her role. One cannot ever have everything, probably she has to pay. After all, what difference does it make if she occasionally gets these attacks of indigestion? I get it occasionally, you do too, probably, and not for physical reasons, as you may know. One gets headaches. In other words, it is not so much a question as to whether we are able to cure a patient, whether we can or not, but whether we should or not.
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No organismic life can be straightforwardly self-expansive in all directions; each one must draw back into himself in some areas, pay some penalty of a severe kind for his natural fears and limitations. It is all right to say, with Adler, that mental illness is due to “problems in living,”—but we must remember that life itself is the insurmountable problem.

This is not to say that psychotherapy cannot give great gifts to tortured and overwhelmed people and even added dignity to anyone who values and can use self-knowledge. Psychotherapy can allow people to affirm themselves, to smash idols that constrict the self-esteem, to lift the load of neurotic guilt—the extra guilt piled on top of natural existential guilt. It can clear away neurotic despair—the despair that comes from a too-constricted focus for one’s safety and satisfactions. When a person becomes less fragmented, less blocked and bottled up, he does experience real joy: the joy
of finding more of himself, of the release from armor and binding reflexes, of throwing off the chains of uncritical and self-defeating dependency, of controlling his own energies, of discovering aspects of the world, intense experience in the present moment that is now freer of prefixed perceptions, new possibilities of choice and action, and so on. Yes, psychotherapy can do all these things, but there are many things it cannot do, and they have not been aired widely enough. Often psychotherapy seems to promise the moo
n: a more constant joy, delight, celebration of life, perfect love, and perfect freedom. It seems to promise that these things are easy to come by, once self-knowledge is achieved, that they are things that should and could characterize one’s whole waking awareness. As one patient said, who had just undergone a course in “primal scream” therapy: “I feel so fantastic and wonderful, but this is only a beginning—wait till you see me in five years, it’ll be
tremendous!
” We can only hope that she won’t be too unhappy. Not everyone is as honest as Freud was when he said that he cured the miseries of the n
eurotic only to open him up to the normal misery of life. Only angels know unrelieved joy—or are able to stand it. Yet we see the books by the mind-healers with their garish titles: “Joy!” “Awakening,” and the like; we see them in person in lecture halls or in groups, beaming their peculiar brand of inward, confident well-being, so that it communicates its unmistakable message: we can do this for you, too, if you will only let us. I have never seen or heard them communicate the dangers of the total liberation that they claim to offer; say, to put up a small sign next to the one advertising joy, carr
ying some inscription like “Danger: real probability of the awakening of terror and dread, from which there is no turning back.” It would be honest and would also relieve them of some of the guilt of the occasional suicide that takes place in therapy.

But it would also be most difficult to take the straightforward prescription for paradise on earth and make it ambiguous; one cannot be a functioning prophet with a message that he half takes back, especially if he needs paying customers and devoted admirers. The psychotherapists are caught up in contemporary culture and are forced to be a part of it. Commercial industrialism promised Western man a paradise on earth, described in great detail by the Hollywood Myth, that replaced the paradise in heaven of the Christian myth. And now psychology must replace them both with the myth of
paradise through self-knowledge. This is the promise of psychology, and for the most part the psychotherapists are obliged to live it and embody it. But it was Rank who saw how false this claim is. “Psychology as self-knowledge is self-deception,” he said, because it does not give what men want, which is immortality. Nothing could be plainer. When the patient emerges from his protective cocoon he gives up the reflexive immortality ideology that
he has lived under—both in its personal-parental form (living in the protective powers of the parents or their surrogates) and in its cultural
causa-sui
form (living by the opinions of others and in the symbolic role-dramatization of the society). What new immortality ideology can the self-knowledge of psychotherapy provide to replace this? Obviously, none from psychology—unless, said Rank, psychology itself becomes the new belief system.

Now there are only three ways, I think, that psychology itself can become an adequate belief system. One of them is to be a creative genius as a psychologist and to use psychology as the immortality vehicle for oneself—as Freud and subsequent psychoanalysts have done. Another is to use the language and concepts of psychotherapy in much of one’s waking life, so that it becomes a lived belief system. We see this often, as ex-patients analyze their motives in all situations when they feel anxious: “this must be penis-envy, this must be incestuous attraction, castration fear, Oedipal riva
lry, polymorphous perversity,” and so on. I met one young person who was nearly driven crazy and perverse trying to live the motivational vocabularly of the new Freudian religion. But in a way this attitude is forced because religion is an experience and not merely a set of intellectual concepts to meditate on; it has to be lived. As the psychologist Paul Bakan penetratingly remarked, this is one of the reasons that psychotherapy has moved away from the Freudian intellectual model to the new experiential model.
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If psychology is to be the modern religion, then it has to reflect lived experience
; it has to move away from mere talking and intellectual analysis to the actual screaming out of the “traumas of birth” and childhood, the acting-out of dreams and hostility, and so on. What this does is to make the hour of psychotherapy itself a ritual experience: an initiation, a holy excursion into a tabooed and sacred realm. The patient imbibes another dimension of life, one previously unknown to him and unsuspected by him, truly a “mystery religion” separate from the everyday secular world; he engages in behaviors that are very esoteric and permit the expression of aspects of hi
s personality that he never thought of expressing or even imagined that he had. As in any religion, the adept “swears by” it because he has lived it; the therapy is “true” because it is a lived experience explained by concepts that seem perfectly to fit it, that give form to what the patient actually is undergoing.

The third and final way is merely an extension and sophistication of this. It is to take psychology and deepen it with religious and metaphysical associations so that it becomes actually a religious belief system with some breadth and depth. At the same time, the psychotherapist himself beams out the steady and quiet power of transference and becomes the guru-figure of the religion. No wonder we are seeing such a proliferation of psychological gurus in our time. It is the perfect and logical development of the fetishization of psychology as a belief system. It extends that system i
nto its necessary dimension, which is immortality and the life-enhancing power that goes with it. This power comes in two forms: from the concepts of the religion and concretely from the person of the guru-therapist. It is no coincidence that one of the very popular forms of therapy today—called Gestalt therapy—for the most part ignores the problem of transference, as though one can shoo it away by turning one’s back on it.
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Actually, what is happening is that the aura of guru infallibility remains intact and provides an automatic shelter for the patient’s deep yearnings for safety and security. It is no
accident, either, that the therapists who practice these guru therapies cultivate themselves with halo-like beards and hairdos, to look the part they play.

I am not implying dishonesty here at all, merely that men tend to get caught up in the appropriateness of the panoplies they use and need. If one senses therapeutic religion as a cultural need, then it is the highest idealism to try and fill that need with one’s heart and soul. On the other hand, even with the best intentions, transference is, willy-nilly, a process of indoctrination. Many psychoanalysts, as we know, try very conscientiously to analyze the transference; others try to minimize it. Despite the best efforts, the patient usually becomes in some way a slavish admi
rer of the man and the techniques of his liberation, however small it is. We already know that one of the reasons that Freud’s influence on ideas was so great was that many of the leading thinkers of our time underwent Freudian analysis and so came away with a personal, emotional stake in the Freudian world-view.

The thing about transference is that it takes root very subtly, all the while that the person seems to be squarely on his own feet. A person can be indoctrinated into a world-view that he comes to believe without suspecting that he may have embraced it
because
of his relationship to a therapist or a master. We find this in very subtle form in those therapies that seek to put man back into contact with his own “authentic self,” meaning the pristine powers that are locked inside him. The person is enjoined to try to tap these powers, this inside of nature, to dig down deeply into the subjectivity of his organism. The theory is that as one progressively peels away the social façade, the character defenses, the unconscious anxieties, he then gets down to his “real self,” the source of vitality and creativity behind the neurotic shield o
f character. In order to make psychology a complete belief system, all the therapist has to do is to borrow words for the inner depths of the personality from traditional mystical religions: it can be called, variously, “the great void,” the “inner room” of Taoism, the “realm of essence,” the source of things, the “It,” the “Creative Unconscious,” or whatever.