The Denial of Death (43 page)

^†
This brings up the longstanding problem of why so few females are fetishists, a problem that has been so
lved by Greenacre and Boss. Their point is that the male, in order to fulfill his species role, has to perform the sexual act. For this he needs secure self-powers and also cues to arouse a
nd channelize his desires. In this sense, the male is naturally and inevitably a fetishist of some kind a
nd degree. The less self-power, the more terror of the looming female body, the more fetish narrowness an
d symbolism is necessary. The female does not have this problem because her role is
passive; we might say that her fetishism is absorbed in the surrender of her body. As Boss says, women wh
o shrink at the physical aspect of love, at the concreteness of the partner, can simply react with total
frigidity (
Sexual Perversions
, pp. 53-54). Or, as Greenacre observed as well: “The sen
se of failure due to frigidity in the female is softened by the possibility of concealment” (“
Further Considerations,” p. 188, note). “Frigidity can be covered up to a degree which is not possible with distur
bances of potency in the man” (“Further Notes,” p. 192). Also, the woman, in .her passive
, submissive role, often gets her security by identifying with the power of the male; this overcomes the
problem of vulnerability by receiving delegated powers—both of the penis itself and of the cultural
world-view. But the male fetishist is precisely the one who does not have secure de
legated powers from any source and cannot get them by passive submission to the female (Cf. Greenacre, “
Certain Relationships,” p. 95). We might sum this all up by saying that the frigid woman is one who
submits but is not convinced that she is safe in the power of the male; she does not need to fetishize a
nything as she does not have to perform an act. The impotent male is also not convin
ced that he is safe, but it does not suffice for him to lie passively in order to fulfill his species rol
e. He creates the fetish, then, as a locus of denial-power so that he can perform the act; the woman deni
es with her whole body. Using an artfully apt term of Von Gebsattel’s, we could say that frigidity
is the woman’s form of “passive autofetishism” (Cf. Boss,
Sexual Perversions
, p. 53).

^‡
This explains, too, the naturalness of the connection between sadism and sexuality without putting them
on an instinctive basis. They represent a mutually reinforcing sense of appropriate
power, of heightened vitality. Why, for example, does a boy masturbate with fantasies on such a gory stor
y as the “Pit and the Pendulum” (Creenacre, “Certain Relationships,” p. 81)? We have to imagine that th
e fantasy gives him a sense of power that the masturbation reinforces; the experience is a denial of impo
tence and vulnerability. It is much more than a simple sexual experience; it is much
less than an expression of gratuitous destructive drives. Most people secretly respond to sado-masochist
ic fantasies not because everyone is instinctively perverse but because these fantasies do represent the perfect appropriateness of our energies as well as our limitations as animal organis
ms. No higher satisfaction is possible for us than to dominate entirely a sector of the world or to give
in to the powers of nature by surrendering ourselves completely. Very fittingly these fantasies usually t
ake place when people are having trouble with the stress of symbolic affairs of the
everyday world, and one may wonder why—at a meeting concerning business or academic strategy—he can’t shut out
images from Luis Buñuel’s “Belle de Jour.”

^§
Boss assigns an even more creative intent to sado-masochism, at least in some of its forms (see pp. 104 ff.). I don’t know how far to follow
his generalizations on the basis of the few cases he cites. And I am a little uncomfortable with what se
ems to be his inclination to accept his patients’ rationalizations as really ideal motives. I think
this has to be weighed more carefully.

^‖
Nowhere is this clearer than in Waite’s highly researched and carefully thought-out paper on Hitler (“Adolf Hitler’s Guilt Feelings,”
Journal of Interdisci
plinary History
, 1971, 1, No. 2: 229-249), in which he argues that six million Jews were sacrificed
to Hitler’s personal sense of unworthiness and hypervulnerability of the body to filth and decay.
So great were Hitler’s anxieties about these things, so crippled was he psychically,
that he seems to have had to develop a unique perversion to deal with them, to triumph over them. “
Hitler gained sexual satisfaction by having a young woman—as much younger than he as his mother was
younger than his father—squat over him to urinate or defecate on his head” (Ibid., p. 234). This was his “priv
ate religion”: his personal transcendence of his anxiety, the hyperexperience
and resolution of it. This was a personal trip that he laid not only on the Jews and the German nation bu
t directly on his mistresses. It is highly significant that each of them committed suicide or tried to do
so, and more than a simple coincidence. It might very possibly be that they could n
ot stand the burden of his perversion; the whole of it was on them, it was theirs to live with—not
in itself, as a simple and disgusting physical act, but in its shattering absurdity and massive incongrui
ty with Hitler’s public role. The man who is the object of all social worship, the hope of Germany
and the world, the victor over evil and filth, is the same one who will in an hour plead with you in priv
ate to “be nice” to him with the fullness of your excretions. I would say that this discordan
ce between private and public esthetics is possibly too much to bear, unless one can get some kind of com
manding height or vantage point from which to mock it or otherwise dismiss it, say,
as a prostitute would by considering her client a simple pervert, an inferior form of life.

^#
I cannot leave this chapter without calling attention to one of the richest little essays on the pervers
ions that I have yet come upon—too late to discuss here unfortunately, but tying into and deepening
these views in the most suggestive and imaginative ways: Avery D. Weisman’s “Self-Destruction and
Sexual Perversion,” in
Essays in Self-Destruction
, edited by E. S. Shneidman, (New York: Sc
ience House, 1967). Note especially the case of the patient whose mother had given her the message: “If you have sex you will jeopardize your whole life.” The result was that the patient hit upon the
technique of half-strangling or half-suffocating herself in order to be able to experience orgasm. In oth
er words,
if she paid the price of almost dying
, she could have pleasure without crushing
guilt; to be a victim in the sexual act became the fetish that permitted it to take place. All of Weisma
n’s patients had an image of reality and death that was medieval: they saw the world as evil, as ov
erwhelmingly dangerous; they equated disease, defeat, and depravity, just like medieval penitents; and li
ke them, too, they had to become victims in order to deserve to remain alive, to buy
off death. Weisman calls them aptly “virginal romantics,” who cannot stand the blatancy of physical
reality and seek to transform it into something more idealized by means of the perversion.

^*
As anal play is an essential exercise in human mastery, it is better not interfered with. If the adult a
nxiously cuts it short, then he charges the animal function with an extra dose of anxiety. It becomes mor
e threatening and has to be extra-denied and extra-avoided as an alien part of onese
lf. This extra-grim denial is what we mean by the “anal character.” An “anal” upbringing, then, would be an
affirmation, via intense repression, of the horror of the degrading animal body as the human burden
sans pareil
.

^*
One exception is Alan Wheelis, who discusses these very things: the need for transference, the problem of historical change and neurosis, the insufficiency of psychoanalytic therapy for fin
ding an identity, and so on. (
The Quest for Identity
[N.Y.: Norton, 1958], pp. 159-173). The w
hole discussion is pure Rank, although Wheelis evidently arrived at his views independently.

^†
If psychology represents the analytic breakdown and dissipation of the self and usually limits the world
to the scientific ideology of the therapist, we can see some of the reasons Jung de
veloped his own peculiar ideas. His work represents in part a reaction to the very limitations of psychol
ogical analysis. For one thing, he revitalized the inner dimensions of the psyche to secure it
against
the self-defeating analytic breakdown of it. He deepened it beyond the reaches of a
nalysis by seeing it as a source of self-healing archetypes, of natural renewal, if the patient will only
allow it. For another thing, he broadened the psyche beyond its individual base, by turning it into a “
collective unconscious.” No matter what the individual did to his psyche he was transcended as an i
ndividual by it. In these two ways the person could get his heroic justification fro
m within his own psyche even by analyzing it, in fact, especially by analyzing it! In this way Jung’
s system is an attempt to have the advantages of psychological analysis and to negate and transcend them at the same time; to have his cake and eat it too. As Rieff has so compellingly argued, dissatisfaction w
ith and criticism of Jung must stem largely from the impossibility of achieving the
psychological redemption of psychological man—as we will conclude in Part III (Philip Rieff,
The Triumph of the Th
erapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud
[N.Y.: Harper Torchbooks, 1966], Chap. 5).

^‡
The emotional impoverishment of psychoanalysis must extend also to many analysts themselves and to psych
iatrists who come under its ideology. This fact helps to explain the terrible deadness of emotion that on
e experiences in psychiatric settings, the heavy weight of the character armor erect
ed against the world.

^§
I think this helps explain the intensive evangelism of so many converts. Offhand we may wonder why they must continually buttonhole us in the street to tell us how to be as happy as they.
If they are so happy, we muse, why are they bugging us? The reason, according to wha
t we have said, must be that they need the conviction of numbers in order to strengthen and externalize s
omething that otherwise remains very private and personal—and so risks seeming fantastic and unreal.
To see others like oneself is to believe in oneself.

^‖
There are many other names one could mention in the synthesis of psychoanalytic, existential, and theological thought. We have already noted Waldm
an’s work, which carries the synthesis all the way back to Adler, as Progoff a
lso showed. Thus we are not talking about an accidental convergence or unusual similarity but about a sol
id cumulative achievement of several major strands of thought. Igor A. Caruso’s important book
Existential Psychology: From Analysis to Synthesis
(New York: Herder and Herder, 1964) is an excellent “Ran
kian” statement on neurosis. See also Wilfried Daim, “On Depth-Psychology and Salvation,”
Journal of Psychotherapy as a Religious Process
, 1955, 2: 24-37, for another part of the modern movement of th
e closure of psychoanalysis on Kierkegaard. One of the first modern attempts in this direction—perh
aps the first—was that of Freud’s friend the Reverend Oskar Pfister, who wrote a massive work o
n anxiety, translated as
Christianity and Fear
(London: Allen and Unwin, 1948). It took
anxiety as a mainspring of conduct from John through Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Freud; his intent was to
show that anxiety is best overcome through the immortality ideology of Christian love. This is not the p
lace to assess Pfister’s extensive study and argument, but it is important to note that the work is
vitiated by a curious failure to understand that the anxiety of life and death is a
universal characteristic of man. He sides with those who believe that a healthy development of the child
can take place without guilt, and that a full expression of love can banish fear: “… nor is it tru
e that this pre-disposition to fear must necessarily be called into play by existenc
e in the world as such… . That existence in the world as such causes fear is true only of persons w
ho have been disposed to fear by various ‘dammings’… .” (p. 49). He says that Kierkegaard had a fear neurosis
based on his difficult childhood—hence his morbidity. The curious thing is that Pfister failed to
get behind the cultural immortality ideology that absorbs and transmutes fear, even while he recognized i
t: “Many persons, not only children and the aged, find it possible to face dea
th. They may even welcome it as a friend and be ready to die for a great cause.”
Ibid.
This is true but, as
we now know, it is also trivial because it does not come to grips with the transference transmutations o
f reality and power. The result is a book that offers a sort of Wilhelm Reich-Norman
Brown thesis of the possibilities of unrepressed living, with Christ as the focus for Eros. All of which leads to the rumination that when liberal Christianity seizes upon Freud to try to make the world the ch
eerfully “
right
place,” such unusual partners in such an un-Christian venture are bound to pr
oduce something false.