The Denial of Death (44 page)

^*
Philip Rieff sobered me up about my loose use of ideas of immanence during a panel exchange a couple of years ago. In a characteristically honest and dramatic way he a
dmitted that he was—like everyone else—a “part man,” and he enjoined the audience to admit tha
t we all were, asking what it could possibly mean to be a “whole man.”

^†
I think Tillich failed to see through one idol in his search for the courage to be. He seems to have liked the idea of the co
llective unconscious because it expressed the dimension of the inner depth of being and might be an acces
s to the realm of essence. This seems to me a surprising lapse from his customary soberness. How could th
e ground of being be as accessible as Jung imagined? It seems to me that this concep
t would destroy the whole idea of The Fall. How can man have the realm of essence “on tap,” so to
speak; and if he does, doesn’t Tillich’s understanding of grace lose all its meaning as a pur
e gift beyond human effort?

^‡
It is worth noting that Brown’s final point of arrival is the logically correct one, but I personally find his later book very unsatisfying. One wonders why he has to present his new
position in such a barrage of aphorisms, such a turbulent hodgepodge of half-veiled
thoughts, terse in the extreme, and often cryptic—only to end up in a mystical Christianity of the
oldest vintage and a call for the final judgment day. In this, at least, his later book is entirely consi
stent with the earlier one: natural existence in the frustrating limitations of the body calls for total,
all-or-nothing relief, either in unrepression or at last in the end of the world.

^†
Penis-envy, then, arises from the fact that the mother’s genitals have been split off from her bod
y as a focalization of the problem of decay and vulnerability. Bernard Brodsky remarks about his female p
atient: “Her concept of woman as fecal greatly stimulated her penis envy, since the lively erectile
penis was the antonym of the dead, inert stool.” ( B. Brodsky, “The Self-Representation, Ana
lity, and the Fear of Dying,”
Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association
, 1959, Volume 7, p.
102. ) Phyllis Greenacre—outstanding student of the child’s experiences—had already remarked
on this same equation in the child’s perception: penis = movement, therefore life; feces = inertia,
therefore death. (P. Greenacre,
Trauma, Growth and Personality,
New York: Norton, 1952, p. 264.) This mak
es penis-envy very natural. Greenacre even used the apt idea of “penis-awe” to refer to the spel
l that the large male appendage can cast in the child’s perceptions of the father. The child, after
all, lives in a world of body-power predominantly—he doesn’t understand abstract or symbolic
power. So, more body equals more life. A grown woman might well experience a lingering of the same feeli
ng. An indentation and lack of protuberance, with all that goes on inside, is differ
ent from an aggressive extension that must give less of a feeling of vulnerability.

Brodsky’s patie
nt, as we might expect, was in trouble because both dimensions of her ambivalence toward her mother were
heightened, the patient’s need of her mother and the mother’s threat to the patient: “The mother’s ove
rprotection and hindrance of the patient’s gaining motor skills contributed to the faulty development of
the self-image. She had both intense separation anxiety and marked castration anxiety.” In other w
ords, her dependency was intensified, and at the same time it intensified her castra
tion anxiety, as she could not break away from an object that represented decay. This is an almost sure f
ormula for clinical neurosis.

^*
As we shall see in the pages that follow, other thinkers had their version of the “Jonah Syndrome” long before Maslow; I am thinking especially of Rank, who gave the idea no special name, and of Freud, who probably began our scientific approach to it with his famous discovery of the “Wrecked by Success” syndrome. He saw that certain people couldn’t stand succ
ess after they had achieved it; as it was too much for them, they quickly gave it up
or went to pieces. I am leaving Freud out here because Maslow so well represents the existential approac
h that I believe is a considerable expansion of the Freudian horizon—even though Freud himself deve
loped far toward an existential framework, as we shall see in Chapter Six where we discuss this problem again.

^†
For a fuller summing-up of the problem of schizophrenic failure see Chapter Ten.

^*
Two of the most brilliant uses and analyses of the idea of the duality and ambiguity of man in modern Ch
ristian thought are by Reinhold Niebuhr,
The Nature and Destiny of Man,
Volume One (New York
: Scribner’s Sons, 1941), and Paul Tillich,
Systematic Theology,
Volume Three (Chicago: University of Chic
ago Press, 1963), Chapter 1. These studies prove beyond a doubt the truth of Kierkegaard’s work, th
at psychological and religious analyses of the human condition are inextricable,
if
they get down to basics.

^†
Kierkegaard’s use of “self” may be a bit confusing. He uses it to include the symbolic self and the physical body. It is a synonym really for “total personality” that goes beyond the
person to include what we would now call the “soul” or the “ground of being” out
of which the created person sprang. But this is not important for us here, except to introduce the idea t
hat the total person is a dualism of finitude and infinitude.

^‡
I am going to be talking about these things in Chapter Ten, but I am lingering on them here in order to show how organic a part of Kierkegaard’
s own understanding they are and how they can be phrased in his own concepts and language.

^*
But see Paul Roazen’s insight into how confident Freud was behind his use of style. See
Brother Animal: The Story of Freud and Tausk
(London: Allen Lane the Penguin Press, 1970), pp. 92-93.