ERNEST BECKER’S
THE BIRTH AND DEATH OF MEANING
a PRÉCIS summary
ANIL MITRA PHD, 1986, REVISED May 2003
Chapter
One The Man Apes: A Lesson for
Thomas Hobbes
Chapter Two The Origins Of Mind: The Mechanics of The
Miraculous
Chapter Three The Distinctively Human: Ego, Language and
Self
Chapter Four The Inner World: Introduction to the
Birth of Tragedy
Chapter Five Socialization: The creation of the Inner
World
Chapter Six The New Meaning of the Oedipus Complex:
The Dispossession of the Inner World
Chapter Seven Self Esteem: The Dominant Motive of Man
Chapter Eight Culture and Personality: The
Standardization of Self-Esteem
Chapter Nine Social Encounters: The Staging of the
Self-Esteem
Chapter Ten Culture: The Relativity of Hero-Systems
THERAPIES
The Birth and Death of Meaning is a synthesis - from psychology, anthropology, sociology and psychiatry - on the “problem of man…” on existential problems, meaning, freedom…
I wrote this summary to learn – and I learned much from Becker’s work
However, this is not an endorsement of Becker’s work and I note, especially, Becker’s unbalanced emphasis on negative factors in human motivation
SUMMARY OF ERNEST BECKER: THE BIRTH AND DEATH OF MEANING
To explain what makes people act the way they do [-results from-] Learning from the disciplines of psychology, anthropology, sociology and psychiatry … exciting, personally and politically liberating discoveries: “We are today in possession of an excellent general theory of human nature.”
Knowledge of the positive and the dark side of his nature will give man a better chance to achieve something vital
Start with what is vital in Freud: “The universality of the human slavery and blindness that we call neurosis”, “The universal mechanism of development [implantation] of guilt [conscience]”, “Humanization is itself the neurosis”, “The price of freedom from anxiety … is the limiting of experience and action”, “The mechanisms of this ‘freedom’ are the defenses … denial, projection, repression” … “are the techniques of self deception” [pp. 54-57]
Develop Freudian psychology into an organic part of the general movement of ideas, tying it into the work of William James, Mark Baldwin, John Dewey … This got the human organism back into the working of mind Þ unifying early functional psychology and psychoanalytic and existential psychology into a whole. [The major names in this development are Erich Fromm who is “central” to Becker’s ideas and development, and Otto Rank who is “brilliant”. Others are: Alfred Adler, Wilhelm Reich, Kurt Goldstein, Harry Sullivan, Karen Horney, Ludwig Binswanger, Medard Boss, F. Buytendijk, Viktor Frankl, Ronald Laing, and Frederick Perls. To these Becker acknowledges a debt.]
What emerges [from Freud, Fromm, Rank]: A rounded picture, the potentially good largely shaped by society - good / bad, actually / potentially; but there is, potentially, a dark side having origins in animal fears, deep anxieties about death and impotence, about being overwhelmed by and absorbed into the world [-leads to-] a drivenness and desperation and obsession with meaning and significance of life and self … This is not to negate Rousseau [noble savage: man is essentially good but corrupted by society], and the Enlightenment hopes [unbounded reason, order, recapturing primitive innocence], but to show that that program is much more difficult than Rousseau dreamed. Hence, the mission is to achieve knowledge of the dark and the light sides of human nature
Theme: co-development of brain / mind, interpersonal sensitivity, society and tradition, artifact, symbolism and cognition in response to the “needs” of survival and superiority of the hunters
The basic idea is that there is no single thing that is uniquely human. The factors above all developed and stand together as interdependencies. These developed in response to opportunities [and hence “need”] for appetite, survival and freer adaptation. The thesis of modern anthropology is that this occurs, at least originally, in the hunt and then in the opportunities provided by emerging social and ecological organization
Outline: Australopithecines, the transitional man-apes,
appeared first a million years ago in the grasslands of Southern and
Hunter [-leads to-] agrarian [-leads to-] towns [centralization, trade] [-leads to-] modern
Origin of Sexual Codes
Becker asks: “How did the sexual organization come about?” and gives us the views of Otto Rank and Norman O. Brown. According to them, highly sensitive early men made themselves conform to degrees of regulation because of their myriad fears of an overwhelming world of spirits and strange powers; that is, there were “spiritual motives”. Certainly, it is my view, that such fears maintain present social structure at least to some degree, and fear in general is a significant factor. Becker emphasizes the fact that in the “theory”, self-regulation was not “imposed” because of survival needs … However, this does not rule out the rule of survival - there is a sort of social evolution going on, with spirituality [and other factors] being the source of change [mutation] and the interactive and external environment the selective force
Common themes to chapters two and three: Origins of interpersonal sensitivity, symbolic language, ego, self. Intimations of tragedy in the dualism-split of self and body
Theme to chapter two: growth of mind and symbol as a response to interpersonal sensitivity
1. The precise origin of symbolic language is a mystery. Some of the groundwork for the birth of symbol in man occurred at much earlier levels of evolution. Charles Sherrington: Amoeba exhibit stimulus --- response deriving reactive meaning. [Is this concept validly used?] This is the:
Simplest level: direct reflex
Next level: condition reflex; direct reflex and learning. The conditioning becomes a stimulus or sign for something else, a liberation from the environment and an enrichment of the world to include signs
Third level: relation between objects in a visual perceptual field and decision to act on them. Unusual autonomy: chimpanzee
Highest level [of reactivity meaning [valid concept here?]]: symbolic behavior - coin a designation and react to that designation. Becker reports these designations as arbitrary. A synthesis of lower levels and more
The development of mind is a progressive freedom from reactivity [delay and processing of information] [-leads to-] arriving at freedom from intrinsic properties of things. “Mind culminates in the organism’s ability to choose what it will react to.”
2. Vertebrate backgrounds to the growth of mind. The young of mammals are born in an immature state … with far-reaching consequences. The close dependence meant the young had a model for learning some of their behavior - for which they had a wider repertory and choice. Evolution ceased putting a premium on instinct. This needed the young to have a heightened sensitivity to individuals of their own species. … The more complex the animal, the longer the period of dependence of the young; monkeys have seventy-percent brain size at birth - infant humans achieve this at three months. Inside the head of a human infant a brain is being “incubated”; ape and human infants are remarkably like in form, but the adults are different - humans retain a true primate appearance … The great surge of human evolution was made possible by the social inventions of australopithecines [“man-ape”] who in turn owed their complexity to their mammalian heritage, to their long dependence, to their sensitivities to one another … The basis for this sensitivity / alertness is probably laid down in the dominance-subordination hierarchies of vertebrate society, of fish, reptiles, wolves, baboons. The sensitivity allows each animal to be cognizant in some way of the part he is to play in the life of the group. So man’s acute sensitivity to his fellows was foreshadowed in the earliest development of vertebrate stimulation … and with primates there is a new development. The primates are in sexual heat all the time instead of the usual diphasic division into reproductive and nonreproductive phases of lower vertebrates
The picture that emerges is unique in the animal kingdom: a great variety of animals in various stages of development - with keen sensitivity to the aggressive and erotic barometers of one another - are to gather in one group. The result is an extremely complex jumble of status to which they must adjust - This, again, puts a premium on plasticity and against instinctual rigidity, since nothing is as unpredictable as other living organisms. This continuing need for adjustment provides part of the stimulus for emergence of a larger-brained animal … Primate living laid the basis for the nervous complexity of man
3. On the humanoid level the problem of adjustment to the organismic environment is crucial. A way was necessary to give an ordered simplification to the interindividual environment. Among the lower primates the answer is strength and energy differences; for man, a schematization that is symbolic and psychological - by means of status and role … role, correctly. This is why status and role are central in sociology: they describe part of the essence of human behavior and emotion in subhuman primates to permit in turn a new ordering by the man-apes
Theme: nature and origin of ego and self as based in language
4. The distinctively human. Western culture has for the most part set a great distance between itself and nature; language helps in this … Speculations on the origin of language include: [Charles Hockett] the hunt; [Weston La Barre] infant-mother sensitivity. There is no agreement on the origins, but there is on the role of language in making man human … It has to do with the ego and its linguistic basis
Nature and Origin of Ego
Man’s large cerebral cortex seems to aid man feed consciousness from within and serve as a control for reaction to the environment. The “brain” is an internal gyroscope that keeps the organism in hand and the environment at a distance and well sorted out. The ego
is the unique process of identity and central control in a large-brained animal. In normal function it keeps the organism independent of immediate environmental stimuli: to wait and delay response, to hold in awareness several conceptual processes and stimuli at one and the same time, imagine outcomes without immediate action; it makes a reasoned choice possible [decision making] [ego = design and problem solving - individual level]; it allows the organism a freedom unknown in nature … The study of the development of the ego is one of the great and lasting contributions of psychoanalysis
Freud’s Discovery of the Ego came partly from focus on the id, “it” = the unconscious instinctive functioning without conscious control and mastery, from which ground the perceptive “I”, “ego” springs and grows … The id is a world of pictures, emotions, sensory meanings in confusion, timeless. The lower animals are almost entirely id, bodies bound by instantaneous reactivity to a world of sensation, incapable of holding reactions and urges in abeyance - beds of sensation without delaying, central control. The id is reactive life, the ego, the human “organ” develops in control the reactivity, ego creates time by binding and organizing images in memory, allows man to live in a symbolic world of his own creation. When the cerebral cortex became a central exchange for the regulation and delay of behavior, the stage for consciousness of self and of precise time was set and a controlled-time stream could come into being … Lower animals live in a continuous “now” troubled, perhaps, by sensory [as against symbolic?] memories over which they have little or no control. The uncontrolled picture thinking that probably occurs in the prehuman primates is an intrinsic symbolization in which the individual cannot assign himself a very definite place … In sleep the “I” gives up its differentiated alertness and control of anxiety and defense mechanisms [Preface and Chapter 6], and sinks to bed in the id. [Freud’s theory of dreams is based on this idea that ego gives up direction of the individual’s perceptions and everything that the ego has chosen not to be aware of, in order to continue its mastery over sensation, may surface - things the ego cannot or will not admit.]
Ego and Anxiety Control. For delay of sensation, control of function, ego must be an alert sentinel - to control anxiety. Freud discover this as one of the ego’s main functions. [Comment: As the individual learns to resolve the stimuli causing anxiety, by controlling the anxiety while cognitively resolving it, he becomes less responsive to the stimulus. An aspect of neurosis may be the denial of essential anxiety. However, the original basis of the anxiety remains.] “The ego handles anxiety by saying: this is not me, my conduct, etc.” But of course, first a differentiated concept of “me” is essential. Freud thought that the “nots”, the alien things, were in the id in the form of guilt and threatening desires, but most modern psychologists no longer hold this view as the source of anxiety
Anxiety Control and Origin of Thinking. Main ego function [-leads to-] delay [-leads to-] scan memory Ö thought for alternate approaches and choose; therefore, anxiety control central to time-binding, action delaying, and cerebral functions of humans
Intrinsic Symbolic Processes. Rudimentary ego and intrinsic symbolic processes seem to exist on a subhuman level = existence of consciousness. But this is not enough for full development of ego and symbolic communication
For true ego need, a symbolic rallying point, a personal and social symbol “I”; the ego builds up in a world in which it can act with equanimity largely by naming names. Objects are designated good, bad, indifferent. [A lack of such an ego explains why an “ape’s emotional motor is always idling” - an apt way to describe an animal whose brain is large enough to provide anxiety-provoking sensory memories and whose environment is complex and threatening, yet an animal who does not have controlled symbols to distance himself from his immediate internal and external environment
Speech is essentially human. Every language has, effectively, “I”, “you”, “me” without which there can be no ego. The “I” is the rallying point for the already existing rudimentary ego of the subhuman primates. Further, “The ‘I” is not airy. It is bolstered by a name”. “A whole marvelous organic existence can be predicated on a mere sound, as in ‘Nobody can do that to Fred C. Dobbs’.”
6. Self and Self Objectification . The price of control given by the “I” is that it does so initially by taking away control: the human animal is an organic instinctive center and in learning the social “I”, it partly loses its instinctive center within itself and becomes split against itself … We first understand me, then I. This means that the child begins to identify himself as an object of others [me] before he becomes an executive subject [I]. This is self objectivity: “I can think of me”. … “Man may be the only object in the universe who sees himself as an object - with experiences and fate.”
The Process of Self Objectification
Beings and objects have insides and outsides. The child initially experiences itself as inside and others by outside. [Without initially making a distinction - necessarily] … He only learns about his outside by taking the attitude of others toward himself. The self cannot come into being without using the other as lever. As sociologist Franklin Giddings said, “It is not that two heads are better than one, but that two heads are needed for one.”
Consciousness is, therefore, a fundamentally social experience. Symbolic action is also learned from outside in: as a child imitates the language of adults, this becomes a signal to him … A self-reflexive animal gets the meaning of his acts by observing them after they have happened and by observing the responses of others. This is how mind grows and how self-reflexivity gives depth of experience at the cost of directness of experience
The Self vs The
Body
Hence, from above, there is a real dualism in human experience. The social identity is largely symbolic but the experience of one’s powers is at first organic. The sense of self builds up thought symbols as well as energetic movement, perceptions, and excitement. The child has self-experience when his actions have been blocked and he takes the role of other to see what his act means. The more the blockage, the more the sense of self is symbolic … If a person’s social identity is undermined in later life, he always has his organism to fall back on; this “is the basis for all psychotherapeutic change as well as for spiritual self-realization”. If the child has been allowed to gain an “organismic identity” by relatively free actions and self-controlled manipulation of his world, he has more strength and resilience toward the vagaries of social symbol systems … The total striving organism is greater than the particular world view imposed on it. Often, under severe stress, an individual saves his sanity by learning to fall back on his body, to rely on it. He learns to trust nature and stops the interference of his mind - the fears that act back on his body and undermine it … This is why progressive educators from Rousseau to Dewey and Reich have made self-directed activity by the child a basic cornerstone of mental health
Theme: the structure of human anxiety [beyond immediate physical anxiety] and its basis in the dualism of symbolic / physical; that is, self / body; that is, inner / physical
Recall the vital dualism
of experience [the inner and the outer worlds] - It is one of the great mysteries of the universe, the basis of the belief in souls and spirits … Gustav Fechner, one hundred years back [from 1970s], tried to prove there is an equal part of soul for every particle of matter. He said all objects have interiority, even trees - Why not say the tree soaks water because it is thirsty? Even rocks have interiority if only the idling of the atoms. … These thoughts help introduce the problem of man’s distinctive interiority . At the scale of man the great dualism of nature is carried to its furthest extreme [? - me]: and poignant problem . The child quickly learns to cultivate the inner, private, life because it puts a barrier between him and the demands of the world . By the time we grow up we become masters at dissimulation, at cultivating a self that the world cannot probe, but we pay a price. We find ourselves hopelessly separated from everyone else … Only during one period do we break down the barriers of separateness: “preadolescent chumship” … One reason youth and elders don’t understand one another is that they live in “different worlds”: youth trafficking in their “insides” which elders have long since “submerged” [?]. The parent himself “now” has difficulty making contact with his own inner feelings, hopes, and dreams. He wonders who is really inside his fleshy casing … “What do the blue eyes mean, the wrinkles?” … The face is a lie for an animal who really feels himself to be somewhere in his own interior; … We find ourselves in the ironic situation of having to transact with others with the part of ourselves - our exteriors - that we value the least. And we are all placed in the position of having to judge others on this least important aspect
The Protean Self
The self is not physical. It is symbolic. It is [usually] “in” the body but rarely completely in the body … A person is where he believes his self to be; or, more technically, the body is an object in the field of the self. It is one of the things we inhabit. … William James eighty years ago said a man’s “me” is the sum total of all that he can call his, not only his body and his mind, but his clothes and house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands and horses, his yacht and bank account. [Yes, the self men “identify” with things that are not essential - either through a mistake in judgment or an acceptance of judgment of others.] … This is important for an understanding of the bitter fighting between social classes for social status. … We see grown and healthy organisms being jerked off balance by their symbolic extensions … Becker cites examples of symbols of individual and group status
You get a good feeling for what the self looks like in its extensions if you imagine the person to be a hollow cylinder in which is lodged his self. Out of this cylinder the self overflows and extends into the surroundings as a kind of huge amoeba, pushing its pseudopods to a wife, a car, a flag, a crushed flower in a secret book. The picture you get is of a huge invisible amoeba spread out over the landscape with boundaries very far from its own center or home base. Tear and burn the flag, find and destroy the flower in the book and the amoeba screams with pain … Usually we extend these pseudopods not only to things we hold dear, but also to silly things … We call precisely those people “strong” who can withdraw a pseudopod at will from the trifling parts of their identity, or especially from important ones. … This flexibility of self is real power and the achievement of it rare maturity . In technical language, we say the person is “well centered” and has control of his ego boundaries. Centering of the ego boundaries under one’s control is one of life’s principal tasks and few achieve it. The origin of the difficulties
is in childhood when the child has no control over his self. His awarenesses are not really his own: he has identified with his parents. His own feelings of warmth about himself will exclude areas that cause anxiety to the parents. He may not have control over his own feelings in certain areas [or even awareness of this fact - either through explicit repression or, subtly, by assuming it to be the natural order of things.]
This simplified discussion of the ego and its boundaries takes us to the heart of psychoanalytic theory, to one of its truly great and lasting discoveries: the “mechanisms of defense”, which have largely to do with where and how [the child] stakes out the contents and extensions of his self. In his symbiotic relationship with his mother, the child absorbs part of her and her worldview, automatically and unthinkingly - “introjection”; or the child places his thoughts and desires out into other persons - “projection”. Each of us is in some ways a grotesque collage of injected and ejected parts over which we have no honest control. We are not aware that we carry such a burden of foreign matter in our amoebic pseudopods, nor do we know where the heart of our self really is, or clearly what images and things compose it … so we spend our lives searching in mirrors to find out who we “really are”
Finally, the Protean character of self helps us understand another great fruit of psychological and psychoanalytic investigation: the “character types” … People spread themselves differently, derive their sense of value from different activities. The narcissist, or phallic-narcissist, character, for example, has highly charged his sensuality with a sense of himself. The sadist, or anal-sadist, is sensitive to the dualism of self and body and prefers the physicalness of body to the symbolism of self. Physical expressions of the body are more important than symbolic expressions of the mind; an example, the torturer who tries to expose the self and show its impotence in the face of physical power [or, on the opposite side, the victim, or saint, who asserts the priority of the inner self even though the body dies in the process]. Here is not only a character [the sadist] who has made a peculiar kind of investment in the dualism of self and body, but also a type of animal who must establish and universalize his characterological preferences into a philosophy of existence. The drama of the sadist is particularly interesting as an attempt to assert the victory of human powers over the insides of nature. It is in these interiors that lies the secret vitality that man cannot fathom, that seems to mock all his efforts at order and control with indeterminacy and disruption. Little wonder that the scientific revolution in the West has given such an ascendancy to the sadistic character type
Becker now turns to the question: “What is the origin of the inflexibility of ego boundaries - what is at stake in the world of the self?”
Note to Chapter Four: Phantom pain
“Phantom pain”, relation to referred pain, is an intriguing aspect of the dualism of body / self … It helps us understand something about the historical dualism of soul and body, and also of the deep rooting of one in the other. What is the mechanism of pain and the way it is assigned a location; or of the assignment of any perception? Phantom pain is the pain an individual feels in a part of a body after it has been amputated … There must have been amputations and phantom pain far back into prehistory, and so the traditional beliefs of an invisible but sentient soul could have some empirical basis. In other words, the idea of the soul is the peculiar gift of a self-reflexive animal to the data of existence
“It is not our parents loins, so much as their lives that enthralls and blinds us,” : Thomas Traherne, c. 1672
Theme: origin of human anxiety in the socialization process in which the self appears “in” the body
One of the two
most important facts about children everywhere - their need for closeness, fondling and warm praise! [Due to the basic need for interpersonal sensitivity and due to natural needs expressed, indirectly, through “Mom”.] The child’s ego or sense of self at this time of merger and identification with his mother must be one of pure pleasure - the psychoanalysis have aptly named it the “purified pleasure ego” … Socialization refers to the training of the child and to the process of disentanglement from Mother in order to function as a member of a social group. The child comes to realize that he has to abandon the idea of “total uninterrupted excitement” in the physical and then social worlds, if he wants to keep a secure background of love from his mother. This is what Alfred Adler meant when he spoke of the child’s need for affection as the “lever” of his education. The ambivalence of the process is the conflict between:
Anxiety at Lost Control
Need for Need for Development of
Sensitivity Conflict
Loves Contact
Socialization
The Fundamental Role of Anxiety in Child Development. [ [-leads to-] Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis]: Anxiety pervades the organism when it feels completely powerless to overcome a danger. Except in small doses it is overwhelming. Kurt Goldstein has observed: the ability to withstand anxiety is heroic . Probably it is the only genuine heroism given to man. [Heroism is the ability.] The origin and exact nature of anxiety is still unclear [Becker]; Kierkegaard - a basic response to man’s condition - his finitude; Darwin - grew up in evolution, a stimulus to growth of intellect, had survival value; modern - anxiety is a part of the alertness that characterizes all life and derives from protoplasmic irritability; Freud - all the higher organisms have anxiety - a universal reaction of the organism to danger
For the child, because of his utter helplessness, anxiety comes to be naturally associated with the threat of abandonment - The infant has no way of knowing he will not be abandoned to his helpless pain except by continual contact and relief of that pain
Freud’s contribution to the theory of ego development: the psychoanalytic theory of neurosis - how the child comes to control anxiety. We saw [Chapter 3] ego as central control of reactivity. Ego delays response to permit richer reaction; therefore, if ego must overcome the most overwhelming stimulus of all: anxiety of abandonment! How? By becoming, said Freud, the site of anxiety, by producing it at will and proclaiming its supreme independence of the environment in this vital area of adaptation … Freud understood this process of ego taking over anxiety as a sort of “vaccination” of the total organism. And a good many of the child’s first anxieties are those of his trainers … and so the child obtains his own control by a fundamental adaptation to his social world … Freud’s theory of the ego and Mead’s theory of the self merge to give us a thorough understanding of the external source of the child’s inner world
The Great Debate Over Freud’s View of Anxiety: The merger of the psychoanalytic and sociological theories of humanization was not smooth … because … Freud was never very clear about the nature of anxiety for the child. In Freud’s early writing, there were two major sources of anxiety for the child: the trauma of birth; that is, the child’s discovery of its own helplessness, and the fear of castration awakened by the child’s own sexual urges. Evolution had decided the child’s fate by building into him strong instincts of destructive aggression. His [the child’s] major anxiety, over the loss of the protective and loving mother, is a problem stemming from his relentless search for pleasure. Freud could not get away from his instinct theory and so could never get away from the idea that anxiety was due to social frustration
Because Freud was a phylogenetic thinker, his thought lingered on events that happened way back in evolution. Freud postulated a hypothetical event in the dim recesses of prehistory - the famous “primal-horde” theory about the crisis in the humanoid horde, when the young males, tired of being deprived of females by the dominant male, turn on him and kill him, and take possession of the females - their own mothers. Freud sometimes wrote as though the primal-horde theory was an actual prehistorical event and the memory of it was passed down in evolution, in our genes as a racial inheritance of indelible feelings. This complex of feelings and the related suppression and guilt - suppression of the patricidal urge and guilt over both the patricidal urge and the incest instinct - these Freud called the “Oedipus complex” … But the child must abandon this attitude and learn to satisfy himself by controlling himself with social symbols and a new kind of mastery, instead of biologically. In Freud’s view, this is how the Oedipus complex is resolved and how the “superego” or sense of conscience is implanted: the parent’s values become the touchstone for the child’s conduct. As Alfred Adler put it, the early training process awakens a person who has social [symbolic] interests rather than personal [body] interests
Freud’s Error. The errors in Freud’s theory of anxiety can be pinpointed. Decades of observation and research have led to a general agreement that the infant is not driven by instincts of sexuality and destructive aggression: the man-apes took a step away from baboons by making new social inventions over sexuality and aggressive competition
The major revision of Freudian thinking, then, is a complete carrying out of what Freud failed to accomplish fully: abandonment of phylogenetic thinking in favor of general developmental and interpersonal thinking
This transition can be seen as a shift from genetic determinism to genetic determination of potential, in the sphere of personality. Anxiety is based on the child’s helplessness, but this is not a helplessness in the face of the instincts of his own id, but in the child’s life situation and in his social world. All this is actually in Freud’s work, but he never made the development complete and clear cut … One reason that the world of Alfred Adler is still contemporary is that he saw what was really at stake in the early training period more clearly than did Freud. Adler insisted that the Oedipus complex as such was rare. The child does not bring to the relationship with his mother any dark desires that have to find their outlet at body orifices. Rather, he brings a generalized need for physical closeness and support. If the family dramatizes this closeness and support while lingering on any one orifice, then we can say that this child is perverted by the adult; or better, in the context of a certain kind of relationship. … Freud’s term “polymorphous perverse” should be changed to “polymorphous pervertible” …
Yet infantile sexuality is observed, but what is it if it is not an autochthonous drive? We see that after a few years children do masturbate pleasurefully and enjoy rubbing against the bodies of their parents. But it is now understood that the issue is not what “adults” would be experiencing, but rather the child’s experience of the stimulating contact … The appendages of the body are secondary compared to the emotions of the inner self … urges for all kinds of experience and maintenance of boundless parental love … Sexual functioning is subservient to ego functioning, to problems of identity and freedom. Paradoxically, sex does not dominate the child as sex, even if it shows itself as sex, as Rank reasoned in his Modern Education . The main anxieties of the child are frankly existential from the beginning. … We know now that a child becomes passive and oral, not because of a rigorous weaning from the breast, but because of a whole atmosphere that undermines his initiative and self-confidence. A child becomes tense, mechanical and “anal”, not because of strictly scheduled toilet-training or meticulous bodily cleanliness and orderliness, but because of a lack of joy and spontaneity in the child’s environment, anxieties about life which are communicated to him, and which cause him to shut up within himself and to try extra hard for basic security. [This simple account does not do justice to the rich variations in each case and to the child’s own natural ambivalence about his body, but it gives a feeling for adult as “perverter”.] The adaptation a child makes to his early training is a kind of “standardized confusion” about what the world wants from him and what is possible for him in it
At the center of the confusion is the fact that the child has only his body. He is not yet a fully symbolic animal. He has no coin other than his body to establish himself as a loved object. He doesn’t understand big words, long sentences, monologues on the nature of reality. … Does the mother value his body - him - or not? Only if we understand how basic and natural this question is, can we also see why harsh and loveless training regimens are the most harmful to the child. They deprive him of his first and only secure footing and make his feel secondary to symbols. He develops a symbolic style of achieving his sense of self without having had a secure physical sense of himself. This is why psychoanalysts have been concerned about facts that seem trivial: time of weaning, sphincter training, severity of the training, etc. … These questions should not be understood as narrow questions of body zones or routine matters of child discipline that are completely forgotten in a few years or are irrelevant to the hard facts of adult life … The atmosphere of love and support that surround all the child’s body transactions with his mother is what sustains his sense of self-worth and distinguishes between those who are able to face challenges and those who shrink from them
We can understand why Freud said that the Oedipus was universal - but again, not for his phylogenetic reasons. Rather, the very fact that there has at all been frustration, confusion between the body and symbols, in a hypersensitive affection-hungry animal, leaves an undigested residue. The child is a “museum of antiquities”, of nervous conditionings and archaic messages that are unrelated to the straightforward experience of the adult world
Theme: the fundamental contribution of freud. how the conscience is implanted: the dynamics of neurosis
The flexibility of the self is an achievement of rare maturity: The ability to relinquish objects, reorganize boundaries of self and ego, extending and withdrawing at will … it seems simple. Why not just do it?
We cannot easily, and few can fully. The reason lies in the development of the ego itself. Freud saw that the ego grows by putting anxiety under its control as it finds out what anxiety is for the organism, and then chooses to avoid it by building defenses that handle it. Freud put it: The ego “vaccinates” itself with small doses of anxiety, and the “antibodies” that the organism then builds up become its defense [mechanisms] - Denial: This is not happening to me; projection: that person is thinking these vulgar thoughts; repression: that did not occur … But now the freedom from anxiety is bought at a heavy price: the restriction of experience - The ego develops by skewing perceptions and limiting action. The ego banishes from its own organization that which “threatens the safety” of the organism; rules established in interaction with parents [authority … ] … The mechanisms of defense are par excellence techniques of self deception … This is the paradox called neurosis: the child becomes human by his autonomy, by accepting social values, by developing a conscience. As Freud said: The child becomes humanized and social and says “You no longer have to punish me, Father; I will punish my self now” … “I am a social person because I am no longer mine; I am yours”. The [terrible] conclusion we draw from Freud’s work is that the humanization process itself is the neurosis: the limitation of experience, the fragmentation of perception, the dispossession of genuine internal control
Freud’s theories will continue, into the future, to hold an awesome fascination and a feeling of terror [not because of reference to childhood instincts of sexuality and destructive aggression but] because of the universality of the human slavery and blindness we call neurosis. This is Freud’s durable contribution and the real meaning of the universality of the Oedipus. Freud himself prevented us from seeing this because he was not clear about the sources of anxiety … Freud, at the very beginning of his career, set out to discover the nature of conscience, why man everywhere feels guilty, what he feels guilty about, his deep underlying motives. Kant believed conscience was a miracle implanted by God. Freud wanted to show that it was the reflex of frustrated desire. What was the truth in this? Freud was wrong about the Oedipus complex, about the motives of the human condition. Motives were not inherent as Freud thought they were - the instincts of sexuality and destructive aggression. They developed within a child in interaction with his parents and were as diverse and complex as a set of a person’s perceptions and interactions. Freud did not discover the universal conscience of man, but, instead, the universal mechanism of implantation of conscience . His theory of ego and anxiety laid bare the reason that the sense of conscience was so deeply rooted, even in the face of experience and aging. When the child says, “I’ll ‘punish’ myself now”, he is affirming that he has control over the anxiety of his whole sense of being, of life and death. One’s motives reside in one’s skewed perceptions. That they are buried deep in unconscious, does not mean that they are buried in the recesses of evolution; but instead that they are veiled by ignorance of one’s self. Freud discovered conscience as limited vision and dishonest control over one’s self
The Basic Dynamics of Neurosis
Dishonest control is a neurotic style of living. It shocks us to learn that our innermost sense of right and wrong is [nothing more than] the distillation of a simple learning process. To admit that neurosis is merely a process of interference with simple animal movement, of the blocking of the forward momentum of action … But the work of Adler and Reich and more recently the extension of the work in the Gestalt psychology of Frederick Perls, has made this abundantly clear
Socialization is characterized by one fundamental and recurring fact: the child’s natural urge to move freely forward, manipulate, experiment, and exercise his own assimilative powers is continually blocked . Some blockage is good: for safety and learning self-control and mastery, but much is because of parents’ fears, irritability, etc., in Perl’s view, after the child’s attempt to carry through satisfying action is blocked by the parent. The energy must then find outlet in the process of adapting to the parent and his commands and the child thus incorporates the image of his parent and of his parent’s values and makes them slavishly and uncritically his own - because he does not have the ability or power to criticize. … In this process of frustrated blockage and the associated ambivalence, the mechanisms of defense take root with all the dishonesty about oneself and one’s real satisfaction that they represent. The child is coerced into adopting a fictional pleasure, the symbolic one that he does not understand, instead of his own authentic pleasure. The process is insidious; traumas are not important in the causation of neurosis … The contest of power that represents the socialization of a child is not necessarily a contest of blatant power, but more generally a contest of benign and disguised power. Psychologists have put it in the simplest, most biting formula: the avoidance of external conflicts [with the parents] creates internal conflicts [the neurotic de-centering, fragmentation and cluttering up of the self with alien images]. There is another sense in which the child loses governance over himself, the polar opposite of the excessive interference: not being interfered with enough. Free movement for the [mature] individual is not crippled movement, but neither is it fluid accommodation: it is movement under the aegis of the mover. Freedom is a sense of personal potency. And so the mother who does not permit the child to cultivate this aegis by wisely teaching him the limits of his powers, the rights of others, the natural difficulty of experience, is preventing him from becoming an individual
What Freud did Not do
In order to set up the next development, Becker now turns to consider what Freud did not achieve. … If Freud did not discover the nature of conscience, but only the mechanism of its implantation, he could not be correct about why people feel guilty. Freud thought that conscience [motivation] was laid down as early as the recesses of evolution as biological memory
Today we understand that guilt is due to the human condition, to the sense of being bound, overshadowed, feeling powerless. Guilt is understood as the sense in which the body is a drag on human freedom, on limitless ambitions of movement and expansion of the inner self. This is natural guilt. Further, as existentialists have taught us, a person can feel guilt about the blockage of his own development: that he has not had the experiences or realized the urgings that seemed his natural right. … Generally, man’s social experience can lead to an immense increase in his natural guilt. If neurosis is the result of benign blockage of free movement, guilt can be as superficial as interference with action, as natural a thing as a young animal’s dumb perceptions of the totality of his power world. … The perceptive genius of Kafka could instruct Freud on the nature of guilt. If we take what is durable in the work of the two men, we can understand how simple, how inevitable, how peculiarly human and tragic, is the dispossession of man
Freud’s Contribution
Becker implies that it is too early for a complete inventory, but that the general contents can be now identified: it would have to include everything in Freud’s work which revealed the individual’s blindness and dishonest self-control: his findings on the ego, anxiety, the mechanisms of defense, the character types, the importance of dreams as the royal road to the unconscious. If we omit all the phylogenetic referents and all the misemphasis on the sexual symbolism, we are still left with a staggering corpus of insight into why people act the way they do. [William James predicted that the future of psychology was with Freud’s work. The credit to names in the Preface is surely the natural development of the mainline of this psychology. An excellent appreciation and development is in Fromm, The Heart of Man [1964.]
“The supreme law [of life] is this: the sense of worth of the self shall not be allowed to diminish,” Alfred Adler
Themes
Self esteem as the natural homeostasis of the psyche, as
man’s essential social motive and as a natural continuation of early ego
efforts to handle anxiety
Relationship of self esteem to psychoanalytic characterology and its continuation by dilthey’s
followers, the modern existentialists, and the data of anthropology. That this
gives a “fairly complete cosmography of the inner worlds of men”
This change is central to the theme / development of the
book. It culminates the development of human social motivation and personality
analysis. It leads into interaction of personality and culture [Chapter
8], personality dynamics [Chapter 9], cultural stage for personality
plays and relative nature [Chapter 10], universals [Chapter 11]
synthesis of universals in psychology, sociology and anthropology to form a
complete science of man [Chapter 12], possible directions for
development of self and society [Chapter 13]
Freud did not explain motives [conscience, guilt], but how they are implanted. This is the main reason Alfred Adler is still contemporary. Adler broke very early with Freud on this problem when he strongly proclaimed that the basic law of human life is the urge to self-esteem. … Once this break with Freud is made, a new world of understanding opens up. Man’s motive has been laid bare, which is what Freud set out to do … This is why the clinical theories of Adler as well as Sullivan, Rank, Fromm, Horney and a growing number of young and undogmatic Freudians give us such rich and true explanations of what really makes people act the way they do - what they are really upset about
Self-esteem maintenance begins for the child with the first infusion of mother’s milk and is a natural and systemic continuation of the early ego efforts to handle anxiety. It is the durational extension of an effective anxiety buffer. The words self-esteem are at the very core of human adaptation. The qualitative feeling of self-value is the basic predicate for human action, precisely because it epitomizes the whole development of the human ego
Socialization: the entire early training period in which the child learns to switch modes of maintaining self-esteem. He cannot earn parental approval or self-esteem by continuing to express himself with his body - It comes to be derived from symbols … The change is momentous. The child’s sense of self-value, of human worth, has been largely artificialized, largely a linguistic “contrivance”. He has become the only animal in nature who vitally depends on a symbolic constitution of his worth
The Inner Drama
“Everyone” runs an inner newsreel, even if it does not record the same symbolic events. Always it passes in review the peculiar symbols of one’s choice that gives him a warm feeling about himself. When the drama records a negative image, we immediately counter with a positive one … While we are asleep, the ego is not working and has no conscious control over the messages. Our deeper experience may have on record that we are really worthless, helpless, dependent, mediocre, inadequate, finite: this is our unconscious speaking; and when the ego cannot oppose any positive images to counteract these negative ones, we have the nightmare, the terrible revelation of our basic uselessness … This balancing of positive and negative images of self-worth begins very early … Self-esteem depends on our social role and it is always packed with faces - it is rarely in the nature of documentary
Comments: Although the self-esteem may be central [it is confused with survival] - [1] we are dependent on others for survival, [2] the boundary between survival, status, comfort, etc. is never clear, in part because of social “lies”, and [3] very often approval is [at least apparently] prerequisite to warmth
The Psychoanalytic Characterology
Pathos: In humanization we exchange a natural sense of worth for a symbolic one. Then we are constantly forced to harangue others to establish who we are. We no longer belong to ourselves: our character has become social. Alfred Adler saw with beautiful clarity that the basic process in the formation of character was the child’s need to be somebody in the symbolic world, since physically, nature had put him into an impossible position. He is faced with anxieties of his own life and experience as well as the need to accommodate the superior powers of his trainers; and from all this to salvage his sense of superiority and confidence … He can do this by choosing a symbolic action system in which to earn his basic feeling of self-worth: examples, superiority through the “Don Juan” approach through physical attractiveness; by superiority of their minds; by being generous and helpful; making superior or beautiful things, money; by being devoted slaves; by serving the corporation or the war machine and so on
The great variation in character is one of the fascinations and plagues of life: it makes our world infinitely rich and yet we rarely understand what the person next to us really wants, what kind of message he is addressing to us, what kind of confirmation we can give him of his self-worth. … The reason scenarios of self-esteem seem so opaque even in our closest relationships is embarrassingly simple: we ourselves are largely ignorant of our own life-style, our own way of seeking self-esteem, more or less unique, formed in early training, beginning in presymbolic roots. As a result we have no way of getting on top of this process of conditioning, no way to grasp it, because as children we did not “know” what was happening to us. The psychoanalytic characterology is the study of efforts that the child makes to salvage an intact self-esteem from this confusion. … If this were merely a matter of finding out what symbol-system one had unwittingly adopted in order to get on top of all the burdens of his early situation, we could all fairly early get self-knowledge. But the sense of right and wrong, our way of perceiving the world, our feelings for it and who we are not merely a mental matter - they are largely a total organismic matter, as Dewey saw long ago, and Frederick Perls has recently reminded us. We earn our early self-esteem not actively but in large part passively, by having our action blocked and reoriented to our parents’ pleasure. This triggers introjection of parents’ images without digesting them - part of our “honest” control … So the self is largely a confusion of insides, outsides, boundaries, alien objects and it is de-centered and split off from the body in some measure. This is what makes the study of character difficult and fascinating. Even the person himself cannot know completely what his experience and feelings mean because it is largely presymbolic and unconscious
What makes the psychoanalytic corpus so compelling from the scientific point of view is that it has mastered the general problem of character by finding the current types, outline groups, into which everyone more-or-less fits: aggressive, passive, sadistic, narcissistic [or oral-aggressive, oral-passive, anal-sadistic, phallic-narcissistic], and so on. We can rarely know the unique character a person has, but his mode of earning self-esteem is more or less identifiable in terms of the basic psychoanalytic characterology. If we merge it with the characterology developed by Dilthey’s followers, the modern existentialists, and the data of anthropology, we have a fairly complete cosmography