"Regression In The Service Of The Ego"

Yet another insightful passage from "The Denial Of Death". This book will occasionally dish out some awesome stuff.

If you know me at all, then you will read this and say "hm,makes sense" and not be shocked as to why I find this interesting. Now, I wouldnt say that Im the woman in the situation or the male, since I like to think I have some sort of perception into understanding both male and female psychological (re)actions and the only thing that pigeon holds any specific (re)action is whats been taught,mainly told to us by "society",but thats a WHOLE different thing all together. I guess what I could say is I understand the, moral significance,maybe? Of the whole thing. This is far deeper than anything I could ever explain, but on the surface, I agree and find it a fantastic referance for explaination. That I also may be blessed or cursed with the preferance to appreciate the mind before the body.

"But we can anticipate it by showing how sexuality is inseperable from out existential paradox, the dualism of humant nature. The Person is both a self and a body, and from the beginning there is the confusion about where "he" really "is"-in the symbolic inner self or in the physical body. Each phenomenological realm is different. The inner self represents the freedom of thought, imagination, and the infinite reach of symbolism. The body represents determinism and boundness. The child gradually learns that his freedom as a unique being is dragged back by the body and its appendages which dictate "what" he is. For this reason sexuality is as much a problem for the adult as for the child: the physical solution to the problem of who we are and why we have emerged on this planet is no help-in fact, it is a terrible threat. It doesnt tell the person what he is deep down inside, what kind of distinctive gift he is to work upon the world. This is why it is so difficult to have sex without guilt: guilt is there because the body casts a shadow on the persons inner freedom, his "real self" that- through the act of sex-is being forced into a standardized, mechanical, biological role. Even worse, the inner self is not even being called into consideration at all; the body takes over completely for the total person, and this kind of guilt makes the inner self shrink and threaten to disappear.
This is why a woman asks for assurance that the man wants "me" and not "only my body"; she is painfully conscious that her own distinctive inner personality can be dispensed with in the sexual act. If it is dispended with, it doesnt count. The fact is that the man usually does want only the body,and the womans total personality is reduced to a mere animal role. The existential paradox vanishes, and one has no distinctive humanity to protest. One creative way of coping with this is, of course, to allow it to happen and to go with it: what the psychoanalysts call "regression in the service of the ego". The person becomes, for a time, merely his physical self and so absolves the painfulness of the existential paradox and the guilt that goes with sex. Love is one great key to this kind of sexuality because it allows the collapse of the individual into the animal dimension without fear and guilt, but instead with trust and assurance that his distinctive inner freedom will not be negated by an animal surrender."

Depressive Psychosis

Something else that caught my eye as I continually read "The Denial Of Death"

"Schizophrenic Psychosis"- any of several psychotic disorders characterized by distortions of reality and disturbances of thought and language and withdrawal from social contact.

Søren Kierkegaard

If Schizophrenic Psychosis is on a continuum of a kind of normal inflation of inner fantasy, of symbolic possibilty, then something similar should be true of Depressive Psychosis. And so it is in the portrait that Kierkegaard paints. Depressive Psychosis is the extreme on the continuum of too much necessity, that is, too much finitude, too much limitation by the body and the behaviors of the person in the real world, and not enough freedom of the inner self, of inner symbolic possibility. This is how we understand Depressive Psychosis today: as a bogging down in the demands of others-family, job, the narrow horizon of daily duties. In such a bogging down the individual does not feel or see that he has alternatives, cannot imagine any choices or alternate ways of life, cannot release himself from the network of obligations even though these obligations no longer give him a sense of self-esteem, of primary value, of being a heroic contributor to world life even by doing his daily family and job duties. As I once speculated, the Schizophrenic is not enough built into his world-what Kierkegaard has called the sickness of infinitude; the depressive, on the other hand, is built into his world too solidly, too overwhelmingly. Kierkegaard put it this way:

"But while one sort of despair plunges wildly into the infinite and loses itself, a second sort of permits itself as it were to be defrauded by "the others". By seeing the multitude of men about it, by getting engaged in all sorts of worldly affairs, by becoming wise about how things go in his world, such a man forgets himself...does not dare to believe in himself, finds it too venturesome a thing to be himself, far easier and safer to be like the others, to become an imatation, a number, a cipher in the crowd"


This is a superb characterization of the "culturally normal" man, the one who dares not stand up for his own meanings because this means too much danger, too much exposure. Better not to be oneself, better live tucked into others, embedded in a safe frame-work of social and cultural obligations and duties.
     Again, too, this kind of characterization must be understood as being on a continuum, at the extreme end of which we find depressive psychosis. The despressed person is so afraid of being himself, so fearful of exerting his own individuality, of insisting on what might be his own meanings, his own conditions for living, that he seems literally stupid. He cannot seem to understand the situation he is in, cannot see beyond his own fears, cannot grasp why he has bogged down. Kierkegaard phrases it beautifully:

"if one will compare the tendancy to run wild in possibility with the efforts of a child to enunciate words, the lack of possibility is like being dumb...for without possibility a man cannot, as it were, draw breath."

This is precisely the condition of depression, that one can hardly breathe or move. One of the unconscious tactics that the depressed person resorts to, to try to make sense out of his situation, is to see himself as immensely worthless and guilty. This is a marvelous "invention" really, because it allows him to move out of his condition of dumbness, and make some kind of conceptualization of his situation, some kind of sense out of it-even if he has to take full blame as the culprit who is causing so much needless misery to others. Could Kierkegaard have been referring to just such an imaginative tactic when he casually observed:

"Somtimes the inventiveness of the human imagination suffices to procure possibility..."


In any event, the condition of despression might permit an inventiveness that creates the illusion of possibility, of meaning, of action but it does not offer any real possibility. As Kierkegaard sums it up:

"The loss of possibility signifies: either that eveything has become necessary to man or that everything has become trivial."

Actually, in the extreme of depressive psychosis we seem to see the merger of these two: everything becomes necessary AND trivial at the same time-which leads to complete despair. Necessity with the illusion of meaning would be the highest achievement for man; but when it becomes trivial there is no sense to ones life.
     Why would a person prefer the accusations of guilt, unworthiness, ineptitude-even dishonor and betrayal-to real possibility? This may not seem to be the choice, but it is: complete self-effacement, surrender to the "others", disavowal of any personal dignity or freedom-on the one hand; freedom and independance, movement away from others extrication of oneself from the binding links of family and social duties-on the other hand. This is the choice that the depressed person actually faces and that he avoids partly by his guilty self-accusation. The answer is not far to seek: the depressed person avoids the possibilty of independence and more life precisely because these are what threaten him with destruction and death. He holds on to the people who have enslaved him in a network of crushing obligations, belittling interaction, precisely because these people are his shelter, his strength, his protection against the world. Like most everyone else the depressed person is a coward who will not stand alone on his own center, who cannot draw from within himself the necessary strength to face up to life. So he embeds himself in others; he is sheltered by the necessary and willingly accepts it. But now his tragedy is plain to see: his necessity has become trivial, and so his slavish, dependent, depersonalized life has lost its meaning. It is frightening to be in such a bind. One chooses slavery because it is safe and meaningful; then one loses the meaning of it, but fears to move out of it. One has literally died to life but must remain physically in this world. And thus torture of depressive psychosis: to remain steeped in ones failure and yet justify it, to continue to draw a sense of worth-whileness out of it.


Wow, that one was a doosey.

Human Character as a Vital Lie

I dont know if you ever have looked at an animal and just kinda been like "thats an animal, it has no idea about anything, it just sits there and eats that, it just flys around or walks, eats stuff off the ground, jumps from tree to tree, sits on a wire" then ask yourself, "whats that things purpose" and bascially wonder and question its existence and wonder if it also has any idea of itself. Of course by the examples I gave im talking more of "City" animals right now, not so much the lions and zebras of Africa. However, in the end its still all the same, since those animals have their own daily routine, sit under that tree, go kill that gazelle, you get the idea? But back to the oirginal point, I always have wondered this at times. Leaning more towards "it has no idea about anything" and "wonder if it has any idea of itself" statements.

I've been reading "The Denial of Death" by a man named Ernest Becker. The book as a whole isnt exactly what I thought it was so im not completely into it. Its kinda like reading a text book. Though I have come across a few parts that have turned my head and made me go, "hmmm". What im talking about here, is one of those things. The chapter its from is "Human Character as a Vital Lie" and its obviously more about humans, but it has some stuff about the difference between animals and humans which answered my silly question completely and a WHOLE lot more.

"The great boon of repression is that it makes it possible to live decisively in an overwhelmingly miraculous and incomprehensible world, a world so full of beauty, majesty and terror that if animals perceived it all they would be paralyzed to act.

But nature has protected the lower animal by endowing them with instincts. An instinct is a programmed perception that calls into play a programmed reaction. it is very simple. Animals are not moved by what they cannot react to. They live in a tiny world, a sliver of reality, one neuro-chemical program that keeps them walking behind their nose and shuts out everything else. But look at man, the impossible creature! Here nature seems to have thrown caution to the winds along with the programmed instincts. She created an animal who has no defense against full perception of the external world, an animal completely open to experience. Not only in front of his nose, in his umwelt, but in many other umwelten. He can relate not only to animals in his own species, but in some ways to all other species. He can contemplate not only what is edible for him, but everything that grows. He not only lives in this moment, but expands his inner self to yesterday, his curiosity to centuries ago, his fears to five billion years from now when the sun will cool, his hopes to an enternity from now. He lives not only on a tiny territory, nor even on an entire planet, but in a galaxy, in a universe and in dimensions beyond visible universes. It is appalling, the burden man bears, the experiential burden.

As we saw in the last chapter, man cant even take his own body for granted as can other animals. It is not just hind feet, a tail that he drags, that are just "there", limbs to be used and taken for granted or chewed off when caught in a trap and when they give pain and prevent movement. Mans body is a problem to him that has to be explained. Not only his body is strange, but also its inner landscape, the memories and dreams. Mans very insides--his self--are foreign to him. He doesnt know who he is, why he was born, what he is doing on the planet, what he is supposed to do, what he can expect. His own existence is incomprehensible to him, a miracle just like the rest of creation, closer to him, right near his pounding heart, but for that reason all the more strange. Each thing is a problem and man can shut out nothing. As Maslow has well said, "its precisely the god like in ourselves that we are ambivalent about, fascinated by and fearful of, motivated to and defensive against. This one aspect the basic human predicament, that we are simultaneously worms and gods"

The historic value of Freuds work is that it came to grips with the peculiar animal that man was, the animal that was not programmed by instincts to close off perception and assure automatic equanimity and forceful action. Man had to invent and create out of himself the limitations of perception and the equanimity to live on this planet. And so the core of psychodynamics, the formation of the human character, is a study in human self-limitaion and in the terrifying costs of that limitation. The hostility to the psychoanalysis in the past, today, and in the future, will always be a hostility against admitting that man lives by lying to himself about himself and about his world, and that character, to follow Ferenczi and Brown, is a vital lie"