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I once wrote that I thought the reason man was so naturally cowardly was that he felt he had no authority; and the reason he had no authority was in the very nature of the way the human animal is shaped: all our meanings are built into us from the outside, from our dealings with others. This is what gives us a self and a superego. Our whole world of right and wrong, good and bad, our name, precisely who we are, is grafted into us; and we never feel we have authority to offer things on our own. How could we? - I argued - since we feel ourselves in many ways guilty and beholden to others, a lesser creation of theirs, indebted to them four our very birth.
But this is only part of the story - the most superficial and obvious part. There are deeper reasons for our lack of courage.....
We fear our highest possibility (as well as our lowest ones). We generally afraid to become that which we can glimpse in our most perfect moments... We enjoy and even thrill to the goodlike possibilities we see in ourselves in such peak moments. And yet we simultaneously shiver with weakness, awe and fear before these very some possibilities. (Abraham Maslow)
Maslow used an apt term for this evasion of growth, this fear of realizing one´s own fullest powers. He called it the Jonah Syndrome. He understood the syndrome as the evasion of the full intensity of life:
We are just not strong enough to endure more! It is just too shaking and wearing. So often people in ...ecstatic moments say, It´s too much or I can´t stand it or I could die... Delirious happiness cannot be borne for long. Our organisms are just too weak for any large doses of greatness... (Abraham Maslow).
The Jonah Sindrome, then seen from this basic point of view is partly a justified fear of being torn apart, of losing control, of being shattered and disintegrated, even of being killed by the experience. And the result of this syndrome is what we would expect a weak organism to do: to cut back the full intensity of life
For some people this evasion of one´s own growth, setting low levels of aspiration, the fear of doing what one is capable of doing, voluntary self-crippling, pseudo-stupidity, mock-humility are in fact defenses against grandiosity....(Abraham Maslow)
It all boils down to a simple lack of strenght to bear the superlative, to open oneself to the totality of experience.... developed in phenomenological terms in the classic work of Rudolf Otto. Otto talked about the terror of the world, the feeling of overwhelming awe, wonder, and fear in the face of creation - the miracle of it, the mysterium tremendum et fascinosum of each single thing, of the fact that there are things at all. What Otto did was to get descriptively at man´s natural feeling of inferiority in the face of the massive transcendence of creation; his real creature feeling before the crushing and negating miracle of Being. We now understand how a phenomenology of religious experience ties into psychology: right at the point of the problem of courage.
We might say that the child is a natural coward: he cannot have the strength to support the terror of creation. The world as it is, criation out of the void, things as they are, things as they are not, are too much for us to be able to stand. Or, better: they would be too much for us to bear without crumbling in a faint, trembling like a leaf, standing in a trance in response to the movement, colors, and odors of the world. I say would be because most of us - by the time we leave childhood - have repressed our vision of the primary miraculousness of creation. We have closed it off, changed it, and no longer perceive the world as it is to raw experience....We change these heavily emotional perceptions precisely because we need to move about in the world with some kind of equanimity, some kind of strenght and directeness; we can´t keep gaping with out heart in our mouth, greedily sucking up with our eyes everything great and powerful that strikes us. 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 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 eternity from now. He lives not only on a tiny territory, nor even on an entire planet, but in a galaxy, in a universe, and dimensions beyond visible universes. It is appaling, the burden that man bears, the experiential burden.
...........
Man´s 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. Man´s very insides - his self - are foreign to him. He doesn´t 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, It is precisely the godlike in ourselves that we are ambivalent about, fascinated by and fearful of, motivated to and defensive against. This is one aspect of the basic human predicament, that we are simultaneously worms and gods. There it is: gods with anuses.
The historic value of Freud´s work is that it came to grips the peculiar animal that man was, the animal that was not programmed by instincts to close off perception and assure automatic equanimity to live on this planet. And so the core of psychodynamics, the formation of the human character, is a study in human self-limitation and in the terrifying costs of that limitation. The hostility to 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.
......
The individual has to repress globally, from the entire spectrum of his experience, if he wants to feel a warm sense of inner value and support something that nature gives to each animal by the automatic instinctive programming and in the pulsating of the vital processes. But man, poor denuded creature, has to build and earn inner value and security. He must repress his smallness in the adult world, his failures to live up to adult commands and codes. He must repress his own feelings of physical and moral inadequacy, not only the inadequacy of his good intentions: the death wishes and hatreds that result from being frustrated and blocked by the adults. He must repress his parents inadequacy, their anxieties and terrors, because these make it difficult for him to feel secure and strong. He must repress his own anality, his compromising bodily functions that spell his mortality, his fundamental expendability in nature. And with all this, and more that we leave unsaid, he must repress the primary awesomeness of the external world.
......
Freud´s greatest discovery, the one which lies at the root of psychodynamics, is that the great cause of much psychological illness is the fear of knowledge of oneself - of one´s emotions, impulses, memories, capacities, potencialities, of one´s destiny. We have discovered that fear of knowledge of oneself is very often isomorphic with, and parallel with, fear of the outside world............
.......
In general this kind of fear is defensive, in the sense that it is a protection of our self-esteem,of our love and respect for ourselves. We tend to be afraid of any knowledge that could cause us to despise ourselves or to make us feel inferior, weak, worthless, evil, shameful. We protect ourselves and our ideal image of ourselves by repression and similar defenses, which are essentially techniques by which we avoid becoming conscious of unpleasant or dangerous truth. ( Abraham Maslow)
The individual has to repress globally, from the entire spectrum of his experience, if he wants to feel a warm sense of inner value and support something that nature gives to each animal by the automatic instinctive programming and in the pulsating of the vital processes. But man, poor denuded creature, has to build and earn inner value and security. He must repress his smallness in the adult world, his failures to live up to adult commands and codes. He must repress his own feelings of physical and moral inadequacy, not only the inadequacy of his good intentions: the death wishes and hatreds that result from being frustrated and blocked by the adults. He must repress his parents inadequacy, their anxieties and terrors, because these make it difficult for him to feel secure and strong. He must repress his own anality, his compromising bodily functions that spell his mortality, his fundamental expendability in nature. And with all this, and more that we leave unsaid, he must repress the primary awesomeness of the external world.
In his later years, Freud evidently came to realize, as Adler had earlier, that the thing that really bothers the child is the nature of his world, not so much his own inner drives. He talked less about the power of Oedipus complex and more about human perplexity and helplessness in the face of nature´s dreaded forces, the terrors of nature, the painful riddle of death, our anxiety in the face of life´s dangers and the great necessities of fate, against which there is no remedy. And when it came to the central problem of anxiety, he no longer talked - as he had in his early work -about the child´s being overwhelmed from within by his instinctual urges; instead, Freud´s formulations became existencial. Anxiety was now seen as a matter of the reaction to global helplessness, abandonement, fate:
This formulation indicates a great broadening of perspective. Add to it a generation of two of psychoanalytic clinical work, and we have achieved a remarkably faithful undestanding of what really bothers the child, how life is really too much thought, too much perception, too much life. And at the same time, how he has to avoid the death that rumbles behind and underneath every carefree activity, that looks over his shoulder as he plays. The resul is that we now know that the human animal is characterized by two great fears that other animals are protected from: the fear of life and the fear of death. ....Heidegger brought these fears to the center of existential philosophy. He argued that the basic anxiety of man is anxiety about being-in-the-world, as well as anxiety of being-in-the-world. That is, both fear of death and fear of life, of experience and individuation. Man is reluctant to move out into the overwhelmingness of his world, the real dangers of it; he shrinks back from loosing himself in the all-consuming appetites of others, from spinning out of control in the clutchings and clawings of men, beasts and machines. As an animal organism man senses the kind of planet he has been put down on, the nightmarish, demonic frenzy in which nature has unleashed billions of individual organismic appetites of all kinds - not to mention earthquakes, meteors, and hurricanes, which seem to have their own hellish appetites. Each thing, in order to deliciously expand, is forever gobbling up others. Appetites may be innocent because they are naturally given, but any organism caught in the myriad cross-purposes of this planet is a potential victim of this very innocence - and it shrinks away form life lest it lose its own. Life can suck one up, sap his energies, submerge him, take away his self-control, give so much new wxperience so quickly that he will burst; make him stick out among the others, emerge onto dangerous ground, load him um with new responsibilities which need great strenght to bear, expose him to new contingencies, new chances. Above all there is the danger of a slip-up, an accident, a chance disease, and of course of death, the final sucking up, the total submergence and negation.
The great scientific simplification of psychoanalysis is the concept that the whole of early experience is an attempt by the child to deny the anxiety of his emergence, his fear of losing his support, of standing alone, helpless and afraid. The child´s character , his style of life, is his way to using the power of others, the support of the things and the ideas of his culture, to banish form his awareness the actual fact of his natural impotence. Not only his impotence to avoid death, but his impotence to stand alone, firmly rooted on his own powers....His world is a transcendent mystery;even the parents to whom he relates in a natural and secure dependency are primary miracles. How else could they appear? The mother is the first awesome miracle that haunts the child his whole life, whether he lives within her powerful aura or rebels against it. The superordinacy of his world intrudes upon him in the form of fantastic faces smiling up close through gaping teeth, rolling eery eyes, piercing him from afar with burning and threatening glances... The only way he could securely oppose them would be to know that he is as godlike as they but he can never know this straightforwardly and unambiguously. There is no secure answer to the awesome mystery of the human face that scrutinizes itself in the mirror; no answer, at any rate, that can come from the person himself, from his own center...
In these days, then, we understand that if the child were to give in to the overpowering character of reality and experience he would not be able to act with the kind of equanimity we need in our non-instinctive world. So one of the first thing a child has to do is to learn to abandon ecstasy, to do without awe, to leave fear and and trembling behind. Only then can he act with a certain oblivious self-confidence, when he has naturalized his world. We say naturalized but we mean unnaturalized, falsified, with the truth obscured, the despair of the human condition hidden, a despair that the child glimpses in his night terrors and daytime phobias and neuroses. This despair he avoids by building defenses; and these defenses allow him to feel a basic sense of self-worth, of meaningfulness, of power. They allow him to feel that he controls his life and his death, that he really does live and act as a willful and free individual, that he has a unique and self-fashioned identity, tha he is somebody... We called one´s life style a vital lie, and now we can understand better why we said it was vital: it is necessary and basic dishonesty about oneself and one´s whole situation. This revelation is what the Freudian revolution in thought really ends up in and is the basic reason hat we still strain against Freud. We don´t want to admit that we are fundamentally dishonest about reality, that we do not really control our own lives. We don´t want to admit that we do not stand alone, that we always rely on something that transcends us, some system of ideas and powers in which we are embedded and which support us. This power is not always obvious. It needs not be overtly a god or openly a strong person, but it can be the power of an all-absorbing activity, a passion, a dedication to a game, a way of life, that like a comfortable web keeps a person buoyed up and ignorant of himself, of the fact that he does not rest on his own center. All of us are driven to be supported in a self-forgetful way, ignorant of what energies we really draw on, of the kind of lie we have fashioned in order to live securely and serenely. Augustine was a master analyst of this, as were Kierkegaard, Scheler, and Tilich in our day. They saw that man could strut and boast all he wanted, but that he really drew his courage to be from a god, a string of sexual conquests, a Big Brother, a flag, the proletariat, and the fetish of money and the size of a bank balance.
The defenses that form a person´s character support a grand illusion, and when we grasp this we can understand the full drivenness of man. He is driven away from himself, from self-knowledge, self-reflexion. He is driven toward things that support the lie of his character, his automatic equanimity. But he is also drawn precisely toward those things that make him anxious, as a way to skirting them masterfully, testing himself against them, controlling them by defying them. As Kierkegaard taught us, anxiety lures us on, becomes the spur to much of our energetic activity: we flirt with our own growth, but also dishonestly. This explains much of the friction in our lives. We enter symbiotic relationships in order to get the security we need, in order to get relief from our anxieties, our aloneness and helplessness; but these relationships also bind us, they enslave us even further because they support the lie we have fashioned. So we strain against in order to be more free. The irony is that we do this straining uncritically, in a struggle within our own armor, as it were; and so we increase our drivenness, the second-hand quality or our struggle for freedom. Even in our flirtations with anxiety we are unconscious of our motives. We seek stress, we push our own limits, but we do it with our screen against despair and not with despair itself. We do it with the stock market, with sports cars, with atomic missiles, with the success ladder in the corporation or the competition in the university. We do it in the prison of a dialogue with our own liggle family, by marrying against their wishes or choosing a way of life because they frown on it, and so on. Hence the complicated and second-had quality of our entire drivenness. Even in our passions we are nursery children playing with toys that represent the real world. Even when these toys crash and cost us our lives or our sanity, we are cheated of the consolation that we were in the real worldo instead of the playpen or our fantasies. We still did not meet our doom on our own manly terms, in contest with objective reality. It is fateful and ironic how the lie we need in order to live dooms us to a life that is never really ours.
It was not until the working out of modern psychoanalysis that we could understand somithing the poets and religious geniuses have long known: that the armor of character was so vital to us that to shed it meant to risk death and madness. It is not hard to reason out: If character is a neurotic defense aginst despair and you shed that defense, you admit the full flood of despair, the full realization of the true human condition, what men are really afraid of what they struggle against, and are driven towar and away from. Freud summed it up beautifully when he somewhere remarked that psychoanalysis cured the neurotic misery in order to introduce the patient to the commom misery of life. Neurosis is another word for describing a complicated technique for avoiding misery, bur reality is the misery. That is why from the earliest times sages have insisted that to see reality one must die and be reborn. The idea of death and rebirth was present in shamanistic times, in Zen thought, in Stoic thought, in Shakespeare´s King Lear, as well as stake in Judeo-Christian and modern existential thought. But it was not until scientific psychology that we could undestand what was at stake in the death and rebirth; that man´s character was a neurotic structure that went right to the heart of his humanness. As Frederick Perls put it, To suffer one´s death and to be reborn is not easy. And it is not easy precisely because so much of one has to die.
I like the way Perls conceived the neurotic structure as a thick edifice built up of four layers. The first two layers are the everyday layers, the tactics that the child lerns to get along in society by the facile use of words to win ready approval and to placate others and move them along with him; these are the glib, empty talk, cliché, and role-playing layers. Many people live out ltheir lives never getting underneath them. The third layer is a stiff one to penetrate: it is the impasse that covers our feeling of being empty and lost, the vety feeling that we try to banish in building up our character defenses. Underneath this layer is the fourth and most bafflint one: the death or fear-of-death layer; and this, as we have seen, is tghe layer of our true and basic animal anxieties, the terror that we carry around in our secret heart. Only when we explode this fourth layer, says Pearls, do we get to the layer of what we might call our authentic self: what we really are without sham, without disguise, without defenses against fear.
From this sketch of the complex rings of defense that compose out character, our neurotic shield that protects our pulsating vitality from the dread of truth, we can get some idea of the difficult and excruciatingly painful, all-or-nothing process that psychological rebirth is. And when it is through psychologically, it only begins humanly: the worst is not the death, but the rebirth itself - there´s the rub. What does it mean to be born again for man? It means for the first time to be subjected to the terrifying paradox of the human condition, since one must be born not as a god but as a man, or as a god-worm, or a god who shits. Only this time without the neurotic shield tha hides the full ambiguity of one´s life. And so we know that every authentic rebirth is a real ejection from paradise as the lives of Tolstoy, Péguy, and others attest. It makes men of granite, men who were automatically powerful, secure in their drivenness we maigh say and it makes them tremble, makes them cry....
It was Rank who very early admitted that anxiety could not all be overcome therapeutically, and this is what he meant: that it is impossible to stand up to the terror of one´s condition without anxiety. It was Andras Angyal who got to the heart af the matter of psychotherapeutic rebirth when he said that the neurotic who has had therapy is like a member of Alcoholics Anonymous: he can never take his cure for granted, and the best sign of the genuineness of that cure is that he lives with humility.
Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (Chapter 4, Human Character as a Vital lie)
I therefore maintain that the fear of death is to be regarded as an analogue of the fear of castration and that the situation to which the ego reacts os tje state of being forsaken or deserted by the protecting superego - by the powers of destiny - which puts an end to security against every danger.
This formulation indicates a great broadening of perspective. Add to it a generation of two of psychoanalytic clinical work, and we have achieved a remarkably faithful undestanding of what really bothers the child, how life is really too much thought, too much perception, too much life. And at the same time, how he has to avoid the death that rumbles behind and underneath every carefree activity, that looks over his shoulder as he plays. The resul is that we now know that the human animal is characterized by two great fears that other animals are protected from: the fear of life and the fear of death. ....Heidegger brought these fears to the center of existential philosophy. He argued that the basic anxiety of man is anxiety about being-in-the-world, as well as anxiety of being-in-the-world. That is, both fear of death and fear of life, of experience and individuation. Man is reluctant to move out into the overwhelmingness of his world, the real dangers of it; he shrinks back from loosing himself in the all-consuming appetites of others, from spinning out of control in the clutchings and clawings of men, beasts and machines. As an animal organism man senses the kind of planet he has been put down on, the nightmarish, demonic frenzy in which nature has unleashed billions of individual organismic appetites of all kinds - not to mention earthquakes, meteors, and hurricanes, which seem to have their own hellish appetites. Each thing, in order to deliciously expand, is forever gobbling up others. Appetites may be innocent because they are naturally given, but any organism caught in the myriad cross-purposes of this planet is a potential victim of this very innocence - and it shrinks away form life lest it lose its own. Life can suck one up, sap his energies, submerge him, take away his self-control, give so much new wxperience so quickly that he will burst; make him stick out among the others, emerge onto dangerous ground, load him um with new responsibilities which need great strenght to bear, expose him to new contingencies, new chances. Above all there is the danger of a slip-up, an accident, a chance disease, and of course of death, the final sucking up, the total submergence and negation.
The great scientific simplification of psychoanalysis is the concept that the whole of early experience is an attempt by the child to deny the anxiety of his emergence, his fear of losing his support, of standing alone, helpless and afraid. The child´s character , his style of life, is his way to using the power of others, the support of the things and the ideas of his culture, to banish form his awareness the actual fact of his natural impotence. Not only his impotence to avoid death, but his impotence to stand alone, firmly rooted on his own powers....His world is a transcendent mystery;even the parents to whom he relates in a natural and secure dependency are primary miracles. How else could they appear? The mother is the first awesome miracle that haunts the child his whole life, whether he lives within her powerful aura or rebels against it. The superordinacy of his world intrudes upon him in the form of fantastic faces smiling up close through gaping teeth, rolling eery eyes, piercing him from afar with burning and threatening glances... The only way he could securely oppose them would be to know that he is as godlike as they but he can never know this straightforwardly and unambiguously. There is no secure answer to the awesome mystery of the human face that scrutinizes itself in the mirror; no answer, at any rate, that can come from the person himself, from his own center...
In these days, then, we understand that if the child were to give in to the overpowering character of reality and experience he would not be able to act with the kind of equanimity we need in our non-instinctive world. So one of the first thing a child has to do is to learn to abandon ecstasy, to do without awe, to leave fear and and trembling behind. Only then can he act with a certain oblivious self-confidence, when he has naturalized his world. We say naturalized but we mean unnaturalized, falsified, with the truth obscured, the despair of the human condition hidden, a despair that the child glimpses in his night terrors and daytime phobias and neuroses. This despair he avoids by building defenses; and these defenses allow him to feel a basic sense of self-worth, of meaningfulness, of power. They allow him to feel that he controls his life and his death, that he really does live and act as a willful and free individual, that he has a unique and self-fashioned identity, tha he is somebody... We called one´s life style a vital lie, and now we can understand better why we said it was vital: it is necessary and basic dishonesty about oneself and one´s whole situation. This revelation is what the Freudian revolution in thought really ends up in and is the basic reason hat we still strain against Freud. We don´t want to admit that we are fundamentally dishonest about reality, that we do not really control our own lives. We don´t want to admit that we do not stand alone, that we always rely on something that transcends us, some system of ideas and powers in which we are embedded and which support us. This power is not always obvious. It needs not be overtly a god or openly a strong person, but it can be the power of an all-absorbing activity, a passion, a dedication to a game, a way of life, that like a comfortable web keeps a person buoyed up and ignorant of himself, of the fact that he does not rest on his own center. All of us are driven to be supported in a self-forgetful way, ignorant of what energies we really draw on, of the kind of lie we have fashioned in order to live securely and serenely. Augustine was a master analyst of this, as were Kierkegaard, Scheler, and Tilich in our day. They saw that man could strut and boast all he wanted, but that he really drew his courage to be from a god, a string of sexual conquests, a Big Brother, a flag, the proletariat, and the fetish of money and the size of a bank balance.
The defenses that form a person´s character support a grand illusion, and when we grasp this we can understand the full drivenness of man. He is driven away from himself, from self-knowledge, self-reflexion. He is driven toward things that support the lie of his character, his automatic equanimity. But he is also drawn precisely toward those things that make him anxious, as a way to skirting them masterfully, testing himself against them, controlling them by defying them. As Kierkegaard taught us, anxiety lures us on, becomes the spur to much of our energetic activity: we flirt with our own growth, but also dishonestly. This explains much of the friction in our lives. We enter symbiotic relationships in order to get the security we need, in order to get relief from our anxieties, our aloneness and helplessness; but these relationships also bind us, they enslave us even further because they support the lie we have fashioned. So we strain against in order to be more free. The irony is that we do this straining uncritically, in a struggle within our own armor, as it were; and so we increase our drivenness, the second-hand quality or our struggle for freedom. Even in our flirtations with anxiety we are unconscious of our motives. We seek stress, we push our own limits, but we do it with our screen against despair and not with despair itself. We do it with the stock market, with sports cars, with atomic missiles, with the success ladder in the corporation or the competition in the university. We do it in the prison of a dialogue with our own liggle family, by marrying against their wishes or choosing a way of life because they frown on it, and so on. Hence the complicated and second-had quality of our entire drivenness. Even in our passions we are nursery children playing with toys that represent the real world. Even when these toys crash and cost us our lives or our sanity, we are cheated of the consolation that we were in the real worldo instead of the playpen or our fantasies. We still did not meet our doom on our own manly terms, in contest with objective reality. It is fateful and ironic how the lie we need in order to live dooms us to a life that is never really ours.
It was not until the working out of modern psychoanalysis that we could understand somithing the poets and religious geniuses have long known: that the armor of character was so vital to us that to shed it meant to risk death and madness. It is not hard to reason out: If character is a neurotic defense aginst despair and you shed that defense, you admit the full flood of despair, the full realization of the true human condition, what men are really afraid of what they struggle against, and are driven towar and away from. Freud summed it up beautifully when he somewhere remarked that psychoanalysis cured the neurotic misery in order to introduce the patient to the commom misery of life. Neurosis is another word for describing a complicated technique for avoiding misery, bur reality is the misery. That is why from the earliest times sages have insisted that to see reality one must die and be reborn. The idea of death and rebirth was present in shamanistic times, in Zen thought, in Stoic thought, in Shakespeare´s King Lear, as well as stake in Judeo-Christian and modern existential thought. But it was not until scientific psychology that we could undestand what was at stake in the death and rebirth; that man´s character was a neurotic structure that went right to the heart of his humanness. As Frederick Perls put it, To suffer one´s death and to be reborn is not easy. And it is not easy precisely because so much of one has to die.
I like the way Perls conceived the neurotic structure as a thick edifice built up of four layers. The first two layers are the everyday layers, the tactics that the child lerns to get along in society by the facile use of words to win ready approval and to placate others and move them along with him; these are the glib, empty talk, cliché, and role-playing layers. Many people live out ltheir lives never getting underneath them. The third layer is a stiff one to penetrate: it is the impasse that covers our feeling of being empty and lost, the vety feeling that we try to banish in building up our character defenses. Underneath this layer is the fourth and most bafflint one: the death or fear-of-death layer; and this, as we have seen, is tghe layer of our true and basic animal anxieties, the terror that we carry around in our secret heart. Only when we explode this fourth layer, says Pearls, do we get to the layer of what we might call our authentic self: what we really are without sham, without disguise, without defenses against fear.
From this sketch of the complex rings of defense that compose out character, our neurotic shield that protects our pulsating vitality from the dread of truth, we can get some idea of the difficult and excruciatingly painful, all-or-nothing process that psychological rebirth is. And when it is through psychologically, it only begins humanly: the worst is not the death, but the rebirth itself - there´s the rub. What does it mean to be born again for man? It means for the first time to be subjected to the terrifying paradox of the human condition, since one must be born not as a god but as a man, or as a god-worm, or a god who shits. Only this time without the neurotic shield tha hides the full ambiguity of one´s life. And so we know that every authentic rebirth is a real ejection from paradise as the lives of Tolstoy, Péguy, and others attest. It makes men of granite, men who were automatically powerful, secure in their drivenness we maigh say and it makes them tremble, makes them cry....
It was Rank who very early admitted that anxiety could not all be overcome therapeutically, and this is what he meant: that it is impossible to stand up to the terror of one´s condition without anxiety. It was Andras Angyal who got to the heart af the matter of psychotherapeutic rebirth when he said that the neurotic who has had therapy is like a member of Alcoholics Anonymous: he can never take his cure for granted, and the best sign of the genuineness of that cure is that he lives with humility.
Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (Chapter 4, Human Character as a Vital lie)
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