{"id":163701,"date":"2025-09-15T18:25:33","date_gmt":"2025-09-16T02:25:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=163701"},"modified":"2025-09-15T19:15:04","modified_gmt":"2025-09-16T03:15:04","slug":"the-denial-of-death","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=163701","title":{"rendered":"The Denial of Death"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ernest Becker writes in his 1973 classic<\/a>:<\/p>\n

* How can one justify his own heroism? He would have to be as God. Now we see even further how guilt is inevitable for man: even as a creator he is a creature overwhelmed by the creative process itself. If you stick out of nature so much that you yourself have to create your own heroic justification, it is too much. This is how we understand something that seems illogical: that the more you develop as a distinctive free and critical human being, the more guilt you have. Your very work accuses you; it makes you feel inferior. What right do you have to play God? Especially if your work is great, absolutely new and different. You wonder where to get authority for introducing new meanings into the world, the strength to bear it. It all boils down to this: the work of art is the artist\u2019s attempt to justify his heroism objectively, in the concrete creation. It is the testimonial to his absolute uniqueness and heroic transcendence. But the artist is still a creature and he can feel it more intensely than anyone else. In other words, he knows that the work is he, therefore \u201cbad,\u201d ephemeral, potentially meaningless\u2014unless justified from outside himself and outside itself.<\/p>\n

* if you are going to be a hero then you must give a gift. If you are the average man you give your heroic gift to the society in which you live, and you give the gift that society specifies in advance. If you are an artist you fashion a peculiarly personal gift, the justification of your own heroic identity, which means that it is always aimed at least partly over the heads of your fellow men. After all, they can\u2019t grant the immortality of your personal soul. As Rank argued in the breathtaking closing chapters of Art and Artist, there is no way for the artist to be at peace with his work or with the society that accepts it. The artist\u2019s gift is always to creation itself, to the ultimate meaning of life, to God. We should not be surprised that Rank was brought to exactly the same conclusion as Kierkegaard: that the only way out of human conflict is full renunciation, to give one\u2019s life as a gift to the highest powers. Absolution has to come from the absolute beyond. As Kierkegaard, Rank showed that this rule applied to the strongest, most heroic types\u2014not to trembling and empty weaklings. To renounce the world and oneself, to lay the meaning of it to the powers of creation, is the hardest thing for man to achieve\u2014and so it is fitting that this task should fall to the strongest personality type, the one with the largest ego. The great scientific world-shaker Newton was the same man who always carried the Bible under his arm.<\/p>\n

* No wonder Freud could say that transference was a \u201cuniversal phenomenon of the human mind\u201d that \u201cdominates the whole of each person\u2019s relation to his human environment.\u201d43 Or that Ferenczi could talk about the \u201cneurotic passion for transference,\u201d the \u201cstimulus-hungry affects of neurotics.\u201d44 We don\u2019t have to talk only about neurotics but about the hunger and passion of everyone for a localized stimulus that takes the place of the whole world. We might better say that transference proves that everyone is neurotic, as it is a universal distortion of reality by the artificial fixation of it. It follows, of course, that the less ego power one has and the more fear, the stronger the transference. This explains the peculiar intensity of schizophrenic transference: the total and desperate focalization of horror and wonder in one person, and the abject surrender to him and complete worship of him in a kind of dazed, hypnotic way. Only to hear his voice or touch a piece of his clothing or be granted the privilege of kissing and licking his feet\u2014that would be heaven itself. This is a logical fate for the utterly helpless person: the more you fear death and the emptier you are, the more you people your world with omnipotent father-figures, extra-magical helpers.45 The schizophrenic transference helps us to understand how naturally we remain glued to the object even in \u201cnormal\u201d transference: all the power to cure the diseases of life, the ills of the world, are present in the transference object. How can we not be under its spell?<\/p>\n

* Gorki\u2019s famous sentiment on Tolstoi, because it sums up so well this aspect of transference: \u201cI am not bereft on this earth, so long as this old man is living on it.\u201d This comes from the depth of Gorki\u2019s emotion; it is not a simple wish or a comforting thought: it is more like a driving belief that the mystery and solidity of the transference object will give one shelter as long as he lives.This use of the transference object explains the urge to deification of the other, the constant placing of certain select persons on pedestals, the reading into them of extra powers: the more they have, the more rubs off on us. We participate in their immortality, and so we create immortals.47 As Harrington put it graphically: \u201cI am making a deeper impression on the cosmos because I know this famous person. When the ark sails I will be on it.\u201d48 Man is always hungry, as Rank so well put it, for material for his own immortalization. Groups need it too, which explains the constant hunger for heroes: Every group, however small or great, has, as such, an \u201cindividual\u201d impulse for eternalization, which manifests itself in the creation of and care for national, religious, and artistic heroes\u2026 the individual paves the way for this collective eternity impulse\u2026.49
\nThis aspect of group psychology explains something that otherwise staggers our imagination: have we been astonished by fantastic displays of grief on the part of whole peoples when one of their leaders dies? The uncontrolled emotional outpouring, the dazed masses standing huddled in the city squares sometimes for days on end, grown people groveling hysterically and tearing at themselves, being trampled in the surge toward the coffin or funeral pyre\u2014how to make sense out of such a massive, neurotic \u201cvaudeville of despair\u201d?50 In one way only: it shows a profound state of shock at losing one\u2019s bulwark against death. The people apprehend, at some dumb level of their personality: \u201cOur locus of power to control life and death can himself die; therefore our own immortality is in doubt.\u201d All the tears and all the tearing is after all for oneself, not for the passing of a great soul but for one\u2019s own imminent passing. Immediately men begin to rename city streets, squares, airports with the name of the dead man: it is as though to declare that he will be immortalized physically in the society, in spite of his own physical death. Compare the recent mournings of the Americans for the Kennedys, the French for De Gaulle, and especially the Egyptians for Nasser, which was a more primitive and elemental outpouring: immediately the cry was raised to renew the war with Israel. As we have learned, only scapegoats can relieve one of his own stark death fear: \u201cI am threatened with death\u2014let us kill plentifully.\u201d On the demise of an immortality-figure the urge to scapegoating must be especially intense. So, too, is the susceptibility to sheer panic, as Freud showed.51 When the leader dies the device that one has used to deny the terror of the world instantly breaks down; what is more natural, then, than to experience the very panic that has always threatened in the background?
\nThe void of immortality-substance that would be left by the absolute abandonment of the leader is evidently too painful to support, especially if the leader has possessed striking mana or has summed up in himself some great heroic project that carried the people on. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ernest Becker writes in his 1973 classic: * How can one justify his own heroism? He would have to be as God. Now we see even further how guilt is inevitable for man: even as a creator he is a … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17382],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-163701","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-psychology"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t