Some notes on Denial of Death by Ernest Becker
First, I got majorly sidetracked by the Ernest Becker website, then the Otto Rank website and finally the full text of The Death and Rebirth of Psychology by Ira Progoff. I wasn't sure where to begin. But Becker was greatly influenced by Rank and it seemed like a bit of knowledge about him would be helpful.
"Only an experience of the meaningful life can make man whole" (Progoff, p. 16). What is whole? Can we attribute (almost) all behavior to either unconscious or conscious aspiring towards meaning or despairing at its lack?
If psychology could have this as its goal, the DSM would lose all meaning. These labels would not matter, what would matter is how to work with a given human being to experience his/her own meaningful life. Wouldn't therapy be dramatically different if this were the case? But this would also require that society change its focus, which seems to be that we make man productive and then "happy".
I don't find conceptions of human behavior very illuminating. They are often interesting but they do not seem to reflect real human being but rather to map it and then to result in treating the map as if it is the human being.
Is the urge to immortality that Rank suggests the same urge that underlies at least some of the desire to have children?
Rank argues that for primitive man, sex was merely play--just like De Waal does for Bonobos in The Bonobo book. Does Rank have any evidence that it was play? If that is the case, at what point did man start to structure sex as something almost sacred? Once sex was connected to children and children to blood tie relationships, sex became something that needed to be controlled.
Rank suggests that the particular type of striving for immortality present in all humans results from a specific social/cultural moment (p. 232). (some of these strivings like religion, are group strivings which allows the individual to not feel so alone, alleviating his fear of being alone while also alleviating his fear of death. The artist, Rank argues, is "a living prototype of man's creative will. He experiences creatively what is dormant or suppressed in others. . ." (p. 234). The artists strives for immortality by creating his art, but the art is inevitably a reflection of a collective culture.
Can the relationship between the rational and irrational be said to be like the relationship between the subjective and the objective? Is it that, all human experience combines an irrational, subjective response to a rational, objective stimulus? That human experiences are always mediated through the subjective/irrational? We can attempt, as Fuch's suggests, to remove the subjective to see what's "there", but can we ever be successful? Is it a conclusion of some more and some less?
Quotes above are from Progoff's The Death and Rebirth of Psychology
Back to The Denial of Death
Becker argues that we wall want to be heroes because this is the way we can distinguish ourselves and earn a feeling of primary value (he defines heroes rather loosely), p. 4-5. We do not want to admit that what we are doing, we are doing just to earn our self esteem. But the "socially sanctioned" places for heroes are diminishing and we act out in unacceptable "heroic" ways to develop our self esteem.
I agree with Becker and Kierkegard that man lies to himself but I just don't buy all the pat psychological reasons (because he fears death, in this example). I do wonder if our vehement protest against lying is ultimately a way to help us to keep denying our own lies. . . what would it mean to try to live a life with fewer lies? Is it like Fuchs discussion of qbism--who we are requires us to strip away the subjective to get at the "object--our self" but such a stripping might simply be not only impossible but self-destructive. . .
I tried to stick with this book but finally gave up--just too much interpretive psychology, which I don't find convincing.
"Only an experience of the meaningful life can make man whole" (Progoff, p. 16). What is whole? Can we attribute (almost) all behavior to either unconscious or conscious aspiring towards meaning or despairing at its lack?
If psychology could have this as its goal, the DSM would lose all meaning. These labels would not matter, what would matter is how to work with a given human being to experience his/her own meaningful life. Wouldn't therapy be dramatically different if this were the case? But this would also require that society change its focus, which seems to be that we make man productive and then "happy".
I don't find conceptions of human behavior very illuminating. They are often interesting but they do not seem to reflect real human being but rather to map it and then to result in treating the map as if it is the human being.
Is the urge to immortality that Rank suggests the same urge that underlies at least some of the desire to have children?
Rank argues that for primitive man, sex was merely play--just like De Waal does for Bonobos in The Bonobo book. Does Rank have any evidence that it was play? If that is the case, at what point did man start to structure sex as something almost sacred? Once sex was connected to children and children to blood tie relationships, sex became something that needed to be controlled.
Rank suggests that the particular type of striving for immortality present in all humans results from a specific social/cultural moment (p. 232). (some of these strivings like religion, are group strivings which allows the individual to not feel so alone, alleviating his fear of being alone while also alleviating his fear of death. The artist, Rank argues, is "a living prototype of man's creative will. He experiences creatively what is dormant or suppressed in others. . ." (p. 234). The artists strives for immortality by creating his art, but the art is inevitably a reflection of a collective culture.
Can the relationship between the rational and irrational be said to be like the relationship between the subjective and the objective? Is it that, all human experience combines an irrational, subjective response to a rational, objective stimulus? That human experiences are always mediated through the subjective/irrational? We can attempt, as Fuch's suggests, to remove the subjective to see what's "there", but can we ever be successful? Is it a conclusion of some more and some less?
Quotes above are from Progoff's The Death and Rebirth of Psychology
Back to The Denial of Death
Becker argues that we wall want to be heroes because this is the way we can distinguish ourselves and earn a feeling of primary value (he defines heroes rather loosely), p. 4-5. We do not want to admit that what we are doing, we are doing just to earn our self esteem. But the "socially sanctioned" places for heroes are diminishing and we act out in unacceptable "heroic" ways to develop our self esteem.
I agree with Becker and Kierkegard that man lies to himself but I just don't buy all the pat psychological reasons (because he fears death, in this example). I do wonder if our vehement protest against lying is ultimately a way to help us to keep denying our own lies. . . what would it mean to try to live a life with fewer lies? Is it like Fuchs discussion of qbism--who we are requires us to strip away the subjective to get at the "object--our self" but such a stripping might simply be not only impossible but self-destructive. . .
I tried to stick with this book but finally gave up--just too much interpretive psychology, which I don't find convincing.
Comments
Post a Comment