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By Daniel Liechty, Ph.D.
THE BIOLOGICAL BACKGROUND
What makes people act the way they do? Ernest Becker approached this question as a trained anthropologist. He utilized the tools of social science, of psychology and sociology, informed by cross-cultural studies, and thoroughly grounded in evolutionary biology. Human beings are animals and share with all animal species in the movement of species evolution. Much psychological and popular literature assumes that human behavior can best be explained by studying animal behavior. Terms such as nesting instinct, herd behavior, territoriality and natural aggression have become established parts of our everyday vocabulary.
Becker recognized that human behavior is deeply rooted in its evolutionary background. However, he rejected the determinism of biology as destiny (Becker 1962a). All animals are creatures of action, and for nonhuman animals, their actions are firmly set by nature. Human beings, in contrast, are almost devoid of determining biological instincts. We must learn how to act in our social environment. In Becker’s presentation of human ego development, biological facts determine the parameters, to be sure. But biology is quickly superseded by the socio-cultural environment in shaping the human ego and behavior.
Yet biology does have a very important influence on culture as well. Especially important for understanding early human ego development is the long gestation period that human beings share with all of the higher primates (Becker 1962b). In human beings this is most pronounced. After nine long months in the womb, a human baby is born. Yet this baby is totally helpless, incapable of satisfying even its most basic survival needs. Other mammals birth young who are also helpless. But within a few minutes, hours, days or at most weeks, these young are mobile in seeking food sources and beginning to fend for themselves. Human offspring, in contrast, spend months and even years in a more or less completely passive state in terms of survival needs. They are totally dependent on having these needs met for them by others. Anyone who has had to deal with a screaming baby may want to dispute just how passive the child is in getting its needs met! Yet the fact remains that, while able to signal its need for care, the human infant is unable to meet those needs alone for many months and years.
From an interspecies perspective, we could say that in relation to its ability to survive, the human infant is born many years prematurely. In Becker’s view, this long period of dependence is of central importance for beginning to comprehend what makes human behavior different from that of other animal species (Becker 1962b). In other animal species, a very direct and immediate relationship exists between environmental stimulus and the organic response to that stimulus. We refer to this immediate stimulus-response sequence as instinctual behavior. The organism seems to be pre-programmed by nature to respond in set patterns to stimulation in its environment. The more predictable and monolithic the pattern of response to a given stimulation, the more we call upon the word instinct to account for it. The less predictable and varied the pattern of response, the more likely we are to assign a degree of choice to the behavior. It makes little or no sense to use words like will or choice to describe, for example, the response of a one-celled animal to the stimulus of food in its environment. But it does make sense to use such words to describe the response of the family dog to the stimulus of a thrown stick Sometimes the dog fetches and sometimes not.
The ability to delay response to environmental stimulation, to consider possible actions and to choose among possible actions before acting, increases as we move up the evolutionary ladder (Becker 1962b). In the higher primates, it is even possible to delay response and to choose behavior that violates what might be considered actions helpful to the survival of the organism. Cat owners who have tried to switch to cheaper brands of cat food will testify to the extreme degree to which the family feline is capable of delaying the satisfaction of its own hunger so as to engage in a battle of wills in expressing its dissatisfaction with the change in food.
In human beings, this ability to delay response and to choose among possible courses of actions reaches a high point in the evolution of species. The human being may even choose a course of action that allows the continued existence of the symbolic self at the expense of the organic self–for example, in a hunger strike. This kind of possibility is unique to the human species. Understanding how such a being develops out of a crying and grasping infant, interested primarily in the satisfaction of its bodily needs, is therefore of central interest in comprehending human behavior and its development.
THE ROLE OF ANXIETY
In all of the higher primates, close care is required for the young. Evolution (survival strategies) creates a bond between parent and young in higher primates not found in other animals. Without this bond, the parental response to the helplessness of the young, the species would not survive. There is evidence that this bond is learned in each generation. Little ones deprived of warm care find it difficult or impossible as adults to establish that bond with their own offspring (Schwartz 1986).
The need for close, warm body care, for affection and praise, is an established and essential requirement for human infants. Without it the infant cannot thrive. The infant continues in this need to one extent or another throughout childhood. This need for continued care, and to perfect behaviors that coax it from parental sources, is one fundamental component of the child’s motivation. The other component is closely related. It is anxiety, aroused by the child’s fear of abandonment by its primary caregivers.
A human infant has no developed sense of self. It is totally dependent on caregivers for survival, and experiences life on the level of a cycle of physical needs and physical satisfactions. When an infant receives adequate care, there is little delay between the time that the infant signals its physical discomfort and having the care given and the discomfort relieved. The caregivers are experienced as an extension of the infant itself.
As the child grows older, the time between the signal of discomfort and the receiving of comforting care grows longer. Due to the delay between the stimulus and the response, the child begins to recognize that the caregivers are not simply an extension of the child. The caregivers have an existence separate from the child, and the child begins to experience its first form of anxiety–the anxiety of being abandoned by the caregivers. The child realizes that techniques must be learned to coax the caregivers into action. These techniques also reassure the child that it has not been abandoned and thus relieve these earliest pangs of anxiety.
One of the earliest techniques a child learns is to scream and cry. A child may use this technique to cause the appearance of the caregivers even though suffering from no immediate physical need. In this way, the child gains the assurance and sense of security that it has not been abandoned by the caregivers. All of the techniques the child uses to gain assurance of the continuation of care are physical. These range from facial expressions to noise making.
The growing child initially uses its body as medium for assurance of continued care. As growth progresses the child starts to learn that not everything it does with its body is equally effective in coaxing the caregivers into the desired response. The growing child learns that some uses of its body as medium are not appreciated by the caregivers and does not result in loving, cooing, and smiling faces thrust into the child’s view. This is probably very confusing to the child, since to the child all physical exertions, all uses of its physical being as medium, are essentially equal. Yet some actions provoke an opposite response in the caregivers than what the child expected and hoped to receive. Their voices become loud and harsh. Their faces show obvious signs of displeasure, again provoking in the child that early anxiety of abandonment by caregivers.
In time the child learns that the urge to act out on certain impulses needs to be curbed in favor of a higher goal of pleasing the caregivers and continuing to bask in the assurance of their continued care. In the course of this learning process the child begins to form its most primitive sense of self, of ego, as an organism that is not tied simply to an automatic cycle of stimulus and response, but as an organism that can imagine itself acting in various ways and then choosing among the options. At this most rudimentary stage of development, we already see the growing child making its self an object of thought to itself, which is the first stage of early ego development (Becker 1962b).
It is important to notice here that ego development occurs as a result of negotiating frustrations of desires and the experiences of opposition in the child’s environment. Our very perception of an object–registering it in our field of experience–is based on the ability to respond to the object. If gratification were always immediate, we would hardly register the experience in our consciousness, for there is no delay in response that causes the experience to be noted in our consciousness (Becker 1964). If the child were to experience no frustration or opposition at all in its environment, it would have no means of experiencing its self as something distinct from that which is outside the self. On the other hand, for healthy ego development the frustrations and opposition cannot be totally overwhelming either, for then there is no chance to negotiate toward satisfaction. It is the negotiating process, beginning already at the prelinguistic stage, which is the path for healthy ego development. The ego expands by confronting opposition, delaying response, testing its powers in the face of that opposition, and then acting on those powers to deal with the opposition.
The long gestation period and the total helplessness of the human newborn create the conditions under which the initial anxieties of the infant are directly related to loss of the caregivers. The growing child learns to negotiate the responses of the caregivers. Using its physical body as the medium, the child’s overwhelming desire is to please its caregivers and therefore to assure itself that it has not been and will not be abandoned by the caregivers. It is this negotiating process, learning that some physical exertions cause a desirable response on the part of the caregivers while others do not, which is the mechanism for the rudimentary development of the child’s ego, its sense of itself as separate from its caregivers and its environment.
The need for continued care for a close relationship with its primary caregivers is the very source of the anxiety of object loss, of abandonment, in the child (Becker 1962b). This initial anxiety is strengthened as the child begins to experience the fact that its caregivers are not automatons commanded by the child’s will. Delays in gratification, and above all being told “NO!” provoke in the child the anxiety of abandonment. The child needs to avoid anxiety-provoking situations for its own continued sense of well-being. The child learns through experience that by refusing certain urges, refusing to act on some impulses, anxiety-provoking situations can be avoided.
The child thus begins to learn that holding itself in check, curbing those organismic urges to explore and expand in all directions, is necessary to avoid provoking its greatest anxiety, the anxiety of abandonment. The child is already engaged in a process that, according to Becker, is one of the great ironies of human existence That is, that in order to avoid overwhelming anxiety–anxiety that is crippling to ego expansion and development–the self assumes the role of task-master, of setting its own restrictions. Repression is carried out largely by the ego itself in response to its environment and becomes the very mechanism by which the ego learns to avoid anxiety and to allow itself continued growth and expansion in at least some areas of living.
Significantly, however, the areas in which the ego does allow itself expansion are not those areas of the ego’s own choosing. They are prescribed by the desires and values of the primary caregivers and later by the socio-cultural environment. The irony in this, rooted in the very nature of being human of being an animal that strives for its own sense of well-being by avoiding anxiety, is that the ego is bound to a process of conforming itself to the image of the other as the very condition for its own continued growth and expansion (Becker 1962b). This process is intrinsic to ego development even during the prelinguistic phase, long before the child has any notion of what is happening to it. As will be seen this carries lifelong consequences.
In the subsequent stages of development, the child learns to master a completely new kind of medium for negotiation, that of a symbol system, the use of language. During this stage the rudimentary sense of self that resulted from the use of the body as the negotiating medium is exponentially increased. The self becomes embedded in this symbol system and takes on a form that is truly and uniquely human (Becker 1962b).
The earliest experience the child has of a self is one that is a reflection of the caregivers’ attitudes toward the child. The child’s perception, the child’s consciousness, is initially united with that of its caregivers and hence is fundamentally a product of its social environment. In the early stages of language acquisition, the child will even refer to itself primarily in the third person. It may be some time before the child learns to use first-person pronouns, and even then the accusative “me!” and the genitive “mine!” will be used long before the nominative “I. ” By the time the child learns the proper use of “I ” a significant step in ego development has been achieved. The child has by then developed the ability to see itself as an object of abstract thought and awareness, as a first-person linguistic construction. As far as we can tell, humans are the only species able as a matter of course to develop this sense of abstract ego awareness. The human ego, in other words, takes shape linguistically and use of language sets humans apart from other animal species (Becker 1962b).
MAINTENANCE OF SELF-ESTEEM
The developing human ego seeks to avoid and master anxiety. Anxiety is rooted in the very precariousness of human existence. It is not possible for a human being with normal mental capacities to live without anxiety, for anxiety is a basic response to the actual conditions of human existence. The response of the ego to this situation is to develop specific defense mechanisms against the onslaught of overwhelming anxiety. These defense mechanisms allow the ego to deal with anxiety in manageable doses, thus allowing the ego to maintain its sense of mastery, its sense of forward movement.
Drawing on the psychoanalytic literature, Becker (1962b) wrote of three primary mechanisms of defense that develop very early and continue throughout life:
As Becker understood it, the many other psychological defense mechanisms we develop over time are derived from these three primary ego defenses. In using each of these ego defenses, the self protects itself from massive and overwhelming anxiety by binding the anxiety and then allowing the ego to call it up in small enough doses that the ego can master it. Much of what transpires in the play world of children and the thought- and daydream world of adolescents and adults is exactly this process of calling up and facing manageable doses of anxiety.
The mastery of anxiety is essentially what Becker means by self-esteem. It is through the mastery of anxiety that the ego is able to maintain its sense of forward movement. When the ego is unable to master anxiety, it will feel overwhelmed, blocked, bogged down. Furthermore, by employing these mechanisms of defense, the ego creates a reservoir of material of which the conscious self is largely unaware. This material forms the content of the unconscious. Becker saw it as one of the major achievements of psychoanalysis to have developed processes whereby the content of the unconscious could be brought into conscious awareness and explored. Although in his later work Becker felt that the concept was too vague, he initially posited self-esteem maintenance as the paradigmatic framework for understanding human behavior.
Self-esteem maintenance is a dynamic concept. One does not achieve self-esteem and then stop. Life moves on and the developing ego constantly confronts new objects and experiences. A healthy developing self is naturally drawn to novelty because the ego grows by new experiences–it fundamentally feeds on new experiences. We admire the natural curiosity of children and a child who exhibits no sense of curiosity, who draws back from all novelty, would be a cause for great concern. Nevertheless, all novelty contains within it the possibility of provoking anxiety. A sense of self-esteem is maintained as the self learns to confront new objects and new experiences and to draw on its emerging powers to master the anxiety that the novelty provokes. This allows incorporation of that object or experience into the repertoire of the ego, to be called upon at will in later confrontations with new objects or experiences. Becker wrote of a three-stage process for maintaining the sense of forward movement necessary for healthy ego development.
The first stage is manipulation (Becker 1964). When confronted with a new object or experience, the initial response is the organismic urge to act upon it, to manipulate it. In toddlers this is expressed directly through the body medium–touch it, pick it up, chew on it. The repertoire of the toddler’s ego is still quite limited. An older child will have a wider reservoir of possible responses, perhaps already exhibiting the restrictions that the ego places on the organism. It’s red and glows… “Caution! It may be hot!” An adult may act upon the new object or experience in purely mental/symbolic form. Becker’s point is that when confronted with novelty, the initial human urge is to act upon it, to manipulate it in some form.
The second stage is that of seeking meaning in the novel experience. The problem of meaning in the face of the objective precariousness of human existence contains a deeply existential aspect to it which will be explored later. Here we note that finding meaning in a novel experience entails the individual’s ability to call up responses to objects and experiences that allow the self to continue its sense of forward movement. Novelty provokes anxiety and the self reaches into its repertoire of responses, calling forth those responses that allow the ego to avoid anxiety and attain some sense of mastery over the novel situation. A confronting object or experience about which one can draw no appropriate response whatsoever cannot have meaning. It is literally meaningless. Again, a toddler’s repertoire is limited–touch it, pick it up, suck on it. Hence the confusion when it burns, is too heavy to move, or tastes terrible. An older child is already learning to abstract and to seek social approval for its responses. A rolled-up rug, for example, long and just low enough to straddle with one leg, might call up the response of “horsey ride” in the child. The abstract qualities of “horsey” may be the only meaning the object has in the child’s world. Finding that throwing or kicking the red round object earns more praise from caregivers than sucking on it, the child learns new ways to respond meaningfully to the “ball” object (an abstraction that perhaps will then be painfully refined when the child first confronts a holiday tree ornament). By adulthood, the abstraction process is well developed and meaning itself may have become an abstract notion. At this second stage, meaning is found in the ability of the ego to draw up from its repertoire of responses those guidelines for manipulation that allow the self to act upon the experience of novelty in ways that anxiety is avoided and mastery is achieved.
The third step is self-esteem. This step in the process is not strictly behavioral but symbolic and psychological. As the self reflects on its achievements during stages one and two it is confirmed in the view that it is an able executive, living in a predictable environment in which it has appropriate powers of mastery. The ego feels good about itself, sees itself as a locus of value, and adds this experience of mastery to the expanding repertoire from which it will draw in future confrontations with novelty.
When viewed in this light, we see that the process of confronting novelty is potentially precarious at every point. There are innumerable ways in which this continually moving process of manipulation-meaning-self-esteem can break down. A new experience may call up associations so full of anxiety that the ego is literally swamped and cannot lay hold of it. It may evoke an abstraction that is so far removed from the object that it is impossible to act upon the object on the basis of that abstraction. Furthermore, even when an object-transaction has been successful, the resulting sense of self-esteem remains vulnerable to deflation by the reactions of others (just think of the beaming young American traveler, who has never before seen a bidet, announces to his more knowledgeable friends that his Paris hotel room is even equipped with a foot washer!)
Caregivers impart the initial funding of self-value through warm praise and continued affection. But even in the most secure of circumstances, self-esteem skates on very thin ice above embarrassment, shame, guilt, deflation, and a sense of being blocked and bogged down–all of which are manifestations of basic anxiety. Real-lived human experience is a shifting patchwork of triumph in some areas and defeat in others. Self-esteem maintenance, avoiding and mastering anxiety sufficiently to have a continued sense of forward movement, is a vital juggling act in which the cost of failure can be literally one’s life. In Becker’s view, a human life without mechanisms of defense, the mechanisms that allow one to navigate in the sea of overwhelming anxiety, is quite simply unimaginable (Becker 1973).
THE OEDIPAL TRANSITION
Becker rejected the instinct theory of Freud and insisted that human beings can best be viewed for practical purposes as devoid of both sexual and aggressive instincts. Furthermore, while Freud (1930) saw our most basic instinctual drives as fundamentally antisocial in nature, Becker believed that the human ego or sense of self is primarily a social product. Becker acknowledged fully the contribution of Freud to understanding human behavior. Any new theory that would be considered at all adequate could not ignore Freud. It would have to incorporate Freud’s ideas into a broader synthesis (Becker 1969).
Freud saw the discovery and elucidation of the Oedipus complex as his greatest achievement. In mapping Freud’s ideas onto a transactional understanding of ego development, Becker preferred to speak of an Oedipal transition that did not rely on instinctual drives as the motivating force for personality development. In Becker’s view, what psychoanalysis discovered was the symbolic nature of human self-esteem, whose contours are shaped in the individual during that stage of development in which the person learns to trade physiological nurturing for the psychological/symbolic nurturing of the self. Becker speaks of this stage as an Oedipal transition rather than an Oedipus complex, a time in which the child must learn to seek and be satisfied with continued parental involvement on a psychological/symbolic level, rather than on a direct physiological level. It is a culturally specific process, the beginning of the process of socialization. During the Oedipal transition, the child is transforming from a primarily biological actor into a primarily social actor (Becker 1962b).
Psychoanalytic theory outlines stages of development focused on body orifices as erotic centers. Working from a fully transactional frame of reference, Becker utilized much the same stages, but Becker viewed these stages as centered around the child learning to manage its relationship to its adult caregivers rather than around mastery of instinctual drives (Becker 1973). These are not phases in libidinal organization, in other words, but stages in the process of socialization.
The oral stage takes place during the time before the ego of the infant is totally undifferentiated from the mother. The mouth is the center of its relationship with the mother. During the anal stage, the child becomes aware of its body as an object. It becomes aware that in order to gain a sense of wellbeing in relation to the parental caregivers, the body itself must be mastered. To avoid the anxiety of abandonment and maintain an ongoing warm and supportive relationship with its caregivers, the child learns that especially the bowels must be mastered and controlled. The child’s relationship with adult caregivers during this phase naturally comes to center on the anus and its products. Anal play is a tool of the ego in mastering in manageable doses the anxiety of learning body control, and the child will be quite proud in showing off its accomplishment of defecating in the right place. It is a demonstration of ego control over its own body-encasement. The child is learning to earn love and support from its caregivers, accepting the frustrations of denying itself immediate physical gratification in order to maintain a positive overall relationship with the parents on an increasingly symbolic level. During the phallic stage, the child is forcefully faced with the full implications of exchanging biological (body) meanings for social (symbolic) meanings. Throughout the Oedipal transition, spurred by anxiety avoidance, the child is in the process of giving up bodily gratifications in favor of the security of maintaining adult care and attention. In the phallic stage, ambivalence is most acute and brought to a head, and the child must finally capitulate to the symbol world of the adults.
Propelled by the increasing functional mastery of the developing ego, the child is at the same time restrained by the needs of the self for continued care and affection (Becker 1962b). The Oedipal transition is not a straightforward and unidirectional process. It is a process of learning by which the child is inducted into symbol-performance in relation to its caregivers. It is a training period in which the child exchanges its primary mode of self-esteem maintenance in relation to its caregivers. Initially basking in erotic body closeness, the child emerges from this process more or less able to maintain self-esteem on the based on living according to the incentives and disincentives of the symbolic world of the parents. Yet to the child much of this symbolic world remains a mystery.
Through this transition, the child is weaned from physical satisfactions it does understand and taught symbolic satisfactions it does not understand. This is yet another reason for the ambivalence and rebellion that the child feels toward the whole process. The parental values and modes of perception that the child accepts as its own during this transition are largely habitual. They are not freely chosen by the ego, but are acquired in the absence of any alternatives. They become automatic patterns of response for the child in order to avoid anxiety aroused by displeasing the parents.
The very process by which the child becomes a symbolic performer–that is, becomes a properly socialized human being–further limits the conscious choices of the ego in relation to the broad spectrum of possible behaviors. The child’s restrictions of behavior to please its parents progressively come to include symbolic behavior and symbolic pleasing. This necessarily ties the child to the same limitations that form the world of its parents. A person’s character comes to reflect the peculiar perceptions, behaviors, values and anxieties of the caregivers. The psychoanalytic elucidation of inherited character types does not demonstrate patterns of human instincts, but rather that because of the limited range of behavioral styles available to avoid and master the anxieties of the human condition, there emerge certain broad and identifiable character modes among human beings which tend to be passed down through families from generation to generation (Becker 1973).
SOCIALIZATION–ADAPTING TO CULTURE
By the time the child has successfully come through the Oedipal transition, the child has learned to maintain self-esteem in a symbolic mode by developing a peculiar behavioral style (personality) contoured by and compatible with the values and perception of its parental/familial caregivers. Although the process is not straightforward and the acceptance of it on the part of the child is ambivalent, it is a most important initial step in socialization. In socialization, primary anxiety is utilized to tutor the child in the cultural symbol world. The primary anxiety of abandonment is steadily transformed into the mature adult abhorrence of immorality and wrong behavior (Becker 1962b).
The child accepts this discipline in the interest of becoming an independent cultural actor. The unconscious, formed by the mechanisms of psychological defense in early training, now expands to include the taboos of the culture and society in which the individual is raised. From a psychological perspective, this process of becoming a ‘symbolic Self’ is the process by which the superego, or conscience, is formed. From that point on, the child will gain a sense of self-value from doing the right and proper thing as an habitual course of action, even though the person largely will have no immediate awareness from where the inner voice urging such behavior comes. From this learning process, the child enters into the wider social environment where rules, customs, and a means-ends schema of action are embedded into the automatic behavioral patterns of the person. In the cultural/symbolic world, this new mode of maintaining self-esteem will be further inculcated and reinforced. Once the superego is firmly implanted, the person’s mind is claimed for society. “This is just the way it’s done” becomes the tune to which most people will dance for the duration of their lives.
In Becker’s view, further socialization in the cultural milieu means above all a direct continuation of the self willingly limiting and narrowing its freedom and possibilities in exchange for being able to view itself as a locus of value in a world of meaning. The process by which the child has limited its ego strivings so as to find its place in the family order and thus assure itself of the continued care and affection of its caregivers is now extended into the larger world of culture and society. By learning to transact in culturally prescribed and socially accepted modes, the self finds its place in this environment and thus assures itself of its continued symbolic value.
This identity is built on symbolic social performance and it is the ability to perform in the proper social role that solidifies one’s sense of self-esteem. A social identity can only be earned from other people, those who are in positions of superior power and who introduce the individual into the new social symbolic world (1964). Culture forms the environmental shell within which a person’s personality continues to develop. In this environment, the individual seeks to maintain the process of assuring the self of its primary value. The function of culture and society is to give its people a theater and script to sustain this process. Culture and society, therefore, can be seen as an amalgam of pathways for creating and sustaining symbolic meaning for individuals and groups.
Maintenance of symbolic meaning assumes the ability to repress anxiety. In the social world, disorder is a major anxiety-provoking factor. Growing up in society is fundamentally a process of learning how to act predictably in a potentially unpredictable environment. This is a peculiar problem for an anxiety-prone species, such as we humans are. A certain amount of control and stability is achieved when one learns to correctly play his or her social role (Becker 1964a). The viability of a culture for the individual is predicated on the stability of social transactions. A viable culture and social environment has to provide safety as well as avenues for self-esteem. Thus prescribed status and role are fundamental concepts in the working of all viable societies (Becker 1962b).
For the individual to maintain a sense of value and forward movement, the primary anxiety of abandonment, loneliness, and symbolic deflation must be repressed. The rules and order of society are requisite to the ability to repress anxiety, dictated by the fact that the person must have some means of predicting the behavior of other people. Status and role serve to make social encounters predictable and dependable. Status and role tell the individual how to act in specific social situations and also what behaviors can be expected from others. By providing the rules and guidelines for interaction, social and cultural conventions are essentially scripts for self-esteem maintenance.
Socialization thus continues the learning process begun in early childhood training in both its positive and negative aspects. On the positive side, the dependence of the child on its primary caregivers for security and feelings of self-worth are transferred to the wider symbol system of the culture and society. The ability to sustain a symbolic sense of self-value and forward movement that is not dependent on the direct and binding ties of the relationship with primary caregivers allows the individual a new measure of freedom to move independently into the larger social world. The stage of social interaction makes ego expansion possible on a scale larger than could ever be achieved only within the immediate family circle. Actions shared and reinforced by larger groups of people are much more convincing to the individual and provide an even more solid sense of purpose and meaning. Because the parameters of child-training configurations are set by cultural norms, Oedipal training contours the child’s personality for membership in his or her particular culture and society, shaping the child to feel comfortable and at home in the institutions of that very society. Simply put, you learn to behave properly in the society in which you are raised.
On the negative side, however, it must be noted that the fundamental mechanism for achievement of this transition to the larger social world remains the manipulation of the individual’s primal anxieties. The commitment of the person to the social and cultural meanings of his or her environment continues to be based on that foundation of anxiety. Even for the most grounded of persons living in the most integrated of societies, a river of anxiety runs under the surface and the denial, projection, and repression utilized to avoid this anxiety increases in the same measure as that of possible ego expansion.
While in one sense we can speak of the entrance onto the social stage of action as an opening up and widening of the possibilities for individual ego expansion, this is actually achieved only by a further narrowing down, distortion, and skewing of the person’s perceptions about the true nature of human reality. Becker went so far as to call this a process of “reinstinctivization,” a process in which the human animal, though born largely devoid of instinctual rules for behavior, becomes totally embedded in automatic behavioral styles of the larger society, over which he or she has no more control than do lemmings running to the sea (Becker 1968a).
Furthermore, the person becomes bound by an extra measure of anxiety to the peculiar worldview, meanings and values of his or her particular culture and society. One reason that cross-cultural studies can be so threatening is exactly because seeing that other people are so different (and yet happy and content) awakens in people the sense that the norms, values, and meanings of their own particular society are largely fictitious and arbitrary, devoid of universal and transcending significance and meaning. This gnawing recognition thus opens one up to the river of anxiety that flows beneath the surface of our serenity. Our unconscious bargain, that proper transaction of our social rules assures us of transcending meaning and protection is shown to be a lie.
Technologically, through travel and communications, people in modern societies are daily exposed to beliefs and customs foreign to their own upbringing, and thus daily confront the fictitious and arbitrary nature of cultural norms, meanings, and values. This is simply unavoidable for most people in modern society. Thus we regularly see manifestations toward violent xenophobic lashing out that bubble up as we are forced to confront the root anxieties this provokes. The fundamental question posed by modem human is whether in such social conditions we can learn to live with a raised level of general anxiety, or prefer in large numbers to opt for the psychological security of willful myopic intolerance toward those different from ourselves. Ernest Becker repeatedly returned to this question in his writings.
A TRANSACTIONAL VIEW OF MENTAL ILLNESS
For a symbolic species tutored psychologically and emotionally in the school of anxiety, Becker made a rather startling suggestion, that ‘normalcy’ is itself a form of neurosis! Although he stated this somewhat ironically, he also had a very sobering intention in mind.
In Becker’s view, mental health is an ideal-typical construct that might be relatively approximated but never actually achieved. Remember, repression comes from within. It is self-repression as much as it is anything. All human beings repress, narrow down, reality to one extent or another and (contrary to the promises made by the many psychological self-help gurus of his day) Becker insisted that life without repression of some measure would be simply intolerable. Of the ‘normal’ person Becker wrote, “If we say that the average man narrows down ‘just about right,’ we have to ask who this average man is– all through history it is the ‘normal, average men’ who, like locusts, have laid waste to the world in order to forget themselves.” (Becker 1973, p 187)
If, as the transactional model suggests, “normal mental health” is a fundamentally social construction, how does it happen that some people are thought to require special care from mental health professionals? How does it happen that some people lose their freedom, are incarcerated in prisons or psychiatric hospitals, because of their mental condition?
Very early in his career, Becker published an instructive article that outlined some anthropological and philosophical reflections on the problem of mental health (Becker 1961b). In this article, Becker drew on anthropological literature to demonstrate that mental health, normality, far from being an absolute concept, consists mainly in the appropriate use of public logic, that is, the logic shared by most people in the society in their everyday actions and perceptions. Mental illness, on the other hand, consists mainly of the inability to utilize public logic in everyday perceptions and behavior.
According to Becker, public logic is necessary for survival. The inability to use public knowledge in everyday perceptions and behavior will finally end in self-destruction of the person. The premodern societies were very tolerant of the mentally ill–those who employed mainly private logic in everyday perceptions and behaviors–and allowed them to live largely as accepted members of the group. They could do this because they were also very tolerant of the self-destruction that this style of living entailed. The sanctity of public knowledge–its utter convincing quality for all members of the society–was assured by simply observing the end suffered by those who significantly deviated from it. In contrast, modern societies are very intolerant of the self-destruction suffered by social deviants (suicide, starvation, burning or cutting, and so forth), and take it upon themselves to save people from their self-destructive patterns of behavior. We consider that to be a signal of our ‘advancement’ over those societies which do not intervene in self-destructive behavior. Perhaps that is true. But on the other hand, modern societies must protect the sanctity of their public logic by maintaining an equal intolerance of those who employ a private logic in perception and behavior. Such people must be ‘diagnosed,’ labeled, ‘treated,’ and if need be, incarcerated and kept separate from the rest of society, by force. Mental health and mental illness is a social continuum, and in a society gone mad (of which we certainly have plenty of historical examples) we might at least entertain the notion that it is the insane who are most in possession of their sanity!
Here again it should be said that Becker’s purpose in this article was to jar our commonplace and self-congratulatory perceptions, especially about the then-widespread use of involuntary incarceration of those labeled mentally ill. Less a signal of our humane desire to ‘save’ such people, Becker suggested, it is a signal of our inhumane intolerance of having them live among us! ‘Mental illness’ in this view, then, is not primarily a statement about a person’s mental health at all, at least not in any absolute sense, but is rather in indication of how far one has strayed from the public logic of one’s society, and of society’s need to protect the sanctity of its public logic (social norms and values) from the challenges of public deviation.
References
Becker, E. (1962a). Anthropological notes on the concept of aggression. Psychiatry. 25:327-338.
___(1962b). The birth and death of meaning: A perspective in psychiatry and anthropology. New York: Free Press.
___(1964b). The revolution in psychiatry: The new understanding of man. New York: Free Press.
___(1969). Angel in armor: A post-Freudian perspective on the nature of man. New York: Free Press.
___(1973). The denial of death. New York: Free Press.
Freud, S. (1930). Civilization and its discontents. Standard Edition 21.
Schwartz. S. (1986). Classic studies in psychology. Mountain View. CA: Mayfield.The language of psycho-analysis. New York: W. W. Norton.