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By Daniel Liechty, Ph.D.
THE OEDIPAL PROJECT
What makes people act the way they do? Becker considered Freud’s major contribution to be the discovery and elucidation of the Oedipus complex as the mechanism by which the superego is formed, and the internalization of the demands and prohibitions of the caregivers and subsequently society is implanted during the course of individual psychological development (Becker 1969). Freud related this development to instinctive sexual drives, referring to the entire range of pleasure-seeking urges that begin already in infancy. According to Freud, the instinctual sexual drive is expressed in a wide variety of activities with a wide variety of objects. In Freudian theory, it remains the key concept in personality development and organization.
Although any part of the body may be a source of pleasure, the mouth, anus, and genitals are seen as the particular locations for erotic pleasure. These erogenous zones are each connected to a particular bodily function necessary for survival–eating, defecating, reproducing. Erotic pleasure stemming from these zones is seen as integral to the instinctual drive of self-preservation. The child progresses from mainly oral satisfaction to anal satisfaction and finally to genital satisfaction. At that stage of development, Freud postulated an overtly sexual attraction to the mother for boys, and to the father for girls (Laplanche and Pontalis 1973).
The child originally identifies with both parents. However, at the point that the (male) child becomes overtly sexually attracted to the mother, the child begins to see the father as a rival for the mother’s attention. The result is a strong antagonism toward the father, a desire to eradicate and eliminate the father from the scene of competition. This desire to be rid of the father and to take full possession of the mother is what Freud referred to as the Oedipus complex. But the father is physically overpowering to the child and the child feels itself endangered by a continuing state of antagonism toward the father. So long as the child continues to desire sexual possession of the mother, the antagonism will continue. The child must therefore repress the sexual desire out of fear of the father’s revenge. The child must renounce the mother as an object of sexual desire and in this way again identify with both parents. This renunciation of sexual desire for the other is a fundamental capitulation to and internalization of the prohibitions of the adult world. The reidentification of the child with both parents is achieved only by the child’s willingness to accept parental and adult prohibitions. It is during this stage of reidentification with both parents that the child finally develops a superego, the internal voice of parental and adult prohibition.
Ernest Becker was both attracted to and repelled by this explanation of the origins of the individual conscience. On the one hand, he was quite sure that the development of conscience was intimately connected to relations between the child and its caregivers. He agreed that Freud had pointed toward a central issue involved in understanding human development and human behavior (Becker 1972). On the other hand, he was also quite sure that Freud was wrong in terms of his theory of instinctual drives. Becker suggested that this was a reflection of nineteenth-century biologism and not of a well-rounded theory of human behavior (Becker 1973). Becker rejected the idea of the frustration of inner drives and instincts as the motivating force in human behavior. This has interesting implications for how Becker’s view of human nature contrasts with that assumed by Freud.
For Freud, the human being is fundamentally antisocial. The basest inner urges are seen as prior to and usually more powerful than the refining influence of society. Society and the individual are on the deepest levels of the psyche perpetually at odds. He reduced interpersonal behavior to the base animal level of satisfactions. Becker saw in this reductionism the prejudices of nineteenth-century science and philosophy rather than a broadly empirical view of human existence.
Becker did not think that one had to resort to a theory of innate aggressive, sexual drives and their frustrations to account for the implantation of the superego. Nothing more needed to be assumed about basic motivations of the child than the need for continued closeness, affection, and care (Becker 1968b). These motivations are essentially pro-social and not antisocial. Becker wrote not of an Oedipus complex but of an Oedipal transition, a transition by which the child comes to exchange body-based involvement on the part of the caregivers for continued parental involvement on a psychological and symbolic level. But beyond that, Becker also wrote of an Oedipal project that continues as a life project (Becker 1973). In the course of the Oedipal transition, the child comes to see the body as an object to be controlled in the interest of symbolic modes of self-esteem maintenance (Becker 1972). This process is begun in the anal stage and continues into the phallic stage. The child, in effect, coaxes the caregivers into continuing closeness affection and care by demonstrating through actions that it understands the need to take control of body demands and is increasingly able to do so. The child also demonstrates to itself its own worthiness of continued parental care by testing its ability to deny the body, delaying gratification of body cravings until the proper, socially sanctioned times, as prescribed by the adult world of symbolic meanings.
Eventually the child may even play games of body mastery when there is no adult around to give praise for the act. Certainly the child’s notion is that adults know everything that happens. whether they are present or absent. This type of play also displays the child’s need to master the anxiety of abandonment by continually assuring itself that it is indeed able to control the body on a continuing basis. The body becomes an object for the child’s demonstration of self-control. The child is pushed by anxiety avoidance into the symbolic world of adult meanings. Entrance into this world depends on the child’s ability to gain increasing mastery and control over the demands of the body–to delay bodily satisfactions and channel the gratification of those bodily cravings into forms, times and places that accord with the symbol world of adult meanings. The child feels that if it is not able to do this, it faces the displeasure of the parents, a displeasure whose ultimate form is abandonment and annihilation.
During this transitional period, the body as object represents the vehicle for demonstrating successful entry into the adult world of symbolic meanings. But it also represents the major and primary threat to the child’s sense of ego mastery. The demands of the body can simply overwhelm a young child to the extent that the child is unable to maintain constant mastery and control (Becker 1962e. 1964). Furthermore, the child in this transitional state is tom between the earlier method of maintaining self-esteem based on immediate gratification of bodily demands and the new, symbolic method of maintaining self-esteem (self-esteem =avoidance of parental loss anxiety) through demonstrated ego mastery of the body.
The trade-off sometimes simply does not seem worth the struggle. The body is experienced both as a source of joy and pleasure and as a threatening source of deep shame and anxiety. The self-scolding of a child for temporarily losing control of the body–for soiling its pants, for forbidden touching, for eating before the appropriate time–is usually much more severe and deprecatory than the admonitions of the caregivers! The child is horrified by its own animal condition and in scolding this animal part of its nature severely the child regains the sense that the symbolic self, the “true me,” is stronger and will have mastery over the animal.
In Becker’s view, the fact that urine and feces, menstrual blood, bodily orifices and appendages, sexual gestures and the like are so charged with guilt and anxiety is not because of instinctual aggressive or sexual drives. Still less does it have to do with primal patricide, incestuous urges, or fear of castration, as Freud had taught (Becker 1973). Becker suggested rather that these things are so charged with guilt and anxiety because to the child in that transitional state, these things represent the immediate and concrete awareness the child has of the body/animal side of being human. They are the concrete and physical elements pointing toward the hard fact of animality–animality that at that stage of development is the child’s primary threat to demonstrated ego mastery and continued self-esteem.
Thus in Becker’s view, the Freudian theory of the Oedipus complex too drastically and narrowly defines our developmental anxieties in terms of sexual drives and competitiveness. One must appreciate Freud’s insistence on maintaining a body-based psychology in the face of some alternative postulations of an ethereal soul that is only temporarily housed in the body. Psychoanalysis had to keep a firm this-worldly grip on its subject matter. However the dogged sexual reductionism of classic psychoanalysis undermined its scientific value from the other side. In short, the sexual theory explains both too much and too little about human motivation. Becker hoped that by recasting the Oedipal theory in terms of more current understandings of human behavior coming from other disciplines that he could achieve an equally body-based theory that was not prone to the strict sexual reductionism of classical psychoanalysis.
In Becker’s transactional and existential reconstruction of the Oedipal transition, the sense of body/ego dualism that emerges defines the problem of living itself. The child encounters this first as it moves to gain entrance into the adult world of symbolic meaning. But it is a life project–the Oedipal transition leads into the lifelong Oedipal project. This dualism is characterized by ego expansion on the one hand and safe anxiety avoidance on the other. The developing ego seeks to expand, become recognized, and mark its significance in the world of symbolic meaning. At the same time, extending too far into the new and unknown inevitably arouses the anxiety of loneliness, of object-loss and abandonment, of annihilation. To allay this anxiety, the person again seeks the comfort of shared meanings, of parental and group affirmation, of solid grounding in the performance of socially prescribed demonstrations of ego mastery over the animal nature. This solid grounding, however, carries with it its own anxieties. For the developing ego has the need to separate and develop independence. To simply accept passively the prescriptions of others leads to the anxiety of annihilation of life unlived by being swallowed up, remaining undifferentiated as an individual creator of meaning (Becker 1972).
The Oedipal transition period is the child’s first confrontation with the paradox and ambivalence of human existence in the world of symbolic meaning. Will the child be controlled and directed by others? Or will the child become its own center of meaning and symbolic creation? Will the child be an active or passive player in the world of symbolic meaning? In Becker’s reconstruction, the oral stage of development represents that period of “primary narcissism” in which the child has not yet begun to differentiate self from primary caregivers. During the anal stage, the child begins to experience self as separate from its caregivers and from its own body. The body has become an object in the phenomenal field of the self. The child learns to understand that ego mastery of the body is the condition for continued closeness, affection and care on the part of the caregivers. The child’s narcissism extends to command and dominion of the object world through self-control (Becker 1973). Finally, in the phallic stage, the child’s ambivalence concerning this developmental process comes to full bloom in the awareness that parentally and socially prescribed symbolic meanings contain their own ego constrictions and sources of anxiety.
There is but one solution to this dilemma of ambivalence: the child finally seeks to ground its ego in itself. The child seeks, as it were, to become the parent of itself, as the only way finally to assert independence. This is its lifelong project.
Having thus recast the Oedipus complex, Becker went on to present the Freudian concepts of castration fear and penis envy in similar transactional terms. Becker saw castration fear as centered primarily on the mother and not the father. The mother represents body pleasure and security. But at the same time the mother represents a primary and terrible threat to self-differentiation and the need to test one’s personal powers in the object world. An incomparable comfort when one is hurt, scared and in need of succor, the mother’s love and protectiveness can be quicksand when one is ready to explore and master the object world. The child has to free itself from her and the state of total dependency she represents.
The mother represents at this stage of development the world of the body, of inertia and animal determinism. While there is no denying the attraction of the mysteries, pleasures and comforts of this world, the developing child has already learned that using the body as the primary vehicle for gaining self-esteem will not finally be tolerated in the adult world of symbolic meaning. The child has already been expelled, so to speak, from that garden of physical paradise.
The child’s developing ego, to continue the metaphor, has already tasted the fruit of expansion through symbolic mastery of the object world. A total embrace of the body-meanings of the mother’s world at this point could come only by complete capitulation of the child’s ego to that of the mother. It would have to be totally on the mother’s terms. The child would have to be removed of, castrated of, that which it now knows to be tangible, exciting and real (i.e., its expanding freedom and independence.) This, Becker suggested, is the power and meaning of castration fears that arise in relation to the mother.
Penis envy is an existential complement to castration fear. Just as the mother appears to the child to be immersed in the world of the body–the world of breast milk, menstrual blood and care for the physical needs of the family–so the father comes to represent freedom, movement, social interaction and mastery in the object world. The child cannot comprehend what the father does all day, but this mystery only adds to the allure. The very absence of the father from the commonplace and daily routines of the household causes the child to associate the father with the great unknown, the outside world.
As the child’s developing ego seeks to test its powers of mastery in the object world, it is only natural that it would gravitate toward a preference for the world of the father, simultaneously experiencing a need to reject and separate from the world of the mother. This is the power and meaning of penis envy in relation to the father.
By presenting the Oedipal transition in transactional and existential terms, the social world of symbolic meaning replaced the instinct theory of human motivation. Becker was able to formulate a theory that also explained the implantation of the superego, of conscience, on a completely this-worldly basis, while avoiding the sexual reductionism of classical psychoanalysis. Because the child is seen as striving primarily for continued ego expansion within the context of continued support and affection of the caregivers, sex and sexuality become secondary and not primary motivational factors (Becker 1972).
Becker’s formulation is clearly open to a feminist criticism that it is solidly biased toward the male perspective. Granted the validity of this criticism, it is well to keep in mind that Becker was writing at a time when family roles were much more uniformly defined and when a modern feminist consciousness was only beginning to be raised. His specific formulation of these dynamics is admittedly dated and could easily be dismissed as the sputtering of patriarchy. Becker assumed a model of the nuclear, heterosexual, two-parent family that too easily equated woman/mother/ feminine with hearth and home and man/father/masculine with work outside the home. But he was offering here a description and not a prescription. Furthermore, the fact that his formulations were constructed in direct dialogue with the categories of classical psychoanalysis made it even more difficult to shed the patriarchal overtones of the reference frame. Becker recognized above all else that strictly defined social roles are a main cause of alienation in adult life. By recasting the Oedipus complex, castration anxiety, and penis envy in transactional and existential terms, he was able to demonstrate that both sexes confront these forces equally in the course of ego development. By extending the Oedipal transition into adult life in the form of the Oedipal project, he was able to demonstrate that these are forces that both sexes confront equally as adults. Furthermore, by being the main vehicle through which society offers its approval of individual striving and achievement, it is the strictly defined social role that, in effect, plays the part of arousing castration fear in adults. The more tightly defined the approved social role, the more personal ego expansion must be sacrificed in order to perform that role (Becker 1973).
While there is no sense in trying to make a proto-feminist out of Ernest Becker, a positive feminist reading of Becker is certainly possible. Becker pointed toward the ways in which individual personality growth is shaped, for better and for worse, by social arrangements. Becker assumed the traditional family structure in his recasting of the Oedipus complex. However, the transactional and existential dynamics he employed in this recasting are equally available for further adaptations to the wide variety of family structures toward which our society is moving.
Beyond the criticism that Becker assumed a traditional family structure in his writing, it could also be said that Becker’s general view of the human being as an individual striving for mastery and recognition is itself descriptive of a male ego structure. The female ego structure might be quite different–for example, seeking cooperation and relationship rather than opposition, mutuality rather than personal gain, nurture of the other rather than naked self-interest. From this perspective we find Becker to be simply one more example of a male theorist designating the male ego structure as ‘human nature,’ and then judging the female ego structure by that measure.
There is certainly a large measure of validity to this criticism. However, it is well to keep in mind that in Becker’s formulations, these so-called female personality traits are also easily understood as variant mortality coping strategies. In Becker’s work clearly there is no blanket denigration of “female” personality traits, or any particular exultation or privileging of the “male” personality traits. Both can be healthy and both can be unhealthy. The assignment of gender to any personality characteristics is in any case a social construction. The discussion continues between feminist theorists who suggest that women have deep-rooted differences in personality characteristics from men, and those feminists who claim that all perceived differences are a result of social conditioning. As women move into traditional positions of male power in society–leadership positions in business, government, education and the military–it remains to be seen whether genuine power transformations will result, or whether women will increasingly replicate the same kinds of dominating behavior men in these positions have traditionally exhibited.
THE CULTURAL CAUSA SUI NARRATIVE
The Oedipal project is the lifelong quest to become one’s own parent, to find independent sources for grounding ego expansion. It is a striving for a self-grounded ego. Yet very few are able to establish their own meanings in an absolute sense and no one is able to sustain such personal meaning without interruption over time. Therefore, most people all of the time, and all people some of the time, must draw upon the established cultural categories of meaning for a personal sense of worth and forward movement. That transcending sense of order and meaning imparted to individuals through participation in the wider society Becker (1973) refers to as the cultural causa sui narrative. It can be seen as an extension of the micro-level Oedipal project mapped onto the collective, macro-level of society and culture.
Human beings are meaning-creating animals. Because this meaning always skates on thin ice above a lake of anxiety, it is very fragile and tentative. The creation and establishment of individual meaning is the defining urge of the expanding ego. To meet new experience in the world of objects with an adequate reservoir of skills that allow incorporation of that experience and confident action in relation to that experience is the very core of meaning.
Self-esteem is maintained by the continued sense of meaning and purpose. Confident ability to act, self-esteem, feeling “right” in the world of objects, the sense of meaning and purpose–these become interconnected and even equivalent ways of speaking about mental health (Becker 1969). Blocks in the pathway create doubt and confusion. Continued blockage that cannot be reinterpreted and reconstituted begins the process of breakdown in mental health.
The ability to meet new experiences with confidence depends on a broad interpretive frame of reference, on a worldview, from which the person moves forward toward incorporation of the experience. Without this broad frame of reference, the ego has no mooring, no reference point, in the sea of experience. This broad frame of reference for meaning is what is supplied by the particular culture into which the person is socialized. The culture carries its own concrete images of truth–of what is most important and is most highly valued.
Becker (1962), drawing on Kluckhohn (1950), wrote of six basic human questions to which a viable culture gives answers:
Cultural viability depends on providing convincing answers to these basic human questions. As anthropological studies have shown, cultural malaise and decline occur when people within a culture are no longer convinced of the truth of their received answers to these basic questions.
Looking at these questions more closely, we notice that they tell the person something very fundamental about both personal and social existence; that there is an overall scheme of meaning in the universe into which individual and corporate life fit. This is to say that culture provides people with their sense of groundedness in the cosmos. Culture is what stands between human experience in the object world as potentially rational and meaningful and human experience in the object world as a chaotic jumble of sequential sense stimulations. Culture provides for human beings what instincts provide for bees, ants and fish (Becker 1972).
The answers a particular culture provides to the basic questions of existence are self-referential. That is, if the question “How do we know?” is pursued, empirical inquiry (if that be the privileged epistemic method) must ultimately lead to myths, hagiography and legends–that is, to other artifacts of the culture itself. What we see then is that the individual Oedipal project–the project of establishing personal meaning–becomes grounded in the cultural causa sui narrative, the claim of all cultures to be immediately grounded in transcendent sources and to mediate transcendent truth and meaning for those living within the culture. The cultural causa sui narrative is a direct collective extension of the individual Oedipal project, the desire to become one’s own father (parent), that is, to be independently self-created and self-grounded.
Presented in this perspective, a few other observations on the nature of culture are warranted. First, in relation to its answers to the most basic human questions, all cultures are sacred in character. This was seen also by Peter Homans (1989) who defined the sacred as “a series of diverse patterns of powerful, shared and unconscious idealizations of esteemed cultural objects” (p. 19). On that deepest level, the distinction that Western culture makes between the sacred and the profane, or the religious and the secular, simply does not apply (Becker 1975).
Second, we can see why intensive cross-cultural contact is very threatening. Radically different answers are available to the basic human questions, each providing relatively satisfying answers, which give people confident grounding of their Oedipal project in the cultural causa sui. Since there is no higher court of appeal to adjudicate between the truth of each, intensive cross-cultural contact tends to cast doubt on the transcendent and absolute nature of one’s own cultural causa sui. This in turn places one’s Oedipal project in jeopardy, exposing one directly to the primal anxiety on which human personality is feebly built.
When cross-cultural contact is slow and takes place over many generations, the particular answers to the basic questions given in the contacting cultures have time to meld and unite, to the benefit of all concerned. But when the cross-cultural contact is swift and sudden–as when Western explorers barged in on the social rituals and pageantry taking place in the native worlds outside of Europe–the doubts and anxieties can be overwhelming. Unfortunately, rather than contemplating the other’s truth and reflecting on what it means for one’s own sense of transcendence, it is much easier to deny and ridicule the other as some lesser form of human beings–or what is worse, to make the next court of appeal whoever has the biggest guns.
Now because of technology, especially rapid travel and communications, Europeans and Americans find themselves in the same position–living with doubt concerning the transcendent truth of their grand narrative–that they placed many people in other parts of the world in during the eras of colonialism and imperialism. This doubt characterizes the postmodern consciousness.
A further observation was alluded to above, but it merits special remark because it is so important in Becker’s thought. Becker, in fact, saw it as the very consensus of all social science. Human meaning in both the form of the individual Oedipal project and in the form of the cultural causa sui narrative is fundamentally fictional and arbitrary (Becker 1964). It is a human construction pretending to be more than that–it pretends to come from some transcendent source. To maintain the fiction of meaning, varying degrees of denial are necessary. Therefore, even the most viable of cultures carries within it the seeds of its own decadence and decline–directly analogous, one might say, to the individual psyche. The very thing that characterizes postmodern consciousness (a gift of psychoanalysis, cross-cultural anthropology and the Marxian ‘hermeneutic of suspicion’ for reading history) is our uneasy awareness of the fictitious character of our cultural causa sui narratives, though we hardly know what to do with it. To characterize this consciousness, one thinks by way of analogy of the scene from The Wizard of Oz in which the little dog Toto pulled back the curtain to reveal a puny little man operating the awesome and transcendent wizard. Once the illusion was revealed (shattered, actually) the little man gave good advice–basically, rely on a realistic assessment of your own strengths for achieving your goals–but it is just not as convincing as were the same advice coming from a terrible and awesome wizard.
From this we see why so-called fundamentalism is a uniquely modem phenomenon. Various stripes of cultural, political and religious fundamentalists continue to deny that the curtain was ever opened and insist that their particular brand of meaning comes from the Great Wizard himself. But this is less and less convincing to contemporary human beings. The extra denial energy this fiction demands is bought at the price of ever-increasing isolation, alienation and insulation from outsiders, or where available, by the use of instruments of coercion and violence to patrol the boundaries between believers and unbelievers. Such authoritarian moves reveal an inherent anxiety concerning the plausibility of the ideas being defended. For if the ideas were truly convincing, the coercive moves would be simply unnecessary.
The cultural causa sui is arbitrary and fictional. It can only be maintained by varying degrees of denial. We look with some envy at those in earlier times who could move easily from their personal Oedipal project into the cultural causa sui and never feel the least pang of doubt. To them (we imagine) human existence was transcendently grounded and the individual served and participated in that transcendence simply by acting out the duties and tasks of expected cultural performance in whatever station the person happened to be born. How easy and natural life was “back then.”
Yet our nostalgic musings about the good old days are themselves probably largely fictional. Even a culture in its ascendant phase is based on the energy of denial and therefore contains within itself the very cultural contradictions that have always led to decadence and decline. Yet there is an extra dose of anxiety that those of postmodern consciousness must endure. The personal burden of anxiety in our time stems from the fact that, even when compared with those who lived during a period of cultural decadence and decline, we know why our frantic offerings to the gods are no longer effective. Postmodern consciousness is one characterized by visible anxiety, as is borne out daily in the counselor’s office. This revealing of ourselves to ourselves, which Becker thought reached an entirely new plateau in Freud’s delineation of the Oedipus complex, is the most anxiety-arousing step that human beings can take (Becker 1972). Most people will prefer the comfort of any number of mundane diversions to keep from facing it.
Becker saw this knowledge concerning the fictitious and arbitrary nature of our meaning systems also as an opportunity, toward what he called the “second great step” in the evolution of consciousness. The first great evolutionary step was the development of a self-conscious self through language (Becker 1964). The second great step came with looking at the mechanisms of cultural transmission to understand how and in what ways we are reinstinctivized, thus allowing at least some measure of conscious control and freedom in this process. But taking that second step is by no means fully accomplished and until we figure out what to do with that information, even marginally self-reflective people must live with the burden of anxiety it arouses. To a large extent, all manner of counseling, therapies and programs of education are, at their best, ways to help people on various levels face up to and cope with the extra burden of anxiety this situation provokes. (And at their worst, they each represent strategies to help people avoid and deny our situation and the anxiety it provokes.)
In his earlier writings, Becker was quite optimistic about the prospect of most of humanity learning to cope with this anxiety. As he gained more understanding of the deeper dynamics of human evil, his optimism was considerably tempered.
THE URGE TOWARD COSMIC HEROISM
Here another major theme in Becker’s thought now becomes intelligible. Each human being strives to maintain self-esteem through ego expansion in the world of objects. Self-esteem is predicated on seeing oneself and one’s actions within a cultural worldview that gives satisfying answers to the basic human questions. One needs to place oneself within a frame of reference, a worldview, such that one’s life makes sense not only in mundane terms but in transcendent terms. Each human being strives to be an object of primary value, a contributor in some way to that which is transpersonal.
In other words, each person strives for nothing less than cosmic heroism (Becker 1972. 1973). Put this bluntly, it may strike the reader as pathetically grandiose. One must see that in Becker’s existential interpretive scheme of ego expansion, there are rather direct lines from early body mastery, to mastery in the object world, to self-esteem through meaning and purpose, to participation in the transcendent and immortal cultural causa sui narrative. From there is but a short hop to suggest that what we are striving for is a sense of cosmic heroism. All of these are simply ways of talking about the increasingly expansive side of the ego, and each has a corollary anxiety-based constriction as well.
(NOTE: Becker’s use of the term heroism here is an attempt to respond to specific themes being discussed publically at that time philosophy and religion, associated with works by authors such as Joseph Campbell, Sidney Hook, and others. The details of that discussion do not concern us here. But suffice to say that Becker’s concern was to take our attention away from the focus on individual characters in most of the mythologies of the ‘hero’s journey’ and such, and instead to draw our attention to the many ways in which all of us strive on various levels to leave our mark, to make the world a better place, to maintain a personal sense that we are contributing in some way to that which is of transcendent/cosmic significance.)
The tendency to see even the everyday interactions of human beings in terms of the pompous and grandiose, of strutting and puffing, is a result of having seriously confronted the fictional character of all human meaning systems. If one person gains a sense of heroism, of adding to the transcendent cosmic scheme, by quietly working the fields, raising a family and worshiping God, while another must lead conquering armies out to subdue all within sight, each is participating according to his or her station in the cultural causa sui narrative, gaining thereby a particular sense of cosmic heroism (which is not to say you would be equally happy to have either one as a next door neighbor).
The cultural causa sui narrative is what allows people to gain a sense of cosmic heroism through adequate performance of their social role within the hierarchy of social power; it is the narrative that informs us of the rules and parameters of the social rituals (games) we are playing (Becker 1972). The rules, mores, ideas and customs of a particular culture are in effect conduits for heroism. By living one’s life according to the cultural rules, the person contributes to the fuller meaning of the universe, even in the face of personal death. This, we can only assume, is true heroism. Culture and society testify to the significance of human life. Without that assurance of transcending significance, the expansive aspect of the ego begins to turn in on itself, resulting in depression and despair.
This is a genuine problem for people who share in the postmodern consciousness. For once one has seen behind the Wizard’s curtain, has seen the fictitious nature of human meaning systems, it is very difficult to maintain the kind of conviction necessary for performance of the prescribed rituals and pageants of heroism within culture. The only way to achieve a sense of heroism is to act within culturally-established systems of transcending symbolic meaning. Yet once the fictitious nature of the system is revealed, belief in its transcendent character is undermined and the person is deprived of this sense of cosmic heroism. The payoff of playing the social role in gaining a sense of cosmic significance simply isn’t there anymore once the system has been experienced as fictional and arbitrary. It is no accident that our time has been called an age of despair. If indeed, as some have claimed, depression is a modem disease of the mind, this is why.
Becker suggested that the study of culture might be approached as a study of comparative hero systems. What mechanisms for heroism are provided for what segments of society in a given culture? And because, like the cultural causa sui narrative, these hero systems are fictitious and arbitrary, further inquiry could be made concerning the costs incurred, in blood and alienation, for maintaining particular hero schemes. Who benefits and who pays? This type of inquiry, in a nutshell, would be the social scientific synthesis of Freud and Marx.
Because one’s sense of oneself as heroic, as a meaningful contributor to a transcendent system of meaning, is intimately connected to ability to maintain self-esteem, Becker sometimes spoke of personality disorders in terms of “failed heroics” (Becker 1973), and that the critical examination of counseling and psychotherapy is largely a process of becoming consciously aware of the strategies one habitually employs to gain and maintain one’s sense of heroism. We will examine that insight soon. For now we will end this section with two quotes from Becker that illustrate what he was driving at with this concept of heroism.
[It is] not a matter of simple reflection about his early family life, or even bringing to consciousness some of the most distasteful events of his childhood, or least of all a hard, rational scrutiny of one’s motives. It is … going through hell of a lonely and racking rebirth where one throws off the lendings of culture, the costumes that fit us for life’s roles, the masks and panoplies of our standardized heroisms, to stand alone and nude facing the howling elements as … a trembling animal element, the disintegration of the self-esteem that sustains one’s character … The question of personality growth and change, if it is deep-going and authentic, is usually whether one will end in madness or suicide or whether one will, somehow, be able to marshal the strength to take the first few steps in a strange world. [Becker 1972, p. 146]
If you … want to understand directly what is driving your patient, ask yourself simply how he thinks of himself as a hero, what constitutes the framework of reference for his heroic strivings–or better, for the clinical case, why does he not feel heroic in his life? [p.77]
A KEY TO UNDERSTANDING HUMAN EVIL
We see that in Becker’s presentation, human beings are an evolving species which strives to grasp the meaning of the whole of existence while remaining stuck in the position of being but one part of that whole. For accomplishing this task, language is the main tool, yet language itself is a human artifact whose origin is but dimly understood. The human species shares in the evolutionary history of all past and present species. As physical beings, we share completely in nature’s demand that a living species maintain sources of nourishment, protection from the elements, and a suitable environment for procreation.
The human species is physically quite weak and vulnerable. Yet because of our powers of observation and reasoning and the ability to learn new skills, we have successfully adapted to even the most extreme environmental conditions. However, humans are relative newcomers here and the story of our success or failure is still unfolding. Will we as a species learn to contain the raging in our breast and create true community among ourselves and with our environment? Or will it finally be said that we are but one more of those curious species for whom the very characteristics that for a time allowed the species to flourish in the end brought about its own extinction?
As a social species, human beings are nurtured in particular social environments and internalize the values of that social grouping. Group values, in turn, emerge from the particular history and experience of the group. Group values, therefore, are social products, and as factors in social maintenance, are one important aspect of species survival strategy. The material root of values held as transcendent is the extent that social values encapsulate the survival wisdom of particular social groups.
All of this is very true, and is the connection point between such disciplines as evolutionary biology, psychology and sociology. But a strictly materialistic enumeration of the conditions of our existence is ultimately unsatisfying, for we sense ourselves most deeply to be more than merely material beings. Humans have powers of mind that extend far beyond what is necessary for mere material survival.
This mental overload is the source of human creativity and aesthetic and emotional sensitivity, and is expressed symbolically in the assertion that besides the physical body humans also possess a soul or spirit. To speak of the human soul or spirit is to speak of that aspect of human thought and experience that seems to transcend and fly above the material world. In our art, work relationships and communities, humans seek to arrange the physical world such that it bears the human stamp, the imprint of human personality, to demonstrate that we are more than passive adaptors to our physical environment. We are creators–even co-creators with God!
Closely related to the work of the human soul and spirit is the ability to love (Becker 1964). Giving and receiving love is the zenith of human creativity. In love people most clearly experience themselves as a unity of body, soul and spirit. It is through love that personal energies can be most positively directed, so that individual works of creativity are lifted up and invested with meaning and significance far beyond what a material analysis of those works could convey. It is from this that humans gain their sense of being special in the material world. There is no other species that seems to possess this ability for transcending creativity in love in any degree approaching that of human beings.
At the same time we know there is something terribly wrong with us! For while other animals may kill out of territorial instinct and for food, human beings kill for the purely sadistic joy of the act itself. Other animals might, out of helplessness and lack of understanding, dumbly stand by while a fellow suffers. But humans purposely and knowingly inflict suffering on their fellows and then stare at that suffering in Mephistophelian fascination, record it, reenact it, film it and ritualize it, anxious for more!
Human beings are a self-contradictory animal. In terms of mental abilities, humans are truly divine beings, transcendent and ethereal. Mentally we create new worlds or sit on the far side of the planets. Yet this divine and ethereal soul or spirit is entirely dependent for its very existence on a weak and vulnerable physical body, which hungers, thirsts, defecates, ages and finally dies, taking the soul and spirit with it into the abyss of death. Divine beings this vulnerable to negation! It is no wonder there is a raging whirlwind in our breast!
As a result, human beings spend most of their psychic energy in the creation of symbols of immortality that allow, at least momentarily, suppression from consciousness the fact of their mortal, animal nature (Becker 1973). (Note: For purposes of this discussion we are assuming that narratives of the afterlife or psychic survival of the body are primarily–from a functional psychological point of view–defenses against the terror of annihilation. There is no claim made as to whether such narratives may, in addition, be true or false.)
Humans, for all our abstract mental abilities, are fleeting and mortal, here today and gone tomorrow, “fallen,” as many great religious traditions have said. But human symbolic meanings point toward that which is higher, solid, lasting, eternal, whole, heroic, and immortal. Human striving is toward, as Becker saw so clearly, a denial of species determinism, a denial of death.
As far as we know, humans are the only species that knows and understands the reality of death years before it happens. Some animals never seem to understand death, even as the predator pounces or the butcher’s blade is poised for the kill. Other animals do seem to experience a kind of terror just prior to the mortal blow–that look of terror on an animal face at times has haunted each and every one of us! But humans are a species who must live with that furious terror, now simmering, now boiling, from early childhood until the day the death angel calls. Taming the terror is quite literally the central human psychological task. Without some success in taming this terror, in suppressing it from immediate consciousness, a person would be psychotically stunned and unable to maintain forward momentum.
The mechanism for taming of the terror is the creation of symbols of immortality with which people can identify themselves and through which people vicariously participate in immortality. According to this basic insight concerning the nature of being human, all people want to endure and prosper and in some sense gain immortality. But knowledge of mortality condemns them to mask this fact and suppress awareness of it from consciousness. With this we begin to understand the source of evil in our world.
The thing that makes man the most devastating animal that ever stuck his neck up into the sky is that he wants a stature and a destiny that is impossible for an animal; he wants an earth that is not an earth but a heaven, and the price for this kind of fanatic ambition is to make the earth an even more eager graveyard than it naturally is. [Becker 1975. p. 96)
Human beings create symbols to represent immortality and then treat the symbol as if it really had the power to bestow immortality upon us. That is, we become attached to our symbols as to a fetish object (Becker 1973).
For example, wealth, in the form of accumulated goods and services, is a natural symbol of more life, of immortality, as that which stands opposed to deprivation and starvation. Money provides the power to command goods and services and the symbol of wealth might therefore take the form of an accumulation of money. However, the accumulation of money almost inexorably takes on a power of its own, a psychological investment that becomes all but disconnected to the accumulation of goods and services it initially represented. It gets pursued for its own sake as a fetish object.
A fetish is a narrowing down in our symbol picture that has become irrational. The accumulation of wealth in the form of goods and services, because it aids in survival, can be seen as reasonable and rational, although it would surely also have a reasonable and rational satiation point somewhere as well. But the pursuit of money for its own sake, as a fetish object, has no rational satiation point, for more zeroes can always be added!
There is a sacrificial element involved in this kind of fetishism as well. As with idolatry, that which has been constructed becomes a consuming focus for life, causing the person to miss the true richness of life’s experience. Life becomes too narrow and constricted.
Some degree of narrowing down, of constricting, is necessary to human life, for there is simply too much possible experience to digest (Becker 1975). Sitting alone in one closed room, it would be impossible to take in all that is truly there to experience (though some studies suggest that we absorb more through the subconscious than most of us could ever imagine). If all possible perceptions–the clock ticking, the heart beating, the voice of every person speaking, street noises, the fly crossing the room, ad infinitum –-were to register in our consciousness with equal intensity, we would be constantly overwhelmed and life would obviously be impossible. Attention is focused on that which is important and only these things become conscious. Most of what is going on passes by without notice. Given the totality of possible experience in each moment, a mind unable to narrow down to this degree would be stunned by the multiplicity of life.
But how narrowly must we constrict and narrow our experience? A life too narrow is impaired. A landscape perceived only in terms of a prospective development site is crippling. A fellow human perceived only as a client, a consumer, or the possessor of desired sexual organs, is debilitating. It is to miss even that fullness of life that we, with our limited capacities, are able to experience.
Evil has been symbolized in all societies through symbols involving animality, death and decay. Satan, evil personified, is pictured with animal characteristics, living in the place of the dead, which reeks of putrification and feces. Satan’s surroundings are filled with skulls and bones, vipers, dirt and filth, and Satan is totally immersed in the physical world of sexual lust. Evil comes to have a clear moral sense about it as well, as Satan becomes the arch foe of the Good, of God. Therefore, as God becomes identified with that which is supportive of the good (survival and prospering) of community, society and civilization, evil becomes opposition to God’s Will, as acting contrary to God’s Law and as detrimental to the good (survival and prospering) of society.
Evil is wickedness, disorder and chaos. We oppose evil, and rightly so. Our aversion to evil is rooted in the attempt to defeat mortality. We oppose evil as we oppose death! (Becker 1975). But now we have come to the problem of evil from the other side. For evil also clearly results from our attempts to deny and defeat our mortal state–yet we oppose evil as we oppose death. Here we are onto to something important. Follow this closely.
We rightly oppose evil. Few among us consciously embrace evil, and those few who do we mostly consider to be clinically pathological–psychopaths, sociopaths, and such. The liberal humanist tradition is to that extent correct when it posits the innate goodness of human beings–normal people in normal circumstance will choose the good and oppose evil.Reality, however, is too much for us to take in–we must narrow it down lest we be simply overwhelmed. Likewise, mortality is too much for us to oppose. So with but vaguely conscious awareness we narrow down our struggle against mortality to a struggle against evil. Mortality we cannot oppose–but lawbreakers, yes! There is nothing we can do finally to halt death. But this enemy we can annihilate!
The basic theory of evil being offered here is intelligible and clear. In our opposition to evil, we must of necessity narrow down and focus on specific evils, which come to represent mortality and death in the hazy space between conscious awareness and our unconsciousness. Our motives in this are good and it is certainly better that specific evils be opposed than that no evils are opposed, even if ultimately we cannot solve the enigma of death.
However, once we have started to narrow down to specific evils to fight, our tendencies are to narrow too much in our focus, leading us to associate and identify the specific evil we oppose with ultimate evil, and to vaguely imagine that all will be well if we can simply defeat and wipe out this identified evil before us. (To take one example still existentially with us–we start out intending to remove the objective tyrant Saddam from office, but very quickly find ourselves locked (psychologically) in a struggle to the death with the Great Satan himself…)
This tendency to narrow down and to fetishize evil is especially dangerous when we consider the related urge to which we are prone in our manufacture of symbols, that of scapegoating, of identifying our narrowly focused evil of evils with particular persons, groups, races, and ideologies. Once this happens, it is only natural that we then identify the eradication of the evil we fight against as God’s Cause, thus insuring that massacres will continue as sacramental acts!
At this point, it becomes all but impossible to place limits on the violence we are willing to employ in fighting against this evil. And thus the stage is set for the treacheries and demonic events of human history. Ironically, the worst of these atrocities, symbolized by Auschwitz and Hiroshima, were the actions of nations who had been considered by many to be beacons of reason, rationality and Enlightenment in our world. In both cases, as later generations stand in those places where racial and nuclear holocausts have occurred, it is very difficult to even imagine what sort of evil these people thought they were confronting that would justify the means these educated, enlightened and reasonable people willingly employed to fight against it.
We see, therefore, that in seeking to fight against evil, human beings bring ever more evil into the world, because all but inevitably the evil we fight against has been too narrowly defined and too narrowly focused (scapegoated) onto other human beings and ideologies.
But if we add together the logic of the heroic struggle against evil with the necessary fetishization of evil, we get a formula that is no longer pathetic but terrifying. It explains almost by itself why man, of all animals, has caused the most devastation on earth–the most real evil. He struggles extra hard to be immune to death because he alone is conscious of it; but by being able to identify and isolate evil arbitrarily, he is capable of lashing out in all directions against imagined dangers of this world… Man is an animal who must fetishize in order to survive and have “normal mental health.” But this shrinkage of vision that permits him to survive also at the same time prevents him from having the overall understanding he needs to plan for and control the effects of his shrinkage of experience. (Becker 1973, pp. 150, 153)
This is why human evil in Becker’s presentation is so ambiguous and so frightening. Human beings commit their most treacherous evil acts out of heroic intentions, motivated by the very desire to eradicate evil. It is no wonder that the generals, soldiers and civilian populations on both sides of any armed conflict see themselves as working toward the Good, fighting evil, and are able to repeat ritually and with fullest conviction, “God Is With Us–God Is On Our Side!” When we examine ourselves and others, what we find is not an immediate desire to slay, maim, hurt and kill (or if so, we rightly consider the person to be clinically pathological). What we find is the intention to struggle heroically against evil! Human beings will identify willy-nilly as “enemy” that which potentially threatens personal expansion or the collective survival and prospering of their group. Our images of enemy/evil are culturally mediated and we very soon lose any kind of reasonable, rational individual or collective control over the means we sanction for use against them.
References
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