Death and the Limits of Psychotherapy

By Daniel Liechty, Ph.D.

 

DEATH AND REPRESSION

Why do people act the way they do? By the time Ernest Becker wrote his mature works, he began to see that a well-rounded, interdisciplinary and empirical/scientific picture of the human condition would have to take some rather unexpected turns. He began to understand that even mundane, everyday actions grow out of an acutely existential and ontological dilemma. A symbol-creating animal must mask anxieties of finitude and numb itself to its own precariousness in the face of threats of abandonment and annihilation. For such a being, even mundane events can take on the character of life and death (Becker 1973).

Consciousness of self, the paramount human characteristic, necessarily entails consciousness and knowledge of death. In Becker’s understanding of human motivation, awareness of death, the anxiety that this provokes, and the strategies people devise to deal with the anxiety are at the very core of why we act the way we do. But it would be too naive just to say that we are motivated by the fear of death. That simple formula is easily countered by examples of people who, in situations of extremity, have willingly chosen death. Furthermore, people engage regularly in behaviors such as smoking or driving a car, which, if anything, would indicate that fear of death is the farthest thing from their minds. Therefore, to understand what Becker was getting at, we need to approach death not as the concrete, bodily bluntness of dead corpses but rather as a very complex psychological symbol.

Death anxiety is not present in young children, who have no clear understanding of death. The infant strives to thrive and grow on an organismic level and to experience warmth and care on the psychological level. Being totally dependent on its caregivers for this, the first anxiety a child experiences is that of abandonment. This is only indirectly a death anxiety and is not experienced as such by the child. Death anxiety is not the basic anxiety if that is determined by chronological priority. But existentially, it is possible to see that first anxieties chronologically are not necessarily the basic anxieties in psychologically developed adults. By the time one’s cognitive abilities are developed enough to comprehend the sequence of object-loss (abandonment) = inability to thrive = death, we may assume that death anxiety, dread of annihilation, has already superseded mere abandonment as the basic anxiety. That is to say that as the self becomes an object of consciousness, the anxiety of object loss becomes the anxiety of loss of self. In Becker’s (1973) view, death as a symbol summarizes the entire spectrum of adult anxiety.

If fear of death is the basic anxiety of adults, why are so few aware of it? Becker’s answer to this was repression. Fundamental repression is not directed toward instinctual libidinal drives (as in the orthodox psychoanalytic tradition) but toward recognition of the basic human condition. It is not a simple and straightforward negation. Becker understood repression as an essential and creative force of the ego used to further ego enhancement. Because death is an inescapable fact of our animal nature, fear of death is natural and inevitable to any animal who has gained a sense of self-consciousness. Yet to live in a state of immediate consciousness of death would be to live in constant panic, dread, and paralysis. In the absence of adequate repression, the forward movement of living would be severely impaired, as in fact we do see happens in cases of specific types of psychosis.

Repression serves the interest of the ego in blocking from immediate awareness the consciousness of death, thus allowing normal life to continue. Immediately we face a major paradox of human existence in this formulation. Death is a fact for all human beings. There is no escape from it and it could happen at any moment. Yet those who are most realistic and “unrepressed,” people for whom this awareness is constantly right there on the surface of consciousness, are those least able to function. Likewise, those who are most able to act with equanimity and ease in daily living are those who are the most “repressed” and oblivious to this basic reality of human existence. Repression in Becker’s view is thus more positive than negative. Only half tongue-in-cheek did Becker take a poke at the human-potential movement in suggesting that a really repression-free existence would resemble at least one type of schizophrenia.

Yet repression is not a single-dimensional positive phenomenon. The real human condition must strike sheer terror in the heart of anyone who faces it head on. That we are both divine beings and food for worms is too much to psychologically digest. lf the ego uses repression in order to maintain normal mental health, there is a price to be paid. There is always the return of the repressed. Becker poignantly summed up the genius of psychoanalysis in suggesting that it “revealed to us the complex penalties of denying the truth of man’s condition, what we might call the costs of pretending not to be mad” (Becker 1973, p. 29).

What Becker was saying is that while on the one hand repression allows normal living to proceed, it does so only by closing the doors of perception to much that is undeniably real about human existence. The price paid for keeping our psyche from being continually flooded with the real terror of the human situation is shrinkage of experience, a preference for habitual perceptions and responses and a narrowing down of our ability to see alternative points of view and alternative responses.

Becker suggested that what in the literature of psychoanalysis is referred to as specific character types can easily be understood as broad groupings of habitually preferred ways of perceiving and responding in the context of this shrinkage of experience. Character type varies according to the specific circumstances of individual upbringing. Because of its commitment to the theory of libidinal sexual drives as the foundation for character, psychoanalysis grouped these character types around specific erogenous zones-oral, anal, and phallic. In Becker’s recasting of the basis for character formation, the use of erogenous zones to designate groupings continues to make sense. But not because of the libidinal drive theory, which has been largely abandoned in social science. It continues to makes sense because in specific families and individual circumstances of upbringing, early training during the oedipal transition phase is likely to give an extra charge of anxiety to the learning around one of these bodily orifices. As the child picks up on that extra charge of anxiety that within its particular family group is associated with particular body parts and body functions, the child’s habitual repressive preferences begin to be formed. The learning of specific styles of habitual repressive preferences is essentially what Becker meant by character formation (Becker 1962).

Narrowing down of experience in repression, learning of habitual repressive preferences, and refusal or even inability to perceive the fullness of a situation and to formulate alternative responses are all ways of speaking about the price we pay for protecting ourselves from being flooded by overwhelming anxiety in the face of the real terror of the human situation. Becker referred to all of this collectively as “character armor,” a term he borrowed from Reich (1970). Becker expanded on it in an especially vivid way to describe the human being as the “angel in armor,” the divine being who must protect itself against normal, everyday life (Becker 1969). “Character armor” is a very apt phrase that highlights the ambiguity of human existence. The metal armor worn by the knights of old protected the person inside against the onslaught of enemy blows and arrows. But at the same time it severely restricted the person’s range of vision and scope of movement. The suit of armor was of value in one arena and one arena only.

Character armor also protects the ego from overwhelming anxiety. But just as it protects, so also does it severely restrict. Arguably functional and necessary within the arena in which it was formed, it may be very dysfunctional in new and different circumstances. The person’s habitual repressive preferences inform one that what is happening now is like what has happened before. This may prevent the person from seeing new situations for what they really are.

This we all do. We could not live and function without character armor. Without it we would be faced with a continual onslaught of overwhelming anxiety, an anxiety rooted in the terror of abandonment, loneliness, finitude, animality, exposure and unprotectedness, of the void of nothingness, of nonbeing–that is, the terror of death understood as a complex symbol. The prospect we face in personal growth, therefore, is not one of living in the absence of character armor.

Our character armor forms who we are as individuals. But how much repression is necessary? How protected must we be? When habitual perceptions and responses have become clearly dysfunctional in new situations, causing us to hurt and damage people we love, or always to miss out on creative and joyful experiences, can we shed at least some of that armor? This is the question we face in personal growth and in therapy. Our character armor was formed reflexively, without our knowing what was happening to us. It was formed by our family situation, by the particulars of our upbringing, by the particulars of class, cultural, and social prejudices to which we have been exposed. It was formed without our conscious consent, so to speak. By making our habitual repressive responses, our character armor, an object of conscious awareness, it might be possible to take at least some conscious control and shed the part of it that is most severely blocking us at a particular point in time.

The process of making our character armor an object of our consciousness and taking some rational control of it is the very process of personal growth and of therapy. But it is also a process that exposes the ego to the very anxiety from which the armor was designed to protect it. A decision to look at our armor full in the face, to see and understand how and why it was formed in the first place, is by its very nature a decision to face the anxiety of finitude, the terror of death. The promise of therapy is a greater ability to adjust, to love and to experience creativity and joy. But the lake of anxiety from which our character armor protects us also defines the limits of therapy.

THE LIMITS OF THERAPY

Once we look at the problem of human existence from the perspective that Becker presented, it becomes very clear that what is wrong with human life is a basic fact of life itself–that we are born to die (Becker 1973). There is simply no therapy that will solve the real and root cause of this basic anxiety. There is no therapy or strategy for personal growth that can give people what they really want, which is not to die–immortality. The human condition is finally one of agony, tragedy, despair and death. And the more self-actualized or liberated the individual becomes, the more that individual is brought face to face with this reality. As Becker (1973) wrote,

The person is stuck with the full problem of himself, and yet he cannot rely on himself to make any sense out of it … What does it mean, then … to talk such fine-sounding phrases like “Being cognition,” “the fully-centered person,” “full humanism,” “the joy of peak experiences,” or whatever, unless we seriously qualify such ideas with the burden and the dread that they also carry? … we must remember that life itself is the insurmountable problem. [pp. 269-270]

Faced with the dread and burden of life itself, people gain their strength, their sense of security and protection, from external sources. As we saw, this dynamic of gaining strength from external sources, which begins in earliest childhood as the child gains its sense of security and protection from its caregivers, is the dynamic of transference. What people seek from the outside is what Becker called an “immortality ideology” (Becker 1975. p. 5), in which to find security and protection. By giving allegiance to some external source of symbolic power, whether in the form of a particular person, the cultural causa sui narrative, a political group or movement, or in abject idol worship, the anxieties of personal finitude are calmed and kept at bay.

Counseling and therapy can help people who are particularly twisted and hemmed in by their habitual repressive preferences. It can help those so motivated to become consciously aware of the immortality ideologies to which they have given allegiance in the past, along with the consequences this has had in their lives. It can help those so motivated to look at the underside, the unintended consequences, the price being paid for giving their devotion and loyalty to particular sources of security and protection. In this way the person can be aided in taking some intelligent control of what have been reflexive and unconscious motivations in that person’s life.

Yet if Becker (and here Becker, who was open about his indebtedness to Otto Rank, followed closely Rank’s [1958] formulations) is correct, this is not finally what people want. They want a new immortality ideology. They want religion. Honest psychology simply cannot deliver on that desire.

Many approaches to therapy and counseling in our time have tried to solve this human need by making of psychology or psychotherapy itself a new immortality ideology. Becker (1972) saw this happening on various levels that are continuing in the present.

The first way that psychology becomes a new immortality ideology is limited to the few, such as Freud, who developed totalistic explanatory systems and used those systems as personal immortality ideologies (Becker 1973). The closest disciples of such people may also participate in and perpetuate the aura of power that the system generates. By nearly exclusive use of the language and symbols of a particular system in everyday life, the system becomes, in effect, a living system of belief. The transference dynamics involved in maintaining such an immortality ideology might include aloofness or disdain for the unenlightened outside the fold, rejection and excommunication of dissenters within the fold, narrowness of perception in an attempt to make all new experiences fit the system, and endless arguments and divisions over the fine points of officially sanctioned interpretations. (Note here the many similarities between those new converts to a particular school of psychology or psychotherapy and those new converts to a particular overt religious belief.)

All allegiances to human creations as symbols of immortality power have an underside, have unintended side-effect, and exact a price in order to maintain their plausibility as transcendent sources of power. Another way that psychology becomes a new immortality ideology is to supplement itself with explicitly metaphysical doctrines and teachings. Much of the New Age therapies and recovery programs we see in our time clearly move in this direction. (Note also the emergence of ideologies such as Scientology and est, that self-consciously position themselves on the ever-blurring line between a psychological self-help system and an overtly religious ideology.) Becker saw the power of such approaches as coming from the religious nature of these ideologies. But he also saw in some of these therapies that the power source is rooted in the transference dynamics of the person of the guru-psychologist. Of such Becker (1973) wrote,

The psychotherapist himself beams out the steady and quiet power of transference and becomes the guru figure of the religion. No wonder we are seeing such a proliferation of psychological gurus in our time. It is the perfect and logical development of the fetishization of psychology as a belief system. It extends that system into its necessary dimension, which is immortality and the life-enhancing power that goes with it. [p.273]

Becker saw that in such therapies, there is usually a studied disregard and avoidance of examination of transference/countertransference dynamics. After all, such an examination could only expose the clay feet of the system itself. By ignoring and avoiding such dynamics, Becker wrote,

The aura of guru infallibility remains intact and provides an automatic shelter for the patient’s deep yearnings for safety and security. It is no accident, either, that the therapists who practice these guru therapies cultivate themselves with halo-like beards and hairdos, to look the part they play. [p. 273].

Honest psychotherapy and counseling can play a positive role in helping people to develop lives that are less reflexive and compulsive, less restricted, less damaging to others, lives with enhanced possibilities for creativity, joy, and spiritual depth. But honest counselors and therapists must also be clear that this is achieved only when the patient assumes the burden of increased anxiety.

In short, attached to personal growth there is an inevitable aspect that the traditions of spiritual formation identify as a “dark night of the soul.” The work of the person in therapy is to confront and learn to shoulder an increased burden of anxiety. This takes an enormous amount of ego strength, and much of the therapy will be directed less at ‘solving’ the person’s issues tan toward assisting the person in developing the ego strength required for the tasks of living a productive life while shouldering this burden of anxiety.

Becker helps us understand that a therapist must be clear about the costs as well as the benefits of psychotherapy. There are tradeoffs that involve both new possibilities as well as limitations. If the root problem of life is mortal life itself, then those therapies that promise joy without pain, growth without suffering, and unlimited potentialities for living must be seen as extremely problematic.

References

Becker, E. (1962). Toward a comprehensive theory of depression. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease. 135: 26-35.

___ (1969). Angel in armor: A post-Freudian perspective on the nature of man. New York: Free Press.

___(1972). The birth and death of meaning: An interdisciplinary perspective on the problem of man. 2nd ed. New York: Free Press.

___(1973). The denial of death. New York: Free Press.

Rank, O. (1958). Beyond psychology. New York: Dover.

Reich, W. (1970). The mass psychology of fascism. New York: Simon and Schuster.