Metaxy–Life In-Between: A Model of Adult Psychology

By Daniel Liechty, Ph.D.

 

What makes people act the way they do? By the time Ernest Becker wrote his mature works, he was deeply committed to an existentialist frame of reference for understanding human behavior, a frame of reference that rejected an Aristotelian model of homeostasis in favor of a model of the dynamic movement of balance. What makes this commitment so intriguing is the fact that Becker did not bring this frame of reference to his work as a prior philosophical commitment. He began as an empirical social scientist, with a firm grounding in anthropology, sociology, and psychoanalysis, and was drawn to the existentialist framework by following his empiricist method to its conclusion. Explicitly existentialist views took shape slowly and began to appear rather late in his writing.

In formulating his understanding human behavioral motivation and the psycho-emotional dynamics that support this motivational system, Becker wrestled with the ongoing question of what is universal in human nature versus what is relative to the particular culture in which a particular person lives. In many ways, this is a recapitulation of the old “nature versus nurture” argument that is probably the oldest in the social sciences. Do we have a static “human nature” that is the same in every human being? Or is everything about us–our behavior, thoughts, values–totally relative and determined by our environment and upbringing? There appears to be plenty of evidence that can be mustered for either side of this debate.

Becker outlined a position that gives due regard to the evidence coming from both sides. That much about human values, behavior, morals (sense of what is right and wrong) and so on is relative and formed by environment has clearly been established in fields such as psychology, anthropology and even political science. But Becker was also impressed by the idea that human beings are, after all, a species that shares an enormous species history. The universals of “human nature,” the common ground shared by all human beings, in other words, would have to be rooted in that animal species history. What all human beings share, in other words what is universal to all human beings, is life in the physical body, a body that is born and dies, that eats, sleeps, seeks shelter and protection. Furthermore, baseline human cognitive development dictates that humans everywhere are able to reflect upon and know that we are physical bodies that are born and die.

What emerged in Becker’s work was a double-axis way of encountering and interpreting human nature. The first axis delineates the ontological, human universal experience of the self-conscious animal, the animal who is able by course of normal cognitive development to develop and employ abstract and symbolic thought. This invariably creates awareness of one’s mortal nature (knowledge of death) and subject that person to the subsequent anxiety contained in that knowledge–the clash between the survival instincts on the one hand, and the knowledge of inevitable death on the other. This is endemic to who we are as human beings, it is an ontological universal, and hence Becker designated this as the Ontological Axis.

Correspondingly, Becker immediately acknowledged that what we do with that knowledge of death, and how we learn to cope with the subsequent anxiety that knowledge creates, is completely contoured by the varieties of human collective and individual experience, subject to the contouring powers of culture and environment. This is what Becker designated as the Existential Axis.

THE ONTOLOGICAL AXIS

Becker’s mature model of adult psychology views human existence as standing between ontological pulls on the one hand and existential pulls on the other. He characterized the ontological axis as the fear of life and the fear of death. On the one hand the creature is impelled by a powerful desire to identify with the cosmic process, to merge himself with the rest of nature. On the other hand he wants to be unique, to stand out as something different, special and set apart (Becker 1973).

By “fear of life,” Becker characterized that aspect of human motivation that shrinks back from fully developed individuation. The initial experience of all people is that of total dependency, While yet in the womb (as we might imagine) the organism simply exists and grows in a maximally dependent state with no sense of need whatsoever. The developing fetus is kept warm by the mother’s body and is fed by umbilical connection to the mother’s digestive system. We might say that it is only during this period that the person is able to experience a psychological “free lunch.” That is, the person is able to grow without cost, to develop without adding to the store of organismic anxiety.

Becker was not saying that the person remembers this time in any concrete sense, either consciously or unconsciously. Although he did not express himself directly on this issue, Becker would have met the claims of some people to have concrete prenatal memories with extreme skepticism. Becker felt that one of the reasons Otto Rank’s work on birth trauma was so misunderstood stemmed from the fact that he was taken too literally as inferring concrete memories of birth and before. Becker interpreted birth trauma as the trauma involved in leaving the known and comfortable and entering into the new and unknown.

Memories progress from interactions with objects. Even if we grant the extremely doubtful proposition that the fetal brain in the final weeks of gestation is developed enough to form and hold cognitive memories, there are simply no objects in the prenatal state to stimulate such memories. The sense of self is linguistically formed and it is difficult to see how any distinct and personal memories could be fashioned in the absence of some developed use of the linguistic first person.

However, one need not be naively credulous concerning claims to cognitive prenatal memories to posit the prenatal state as a symbol or metaphor for the desire to develop without anxiety. When psychoanalysis speaks of a desire to return to the womb, it is using the metaphor in exactly this sense-a desire to have one’s needs met in an absolutely passive manner.

As the fetus is born into the world, it gets its first taste of the costs of development. It may get a cold slap on the rear or it may be eased into a tub of controlled temperature water. But regardless of the particular birthing technique, as its lungs first fill with air its status as an organism changes completely and further organismic development must be purchased by adding to the store of psychic anxiety.

Because human beings desire both consciously and unconsciously to avoid anxiety, there is, according to Becker, an ontological urge to merge with something larger than the individual. In infancy this is experienced as a desire to merge with the caregivers, to hand one’s individuality over to their care and attention. As the person develops, this fear of life, this fear of individuality, may take the form of a desire to merge and be swallowed up by the family, the tribe, the nation, by oceanic nature, or even by God. The point is that there is an ontological pull, formed in the darkest recesses of even prenatal life, to passively depend on and merge with an oceanic power source that relieves the individual from the anxiety of personal responsibility for existence. When one merges self or ego into such a power source, there is a strong sensation of good feeling, of satisfaction, well-being, and plentitude.

For the human being, however, there is a price to be paid for this merger-the cost of one’s own individuality. Merger finally means death to one’s individuated existence, calling into play the other pull of ontology, a fear of death.

By “fear of death,” Becker characterized that force of human ontology that seeks perpetuation of the self, further individuation and personal uniqueness, and independence and self-reliance. This urge is evident in the earliest stages of childhood, as the organism seeks to interact and grow by exploration and manipulation of the object world. The developing ego is propelled by its own ontological dynamics toward growth. The very sources of power merger, represented by the caregivers, can be experienced as a positive threat to this development, since merger demands development on the terms of the power source rather than on the terms of the developing ego.

Once again, however, this dynamic of ego development has its costs. Independence and individuation risks aloneness, isolation, loneliness. The world of objects is not a unilateral field for ego development. It is also an overwhelming source of danger to the isolated and lone self. Isolation stirs the anxiety of object loss, of annihilation. If the ego sticks out too far in nature, it is vulnerable to being lopped off. This sense of extreme vulnerability in the face of overwhelming power underlies all further development of individuality.

At the merger end of the ontological axis, the side of fear of life, the person enjoys the good feeling of passive safety. But it is purchased by the sacrifice of individuality. The dangers of the world are real dangers, but the ego seeks interaction in the object world. One moves out of the fear of life by repression of the real dangers in the object world. At the other end of the ontological axis, the fear of death, the ego pushes itself into the object world. It gains there the good feeling of development and accomplishment that comes from masterful manipulation of the object world. But the cost of this sense of mastery is the underlying sense of anxiety in standing isolated and alone before the real dangers of the object world. This anxiety of isolation and annihilation pushes the person back toward merger with a protective power source that is larger than the individual ego.

As Becker’s ontology developed, therefore, what we see is a picture of individual motivation running between the poles of fear of life and fear of death-the pulls of merger and individuation. At the one end of this axis, the person is spurred toward the middle by repression of the fear of being swallowed up. At the other end, the person is spurred toward the middle by repression of the anxiety of isolation. A balanced middle point exists only as an ideal. Actual human life is more like a seesaw between these poles.

We might illustrate this by picturing a young child accompanied by its primary caregiver entering into a new environment-say, a petting zoo or playground. As the child enters the strange environment, it clings closely, both physically and mentally, to it caregiver, its external source of protective power. Then, as its eyes and ears begin to survey the new environment, it spots an object that demands further exploration–a puppy or another child. The child’s ego projects itself into further development by interaction with this object and calls into service the dynamic of repression to quell the child’s fears of the object world, allowing the child to move toward interaction with the object. Slowly but surely, the child leaves the close physical and mental protective space of the caregiver as it becomes absorbed in interaction with the object. As the child manipulates the object, the developing ego delights in its sense of growth and mastery. The child “forgets” its caregiver and indulges fully in creative mastery play with the object.

Then something unexpected happens that calls the whole process into question. The puppy barks loudly or the new playmate hits or bites. Suddenly the good feeling of manipulation and mastery grinds to a halt. The child’s self feels itself too far extended, standing alone and isolated in the face of the real dangers of the object world. Overwhelmed by anxiety, the child goes running back to its caregiver, its protective power source, for assurance that it does not risk annihilation for its venture into the object world.

Then after a good cry and a few minutes of hugging comfort, the child spots a new object and the cycle of learning repeats itself.

This illustration is sort of an idyllic picture of running along the ontological poles of human existence. Real, lived experience is rarely so cleanly straightforward. The child might be subject to an overly protective parent who adds to the store of anxiety of the object world and thus hinders the child from natural exploration. Likewise, a parent might be too quick to shove the child into confrontation with the object world before the child is spurred by natural curiosity, thus escalating for the child the anxiety of abandonment. The child may go scurrying back to the parent only to find that the parent is no longer sitting in the same place. The child might experience from the object something much more painful and threatening than a puppy’s bark or a child’s bite–perhaps a serious bum or a deep cut, thus heightening the child’s fear of the dangers of the object world to overwhelming levels. Perhaps, as in cases of child physical or sexual abuse, the caregiver is both a source of comfort and simultaneously a source of the child’s pain, thus creating an almost impossibly ambiguous sense of safety and danger in the world.

The child is not psychically crippled for life by one experience of merger/individuation gone awry. But when recurring patterns of anxiety-laden behavioral interactions take place over long periods of time, the tendencies of the personality–where, when, and by what the person feels threatened–are set. As the ego develops into the symbolic realm, these patterns of symbolic threats are projected in various directions. Likewise, the protective power sources on which the person relies for courage in the face of threats may also be symbolically projected in various directions. The ontological axis of fear of life and fear of death takes shape in the form of an existential axis. Life as metaxy along the existential axis, the axis of anxiety and repression, is the resulting picture Becker drew of adult psychology.

THE EXISTENTIAL AXIS

Becker viewed adult psychology as metaxy, as life in-between, as dialectical forces emanating from various existential pulls, which themselves are rooted unconsciously in the projected perception of threats and sources of protection, formed by early experience, which we explored in terms of the ontological axis. The ontological axis, the fear of life and the fear of death, Becker viewed as basic to human nature and would apply in some measure to all human beings. The existential axis represents culturally specific manifestations of the ontological dynamics. We will discuss those existential elements that apply to Western culture in the late twentieth century, that is, the era of postmodern consciousness. While individual people are focused more intently on specific dialectical pulls along the existential axis, Becker viewed all people within this culture as interacting in various degrees with each of these.

It should be stressed that in presenting human existence in terms of dialectic forces, Becker was not positing these forces as absolute dualisms. But they are felt dualisms. They are experiential dualisms. In effect, Becker was saying that human life is a confluence of opposites. But we tend in our society to think of opposites as mutually exclusive. For example, we tend to think of strength and vulnerability as mutually exclusive. To be strong means to be invulnerable. The strength of a person is registered as inversely proportional to that person’s areas of vulnerability. But Becker would point us toward a kind of balance in life in which, for example, strength would not be set in absolute opposition to vulnerability. In fact, conscious and thoughtful choice to maintain areas of vulnerability in one’s life might be seen as a demonstration of more strength than a reflexive and frantic move to remove or hide all signs of vulnerability. In other words, while our culture pushes us toward an either/or encounter with life’s opposing forces, Becker would rather point us toward an intelligent and reflective balance. With this in mind, let us look at a few of the most important of these dialectical forces.

Anality and Narcissism

In classical psychoanalytic characterology, the anal character type refers clinically to obsessive-compulsive disorder and more generally to that type of person who exhibits orderliness, parsimony, and obstinacy in their manner of coping in life. Becker used the term more expansively to refer to a style of mastering the dualism of symbolic self and animal body. The animal body is part of the object world and is subject to the real and perceived dangers of the object world. People need to symbolically escape the dangers of the object world. Symbolically evading the anxiety of these real and perceived dangers takes the form of mastery of the body, that is, mastery of the object world that the body symbolically represents. Anal characteristics result from this attempt to symbolically transcend nature. As Becker (1973) wrote, “To say that someone is ‘anal’ means that someone is trying extra hard to protect himself against the accidents of life and danger of death, trying to use the symbols of culture as a sure means of triumph over natural mystery, trying to pass himself off as anything but an animal” (p. 32).

In desiring order and cleanliness, excessively fearing germs and filth, the anal character seeks to protect the symbolic self from falling prey to the threats of the object world. If the object world can be ordered just right, it can present no threat. Natural anality tends one toward the preference of thorough and safe embeddedness in the cultural hero system shared by the large crowd of others, and perceives danger in that which threatens the meanings that system imparts. Natural anality tends one toward the fear of life, of individuality, because life and individuality represent the chaos and anarchy of nature. In out society, for example, money might come to represent the ultimate in the orderly symbolic triumph over nature, of a thoroughly abstract mode of compartmentalizing the arbitrariness of nature (Becker 1975), and thus the association of the anal personality with miserliness.

There is a healthy form of anality, for without some measure of orderliness in life experiences, life would simply be intolerable. In its extremes, however, such as in anal-sadism, the only form of encounter with life that one can muster is to destroy it. While anality represents a constricting horror of physicalness, of death and decay, the constriction is sometimes worth the price. Better to be narrowly built into a secure world with secure meanings, into routine and the dependability of mechanical objects, than to shoulder the chaos of nature.

The other end of this continuum is narcissism. Whereas the anal tendency draws one toward the secure and shared meanings, narcissism sets oneself up as the focus of meaning for all people. Becker viewed the narcissistic urge as an expression of the “will to power.” Just as there is a healthy form of anality, so is there a healthy narcissism. A measure of self-love and self-confidence is necessary for a healthy human existence. The narcissistic urge is inseparable from the desire of the ego to grow and develop. It is the urge of narcissism that aids the ego in harnessing the dynamics of repression to quell the anxieties of emerging into the object world.

But in its exaggerated forms, narcissism becomes destructive by discounting and devaluing the meanings of others, of the shared meanings of culture and community. The extreme narcissist puffs up his or her project of meaning to the exclusion of shared meanings with others, in effect cutting him- or herself off from grounding in the communal protective pool of meaning. Turned inward, this inversion creates a totally unresponsive attitude toward the world. Turned outward, it can create the willingness to sacrifice countless people and objects in the pursuit of private aggrandizement and gratification.

Submission and Aggression

The earliest conscious experience of the child is that of seeking to please its caregivers. Pleasing its caregivers is the coin by which the child imagines it coaxes the caregivers into giving love and attention, which are the very foundation stones for the child’s feeling of self-worth and security.

We carry this desire to please those we perceive as authorities into adult life. Submissiveness to authority is, in Becker’s view, the very core of the human heart. We have already seen this in Becker’s understanding of an expanded view of transference dynamics. People do not simply submit to authority because they are forced to do so. They positively seek authority figures to which they can submit. Submission relieves one of the tensions and anxieties of responsible personal existence and action. Submission is a natural response to the recognition of the overwhelming transcendence of nature. To submit and then to bask in the power of that which overwhelmingly transcends the self produces the oceanic good feeling of righteousness. Healthy submission is a realistic assessment of the fact that one’s own ego is transcended in the awesome mystery of nature. As Becker wrote, it takes real strength to allow oneself to be transcended (Becker 1969).

At the other end of this continuum is aggression. Aggression represents the individual urge to resist the ego annihilation of submission, to assert one’s own meanings in the face of that which transcends the ego. Aggression does not simply refer to violence. In fact, the resort to violence may be viewed as the abandonment of healthy aggression. Healthy aggression, aggression in the service of the developing ego, refers rather to a determination to resist the annihilation of being transcended and to insist on the integrity of one’s own meanings and interpretations. Violent aggression often takes place in a group context and takes place more out of cowardliness than out of strength. Often it is but a compensatory act for submission to the will and authority of a leader. The leader buys the group’s submission by authorizing (and shouldering the guilt for) violent aggression directed toward those weaker and those scapegoated by the group.

All people experience the pulls of submission and aggression. The ideal of mental health points toward a centering balance of these pulls, a balance that strives for willingness to be transcended without self-abasement and groveling, a balance that maintains a basic sense of humility in the face of power without succumbing to the urge for violent aggression as compensation for this humility. It is a balance that is the goal of personal psychological growth.

Constriction and Expansion

Personality theorists of various schools look to the constrictions placed on personality during early childhood as a significant source of character development. Most of the time such constrictions are seen as uniformly negative and therapy is aimed at releasing the person from these constrictions. Becker also viewed constrictions as negative, but not uniformly so. A healthy kind of constriction holds the personality together, so to speak, and keeps it from flying off in all directions. Without constrictions, the person would lack a solid base for encounter and action.

The whole of reality is too much for the person to take in and digest. Therefore, personality constrictions aid the person in taking in the world of experience in manageable chunks. What makes constrictions negative is not the fact that they are constrictions but rather that, for the most part, they are reflexive and unconscious. They are imposed on the individual without the person’s consent, at a time when the person had no rational awareness of what was happening. Nevertheless, these constrictions have performed the positive function of allowing the person some sort of solid adaptive survival in the circumstances in which they were formed.

In this view, the goal of therapy would not be simply to uniformly free the person from all constrictions, for to do so would be to leave the person without firm moorings in the world. The goal of therapy would be to make the person more consciously aware of the sources of those constrictions that are now producing unwanted effects in the person’s current life circumstances. Although Becker realized that therapy and personal growth do not consist of insight alone, he did feel that insight, of having the sources of personality constrictions revealed to the person’s consciousness, is essential to the healing process. This is the beginning point for the person to take some conscious control over automatic perceptions of threats and sources of protective power.

Becker viewed neurotic constriction as a result of the suppression of symbolic choices in the face of the world of actions and objects. People hold onto a narrow range of symbolic choices as a way of avoiding anxiety. It reflects the habits one has learned of tucking oneself into a secure meaning world in the choice of symbolic sources of protective power. The clinically-diagnosed fetishist is the extreme example of this kind of constrictive selection of a power source, a person so completely tucked into one peculiar source of power that he or she is literally unable to act in its absence. But all people fetishize to some degree. We all have our rabbit’s foot of one kind or another. The broader our range of sources for protective power, the more different kinds of rabbit’s feet we have, the less dependent we are on any one of them and thus the more able we will be to see a wider range of action choices in response to the object world.

Ego expansion is that force that draws the person into new experiences and discoveries in the object world. It draws the person away from the secure meanings of learned roles and behaviors in recognition that the personality is always greater than the prescribed cultural role and status of society. It is that force that allows the person to encounter others as full beings and not simply as partial beings.

Healthy expansion must be grounded, however, in a firm base of shared social meaning. The pull away from the familiar, toward originality and adventure, can leave the person exposed and isolated if shared meanings are not cultivated at the same time.

All people experience the pulls of constriction and expansion. The ideal of mental health points toward a centering balance of these pulls, a balance that strives for firm grounding in secure meaning without remaining so narrow that the joy of novel experience is lost, a balance that maintains a basic sense of forward movement without flying off willy-nilly any which way, It is a balance that is the goal of personal psychological growth.

Inner World and Outer World

The transaction world of each person exists both externally and internally, Becker wrote of both an “external pole” and an “internal pole” of transaction (Becker 1964b, p, 125). He thought that individual people have preferences for one or the other sphere of transaction and that this has far-reaching effects on everything from personal styles of encounter to choices of occupation. These preferences reflect individual habits of dealing with the experiential dualism of body and self.

The internal world is the world of symbols and fantasy objects, while the external world is the world of those things we bump into, We all act in both worlds, Contact with the external world shapes personal being and identity, while bringing to bear the resources of the internal world in transacting the outer world shapes the order we impose upon it. As Becker (1967) wrote,

The whole history of human culture is a history of the interaction of both worlds: the bringing to bear of man’s fantasy-world on the hard world of nature, the interaction of one in the other. The symbol-world, taken in manageable doses, pays dividends in the real world. [p. 55]

Imagination is the link and mediates between these two worlds, the symbol-world and the real world of concrete objects.

Imagination is the link between new sources of energy within the organism and a new kind of external world outside it. In this way, imagination circles around the bind of habitual thought, and liberates new energies of adaptation; and it also circles around the accustomed facets of objects and shows them in a new light. [pp, 172-173]

Undergoing and Doing

Becker drew repeatedly on the work of John Dewey for his insights. This category of doing and undergoing belongs to Dewey. Doing refers to positive action in the external world, while undergoing refers to the accumulation, registering, and development of the experiences of action. Both activity and passivity are necessary components in building up a sense of personal worth and self-esteem.

Becker saw that these two types of action play an especially important role in the socialization process. The child has a natural urge to act, to experiment. The human being is a “doing” animal and this is very intense during early childhood. Yet if the child never experiences blocks to its actions and experimentations, the experiences cannot be registered and reflected upon. The process of action-blockage-reflection-action is the very learning process of socialization itself. If the child experiences no blockage, we may well have the makings of a sociopath. On the other hand, if the lockage is always immediate and absolute, the child is never allowed to make its own closure on the action process and learns only a style of passive support seeking. For this reason, Becker counseled caregivers to aim for blockage of “middle intensity” (Becker 1964, p. 103).

Masochism and Sadism

Like the French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, Becker thought sadism and masochism come very naturally to human beings and much of human interaction can be viewed as a dance of these two forces (Sartre 1956). Because it corresponds to the experience of earliest childhood, when we were totally dependent on our caregivers for life itself, the passive, masochistic style is present in all people. We positively seek sources of power for self-merger and feel ourselves transcended and unworthy in the face of such power.

The masochistic urge is that which seeks transference merger into a source of higher power. It seeks oceanic pleasure in the act of submission to that power. Becker did write about a kind of healthy and mature masochism, a conscious, reasoned, and freely chosen self-surrender to God in the recognition of the self as fully transcended (Becker 1973). But this is not the masochism of daily life, which is reflexive and unconscious. In normal masochism, as well as in masochism as a sexual perversion, the person pursues an abreactional move to make its source of pain into a source of pleasure. The act of submission is an act of self-abasement, a loss of self, closely tied to the ontological fear of life.

The masochistic surrender of self is accompanied then by the sadistic affirmation of self, as can be seen in many religious rituals, including the Christian eucharist, in which ceremonies of confession and surrender finally culminate in the symbolic or physical sacrifice of a victim (Beers 1992). Both of these styles of interaction stem from an impoverished sense of self, Becker (1969) viewed both the sadist and the masochist as worshipers of force:

The impoverished person is the one who feels that anything that can be affirmed forcefully has value. Whether he is the one who inflicts pain or the one who suffers it, by using and submitting to force he comes under the dominion of the really real, the natural and vital. The weaker we are, the more limited is our action, but necessarily the greater is the forceful commitment with which we undertake it. (p. 34)

Becker did not write of a corresponding healthy or mature sadism, but it is not difficult to see the sadistic element expressing itself in a healthy, socially constructive way, for example, in the wielding of the blade by a skilled surgeon. Becker viewed the sadistic urge as that which ignores and denies the inner mystery of other people, seeking instead to insist that only external, physical reality has any rightful meaning. The sadist affirms his or her own mastery over death and nature by holding the fate of others in command (Becker 1975). While recognizing the fact that we all contain within us the sadistic urge, Becker suggested that the intensity of the sadistic urge mirrors the paucity of interior resilience and strength. This element in Becker’s work stands further exploration and elaboration.

Depression and Schizophrenia

Although he never expressed it quite so explicitly, Becker tended to see depression and schizophrenia as the paradigm mental disorders of modernity. All people seek secure and protective sources of power for the maintenance of self-esteem. In premodern societies, the sources for such power are immediately present in the cultural causa sui narratives, the cultural hero system, the social mythology of the people. This usually means that the sources are very diverse, diffuse, broadly based, reflexive, and automatic.

In contemporary society, by contrast, the sources of secure and protective power are constantly challenged. The result is that while a cultural causa sui narratives and hero system exist, the reflexive and automatic choices are considerably narrowed for most people. The reaction of many to this is to firmly embed one’s sense of self-esteem and self-worth into a rather slender sphere of one’s life. It may be a career, a spouse, a child, a church, a bankbook–but in any case very concentrated and limited. Placing one’s sense of meaning and self-worth into such a small basket leaves one very vulnerable to having that sense of meaning and self-worth undermined by events. The loss of a job, a spouse, a child, an undermined ideology, a stock portfolio crash–such can literally mean the loss of self, of all sense of meaning and forward movement for the person involved. When the blockage is total, depression is the result. From infancy, the state of total dependence is the root survival tactic of human beings. The dependent state of the depressed person reflects regression in the face of a collapse of the ability to cope, the inability to either flee or fight.

Depression is also, to be sure, a result of brain chemistry and the depressed person can be greatly aided by psychoactive drugs. But in viewing the phenomenon of depression in a social context of the loss of self-esteem, Becker sided with those who feel that “cognition plays a larger role in its dynamics than does physiology” (Becker 1962b, p. 26). Becker went so far as to view the self-accusing mea culpa confessions seen so commonly in sufferers of clinical depression as the fragile and tragic attempts of the person to maintain at least some sense of order in the face of a total collapse of the person’s meaning world. Better to at least be able to accuse oneself of being vile and contemptible, at fault for the sour workings of events, than to live in a world where such moral categories themselves have no meaning. In this sense, the biblical Job, who resists such interpretations of his own misfortunes, becomes the patron saint of our time.

Becker held a long fascination, perhaps even a morbid fascination, with the phenomenon of schizophrenia. He wrote about schizophrenia more than any other mental disorder, reflecting the early influence of Thomas Szasz, who, in his attacks on involuntary incarceration based on mental diagnosis, had made of schizophrenia the “sacred symbol” of medicalized psychiatry. Becker’s writings on the subject tend toward a behavioral definition of the problem, seeing it as fundamentally rooted in the self-body dualism in which the schizophrenic literally has lost the firm connection between these two aspects of human experience.

In Becker’s picture of schizophrenia, the schizophrenic person has grasped a basic notion of human-meaning games as essentially games of language. However, language itself is rooted in deeply felt body meaning, which is the shared funded store of meaning for interpersonal transactions. The schizophrenic person is one who has never been able to feel settled enough in the body to partake of this store of shared and funded meaning. The person is left in the situation of trying to transact with others on a purely verbal level. But since those attempts at verbal transaction are divorced from the shared body meanings of others, the frantic verbal gestures–the word salads–simply do not make sense in a social context. The word symbols that the schizophrenic person employs seem to float in mid-air with no firm grounding in the shared experience of others. The gestures to create transactional meaning are genuine, but fail because the language game the person is employing is totally personal and internal.

Becker was fascinated by the phenomenon of schizophrenia because he saw in this total divorcement of the symbol world from the body world a sort of evolutionary irony–the creation of “ultra humanity” (Becker 1964, p. 54). If evolution had produced an animal to whom the animal body itself had become a problem, schizophrenia represented that dualism run amok.

Schizophrenia takes the risk of evolution to its furthest point in man: the risk of creating an animal who perceives himself, reflects on himself and comes to understand that his animal body is a menace to himself … Man alone achieves this terrifying condition which we see in all its purity at the extremes of schizophrenic psychosis. [Becker 1973, p. 219]

These ironic musings of Becker do not detract from the fact that he held real sympathy for the sufferer of schizophrenic vulnerabilities. Rich body meanings, earned during the period of infant dependency, are the source of human repression of the fear of death. Rich body meanings are what we fall back on in the face of the terror of the object world. The schizophrenic person, because he or she is not securely rooted in body meanings, has a very meager ability to repress this terror. This is a person without character defenses, so to speak, a person “for whom life is a more insurmountable problem than for others, for whom the burden of anxiety and fear is almost as constant as his daily breath” (Becker 1973, p. 217).

As the paradigm personality disorders of our time, depression and schizophrenia represent the extremes of the ontological fear of life and fear of death. Although these are the clinical edges of experience, the basic dynamics of each vulnerability are shared to some degree by many people in contemporary society. The depressed person suffers from too narrow and uncritical embeddedness in a secure and protective sphere of interpersonal meanings, while the schizophrenic has been cut off entirely from the sphere of shared interpersonal meanings.

Shame and Guilt

In Becker’s presentation of adult psychology, the dialectic of shame and guilt refers to psychological blocks to action in the object world. Shame occurs when one has abjectly transgressed a clear and shared social taboo. To experience shame, the feeling that makes one want to simply hide, the person must share the social and cultural worldview of those around him or her. Shame is the internal emotional result of flaunting the behavioral norms that, in a particular sociocultural environment, represent the mode of merger with secure and protective sources of power. While internal, shame is a very public emotion. As a block to action, originating in the merger end of the ontological axis, shame functions as a social sanction aimed at keeping the fund of shared social meaning intact. As Becker (1964) wrote, “In a world of confusion, change and mobility, shame sanctions would operate with difficulty, if at all, One is truly shamed before his cultural peers, rarely fully before foreigners” (p. 193).

Guilt originates at the opposite end of the ontological axis. Becker wrote of various types of guilt. In contemporary society, a most common source of guilt occurs when the norms of the society in which one presently lives differ greatly from the rules of behavior one was taught. Guilt often focuses on behaviors relating to sex, use of financial resources, and responsibilities toward the extended family, for these are areas in which the norms of late-capitalist society are most likely to differ from what one was taught in the family.

A more vague but pervasively diffuse type of guilt in modem society is that of existential guilt, which is closely related to the body/self dualism of human life. The body can be experienced as a genuine drag on the ideal freedom of the individual. This is another reason why guilt and sex form a complex unity. Sexual intercourse is the acme of giving in to creature, species, and body meanings. While these meanings form the basis of personal identity, these meanings also tend to deny one’s sense of uniqueness and specialness in the world. As Becker (1973) wrote, “guilt is there because the body casts a shadow on the person’s inner freedom, his ‘real self’ that, through the act of sex, is being forced into a standardized, mechanical, biological role” (p. 42). The controls one places on sexual behavior point toward the human need to remove the act of intercourse from being purely an animal act. Likewise, the slang often employed in speaking about persons who appear to have no controls over their sexual behavior (which are mostly animal metaphors–rabbits, dogs, pigs) point in this same direction.

Becker (1973) saw that this kind of animal guilt is increased when sex is pursued in the absence of love. The dynamic of love in the sexual relationship “allows the collapse of the individual into the animal dimension without fear and guilt, but instead with the trust and assurance that his distinctive inner freedom will not be negated by an animal surrender” (p. 42). The guilt of the body/self dualism is, as various existential philosophers have put it, the guilt of being itself. It is the guilt of a dependent being in the face of overwhelmingly transcendent power. It is the guilt of simply taking up space, and knowing it. As Becker (1975) wrote, “It reflects the self-conscious animal’s bafflement at having emerged from nature, at sticking out too much without knowing what for, at not being able to securely place himself in an eternal meaning system” (p. 158).

Body and Mind/Self

A fundamental experiential dialectic is that of body and mind/self. Since at least the time of Plato this dialectic has been at the center of the Western philosophical tradition. Though countless attempts have been made to mediate this dialectic in one way or another, it is felt experientially by any reflective person and therefore simply will not go away. It is a perennial human issue. (Note: In Becker’s work, mind and symbolic-self are used more or less interchangeably.)

Becker’s presentation of the Oedipal transition and the socialization process clearly demonstrates why this is so. In that transition from a body-self to a symbol-self that is the socialization process, the body must become an object to the self in order for the body to be placed firmly under the control of the self. In other words, the very earliest experiences the person has of the symbolic self is that of the self objectifying the body and seeking to control the body. Making the body an object for control by the symbolic self is the very definition, for example, of the toilet training experience. The child may even drive itself to constipation in the attempt to prove how well it can “hold” the body in check. There is simply no way around the fact that the experiential dialectic of body and mind is deeply embedded in the psyche of all people. There are philosophical and psychological ontologies that radicalize this mind/body dialectic beyond proper measure, and these have been rightly criticized. (Note: A few reviewers of his books claim to have detected a radicalized body-self dualism in Becker’s work that places him among those who would exalt the cognitive-intellectual and debase the body, but clearly this is at best a very cursory reading of Becker’s works that takes single quotes out of context.)

Much of Christian ideology has tended to debase and deny the body. By so strongly valuing the eternal soul, the mortal body comes to be seen as unimportant or even evil. At present we seem to be going through a period of reaction to this, at least in a number of circles. Looking at the well-selling books on the ‘psychology and spirituality’ shelves, one might conclude that Dionysus must be invoked somewhere in a book for it to be taken seriously by modern readers.

Becker’s work on the mind/body dialectic helps us to understand why ideologies that exalt the mind and debase the physical have often been adopted by the forces of oppression in this world. But his work also stands as a strong caution against seeking our salvation in an equally unbalanced move in the opposite direction. The merger and loss of symbolic self in the indulgence of body meaning has as its underside the reflexive affirmation of self in the sadistic ingestion of the body. In ecstatic affirmation of the body, the Dionysian orgy culminates in ritual sacrifice and even cannibalism. This is hardly a more worthy and dignified reward for human rationality than an aesthetic of bodily denigration.

The felt dualism of body and self cannot be simply denied or ignored. Such moves are doomed to failure because they violate the foundational experiences of human personality. The balance required acknowledges and gives due to both body meaning and symbolic self meaning. The body is an object to the self. The self discovers its body as an instrument in possession of the self, an instrument to situate the self in the world of objects. The human self, or consciousness, comes into being by its interaction with others. Its objectification of the body as an instrument to be controlled is made largely in response to other people, to the demands of the social world.

Becker (1964b) stressed this by referring to the symbolic self as “an amalgam of social motives” (p. 241), such that the self can only intellectually comprehend that it is by necessity lodged in an animal body. The self feels itself to be immortal–it can imagine itself in almost any condition, except that of not existing. (The Cartesian dictum, cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am, though roundly criticized in modern philosophy, continues to be defended exactly because it so clear expresses this felt-sense of the symbolic self that it prior to and finally independent of bodily existence.) Yet the self does know, intellectually, that it is bound to a mortal body and that finally the body will have the last word. The body, therefore, feels strange to the self, as a foreign element. We may lose a limb, an eye, an ear and still be happy that “I” am still here.

When pressed, most adults would probably point to their head to locate the “real me” in the body. Current science fiction often assumes that so long as the brain remains the same, the audience will be satisfied that the ‘person’ is also retained, even if that brain is moved from body to body. Yet the location of the ‘brain’ as the throne of the mind/symbolic-self is clearly a cultural construction–the ancient Egyptians, who took great pains to mummify various vital organs so as to assure the immortality of the person, apparently sucked the brain out through the nose of the corpse and tossed it to the dogs! Many ancient traditions have located the throne of the ‘real self’ in the heart, or even the bowels (we also speak of ‘gut feelings’ as some of the deepest feelings we have.) Children seem to prefer the chest or stomach region for locating the “real me.”

All of this only underlines that the body is a symbolic instrument of the self. Furthermore, just as the self can feel itself untouched by the loss of body parts–we hardly agonize over a haircut or nail trim–the self can also extend its symbolic instrument beyond the skin of the body. Almost any object can become ‘body’ to the symbolic self, such that the loss of that object is experienced as traumatically as, or even more traumatically than, an injury or disfigurement of the physical body. We may laugh at a character in a television sitcom who would rather lose an arm than have a scratch on his car. But we easily understand the joke, nonetheless.

All of this simply underlines the fact that the body/mind-self dialectic is a felt experience of human beings. It is inseparable from what we know as self-consciousness, that which separates humans from other animal species. Body meanings and self meanings are both integral aspects of human experience. Body meanings are those that tie us to the earth, to species, to merger with the transcending physicality of “Mother Nature.” Self-meanings are those of uniqueness, soaring above nature, of individuation. Personal, spiritual, and psychological growth demands attention to both aspects of meaning in our lives. A perfect balance between these aspects of our existence is rarely achieved. It is in one sense our life quest. Becker (1973) wrote, “The basic problem of life, in this sense, is whether the species (body) will predominate over one’s individuality (inner self)” (p. 226).

Our basic styles of working on this problem of life have been set for each of us in the course of the Oedipal transition. For some, family styles have invested the body with an extra dose of anxiety and denial, resulting perhaps in adulthood in draining and debilitating hypochondrias and phobias. For others, family styles may have so belittled the life of the mind that the adult person must cope with real blockage and guilt for fostering his or her intellect. Becker (1968b) felt that one very useful way of approaching and attempting to understand what is taking place in the so-called sexual perversions is to view it in the patient as a “problem of the aesthetic integration of spirit (personality) and body” (p. 178). The particular perversion is viewed as the symbol game the patient must play in allowing the aesthetic merger of body and self to culminate in the sexual act.

All people experience the pulls of body and symbolic self. The ideal of mental health points toward a centering balance of these pulls, a balance that strives for the fostering of body meanings without neglect of the intellect, a balance that maintains a basic sense of the spiritual life without discounting or devaluing the physical life. It is a balance that is the goal of personal psychological growth.

Mass Being and Individuality

A person may ask, “What is the meaning and purpose, the value, of my life?” Becker said this question is being posed and in some sense answered in even the most mundane and routine thoughts and actions of everyday living. It is a natural and unavoidable urge of human ontology that the person wants his or her life to count, to make a difference, to mean something. This is the basic urge toward heroism. All human beings pursue the heroic–the safe heroics of the crowd or the dangerous heroics of individuation.

The heroics of the crowd keep one well protected within the sphere of shared meaning. The mass being can answer personally for his or her actions, we might say, by pointing to others who are doing the same thing. In effect, we have here the child’s alibi, “They did it first! Don’t ask me, ask them!” The culture and society offer opportunities for heroism enough for the mass being, To be referred to on occasion as the bread winner, or a civic-minded person, is satisfying enough of the urge toward uniqueness. The mass being accepts the very standardized transference authorities of the culture–parents, the boss at work, the parish minister, and so on–and tucks in warmly to their symbolic powers of security and protection, seeking only to please them. The heroism of the mass being is a species or collective heroism–as progenitor or group member. The urge to heroism is answered by that which is safest, given, nearest to hand.

True individual heroism is not so easily achieved and is even harder to sustain. Individual heroism strives for that which is unique, that which stands out from the crowd. The heroic individual wants to earn for him- or herself the recognition that the mass being is willing to have simply as one member of the group. The heroic individual seeks adventure and novelty, considering safety and routine tantamount to death.

Human beings are seekers of meaning and purpose and need both to live. The earliest sense of meaning and purpose was gained passively, almost by osmosis, from our primary caregivers. Even through adolescence and young adulthood, the sense of meaning and purpose we have comes primarily from doing what other people tell us to do. It is little wonder, then, that so many people easily accept the safety and security of cultural and species heroics. There is nothing to disparage about this, except of course for the fact that it causes to go to waste untold amounts of creative human potential. Individual heroics, on the other hand, leave one open and vulnerable to the onrush of anxiety. The heroic individual, in attempting to transcend the standardized heroics of the crowd, must create his or her own meaning and then offer that up as its own justification. This is not an easy task for anyone because our very character and personality system has been formed as a defense against anxiety. To stand alone with one’s own sense of meaning and purpose is anxiety provoking. In a very real sense, the act of standing alone with the meaning and purpose one has created as a heroic individual risks directly undermining one’s personality and character. It is little wonder that the leader keeps looking back to make sure others are following!

If the holistic personality is to flourish, there must be rooting in shared meanings, the cultural and species heroics of the community. On the other hand, one firmly rooted in the shared meanings, the cultural and species heroics of the community must also be encouraged to cultivate areas of uniqueness and individuality. Becker (1973) suggested that what is needed is the creation of “maximum individuality within maximum community” (p. 251). He recognized this as a paradox, not one that can be solved by public policy, even in a democracy. But as an ideal-typical balance of the polarity of mass being and individual, it is a worthy goal toward which to labor.

Predictability and Creativity

The polarity of predictability and creativity focuses on issues of aesthetics. In Becker’s view, aesthetics is a process of interaction between the established and shared meanings of the culture and society and the innovative and novel meanings of the individual.

There are aesthetic creations that are so embedded in the established and shared meanings of the culture and society that their effect is simply to confirm and further establish those meanings. There is no challenge in such creations, but only a soothing acceptance of the standardized, conventional, and traditional transference objects that the majority of people already share. One thinks here of elevator muzak, which assures the person ascending or descending the floors of a large office building that, yes, here is power, here is protection–relax!–here is a quiet and solemn fortress of strength that you can serve and in which you can perform your tasks of buying, selling, banking, and business in calm serenity. One thinks of the commercial arts, which confirm people in their role as consumers of goods, sanctioning them in the process of extending their sense of personal worth into the accumulation of the newest, the fastest, the best trinkets that the economic system has to offer. One thinks of the sweet paintings of Christ, gathering his cherubic children around him, placidly reflecting back to faces of admiration and gratitude the secure and safe promise of their worthiness before God.

On the other hand, there are aesthetic creations that are nothing but offensive, that assault the audience with total rejection of all the values, sense of worth, and objects of esteem they commonly share. One thinks here of the most excessive kinds of rock and roll music, of performance artists who smear themselves with excrement, or of the creations in various media that consciously seek the sacrilege.

Challenging? Perhaps. But the audience shrinks back almost in terror. The audience wants to scream out, “But is this art?!” We grant such ‘artists’ the freedom to pursue their work, just as we do any citizen. But increasingly we are coming to question policies of paying them to do it with public money–we owe them freedom, but not necessarily a living!

Predictability is an essential element of meaning in human existence. Culture and society have developed complex systems of predictability, from role and status, which allow a person to have some idea of what to expect in transactions with people, to electronic tracking devices, which provide travelers with weather information regarding their flights. Where there is no sense of predictability, where there is no sense of regularity and order, there is no sense of meaning. Without at least some sense of meaning and predictability, of perceivable cause-and-effect sequences, the person is left exposed and vulnerable, open to almost any suggestion that holds the promise of restoring order and regularity. This is a fact of human existence that is not lost on the various demonic brainwashers, from wardens of political prison camps to leaders of religious cults, who employ it without mercy to maintain control over others.

Yet a steady diet of easy aesthetic mergers, which do nothing but confirm and support the shared meanings of social and cultural heroics, can only lead to stagnation of the human spirit. People seek mergers of assurance, protection, and safety. But they also seek to be challenged, to dig deeper, to have their folly exposed to them. The ideal aesthetics, in this view, would be those creations that both assure and challenge. It would be those creations that build on the familiar and predictable, but allow the audience to see these matters in a new way. It would be those creations that draw the audience in through standardized social and cultural heroics, but do not ignore or deny the underside, the shadow side of that reality. It would be those creations that present the audience with this shadow side of reality, but point toward salvation at the same time. As Becker (1973) wrote,

The creative person becomes then, in art, literature and religion, the mediator of natural terror and the indicator of a new way of triumph over it. He reveals the darkness and the dread of the human condition and fabricates a new symbolic transcendence over it. [p.220]

Becker, expanding here on the insights of Rank (1968), saw clearly that the problem of aesthetics, the problem of what “true” art is and what is simply everyday aesthetics, is a direct reflection of the problem of human ontological polarity itself

The aesthetic object demonstrates that life is not in vain, by holding up tangible proof of human creativity. Thus we see the difference between the true artist and the everyday aesthetician: the everyday aesthetician secures conviction by nestling the human spirit in its familiar cultural bonds. The true artist … overcomes the arbitrary cultural fiction by allowing man to believe in his basic creativity. [Becker 1964, p. 239]

This places a very heavy burden on the true artist. The true artist is one who has seen through the fictional character of the shared system of cultural heroics. Having seen through this veneer, the artist is no longer able to draw his or her personal sense of meaning from that secure and protective source of power–or at least so only tentatively and falteringly. The artist must, instead, fashion novel and very personal sources of meaning and conviction and then offer them up to the audience in the hope that these meanings will be confirmed by the community of fellows. In other words, the true artist lives in a state of being that is constantly threatened by loneliness and isolation. This is why, as Becker saw, the truly great artists in human history have often lived their lives very far toward the schizophrenic end of the human continuum. The confirmation of the worth and value of the artist’s work is often postponed until long after the artist is dead–until society has “caught up” to the artist’s aesthetic vision, we might say. How many of our greatest artists have died in poverty, loneliness, and rejection! The artist is doomed to an existence that is often almost indistinguishable from mental illness. Diagnosing great artists of the past has become almost a cottage industry in the world of psychiatric literature. To put it somewhat provocatively, the main difference between a true artist and a prosaic manic or schizophrenic boils down to the very intangible element of talent.

While therapeutic biases lean toward seeking balance between the predictable and the creative, it must be recognized at the same time that had daVinci, Mozart, Van Gogh, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, not to mention Jimi Hendrix or Janis Joplin, been thoroughly therapized and attained more balance in their personalities, it might well have detracted from their artistic production and our world would be much poorer for it. Who could possibly say that we would be willing to live without the great aesthetic works they produced? Yet who could be so cruel as to wish the lives of these people on any fellow human being? This is not even to mention the lives of their families and close acquaintances, for while we appreciate the artistic productions of such people, let’s face it squarely, the artistic muse is one of extreme narcissism, and many such people almost literally pollute their environment with their poisoned personalities. Is the creative and challenging aesthetic vision that these people have given to humanity worth the immense pain and personal anguish that had to be suffered in order to produce it? No one can answer that question without resort to religious metaphysics. But reflecting on this question, Becker (1968) reminded us that “the radical innovator may be the very instrument of creative evolution itself.” (p. 232)

Agape and Eros

We finally come in this exploration of various cultural expressions of the ontological polarity of human existence to those ancient distinctions of love–agape love and eros love. It is the distinction between the love that is expressed as self-surrender and the love that is expressed as self-expression. It is a category of polarity that brings to philosophical closure each of the polarities we have been discussing.

The agapaic love expressed in self-surrender! To take the existential burden of living and place it at the feet of that overwhelming power that transcends the self! What a blissful and oceanic relaxation this brings!

The erotic love expressed in self-expression! To assert one’s own personal strength and value in the face of that overwhelming power that transcends the self and deflates the ultimate meaning of subjectivity! What a sense of intense vitality and energy this brings!

These pulls toward Agape and Eros summarize Becker’s model of a mature adult psychology. Because perfect and sustainable balance can only be offered as an ideal-typical vision, it is finally a model of tragedy, a model of a very peculiar species that is torn by the forces of its very being.

Now we see what we might call the ontological or creature tragedy that is so peculiar to man. If he gives in to Agape he risks failing to develop himself and his active contribution to the rest of life. If he expands Eros too much he risks cutting himself off from the healing power of gratitude and humility that he must naturally feel for having been created, for having been given the opportunity of life experience … You can see that man wants the impossible: He wants to lose his isolation and keep it at the same time … He wants to expand by merging with the powerful beyond that transcends him, yet he wants while merging with it to remain individual and aloof, working out his own private and smaller-scale self-expansion. [Becker 1973, p. 155]

Becker saw that the only really satisfying answer to the human dilemma would be a Creator God, a God who is the origin of human individuation itself, the very author of natural and human creativity. Only such a God could accept and give final meaning and purpose to the creative gifts offered up by a gracious and humble individual without simultaneously so overwhelming that individual with transcendent power that merger in surrender would demand the relinquishment of the achievements of individuation itself.

Thus Becker finally found in the ontological restlessness of the human experience, which he discovered through the methods of empirical social science, a point that the Psalmist knew from ancient times: “As a doe longs for running streams, so longs my soul for you, My God, My soul thirsts for God, the God of life” (Psalm 42: 1-2).

Of course, that is hardly an easy prescription to the human dilemma. For every god that we encounter in everyday life is a god mediated through the institutional structures of the culture and society. In short, the only gods we have available for immediate and mass consumption are exactly those gods that are standardized and conventional transference objects, projections of the social status quo. The god toward which Becker pointed is itself an ideal-typical construct for which there is no overwhelming evidence even of its concrete existence. Seeking such a god is on a practical level indistinguishable from seeking those ideal-typical balances of existential and ontological polarity. There is nothing that privileges the overtly religious pathways for this quest above the pathways of the psychological, philosophical or other secular pathways. The choice of one’s path, whether the quest shall be religious or secular, finally comes down to the individual’s somewhat arbitrary preferences–arbitrary in the sense that such preferences will strongly reflect that which has have been instilled in the person in the process of early character development, which is to say, mainly a reflection of culture and environment.

So where has Becker finally left us? Are we any better off than before this journey of exploration? If our hope was for self-assured mergers, easily attained aesthetic closures, and “gain-without-pain” in our quest for spiritual, emotional, mental, and personal growth, we can only be disappointed. Likewise, if we seek salvation, Becker can only point us elsewhere.

We find in Becker no quick fixes, no therapeutic tricks or techniques, no political ideology, that will dissolve Gethsemane, avoid the dark night of the soul, and hold out the promise of easy salvation. The personal and collective release from the dilemmas of the human condition can only be encountered, as that old Christian formula puts it, “by Grace, through Faith. (cf. Forde 1982)

Yet for those who are determined, who feel compelled toward more truth about the human condition regardless of the costs, Becker’s work does offer the bittersweet solace that the quest for an ideal-typical transference object is not there on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. It is at the very heart and core of human existence itself.

References

Becker, E. (1964). The revolution in psychiatry: The new understanding of man . New York: Free Press.

___ (1968). The structure of evil: An essay on the unification of the science 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.

Beers, W. (1992). Women and sacrifice: Male narcissism and the psychology of religion. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.

Forde, G. (1982). Justification by faith. A matter of death and life. Philadelphia: Fortress.

Sartre, J.-P. (1956). Being and nothingness. New York: Philosophical Library.