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By Daniel Liechty, Ph.D.
THE LIMITS OF THERAPY, NOCH EINMAL
What makes people act the way they do? Ernest Becker has given us a penetrating analysis and exposition of the tragedy of human existence. Psychotherapy, psychological research and pastoral counseling seeks to bring healing and growth to those who request it. Becker seems to have left us in a position that finally, with Miguel de Unamuno, stresses the “tragic sense of life,” with the sad warning that there is no uncomplicated and effortless healing. There is only further stumbling along the road of life. To where? Maybe nowhere.
There is no question that as Becker delved deeper and deeper into the human psyche, he lost his earlier optimism about the human predicament. If there is a clear-cut distinction to be made between the early Becker (1960-68) and the ‘mature’ Becker (1969-73, when Becker died of cancer) it is exactly at that point of optimism concerning human possibilities. Steeped in the tradition of Enlightenment humanism, the early Becker spoke of a Second Great Step in human evolution, of the liberating possibilities of insight and self-knowledge, of emancipation of the human spirit through education, and steady but illuminated tinkering with social structures. By the time we come to the mature Becker, he had come to see the human being in quite a different light–less as courageous and heroic than as terrified, guilt-ridden, and cowering creatures, more than ready to offer up anyone but themselves to keep their defenses intact.
He saw that the shadow side of the human character, the masochistic-sadistic polarity, was much more deeply rooted than an optimistic humanism could possibly admit or imagine. Even that urge for more life, that ontological urge toward individuation that is the very source of all the Enlightenment tradition pictured as admirable and laudable in the human species, was fatefully tainted by the base craving to stand smiling over the corpses of those whom one has slaughtered! With obvious painful ambiguity about his where his own research had taken him, the dying Becker wrote,
The reason is positive and simple: man aggresses not only out of frustration and fear but out of joy, plentitude, love of life. Men kill lavishly out of the sublime joy of heroic triumph over evil. Voila tout. What are the clinical classifications and niceties going to do with that? [Becker 1975, p. 141, italics original]
It is enough to make one who would desire to bring healing and growth to human life want to close the corpus of Becker’s work with a chilling shudder, to repress its very message and quietly hope that he could not have meant these words! If this is a true picture of the human being, it totally demolishes the utopianism of psychotherapy. The utopian assumption underlying psychotherapy is that by liberating people from the constricting influences of past socialization life can become free and unconstricted. Becker’s work insists that the real sources of constriction are internally imposed at least as much as externally imposed. This being the case, psychotherapy can, at best, help to relieve specific, identified symptoms. The person is left with his or her basic personality and character armor unchanged and may well find that the specific symptoms have simply shifted, not disappeared (which may or may not be perceived by that person as a therapy success). Becker’s work forces us to the conclusion that neurosis is normal-that is, that normalcy is neurotic. Furthermore,
Once you accept the truly desperate situation that man is in, you come to see not only that neurosis is normal, but that even psychotic failure represents only a little additional push in the routine stumbling along life’s way. [Becker 1973, p. 269]
If the utopianism of psychotherapy in terms of the individual cannot stand up to critical scrutiny, how much less is its currency as a foundation for social policy. The psychotherapist or counselor who confronts the work of Becker will be quite sobered concerning the prospects of this enterprise. The overall Beckerian perspective is indeed on the pessimistic side. Like the sobering views of Reinhold Niebuhr, Becker’s pessimism can be interpreted as supportive of neoconservative political policy. It undermines the utopian radicalism of the Left.
Yet the fact remains that Becker’s pessimism is not that of the political conservative, who simply wants a continuation of the status quo. Becker is even more critical of present political structures, the very source of continued alienation, than he is of naive utopianism. Becker’s is an intelligent and thoughtful pessimism that I have found impossible to ignore. Furthermore, in spite of its relative pessimism, there is much to be gained from fully confronting Becker’s work, sobering though it may be.
The most beneficial aspect that the psychotherapist or counselor can gain from fully digesting Becker’s thought is an increased depth in understanding of dynamics of transference and countertransference. The psychotherapist or counselor has a duty to uphold the highest standards of professional ethics and professional demeanor. Essential to the therapeutic enterprise is the setting and maintaining of professional “distance” in the therapeutic relationship. This is a given. However, one aspect of the shadow side of this maintenance of professional distance is the subtle placement of judgments of value on the therapist-client relationship. Because of the inequality in the power relationship between therapist and client, it is very difficult for the therapist to avoid placing him- or herself above the client, to avoid a mental opposition between the “sick” and the “healthy,” to avoid a subtle air of superiority.
Consider the act of “diagnosis” itself–literally, a claim of “through knowing.” In effect, the therapist is saying, “I know you through and through. You don’t know me, but I know you. I will tell you what your problem is.” If it is sometimes necessary to the therapeutic enterprise, it is hardly an act of mutuality. Yet the therapist, if he or she is at all authentically in touch with the dynamics of human psychological, spiritual and emotional reality, must be carrying at least as much pain as the client. The therapist also has had to constrict and repress his or her ego expansion in the course of becoming adult. If the therapist is not in touch with his or her own pain, it becomes very likely that this pain (perhaps now in the guise of “therapeutic distance”) will be projected onto the patient. If the goal of therapy is healing, it must happen in the context of dyadic mutual woundedness and pain. Henri Nouwen’s image of the “wounded healer” comes to mind here as an empirical description of the therapeutic relationship.
The problem of transference and countertransference is made more acute by the fact that psychology is itself very much a system of fictitious heroics through which those professionals who have committed themselves to its practice earn their sense of self-esteem and worth. It contains its own doctrines, its secret “gnosis,” reserved only for the initiated. It tends to create in groups and out groups, with all of the social dynamics involved in that process, between those who serenely “know” and those who remain in ignorance.
Psychotherapists and counselors share to one degree or another in this fictitious system of heroics. The client has entered into their territory, their turf, seeking their expertise. This only increases the difficulty of keeping the fictitious nature of the psychotherapeutic hero system well in mind in relating to the client. Even Freud, who certainly understood the dynamics of transference and countertransference well enough, was not immune to the feelings of superiority toward which psychotherapy tends. In response to Freud’s assessment of human beings on the whole–”In my experience most of them are trash,”–Becker (1973) wryly commented,
Of course, he also implies that if most people are trash, some aren’t, and we can surmise who is one of the few exceptions. We are reminded of those once-popular books on eugenics that always carried a handsome frontispiece photograph of the author beaming his vitality and personality as the ideal type of the book’s argument. [p. 256]
Becker reminded us that our most basic problems always extend beyond the reach of psychotherapy. While it is true that the person who presents for therapy is seeking in the therapist the merger with a safe and secure transference object, the therapist is a person as well, just as human, just as mortal and just as fallible. The therapist must earn his or her own sense of self-value within a fictitious system of heroics. Therapists have their own sources of ambivalence and dependency. Therapists have their own objects of transference before which they cower in humble gratitude. If the therapist shoulders the burden of the client’s need for a transference object, the difference between therapist and client remains one of degree, not of kind. “In the game of life and death no one stands taller than any other.” (Becker 1973, p. 259)
This said, we must also keep in mind that if Becker is highly critical of utopian claims of much of professional psychotherapy and counseling, it must be understood that he was writing in reaction to some of the more wild promises about human potential being proclaimed for therapy, counseling, and experiential encounter groups current on the West Coast during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Humanistic-oriented psychology and the Human Potential Movement represented an acme of optimism, both in terms of experimental methods and in terms of the exaggerated proclamations of possibilities for human healing, insight and liberation. To this environment, Becker brought the sober reminders of an empirical scientific mind. If being human is the final problem of Human Being, said Becker, and if Death is the final and absolute annihilation of the human organism, representing the irrevocable defeat of the whole process of individuation and psychological growth, then clearly psychology is severely limited in the extent to which it can give satisfying solutions to the human problem. To pretend otherwise would lead, at best, away from psychology and into religion. If that is the move that therapy in search of human utopia is to take, then Becker demanded that its leaders at least be honest about what they are up to.
These radically experimental therapies represent a flight of the human spirit and need not be totally disparaged. On the other hand, as Becker saw so clearly, when the spirit is cultivated in a manner that ignores or degrades the body meanings of human Being, that is, when one side of human ontology is pursued in neglect or denial of the other polarity, it cannot produce enduring results. The New Age claims about “mind over matter,” exaggerated positive thought and other such ideas, are ephemeral at best, and can leave one dangerously vulnerable to unconscious, reflexive, and regressive backlash. During recent decades, we have watched these therapies reap a bitter harvest of the seeds sown, in form of broken families, cults of personalities, and the regress of ‘personal freedom’ into widespread political apathy and conservatism. These therapies have moved in several directions, some more honest than others.
The most honest direction has been to considerably scale back claims for results, as participants have continued to experience depression, neurosis, and even psychosis, often resulting directly from the lifestyles and substances that were once touted as the key to liberation. These therapies, in chastened form, continue to be useful for some people. Another direction that also has some claim for honesty has been that of frankly admitting that the therapy has moved out of psychology and into New Age style religion, supported by overt adoption of religious myth and metaphysics. Such new religions can offer adherents on a smaller scale what established religions have offered the masses of humanity throughout history–a means of coping with the anxiety of death awareness through doctrines and promises of immortality for the faithful. This can be valuable for those whose disenchantment with established religion has been so complete that they simply can no longer identify with the historical religions. For those whose disenchantment is not so total, such a move into New Age religious sectarianism may not seem very attractive. Among these, we have seen a movement back into the stream of the more historically established religions, albeit often with new interpretations and understandings reflecting various sectarian influences. Less honest directions we have seen from this mushrooming of therapies (Kyle 1993) have included both the devolution into overt personality cults based on adoration of a leader, as well as the cultivation of spirituality while at the same time encouraging the most crass styles individualistic, acquisitive and consumeristic appeasement of the flesh.
Honest psychological, spiritual and pastoral counseling will draw back from the utopian proclamations of both pop therapies and the metaphysics of new religions. A thorough encounter with the work of Becker will be a great aid in discerning reality from utopianism. Furthermore, encounter with Becker’s work does not leave the therapist or counselor paralyzed in the face of the real human desire for personal and psychological growth. In constructing an approach to therapy “beyond Becker,” I would point to just a few avenues open to the honest psychological or pastoral counselor, which I will designate as intimations of transcendence. It should be clear that I am not here speaking of the transcendence of death but rather the transcendence of debilitating side effects of death anxiety. Even as we acknowledge the generally pessimistic tone of some of Becker’s writings, we may also see his philosophical approach in general must remain open to reflective supplementation.
[It will be noticed that in many areas in which we suggest how we might move ‘beyond Becker,’ we are actually taking cues and drawing upon less developed material in Becker’s own writings. In other words, largely we are using Becker’s own work to point toward areas which beg for further development. Becker died very young, and might well have eventually developed some of these areas further himself. The fact that he did die so young, however, leaves this task up to those who encounter his work and ideas and now seek to apply them further the clinical practice of counseling and psychotherapy.]
INTIMATIONS OF TRANSCENDENCE
Unity of Body and Spirit
Becker was a true inheritor of the Western philosophical tradition, which places body and spirit, or body and soul, or mind/body, in binary opposition to each other. As we saw, this dualism is supported by solid empirical evidence of the socialization process. The body indeed becomes an object in the field of the self. It cannot be simply ignored or denied and Becker was rightly suspicious of those approaches that are based on the denial of this fundamental dualism. However, even Becker insisted that this dualism is a perceived dualism–an heuristic dualism–and not an absolute or metaphysical dualism. This leaves the window open, as a goal of therapy and personal growth (not as a beginning point!) for the reconciliation or uniting of body meaning with spiritual meaning.
The psychological and pastoral counselor may want to introduce into therapy perspectives that hold this goal of unity, as that toward which to strive, more explicitly than does Becker. Such perspectives will be countercultural in a cultural atmosphere in which the standardized heroics tend to further this separation rather than to aim toward reconciliation. I personally have found very helpful on this point the metaphors of anima/animus gleaned from archetypal psychology (Hillman 1985; Hopcke 1989).
In our society, males are socialized to prize the intellect above all else, including the secure body meanings of the physical world. A traditionally male spirituality naturally tends in this same direction, of radicalizing the opposition of intellect and body rather than facilitating closer reconciliation. Becker recognized this as a problem. But Becker (1974a) also admitted, if for no other reason than that it better suited his temperament, that his own spiritual path was more Apollonian than Dionysian. Perhaps because females have traditionally been socialized to prize their childbearing ability, while experiencing the pride of intellect through the accomplishments of their husbands, it may be easier for women to integrate body meanings into their spirituality. One hopes this is not lost as women, pursuing justice and equality, seek to be more like men.
Keeping well in mind, therefore, that masculine and feminine are fundamentally social constructions, I have found that open recognition and cultivation of the feminine within myself has had the joyous side effect of tempering one-sided masculine spirituality with feminine body-meanings. I lay no claim to significant personal accomplishment in this movement toward a more secure sense of unity of mind and body. But I can testify that this has been very useful in my attempts to overcome the worst prejudices and constrictions of the masculine socialization I experienced as a male growing up in this culture. While I maintain a strong skepticism of archetypal psychology as a system, I have experienced this process of touching the feminine within myself as a clear intimation of transcendence.
Death as a Source of Enhanced Reflection
Becker saw death, the fact of our mortality, the final and absolute annihilation of the human organism, as the ultimate limitation, as that which gives lie to all of human striving and heroism. Because death cannot be overcome, we may say Qoheleth,
“All is vanity! For all his toil. his toil under the sun, what does man gain by it?” (Ecclesiastes 1:1-3)
Death creates a panic in the human breast that is not easily calmed except by layer upon layer of repression. On the other hand, there are those who testify to the possibility of living with death as an ally in life, an ally that helps them to cut through the vanities of standardized cultural heroism, to recognize and concentrate on what is really important in life.
Much of the reaction to the testimonies of those who have been through near-death experiences associated with the work and research of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross (1969) and Raymond A. Moody. Jr. (1975, 1977) has been at the rather superficial level of seeking easy merger with death in the assurance of an afterlife. However, I have been more impressed with the testimonies of such people to the real changes in living that their death encounters have produced. Many of these people have genuinely made death awareness an ally in life. This has produced for them changes in values, in what they see as important, and in how they allocate their time and resources. (It is worth noting that none of them report that they now see they need to spend more time working at the office, earning money, or in pursuit of any of the standardized heroics of our society. Rather, they are all but uniform in their post-near-death recognition that these things are most unimportant, and that family, human relationships and cultivation of generative love is what really matters.)
Again, I lay no claim to personal achievement in this area. I go through periods when the existential angst of the reality of death, of personal annihilation, is all but overwhelming. Yet I see in the testimonies of these people and others like them a clear intimation of transcendence, an intimation that points toward the possibility of incorporating the immediate awareness of death as an ally in daily life, an ally that enhances concentration on what is important, allowing us to let go of failures and injustices that constrict and deform life away from those values that are most important.
We also notice that this incorporation of death awareness as an ally in life, the living consciousness of human finitude and limitations, is one very potent way of getting at that style of living that many religious traditions have pointed toward in the metaphor of new birth, of dying that one might live. We may add the weight of these traditions to the testimonies of others in encountering this as a clear intimation of transcendence, as a goal of therapy and personal growth.
Irvin Yalom (1980) wrote in a similar vein of the benefits of incorporating death awareness into the process of psychotherapy. While remaining aware that death is a primary source of anxiety that cannot be minimized, Yalom wrote. “The incorporation of death into life enriches life; it enables individuals to extricate themselves from smothering trivialities, to live more purposefully and more authentically” (p. 54). Much of what Becker wrote on death denial and death anxiety would lead one to the conclusion that this incorporation of death awareness as an ally in life is more or less impossible. Yet Becker himself came to a similar understanding as he faced his own death (Becker 1974a).
The Paradigm of Relationship
Becker followed closely the object relations school of psychoanalysis in his formulations of human motivation and human interactions. This is defensible both in terms of what was current in the field as well as by the fact that the phenomenological and existential models of philosophy, which were so influential on Becker’s mature thought, tend one toward viewing the world from the radically subjective perspective. As a mode of perceiving and presenting the problem of human living, object relations is a very useful tool of analysis.
Without disputing the benefits of the object relations approach, one must also ask what alternatives perspectives there are, and evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of object relations theory when compared with alternative approaches. I have found the object relations approach to be most useful in outlining the kinds of cognitive and emotional processes that take place in the course of human development, especially in the earliest stages. But in terms of trying to comprehend a more mature adult psychology, I have found important blind spots in the subject/object frame of reference, especially as it is appropriated and interpreted through an existential philosophical lens as represented by Heidegger, Kierkegaard and Sartre (each of whom cast a long shadow on Ernest Becker’s own intellectual development.)
To focus directly on the most important of these blind spots, this approach leaves very little space for genuine and mutual relationship between people when all relationship issues are squeezed too tightly into the extreme subject/object point of reference. This forces the subject into an objectification of those with whom relationship is sought. Objectification is almost by definition destructive of genuine and mutual relationship. In other words, the very frame of reference for analysis precludes a priori the possibility of achieving the kind of genuinely mutual relationship one seeks. This would not be a problem if, in fact, genuine and mutual relationship does not exist and is only an illusion of the emotions. But a very large number of people report that they do indeed experience of relationships that are genuine and mutual. An approach to analysis that reductively negates such a large and meaningful chunk of human experience, saying in effect, “This is not what you say it is,” must be supplemented by alternative points of view that allow the experience of people to be treated more sympathetically and less reductively.
Becker favored hard-nosed, empirical interpretations. Granted that empiricism has a hard edge to it, and that theories that deflate human pretensions and confound common sense notions have a special place in scientific investigation, one wonders here whether, in the consistent preference for the hard-nosed interpretations, Becker was not himself demonstrating how deeply he had imbibed at the spring of the fictitious heroism of the scientific self-image.
I suggest that Martin Buber’s existential philosophy of I-It and I-Thou relationships carries all of the empirical phenomenological and scientific value of behavioral and object relations theories. Yet in Buber’s I-Thou relationship of genuine mutuality, we find at least an opening that makes theoretically possible the kind of relationships that human beings regularly report in their experience and that they seem to most value (Friedman 1992). Becker also read Buber’s work deeply and thoughtfully, though discussion of Buber does not appear in Becker’s later work. I am quite sure, however, that had Becker’s work not been cut short by an untimely death, Becker would have returned to Buber’s ideas again.
To be sure, the I-Thou relationship of mutuality and intimacy the Buber discusses in his work is not easily attained. Buber also saw that the objectified I-It relationship is the normal relationship, the relationship toward which even I-Thou relationships tend if such are not consciously fostered and attended to consciously. The I-Thou relationship actually has an ideal-typical character, that is, it is something toward which to aim but may only rarely be achieved and even then is not permanent. But by at least describing the contours of the genuine and mutual relationship as a possibility, Buber’s perspective does not cut it off at the knees. It proceeds in the recognition that a genuine, intimate, and mutual relationship cannot be described exhaustively in behavioral terms, which corresponds to the most deeply felt experience of real human beings.
Learning from this, the counselor may well want to explore in therapy those relationships of clients that most approximate the I-Thou relationship, and seek to model this also in the counselor/client relationship. In so doing they might help the client toward fostering and strengthening such relationships in their lives. I have found that fostering and tending such relationships have been integral to my own spiritual and personal growth. Such relationships are authentic and valued intimations of transcendence.
Compassionate Extensions of Self In Others
Another side effect of the existential object relations approach is to refer everything back to the self as an issue of self-knowledge. Again, as a tool for understanding personal motivations, this can be valuable. However, living as we do in what Christopher Lasch (1979) has called the “culture of narcissism,” such primary reference to the self needs to be supplemented by other perspectives if it is to be kept from degenerating into a simple ideological support for standardized cultural heroics. The blind spots of this approach are made most clear when it comes to motivations of compassion and altruism. Of course much that goes on in this society under the name of compassion, altruism, and philanthropy is little more than socially sanctioned modes of self-aggrandizement for the economically privileged. But again, I don’t think that this tells the story exhaustively.
As an example of the narcissism that may be found in modern psychotherapy, journalist Michael Ventura recently wrote about a feeling of genuine compassion (mitleid, which means suffering with) when he encountered a homeless man approximately his own age. When he brought this up in a therapy session, the therapist proceeded to explore with him only the “selfish” nature of his reaching out in compassion to this homeless man, wanting to use the situation not as a spur toward actually helping the man or other homeless people, but only as a spur toward further self-exploration (Hillman and Ventura 1992).
There is nothing wrong, of course, with exploring the self in relation to human feelings of compassion. But a theory that makes this the first line of inquiry and exploration in therapy, tending thereby to deflate the compassionate gesture of action, and that rarely if ever gets beyond that level of self-exploration, needs studied supplementation. No one, and certainly not Ernest Becker, is expecting the therapist to simply function as a mere cheerleader for the noble side of human nature. Yet an approach that only deflates and devalues such compassionate gestures is also less than helpful. Compassionate extensions of the self in the community of people, when pursued in balance with other forces and motivations, should be encouraged in actions and explored in therapy as a vehicle for spiritual and psychological growth. Human beings are animals, to be sure, but “animal” does not mean only selfishness and viciousness! (Kohn 1990). Such compassionate gestures are real and genuine. They are an intimation of transcendence.
Stages of Grief
Kubler-Ross (1969) outlined five basic stages in the process of dying patients in learning about and facing their terminal condition: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. More recently these stages have been built upon by other grief counselors, such as James and Cherry (1988), in helping clients to move beyond loss. James and Cherry outlined these stages as gaining awareness, accepting responsibility, identifying recovery communications, taking actions, and finally moving beyond loss.
One of the things that an encounter with Ernest Becker’s work yields is a deeper understanding of the fact that the loss of almost any object, if it has been invested symbolically with transference power, can be experienced by the person as a mortal loss. The person may well have the same sorts of blockage, depression, and impediments to the forward movement of living as a terminal patient confronting his or her condition, or of a person grieving the loss of a close family member or friend.
This suggests the possibility that counselors would do well to pay close attention to the explorations and ideas emerging from grief therapy and experimentally apply these to situations of loss in which organismic death plays no direct role. This might be efficacious because it seriously treats these losses on a psychological level for what they really are. By accompanying the client through the stages of grieving in relation to these intermediate experiences of loss/death, it might also be possible to assist the client toward awareness of actual death anxiety and in claiming this death awareness as an ally in life. This might be one route into the depths of spiritual and psychological growth that would otherwise be overlooked.
The Human Experience of Love
Ernest Becker also wrote rapturously about love as that which transcends the body/spirit dualism of human experience. He wrote movingly on love in a number of places, referring to love as a “primary need” (1964, p. 141), as the ideal and goal of “aesthetic longing” (p. 241), as the one “counter-fictional” element in life (p. 250), as that which “enriches the world” (1968, p. 186), as the source of human liberation (1968), and as the “highest way” (1973. p. 233). But because Becker was so fully immersed in the psychoanalytic tradition’s bent to distrust positive emotions, his account especially in the later work reflects a spirit of the Freudian pessimism about human nature and strongly suggests that while the negative emotions are real and basic, the positive emotions are more likely to be tainted and ambivalent, defense techniques, or at best, ideal-typical, that is, less than fully real. [Again it is worth noting here that this pessimism is not present in Otto Rank’s reworking of the psychoanalytic material, and that Becker was becoming increasingly influenced by Rank’s criticism of the Freudians during the time Becker wrote his later works. It is absolutely clear, least to my mind, that had Becker lived and wrote for another decade or two, he also would have come around to a much more thoroughgoing criticism of the Freudian pessimism.]
Although I would not suggest drawing back from unflinching examination of the ambivalent nature of our positive emotions, and no slighting of confrontation with the shadow side of our emotional life, I do think that finally we learn to trust the authenticity of our positive emotions as well as our negative emotions. While Becker unquestionably experienced the merger of deep love for his family and others, he was determined to reject any hint of emotional self-flattery to which we humans are prone (which too often is so obviously on display in much of the ‘positive emotion’ and ‘positive psychology’ literature). But this sometimes left Becker seemingly stranded by his transactional and object relations frame of reference from giving the human experience of love its full due and recognition. He seemed stranded by the fact that the empirical method does not fully recognize love in its own right, but tends to see it primarily as a narcissistic defense. There are many motivations for love, and much that is called love in our lives is hardly worthy of the word. Hard-nosed recognition of this fact is integral to spiritual and psychological growth. Yet once again, while acknowledging fully the gain in viewing this noble human emotion from the behavioral and empirical perspective, we finally have to question whether a perspective that remains so suspicious of positive emotions, and only deflates and devalues what so many human beings assert has been most significant and meaningful in their lives, is not in need of studious supplementation.
Psychiatrist Willard Gaylin (1986) has suggested that “certain subjects must be experienced as well as analyzed to be understood; the emotions are a prime example” (p. 6). All of what was said above on the I-Thou relationship could be brought into consideration here, pointing toward love as the paradigm emotional motivation for and fruit of such relationships. In fact, the very dynamic of striving for heroism through achievement and wealth accumulation, which Becker wrote so much about, might be a poor compensation for the lack of having been able to give and to receive real and genuine love in one’s life. Certainly that is what comes though in much of the fictional portrayals of the miserly characters–for example, Charles Dickens’ Ebenezer Scrooge (in A Christmas Carol) or Frank Capra’s Henry F. Potter (in It’s a Wonderful Life.)
The experience of deep caring in love is a fusing experience, an experience in which we catch a glimpse of the unity of body and spirit, the goal of therapy and personal growth. This calms the frantic need for heroic achievement or accumulation to justify one’s existence. Exploring the experience of true love is an invaluable ally in helping us to break down dualistic barriers. It helps us to shed those layers of character armor that restrict us and keep us protected, but alone and isolated.
Love is a primary human emotion. Though it can be deformed as it is contoured by the fear of life and the fear of death, it remains a clear intimation of transcendence–an invaluable and indispensable pathway into the discovery of a more perfect balance of these existential pulls.
Symbolic Immortality
As we have seen, Becker wrote of immortality striving as the very source of human evil. Without negating a word of what Becker had to say on the subject, we should also consider the perspective of Robert J. Lifton (1979), who in a truly astonishing work on death and the continuity of life distinguished between healthy and unhealthy immortality striving. Lifton introduced the concept of symbolic immortality thusly: “While I cannot imagine my nonexistence, I can very well imagine a world in which ‘I’ do not exist. That imaginative capacity is the basis for our theory of symbolic immortality” (p. 8). Reflecting directly on Ernest Becker’s work on the denial of death, Lifton wrote. “While the denial of death is universal, the inner life-experience of a sense of immortality, rather than reflecting such denial, may well be the most authentic psychological alternative to that denial” (p. 13).
Lifton outlined five basic levels of symbolic immortality, each of which can be either healthy or unhealthy in the lives of people:
These modes of symbolic immortality may be explored in therapy as antidotes to naked death anxiety. It needs to be emphasized that there are healthy and unhealthy forms of each of these modes. Each mode can facilitate a life of love, compassion, and psychological and spiritual growth; each mode can function as an immortality ideology that allows the person to continue in a life of compulsive denial. The psychotherapist or counselor must use a pragmatic approach, one that examines relationships and personal behavior, in discerning the degree to which these modes of symbolic immortality are functioning in the life of the client.
While each of these modes of symbolic immortality can be fruitfully explored in psychological counseling as an antidote to overwhelming death anxiety, I am most attracted to the practicality of the biological mode. This is a symbol of immortality that is quickly and easily grasped. Of course, the unhealthy varieties of making one’s children the symbols of one’s own immortality are clearly encountered every day. The violence inherent in working one’s own frustrations out on one’s family is the motor of most concrete evil we see in our society. Even in a relatively benign form, this unhealthy application of the biological symbol of immortality can place an overwhelming burden of expectations for achievement, and guilt for “failure to achieve, on the next generation.
What I find especially attractive in this mode of symbolic immortality is the possibilities it contains for motivating more environmentally responsible behavior in the present. From the sense of symbolic immortality in one’s own family, it is not too giant a step to move toward achieving a sense of immortality in the species. At that point, motivation for behavior that is responsible, as the Native American tradition as well as the biblical tradition says, “to the seventh generation,” is at least a thinkable counterforce to the current cultural heroics of insatiable grasping, regardless of the environmental destruction that results. To live and act in such a way that one feels personally responsible to the coming generations as the symbol of one’s own immortality is a concept that can make sense in our current circumstances.
Much of the curb to the greedy acquisitive material excesses of our time has been the realization that we are placing intolerable economic and ecological burdens on our grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Certainly this motivation for more environmentally responsible lifestyles is less than what might be hoped for by an idealistic utopian. Yet this has led to measured behavioral changes, at least on the personal level, such as widespread cooperation with recycling programs. This suggests the presence here of fertile material which could be encouraged and reflected upon in psychological and pastoral counseling as an alternative antidote to naked death anxiety.
Loneliness as an Intimation of Transcendence
Shortly before his death, Becker (1974b) penned an article of unusual depth on the subject of loneliness. I consider this article to be a classic in the psychology of spirituality.
Becker begins his exploration by looking at life on this planet, plant life as well as animal life. Most forms of life thrive best in the company of their own kind. Especially in herd and pack animals, Becker saw an emotion akin to loneliness when an individual animal is separated from others. Yet it would be clearly anthropomorphic to describe in animals this intense longing for the company of others in identical terms to that of human beings. The human longing for others and the human experience of loneliness is unique. In animals, the longing for the herd or pack is an instinctual longing. a longing on which the animal is not able to reflect.
In human beings, this longing and loneliness spring from a rich interior life that we cannot assume other species share. Only the human being must ask, ‘What does it mean to inhabit a body? to have been created? what am I doing on this planet? Man is placed in the peculiar position of having to make connection with his own inner self’ (p. 238). These are questions that cannot be fully answered in relation to the phenomenal world. We look to others for our confirmation of self-worth and self-value. But other human beings cannot give fully satisfactory responses to these questions. No matter how settled one might be in terms of the body, of family and friends, of occupation or career, these questions point one toward a “beyond” for fully satisfactory answers. This is clearly an intimation of transcendence, for as Becker saw, “Loneliness, as dependency on the other, is built into man” (p. 239).
Each human being is a unique individual with a unique interior life. While we are able to open windows to others on this unique interiority in very intimate relationships, the full experience of each individual’s interiority is finally closed to all but the person him/herself. This is fundamental to the human experience of loneliness. The human experience of loneliness is a complex emotion. Becker outlined various aspects of being human that contribute to this built-in sense of longing and loneliness.
Loneliness is built into the human condition in several ways. By dependency on the other, on a “beyond” for validating who one is. By natural narcissism and organismic separateness. By uniqueness of each socialization and the peculiar needs and anxieties it engenders. And finally, by the paradox of Eros vs. Agape strivings, the urge toward both sameness and differences. In sum. there can be no “cure” for a problem that goes this deep into the human condition. [p. 241]
Becker spoke of seven gradations of human loneliness. The first of these he called developmental loneliness. This is the loneliness of childhood, in which the child separates itself from objects of its environment in order to come to a better understanding of the self. A second gradation is neurotic loneliness. This is the intense longing of that person who has become so dependent on one object for self-validation that the person is literally lost without it. Maturational loneliness is the loneliness of the adolescent or young adult who is yet seeking a course in life, a personal identity. A fourth gradation of loneliness Becker called socio-environmental loneliness. This type of loneliness, a result of extreme atomization and destruction of traditional communities and extended families in late capitalism. is made particularly intense in postmodern society. It is that sense of rootlessness that accompanies extreme mobility and individualism. It is the emotional expression of what sociologists have called anomie.
Becker also recognized a loneliness of psychosis. This is the loneliness of that person who is denied all agapic sense of belonging, who has developed only very weak techniques of ego defense, who is left feeling exposed and unprotected in the face of the real terror of living. This is the opposite of neurotic loneliness. Closely related to this is what Becker called historical-political loneliness. This is the loneliness of the leader who, as a transference object. has assumed the burden of meaning for large groups of people.
Finally, Becker wrote of the loneliness of individuation. This type of loneliness is “the loneliness that is achieved, that is the fruit of a full life, the mark of a mature personality” (p. 244). What Becker was pointing toward in this gradation of loneliness is the idea that even for a person who has accomplished his or her goals in life, who has been confirmed and recognized by others, and enjoys a solid sense of the symbolic immortality, the person must confront the question of the meaning of it all. Because this final question cannot be answered in terms of this world alone, because this final question forces one toward a “beyond,” it is a clear intimation of transcendence.
On the other hand, in the postmodern world we get no unambiguously convincing answers from the beyond toward which we yearn. Our experience of God is for the most part a fragmented encounter with disenchantment, absence, and silence. A mature and wise loneliness, an emotion of continued longing, is finally the best that this-worldly human existence can offer. In the face of this reality, a seasoned resignation, a willingness to live with the longing and loneliness in hope rather than to seek a cure, is the concluding wisdom of being human. Becker suggested that this kind of mature loneliness, of mature Wisdom, is most often first achieved in old age.
In the course of his professional writing, Becker finally looked toward a grounded, solid, reasoned, and freely chosen spiritually mature religious faith as the concluding answer to the human dilemma, as the final goal of spiritual, psychological, and personal growth. He maintained in his work an ongoing dialogue between social science, psychology and theology. In his mature work, Becker achieved what he considered to be a closure of social science and psychology on the religious faith represented by Kierkegaard and Paul Tillich.
Ernest Becker’s work is a significant and essential contribution to understanding the psychological dynamics of the human mind, as well as to psychotherapy and counseling in the care of human beings. Becker’s work reminds us that regardless of the progress we have made, we remain in a state of continuing need. His work brings closure of the goals of counseling and personal growth on the deep spirituality represented in the renowned prayer of Reinhold Niebuhr (1976) which has been adapted by the recovery movement as The Serenity Prayer:
Oh God!
That transcendent beyond, the Higher Power to which I must finally address my life; that transference object, that source of power that does not aggress against my full individuality because it is the source of my individuality.
Grant me the courage to change those things that I can change!
Lead me beyond encumbering constrictions imposed on me, both internally and externally, by my socialization process, which are causing myself and others real pain, which blunt my sense of exhilaration and marvel in the face of life’s possibilities because I refuse to see the fictitious nature of these constrictions.
And to accept those things which I cannot change!
Knowing that human existence is limited by many forces, whose final symbol is death, do not let me give in to despair, but let me enjoy the truly good things, the gifts of love and relationship, the wonder and amazement of being, which living offers.
And give me the wisdom to know the difference!
Do not let me become complacent through denial and repression, but lead me into those habits of living which is a mature and wise sense of loneliness, my longing for merger with You.
References
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