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Other Urges to Freedom
There is the type of man who has great contempt for “immediacy,” who tries to cultivate his interiority, base his pride on something deeper and inner, create a distance between himself and the average man. Kierkegaard calls this type of man the “introvert.”
The social hero-system into which we are born marks out paths for our heroism, paths to which we conform, to which we shape ourselves so that we can please others, become what they expect us to be. And instead of working our inner secret we gradually cover it over and forget it, while we become purely external men, playing successfully the standardized hero-game into which we happen to fall by accident, by family connection, by reflex patriotism, or by the simple need to eat and the urge to procreate.
“Too far” because he does not really want to push the problem of his uniqueness to any total confrontation:
The problem of introversion
And this brings us to our final type of man: the one who asserts himself out of defiance of his own weakness,
The Meaning of Manhood
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Kierkegaard not only posed the question, he also answered it. If health is not “cultural normality,”
The “healthy” person, the true individual, the self-realized soul, the “real” man, is the one who has transcended himself.39
Oedipus complex. The child has built up strategies and techniques for keeping his self-esteem in the face of the terror of his situation. These techniques become an armor that hold the person prisoner.
In order to transcend himself he must break down that which he needs in order to live.
In the prison of one’s character one can pretend and feel that he is somebody, that the world is manageable, that there is a reason for one’s life, a ready justification for one’s action.
the anxiety that results from the human paradox that man is an animal who is conscious of his animal limitation. Anxiety is the result of the perception of the truth of one’s condition. What does it mean to be a self-conscious animal? The idea is ludicrous, if it is not monstrous. It means to know that one is food for worms. This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression—and with all this yet to die.
seems to push us down still further on the scale of self-realization, further away from any possibility of self-transcendence. But this is only an apparent contradiction. The flood of anxiety is not the end for man. It is, rather, a “school” that provides man with the ultimate education, the final maturity. It is a better teacher than reality, says Kierkegaard,40 because reality can be lied about, twisted, and tamed by the tricks of cultural perception and repression.
But anxiety cannot be lied about. Once you face up to it, it reveals the truth of your situation; and only by seeing that truth can you open a new possibility for yourself.
He who is educated by dread [anxiety] is educated...
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this is the destruction of the emotional character armor of Lear, of the Zen Buddhists, of modern psychotherapy,
Our modern understanding of psychodynamics confirms that this progression is very logical:
if you admit that you are a creature, you accomplish one basic thing: you demolish all your unconscious power linkages or supports.
Once you expose the basic weakness and emptiness of the person, his helplessness, then you are forced to re-examine the whole problem of power linkages. You have to think about reforging them to a real source of creative and generative power.
despite one’s true insignificance, weakness, death, one’s existence has meaning in some ultimate sense because it exists within an eternal and infinite scheme of things brought about and maintained to some kind of design by some creative force.
Man breaks through the bounds of merely cultural heroism; he destroys the character lie that had him perform as a hero in the everyday social scheme of things; and by doing so he opens himself up to infinity, to the possibility of cosmic heroism, to the very service of God.
In other words, as long as man is an ambiguous creature he can never banish anxiety; what he can do instead is to use anxiety as an eternal spring for growth into new dimensions of thought and trust.
Neurosis and psychosis are modes of expression for human beings who have lost courage. Anyone who has acquired this much insight … will thenceforth refrain from undertaking with persons in this state of discouragement tedious excursions into mysterious regions of the psyche. —ALFRED ADLER
Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful. Hence one must choose a master, God being out of style. —ALBERT CAMUS1
on how unheroic is the average man, even when he follows heroes. He simply loads them up with his own baggage; he follows them with reservations, with a dishonest heart.
we can even use our own body as a transference object, as Szasz has shown.36 The pains we feel, the illnesses that are real or imaginary give us something to relate to, keep us from slipping out of the world, from bogging down in the desperation of complete loneliness and emptiness.
Jung put it in some beautiful words: “… unless we prefer to be made fools of by our illusions, we shall, by carefully analysing every fascination, extract from it a portion of our own personality, like a quintessence, and slowly come to recognize that we meet ourselves time and again in a thousand disguises on the path of life.”
But Rank understood that the idea of God has never been a simple reflex of superstitious and selfish fear, as cynics and “realists” have claimed. Instead it is an outgrowth of genuine life-longing, a reaching-out for a plenitude of meaning—as
He uses morality to try to get a place of special belongingness and perpetuation in the universe, in two ways. First, he overcomes badness (smallness, unimportance, finitude) by conforming to the rules made by the representatives of natural power (the transference-objects);
People create the reality they need in order to discover themselves. The implications of these remarks are perhaps not immediately evident, but they are immense for a theory of the transference. If transference represents the natural heroic striving for a “beyond” that gives self-validation and if people need this validation in order to live,
Projection is necessary and desirable for self-fulfillment. Otherwise man is overwhelmed by his loneliness and separation and negated by the very burden of his own life.
One of the things we see as we glance over history is that creature consciousness is always absorbed by culture. Culture opposes nature and transcends it. Culture is in its most intimate intent a heroic denial of creatureliness. But this denial is more effective in some epochs than in others. When man lived securely under the canopy of the Judeo-Christian world picture he was part of a great whole; to put it in our terms, his cosmic heroism was completely mapped out, it was unmistakable. He came from the invisible world into the visible one by the act of God, did his duty to God by living out
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As our Heroism was map out in colture it can be map out again with the integration of nature and in nature it self, instead of longing for the evens to reconnect with nature and connect with it again (Ram Dass)
This is the most remarkable achievement of the Christian world picture: that it could take slaves, cripples, imbeciles, the simple and the mighty, and make them all secure heroes, simply by taking a step back from the world into another dimension of things, the dimension called heaven.
Or we might better say that Christianity took creature consciousness—the thing man most wanted to deny—and made it the very condition for his cosmic heroism.
“romantic solution”: he fixed his urge to cosmic heroism onto another person in the form of a love object.
Freud thought that modern man’s moral dependence on another was a result of the Oedipus complex. But Rank could see that it was the result of a continuation of the causa-sui project of denying creatureliness.
Modern man’s dependency on the love partner, then, is a result of the loss of spiritual ideologies, just as is his dependency on his parents or on his psychotherapist. He needs somebody, some “individual ideology of justification” to replace the declining “collective ideologies.”
But this is just what the comfortable sex relationship is for: in sex the body and the consciousness of it are no longer separated; the body is no longer something we look at as alien to ourselves. As soon as it is fully accepted as a body by the partner, our self-consciousness vanishes; it merges with the body and with the self-consciousness and body of the partner. Four fragments of existence melt into one unity and things are no longer disjointed and grotesque: everything is “natural,” functional, expressed as it should be—and
If sex is a fulfillment of his role as an animal in the species, it reminds him that he is nothing himself but a link in the chain of being, exchangeable with any other and completely expendable in himself. Sex represents, then, species consciousness and, as such, the defeat of individuality, of personality. But it is just this personality that man wants to develop: the idea of himself as a special cosmic hero with special gifts for the universe.
the body is a universal problem to a creature who must die. One feels guilty toward the body because the body is a bind, it overshadows our freedom. Rank saw that this natural guilt began in childhood and led to the anxious questions of the child about sexual matters.
When the parents give a straightforward biological answer to sexual questions, they do not answer the child’s question at all. He wants to know why he has a body, where it came from, and what it means for a self-conscious creature to be limited by it. He is asking about the ultimate mystery of life,
We might say that the child is still too weak to be able to bear the conflict of trying to be a personality and a species animal at the same time. The adult is, too, but he has been able to develop the necessary mechanisms of defense, repression and denial, that allow him to live with the problem of serving two masters.
See Otto Rank quote at the beginning of the chapter
then becomes perfectly clear what he means when he says that “personality is ultimately destroyed by and through sex.”15 In other words the sexual partner does not and cannot represent a complete and lasting solution to the human dilemma.16 The partner represents a kind of fulfillment in freedom from self-consciousness and guilt; but at the same time he represents the negation of one’s distinctive personality.
The thing that makes God the perfect spiritual object is precisely that he is abstract—as Hegel saw.19 He is not a concrete individuality, and so He does not limit our development by His own personal will and needs.
from our conceptualization of the ultimate source of things, the perfection of creation. It can only come, as Rank saw, when we lay down our individuality, give it up, admit our creatureliness and helplessness.24
like Augustine and Kierkegaard—that man cannot fashion an absolute from within his condition,
We cannot fashion an absolute form in our human condition there so we need to accept the duality
loathe to admit: their own natural inability to stand alone in freedom. This is why almost everyone consents to earn his immortality in the popular ways mapped out by societies everywhere, in the beyonds of others and not their own.
more you develop as a distinctive free and critical human being, the more guilt you have. Your very work accuses you; it makes you feel inferior.
this paradox: if you are going to be a hero then you must give a gift. If you are the average man you give your heroic gift to the society in which you live, and you give the gift that society specifies in advance. If you are an artist you fashion a peculiarly personal gift, the justification of your own heroic identity, which means that it is always aimed at least partly over the heads of your fellow men. After all, they can’t grant the immortality of your personal soul. As
Kierkegaard: that the only way out of human conflict is full renunciation, to give one’s life as a gift to the highest powers.
