Storm passed over. Something happened. A respite from the doldrums while it lasted.
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The Nonduality of Life and Death: A Buddhist View of Repression
By David Loy
Philosophy East and West
Vol. 40, No. 2 (April 1990)
pp. 151-174
Copyright 2000 by University of Hawaii Press
Hawaii, USA
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p. 151 The Nonduality of Life and Death: A Buddhist View of Repression Philosophy East and West, Vol. 40, No. 2 (April 1990)
Summary
Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy? (Tolstoy)
Why was I born, if it wasn't forever? (Ionesco)
Yaksha: What is the greatest wonder in the world?
Yudhisthira: Every day men see others called to their death, yet those who remain live as if they were immortal. (The Mahābhārata)
One can no more look steadily at death than at the sun. (La Rochefoucauld)
All of life is but keeping away the thoughts of death. (Samuel Johnson)
All our knowledge merely helps us to die a more painful death than the animals who know nothing. (Maeterlinck)
Death is easier to bear without thinking of it, than is the thought of death without peril. (Pascal)
He who most resembles the dead is the most reluctant to die. (La Fontaine)
"I had to die to keep from dying." (Common schizophrenic remark)
By avoiding death, men pursue it. (Democritus)
Man has forgotten how to die because he does not know how to live. (Rousseau)
It is true: we love life not because we are used to living but because we are used to loving. (Nietzsche)
History is what man does with death. (Hegel)
Madness is something rare in individuals -- but in groups, parties, people, ages it is the rule. (Nietzsche)
Men are so necessarily mad that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness. (Pascal)
The 'struggle for success' becomes such a powerful force because it is the equivalent of self-preservation and self-esteem. (Kardiner)
For life in the present there is no death. Death is not an event in life. It is not a fact in the world. (Wittgenstein)
The artist carries death in him like a good priest his breviary.(Boll)
To live in the face of death is to die unto death. (Kierkegaard)
Art has two constants, two unending concerns: it always meditates on death and thus always creates life. (Pasternak)
Only the man who no longer fears death has ceased to be a slave. (Montaigne)
As long as you do not know how to die and come to life again, you are but a poor guest on this dark earth. (Goethe)
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Q: Do not one's actions affect the person in after-births?
A: Are you born now? Why do you think of other births? The fact is that there is neither birth nor death. Let him who is born think of death and palliatives therefor. (Ramana Maharshi)
Just understand that birth-and-death is itself nirvana. There is nothing such as birth and death to be avoided; there is nothing such as nirvana to be sought. Only when you realize this are you free from birth and death. (Dogen)
Much has happened to psychoanalysis in its century of life, and Freud today would have difficulty recognizing many of his progeny. Among those descendants that are of interest to comparative philosophers, transpersonal psychology has attracted considerable attention; [1] but this article will focus on existential psychoanalysis, which originated quite early out of a cross-fertilization between Freudianism and phenomenology, including Heidegger's Being and Time. [2] The leading figure was the Swiss psychoanalyst Ludwig Binswanger, who is also distinguished by the fact that he was able to disagree with Freud without that leading to a break between them. For reasons that will become clear at the end, I think this original movement made a mistake by allying itself with the early Heidegger, and what I have to say is more influenced by the second and third generations of existential psychology in the United States: among the analysts are Rollo May and now Irvin Yalom, and among the scholars, Norman O. Brown and most of all Ernest Becker, whose last two books, The Denial of Death and Escape from Evil, cannot be recommended too highly. [3]
Ernest Becker was not a psychologist but a cultural anthropologist, so his theory of death denial summarizes more than the conclusions of one psychoanalytic school; he attempts what might be called a unified field theory for the social sciences, and I think he comes close to succeeding. Here I want to bring a third party into this dialogue: Buddhism. If we add what Buddhism has to say about the human situation -- in particular, the "emptiness" of the ego-self -- fireworks go off and another cross-fertilization can occur. While Becker demonstrates what du.hkha really means today, Buddhism is able to show how Becker doesn't quite grasp the main point and therefore misses an alternative to his pessimistic conclusions. I confess to high hopes for this expanded conversation: for if important movements in the existentialist tradition (philosophy) , the psychoanalytic tradition (science), and the Buddhist tradition (religion) were to end up agreeing on the essentials of the human condition, who knows to what this might lead?
I shall begin by summarizing some of Becker's rich exposition while making a few general criticisms, then gradually bring in the Buddhist perspective. The conclusion will apply what we learn from this to turn Heidegger's Being and Time upside down.
Freud always emphasized that repression is the key psychoanalytic discovery which underlies the whole edifice. The concept is basically simple: something (it can be almost anything -- usually a thought or a feeling) makes me uncomfortable, and since I do not want to cope with it consciously, I choose to ignore or "forget" it. This clears the way for me to concentrate on something else, but at a price: part of my psychic energy must be expended in resisting what has been repressed, to keep it out of consciousness, and (the real rub) the repressed phenomenon tends to return to consciousness anyway, but as a symptom which is therefore symbolic (because that symptom re-presents it in distorted form). Freud traced the hysterias and phobias of his middle-class Viennese patients back to repressed sexuality, and he concluded that sexual repression is man's primal repression-although, like many of us, his attention gradually shifted from sex to death.
Today psychoanalytic attention has followed him there. Becker builds on a perceptive remark by William James: "mankind's common instinct for reality ... has always held the world to be essentially a theater for heroism." Our natural narcissism and need for self-esteem mean that each of us needs to feel that we are of special value, "first in the universe." Heroism is how we justify that need to count more than anyone or anything else. This is the common denominator behind the cultural relativity that anthropology discovers, which is nothing other than the relativity of hero systems. But why do we need to be heroes? It is "first and foremost a reflex of the terror of death" because heroism is what can qualify us for a special destiny. And we need that hope for a special fate, because the alternative is literally too much to contemplate. [4] The irony of man's unique symbolic life is that it only serves to reveal our fate in no uncertain terms. "Consciousness of death is the primary repression, not sexuality." [5] This fear of death is needed to keep our organism armed toward self-preservation; but it must also be repressed for us to function with any modicum of psychological comfort. The result is us: hyperanxious animals who constantly invent reasons for anxiety even when there are none. This was also the conclusion of Otto Rank, Melanie Klein, Norman O. Brown, and more recently Irvin Yalom, who argues that "a considerable portion of one's life energy is consumed in the denial of death." [6] Most animals have fears programmed into them as instincts, but the animal who has no such instincts (or whose consciousness allows him to transcend his instincts) fashions his fears out of the ways he perceives the world -- which unlocks a door that Becker himself does not open, for it suggests that if we can come to experience the world differently we might be able to fashion our fears differently, too. Or is it the other way around: do our fears cause us to perceive the world in the way we do, and might someone come to experience the world differently who was brave enough to face the thing we fear most?
The reason man's essence was never found, says Becker, "was that there was no essence, that the essence of man is really his paradoxical nature, the fact that he is half animal and half symbolic." [7] But how easily this moves from the common existentialist view that man has no essence to the claim that his essence is dualistic: a spirit with an anus and all the other accoutrements of mortality. This duality lies at the heart of Becker's argument. The mind looks down at the body, realizes what flesh implies, and panics. As a consequence, "everything that man does in his symbolic world is an attempt to deny and overcome his grotesque fate. He literally drives himself into a blind obliviousness with social games, psychological tricks, personal preoccupations so far removed from the reality of his situation that they are forms of madness." A good example is our character traits -- secret psychoses, said Ferenczi, a mechanization of a particular way of reacting, not very different from a repetition compulsion. These sedimented habits are a necessary protection, for without them there can only be "full and open psychosis": to see the world as it really is is "devastating and terrifying"; "it makes routine, automatic, secure, self-confident activity impossible... It places a trembling animal at the mercy of the entire cosmos and the problem of the meaning of it." Thus the bite in Pascal's aphorism: "Men are so necessarily mad that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness." For Becker this is literally true: normality is our collective, protective madness, in which we repress the truth of the human condition, and the ones who have difficulty playing this game are the ones we call mentally ill. Schizophrenics are suffering from the truth. Psychoanalysis reveals the high price of denying this truth about man's condition, "what we might call the costs of pretending not to be mad." [8]
This gives a more existential slant to such key Freudian concepts as guilt and the Oedipal complex. The early experience of the child is really his attempt to deny the anxiety of his emergence, his fear of losing his support, of standing alone, helpless and afraid.
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This despair he avoids by building defenses. and these defenses allow him to feel a basic sense of self-worth, of meaningfulness, of power They allow him to feel that he Controls his life and his death, that he really does live and act as a willful and free individual, that he has a unique and self-fashioned identity, that he is somebody... [9]
Yet this, which Becker calls the "great scientific simplification of psychoanalysis," may be grounded in other views of human nature than Becker's god-that-shits dualism. Elsewhere Becker refers to Maslow's "Jonah syndrome" in presenting a somewhat different explanation for repression: because we are not strong enough to endure the full intensity of life. "It all boils down to a simple lack of strength to bear the superlative, to open oneself up to the totality of experience." [10] In this sense, too, life is really too much for the child, and so we end up with the two great fears that other animals do not have: the fear of life, from inability to endure the intensity of full openness, and the fear of death, from inability to accept one's inevitable fate -- which, as we shall see, are not two distinct fears but two different aspects of the same fear.
But is mind-body dualism the cause of our panic, or its effect? Do we panic because we are consciousnesses with bodies, or is our panic what impels us to dualize ego-consciousness from body? The most detailed historical study of death in Western culture is Philippe Aries' The Hour of our Death, a monumental -- indeed, interminable -- survey of the last millennium. Although Aries' approach is not psychoanalytic, his conclusions are therefore all the more relevant, since his evidence comes to us from a different perspective. At the moment the most interesting to us are the first two stages of death-awareness that he distinguishes. In striking contrast to what came later, death in the Middle Ages was "tame." Although recognized as evil, it was also accepted as inseparable from life. Contrary to the universal implications of Becker's thesis, there do not seem to have been the extremes of terror and denial that we now associate with death; rather, it was a repose, a peaceful sleep from which one may or may not reawaken, in the eventual resurrection of the body.
But this changed. "The strong individual of the later Middle Ages could not be satisfied with the peaceful but passive conception of requies....He split into two parts: a body that experienced pleasure or pain and an immortal soul that was released by death." [11] Evidently it was this dualism that attained a philosophical rationalization in the Meditations of Descartes, whose legacy we still are and with which we still struggle.
Is it a coincidence that this new conception of death spread just before the acceleration -- the explosion -- of Western civilization that began as the Renaissance? If history is what man does with death, as Hegel said, then a more death-conscious society will create more history. Fromm pointed out that the Renaissance brought an increased feeling of strength and freedom, but also isolation, doubt, skepticism, and anxiety. Burckhardt noticed the most outstanding symptom, now so widespread that we take it for granted: a morbid craving for fame. The desire to be famous is a good example of how something repressed (here, death terror) remanifests in consciousness in distorted form (the passion for symbolic immortality), which therefore becomes a symptom of our problem (if what I really want is personal immortality, no fame will ever be enough -- but this is usually experienced as "I am not yet famous enough"). [12] This craving and the other character traits that Fromm mentions are associated with greater self-consciousness: increased consciousness is increased awareness of the end, and the need to resolve the increased anxiety that that awareness brings with it, whether by becoming an immaterial soul or by attaining symbolic immortality through one's reputation.
This implies that the Platonic, Cartesian, and now "commonsense" mindbody dualism that Becker, too, presupposes (in a more sophisticated version: Plate's immaterial psyche and Descartes' cogito become with him the symbolizing functions that modern social science analyzes) is not the unvarying essence of human nature but another example of nurture being taken for nature: a historically determined conception of man now so deeply ingrained that its metaphysical nature is forgotten -- which, we remember, is the definition of repression, something that can afflict whole civilizations as well as individuals. But if this understanding is conditioned, can it be un-conditioned?
From the Buddhist perspective, this is not the only questionable dualism that Becker assumes. Like most of us all of the time (and perhaps all of us most of the time) he takes for granted the apparently objective nature of the world, which Western philosophy (and cognitive psychology) since Kant has realized to be mentally constituted. Not only does each of us construct the supposedly objective world, but (just as important psychologically) we constitute the world in a manner that conceals the fact that we have constituted it -- which can also be seen as a form of repression.
Perhaps the most potent defense of all [against death anxiety] is simply reality as it is experienced -- that is, the appearance of things... [A]ppearances enter the service of denial: we constitute the world in such a way that it appears independent of our constitution. To constitute the world as an empirical world means to constitute it as something independent of ourselves. [13]
Yalom relates this to repressed fear of groundlessness, which makes us try to secure ourselves by stabilizing the world we are in. This fits the Buddhist view of the problem if we understand this fear of groundlessness as the ego-self's fear of its own "emptiness." But it is not just the sense-of-self that is empty. The denial of subject-object dualism which is so fundamental to Mahāyāna (and Advaita Vedānta) implies that our usual sense of separation (between myself and the world I am in) is delusive; the supposed subjectivity of ego-consciousness gains a spurious reality only in opposition to the sup-
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posed objectivity of the empirical world (and vice versa). [14] Then to repress the fact that I constitute my "objective" world is also to repress the fact that I constitute myself. But before we get any further ahead of ourselves, let us return to Becker's exposition.
Freud traced guilt back to the early ambivalent feelings of the child, particularly hate and death wishes toward parents, which lead to fears of object loss. The Denial of Death sees the origin of guilt in the child's reaction to his bodily processes and their urges: "guilt as inhibition, as determinism, as smallness and boundedness" is implied by the constraints that the basic animal condition imposes upon the symbol-using god, who needs to control his condition and would like to escape it. Escape from Evil expands on this:
Guilt, as the existentialists put it, is the guilt of being itself. 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. [15]
This "pure" guilt has nothing to do with infringements or punishment for secret wishes; the major sin is the sin of being born, as Samuel Beckett has said. It is the worm in the heart of the human condition, apparently an inescapable consequence of self-consciousness itself -- and not only the human condition but the social fabric, for Becker like Brown sees social organization as "a structure of shared guilt." The burden is so heavy that man cannot endure it by himself; it must be shared in order to be expiated collectively, as we see more clearly (because more objectively) in the rituals of archaic man, whose life "was openly immersed in debt." [16]
This illuminates the existential view of the Oedipal complex, which Norman O. Brown more accurately calls the "Oedipal project." Brown agrees with Freud that this project is the attempt to become father of oneself, but not by sleeping with mother. To become one's own father is to become what Nāgārjuna described (and refuted) as self-existing -- in Spinoza's formula, causa sui, self-caused; in Sartre's, etre-en-soi-pour-soi, "being both in-itself and for-itself," which, in his ontology, is a contradiction. Becker summarizes this by saying that the Oedipal project is the flight from obliteration and contingency. The child wants to conquer death by becoming the creator and sustainer of his own life. In Buddhist terms, the Oedipal project is the attempt of the developing ego-self to attain closure on itself, foreclosing its dependence on others by becoming autonomous. To be one's own father is to be one's own origin. Rather than just a way to conquer death, this makes even more sense as the quest to deny one's groundlessness by becoming one's own ground: the ground (socially sanctioned but nonetheless illusory) of being an independent person. What is called the Oedipal complex is due to the discovery by the child that he is not part of mother, after all. The problem is not so much that Dad has first claim on Mom, as what that contributes to the child's dawning realization of separation:
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"but if I'm not part of Mom, what am I part of?" -- which becomes, more generally: what am I? Who am I? This generates the need to discover one's own ground, or rather the need to create it -- a futile project, never to be fulfilled except by delusively identifying with something ("I may not be Mom, but I am this!"), which must include, as its other side, the fear of losing it.
If this is what happens, the Oedipal project originates in our intuition that self-consciousness is not something obviously "self-existing" but a fiction, a mental construct. Rather than being self-sufficient, consciousness is more like the surface of the sea: dependent on depths which it cannot grasp because it is a manifestation of them. The problem arises when consciousness wants to ground itself, to make itself real. But to real-ize itself is to objectify itself. The ego-self is this attempt of awareness to objectify itself by grasping itself -- which it can no more do than a hand can grasp itself. Vedānta shows the futility of this by pointing out that whatever the "I" becomes aware of cannot be the "I", that the "I" will always be different from anything cognized as "me."
The consequence of this is that the sense-of-self always has, as its inescapable shadow, a sense-of-lack, which (alas!) it always tries to escape. It is here that the psychoanalytic concept of repression comes in, for the idea of "the return of the repressed" in a distorted form shows us how to link this fundamental yet hopeless project with the symbolic ways we try to make ourselves real in the world. This deep sense of lack is experienced as the feeling that "there is something wrong with me." To the extent that we have a sense of autonomous self, we have this sense of lack, which manifests in many different forms. We have already noticed one: the craving to be famous, which is a good example of the way we usually try to make ourselves real -- through the eyes of others. In its "purer" forms lack appears as ontological guilt or, even more basic, an ontological anxiety at the very core of one's being, which is almost unbearable because it gnaws on that core. For that reason all anxiety wants to become objectified into fear of something (as Spinoza might say, fear is anxiety associated with an object), because then we know what to do: we have ways to defend ourselves against the feared thing.
The tragedy of these objectifications, however, is that no amount of money can be enough if it is not really money that we want. When we do not understand what is actually motivating us -- because what we think we want is only a symptom of something else -- we end up compulsive, "driven." Such a Buddhist analysis implies that no true "mental health" will be found short of an enlightenment which puts an end to that sense-of-lack which is the shadow of the sense-of-self, by putting an end to the sense-of-self. Is psychoanalysis coming close to realizing the same thing?
Transference in the narrow sense is our unconscious tendency to take emotions and behavior felt towards one person (for example, a parent) and project them onto another (for example, one's analyst). But if transference in the large
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sense is "distortion of encounter" (Rollo May), then we all do it most of the time, and this is just what Freud concluded: it is a "universal phenomenon of the human mind" that "dominates the whole of each person's relation to his human environment." Transference reveals that I never grow up, remaining "a child who distorts the world to relieve his helplessness and fears, who sees things as he wishes them to be for his own safety." The need to find security by subjecting ourselves to others remains, transferred from parents to teachers, superiors, and rulers. This is not making "an emotional mistake," but a matter of experiencing the other as one's whole world -- just as the family is for the child. In this way we tame the terror of life, by focusing the power and horror of the universe in one place. "Mirabile! The transference object, being endowed with the transcendent powers of the universe, now has in himself the power to control, order, and combat them." This natural fetishization for man's highest yearnings and strivings explains our urge to deify the other: "the more they have, the more rubs off on us. We participate in their immortality, and so we create immortals." Rank said that we need to erect a god-ideal outside ourselves in order to live at all, and the transference object fits the bill. [17]
The problem is that this process is unconscious and hence uncritical, a regression to wishful thinking which is not fully in one's control. We children of the twentieth century do not need to think very hard to come up with good examples -- but examples have never been lacking. Man has always been hypnotized by those who represent life to him, and eager to submit himself to charismatic personalities who legitimize their power with a little symbolic mystification. "Each society elevates and rewards leaders who are talented at giving the masses heroic victory, expiation for guilt, relief of personal conflicts." Alas, these leaders are usually the grandest, most mindless patriots, "who embrace the ongoing system of death denial with the heartiest hug, the hottest tears, the least critical distance." [18]
Yet Freud and Ferenczi also saw a more positive side, for transference indicates a natural attempt to heal oneself through creating the larger reality one needs to discover oneself, the "self-taught attempts on the patient's part to cure himself." Thus Rank concluded that "projection is a necessary unburdening of the individual; man cannot live closed in upon himself and for himself." So for Becker the question ultimately becomes: "What is creative projection? What is life-enhancing illusion?" [19] As Jung put it: what myth do you live by?
If transference is broadened to include ego models, we can do it with someone we have never met. Let's be honest with ourselves: don't philosophers like Wittgenstein tend to be models for us, as movie stars are for many others? The person not fascinated by one model is fascinated by another, because this is how we choose the cosmology for our own heroics, even if those heroics must be vicarious; at least we can identify our universe with the one that our hero lived, thought, and acted within. And that brings us closer to the heart of the matter, for transference applies not just to people: we admire not only
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outstanding sportsmen, but their teams; we identify not only with national leaders, but countries; not only with Nietzsche, Freud, and the Buddha, but with existentialism, psychoanalysis, and Buddhism.
The Buddhist term for all this is attachment, but because that is such a vague term, Buddhism can here learn from psychoanalysis, which is more methodically discovering how delusion functions. What ties all these manifestations together as the same "universal phenomenon of the human mind" is more than our need to tame the terror of death: it is the need to organize the chaos of life by finding a unifying meaningsystem that gives us knowledge about the world, and a life program, telling us both what is and what we should do. The child tends to absorb this from his parents as part of what it means to be a person; we place ourselves in the universe by accepting the meaningsystem of someone we identify with. "All of us are driven to be supported in a self-forgetful way, ignorant of what energies we really draw on, of the kind of lie we have fashioned in order to live securely and serenely." [20]
But not securely or serenely enough. After a century of theory and practice, psychoanalysis has come to agree with the great insight of existentialism: anxiety is not incidental but fundamental to the self, not something we have but something we are. From this, many (for example, Tillich) have decided that it is not possible to put an end to anxiety. But that conclusion does not necessarily follow. What is implied is that such an end would require ending the ego-self as usually experienced. Brown is sympathetic to such a possibility: "since anxiety is the ego's incapacity to accept death, the sexual organizations were perhaps constructed by the ego in its flight from death, and could be abolished by an ego strong enough to die." [21] But for Rank and Becker, anxiety cannot all be overcome therapeutically, because it is impossible to stand up to the terrible truth of one's condition without anxiety; hence our choice is between anxiety and repression. If we cannot face the truth of our condition, which is mortality, we must repress that truth, which is to forget it. The difference between neurosis and normality -- that undramatic, unnoticed psychopathology of the average (Maslow) -- is how successful that repression is. The neurotic has a better memory than most, so his anxiety keeps breaking through into consciousness and so must be dealt with more harshly in order to preserve a little freedom of action. All of us react to our anxiety by "partializing" our world, by restricting our consciousness within narrow bounds, to areas which we can more or less control and which give us a sense of self-confidence. The neurotic has more difficulty sustaining the illusion of self-confidence and must confine himself even more narrowly. The psychotic can do this hardly at all, and in self-protection de-animates himself, often referring to himself as a toy, a puppet, or a machine; the literature on schizophrenia is full of expressions like "I had to die to keep from dying." [22]
The difference between the three becomes a matter of degree. When you grow up unable to immerse yourself freely in the cultural roles available to
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you, then your own life becomes a problem. Tillich called neurosis the way of avoiding nonbeing by avoiding being. Rank said the constant restriction of the neurotic's life is because "he refuses the loan (life) in order thus to avoid paying the debt (death)." The anguish and despair that the neurotic complains of are not the result of his symptoms but their cause; those symptoms are what shield him from the tragic contradictions at the heart of the human situation: death, guilt, meaninglessness. "The irony of man's condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive." [23]
Then is the guilt that seems to bedevil man not the cause of our unhappiness, but its effect? "The ultimate problem is not guilt but the incapacity to live. The illusion of guilt is necessary for an animal that cannot enjoy life, in order to organize a life of nonenjoyment" (Brown). [24] In Buddhist terms, if the autonomy of self-consciousness is a delusion which can never quite shake off its shadow-sense that "something is wrong with me," it will need to rationalize that sense of inadequacy somehow. The restriction of the neurotic life-sphere merely aggravates this universal sense of lack into a paralysis of consciousness, a death-in-life. But if fear of death rebounds as fear of life, they become two sides of the same coin. Then genuine life cannot be opposed to death but must embrace them both: "Whoever rightly understands and celebrates death, at the same time magnifies life." (Rilke)
The irony is that as long as we crave immortality we are dead. As La Fontaine noted, he who resembles the dead is the most reluctant to die. Aries is struck by the fact that, at the time of the late Middle Ages which we have already mentioned, the idea of death was replaced by the idea of mortality in general: "the sense of death henceforth diluted and distributed over the whole of life, and thus lost its intensity." Yes, but only because life, too, lost its intensity, as he notices elsewhere: "It is a curious and seemingly paradoxical fact that life ceased to be so desirable at the same time that death ceased to seem so punctual or so powerful." [25] In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the "living corpse" became a common theme: what better image could we ask for? Again, Aries' study implies that Becker's pessimistic con-clusions about human nature do not reflect man's unchanging nature, only one particular, historically conditioned nature: ours. But cannot a conditioned nature be reconditioned -- or de-conditioned?
Rank and Becker replace Freud's sexual reductionism with the fear of death and -- every fear has a correlative hope -- the desire for immortality. As different as these monologies are, they imply equally tragic conclusions about the human condition. The best that the early Freud could offer was sublimation or rational control of the libido by the ego, which he saw as making the best of a bad thing; and his later view was more pessimistic, postulating a
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life-against-death struggle between two instincts, Eros and Thanatos, that death must always win. Becker is hardly more optimistic: if our deepest, most repressed fear is of death, we seem to be stuck between transference projections in one form or another, or psychotically acknowledging the terror of our situation; for each of us is indeed going to die. Again, death always wins -- in this case even before we die, in the psychic paralysis of death-in-life.
The difference between Freud and Becker is that Eros and Thanatos are instincts, while the fear of death is not: it is a reaction of the animal who is conscious enough to become aware of himself and his inevitable fate; so it is something we have learned. But exactly what is it we have learned? Is the dilemma of life-confronting-death an objective fact we just see, or is this, too, something constructed and projected, more like an unconscious game that each of us is playing with himself? According to Buddhism, life-against-death is a delusive way of thinking it is dualistic: the denial of being dead is how the ego affirms itself as being alive; so it is the act by which the ego constitutes itself. To be self-conscious is to be conscious of oneself, to grasp oneself, as being alive. (Despite all their struggles to keep from dying, other animals do not dread death, because they are not aware of themselves as alive.) Then death terror is not something the ego has, it is what the ego is. This fits well with the Buddhist claim that the ego-self is not a thing, not what I really am, but a mental construction. Anxiety is generated by identifying with this fiction for the simple reason that I do not know and cannot know what this thing that I supposedly am is. This is why the "shadow" of the sense-of-self will inevitable be a sense-of-lack.
Now we see what the ego is composed of: death terror. The irony here is that the death terror which is the ego defends only itself. Everything outside is what the ego is terrified of, but what is inside? Fear is the inside, and that makes everything else the outside. The tragicomedy is that the self-protection this generates is self-defeating, for the barriers we erect to defend the ego also reinforce our suspicion that there is indeed something lacking in our innermost sanctum which needs protection. And if it turns out that what is innermost is so weak because it is... nothing, then no amount of protection will ever be felt to be enough and we shall end up trying to extend our control to the very bounds of the universe. Something like this, I think, is what motivates mankind's compulsive technological project, and suggests what is wrong with it; but there is no space to go into that here.
If, however, the ego is constituted by such a dualistic way of thinking, it means that ego can die without physical death and without consciousness coming to an end. What makes this more than idle speculation is that there is ample testimony to the possibility of such ego death:
No one gets so much of God as the man who is completely dead. (St. Gregory)
The Kingdom of God is for none but the thoroughly dead. (Eckhart)
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Your glory lies where you cease to exist. (Ramana Maharshi)
