The Denial of Death (30 page)

We can thus see some of the complexities of the dynamics of depression that have made it hard for us to understand it in an agreed and straightforward way, even though it is rather simple when conceptualized as the natural bogging-down of an unheroic human life. One of the things that hinders us, too, was Freud’s language and world-view. The Freudians said the menopausal depression, for example, was triggered by a re-experiencing of the early castration anxiety. It was easy to scoff at this explanation; it seemed that the Freudians were intent on once again reducing the problems
of an adult life to the Oedipal period and to their own patriarchal world-view. Here she was again, the poor castrated woman paying the debt of her natural disadvantages. I myself reacted to this a decade ago with the temerity that comes with inexperience and brashness and offered a theory to counter it, a theory that went to the very opposite extreme and focussed on the failure of social role and that alone. I saw that often menopausal women in psychiatric hospitals were there because their lives were no longer useful. In some cases their role as wives had failed because of a late divorce; in others t
his circumstance combined with the expiration of their role as mothers because their children had grown up and married, and they were now alone with nothing meaningful to do. As they had never learned any social role, trade, or skill outside of their work in the family, when the family no longer needed them they were literally useless. That their depression coincided with the time of menopause I thought was an excellent illustration that the failure of useful social role could alone be called upon to explain the illness.

We encounter the Freudian world-view and language at almost every turn as a peculiar scientific problem: it contains a powerful truth that is phrased in such a manner as to be untrue. And w
e ourselves often get hung up ridiculously trying to untangle the two; or, we throw the truth out with the untrue accent. I suppose one has to be brash to do anything at all in the present state of proliferation of specialists, but it is dangerous. An occasional scoffer cannot wish away a half-century of clinical observation and thought. A constant danger in science is that each gain risks abandoning ground that was once securely annexed. Nowhere is this more true than in the present “role-theories” of mental illness that threaten to abandon the Freudian formulations based on
bodily
facts.

The fact is that the woman’s experience of a repetition of castration at menopause is a real one—not in the narrow focus that Freud used, but rather in the broader sense of Rank, the existentialists, and Brown. As Boss so well said, “castration fear” is only an inroad or an aperture whereby the anxiety inherent in all existence may break into one’s world.
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It will be easy for us to understand at this point that menopause simply reawakens the horror of the body, the utter bankruptcy of the body as a viable
causa-sui
project—the exact experience that brings on the early Oedipal castration anxi
ety. The woman is reminded in the most forceful way that she is an animal thing; menopause is a sort of “animal birthday” that specifically marks the physical career of degeneration. It is like nature imposing a definite physical milestone on the person, putting up a wall and saying “You are not going any further into life now, you are going toward the end, to the absolute determinism of death.” As men don’t have such animal birthdays, such specific markers of a physical kind, they don’t usually experience another stark discrediting of the body as a
causa-sui
project. Once has be
en enough, and they bury the problem with the symbolic powers of the cultural world-view. But the woman is less fortunate; she is put in the position of having all at once to catch up psychologically with the physical facts of life. To paraphrase Goethe’s aphorism, death doesn’t keep knocking on her door only to be ignored (as men ignore their aging), but kicks it in to show himself full in the face.
^*

Once again we see that psychoanalysis has to be broadened to take in the fear of death rather than fears of punishment from the parents. It is not the parents who are the “castrators” but nature herself. Probably the guilt feelings of the patient also express the new
real
self-evaluation over being merely a fecal animal, dirty and truly worthless. But now we see too how the Freudian view and the sociological view merge naturally into one. Normally the cultural
causa-sui
project masks the re-experience of castration anxiety; but it is precisely the failure of the social role, the cultural proje
ct, that then reinforces the natural animal helplessness. Both projects, the bodily one and the cultural one, join in a mutual, resounding failure. No wonder, then, that menopausal depression is peculiarly a phenomenon of those societies in which aging women are deprived of some continuing useful place, some vehicle for heroism that transcends the body and death. No wonder, too, that instead of the eternity of life that one has a right to take for granted under the umbrella of a secure schema of self-perpetuation, the depressed person feels instead condemned to an eternity of destruction.
¹¹
From this vantage point, we have to admit that after all is said and done, the accent on social role as the key to the syndrome is correct because it is the superordinate level of the problems that absorbs the
bodily level. Heroism transmutes the fear of death into the security of self-perpetuation, so much so that people can cheerfully face up to death and even court it under some ideologies.

Furthermore, it is more realistic from a practical point of view to put the accent on the supportive social role because we cannot really expect people at large to emerge from their lifelong object-embeddedness and to attain self-reliance and self-sustaining power without some continued vehicle for heroism. Existence is simply too much of a burden; object-embeddedness and bodily decay are universally the fate of men. Without some kind of “ideology of justification” people naturally bog down and fail. Here again we can see how correctly Rank emphasized the historical dimension of mental illn
ess: the question is never about nature alone but also about the social ideologies for the transcendence of nature. If you can’t be a hero within a communal ideology, then you must be a nagging, whining failure in your family. From this perspective the problem of heroism and of mental illness would be “who nags whom?” Do men harangue the gods, the armies of other nations, the leaders of their own state, or their spouses? The debt to life has to be paid somehow; one has to be a hero in the best and only way that he can; in our impoverished culture even—as Harrington so truly put it—“if onl
y for his skill at the pinball machine.”
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Schizophrenia

From the historical perspective the schizophrenic psychosis becomes more richly understandable. There is a type of person for whom life is a more insurmountable problem than for others, for whom the burden of anxiety and fear is almost as constant as his daily breath. Rank used the term “neurotic” for one type of person who was without illusion, who saw things as they were, who was overwhelmed by the fragility of the human enterprise; and in this sense the term describes perfectly the schizophrenic type. He is the “realist” that William James talked about when he said that the right re
action to the horrors of organismic life on this planet is the psychotic one.
¹³
But this kind of “realism,” as Rank said, is the most self-defeating of all.

Adler very early showed how the schizophrenic was crippled by the fear of life and its demands, by a low self-evaluation in the face of them. He mistrusts not only himself but also the knowledge and ability of others; nothing seems to him to be able to overcome the inevitable horrors of life and death—except perhaps the fantastic ideational system that he fabricates for his own salvation.
¹⁴
His feelings of magical omnipotence and immortality are a reaction to the terror of death by a person who is totally incapable of opposing this terror with his own secure powers. We might
even say that the psychotic uses blatantly, openly, and in an exaggerated way the same kinds of thought-defenses that most people use wishfully, hiddenly, and in a more controlled way, just as the melancholic uses blatantly the defenses of the milder, more “normal” depressions of the rest of us: an occasional giving in to despair, a secret hatred of our loved ones, a quiet self-accusation and sorrowful guilt. In this sense the psychoses are a caricature of the life styles of all of us—which is probably part of the reason that they make us so uncomfortable.

Adler’s line of thought was developed by many people. Some of them are among the most profound and subtle students of the human condition who have ever lived: H. S. Sullivan, H. F. Searles, and R. D. Laing—to mention the nearest few. The result is that we have today an excellent general theory of schizophrenia in the scientific record for anyone to read. Here I want only to mention the main characteristic of the syndrome—why it is that the schizophrenic is in such an extraordinary state of terror. It took a long time for us to understand this state because we were dealing with a phenome
non so strange it seems truly like science fiction. I mean the fact that human experience is split into two modes—the symbolic self and the physical body—and that these two modes of experience can be quite distinct. In some people they are so distinct as to be unintegrated, and these are the people we call schizophrenic. The hypersensitive individual reacts to his body as something strange to himself, something utterly untrustworthy, something not under his secure control.
¹⁵

Right away we can see that the schizophrenic is burdened, like all of us, with an “alien” animal body. What makes his burden greater is that he is not securely rooted in his body. In his early childhood development he did not develop a secure “seating” in his
body: as a result his self is not anchored intimately in his neuroanatomy. He cannot make available to himself the natural organismic expansion that others use to buffer and absorb the fear of life and death. He does not feel this natural animal plenitude. We might say with Santayana that the healthy “Animal Faith” is denied him, which is why he has to develop complex ideational systems of thought. We know today that the cultural sense of space, time, and perception of objects are literally built into the neural structure.
¹⁶
As the cultural immortality ideology comes to be grounded in o
ne’s muscles and nerves, one lives it naturally, as a secure and confident part of one’s daily action. We can say that the schizophrenic is deprived precisely of this neurological-cultural security against death and of programming into life. He relies instead on a hypermagnification of mental processes to try to secure his deathtranscendence; he has to try to be a hero almost entirely ideationally, from within a bad body-seating, and in a very personal way. Hence the contrived nature of his efforts. No one understood better than Chesterton how freakish men become when they must rely on thou
ghts alone, separate from generous emotions in an expansive and secure body.
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Schizophrenia takes the risk of evolution to its furthest point in man: the risk of creating an animal who perceives himself, reflects on himself, and comes to understand that his animal body is a menace to himself. When you are not even securely anchored in this body it really becomes a problem. Terror becomes unabsorbable by anything neural, anything fleshy in the spot where you stand; your symbolic awareness floats at maximum intensity all by itself. This is really a cursed animal in evolution, an animal gone astray beyond natural limits. We cannot imagine an animal completely o
pen to experience and to his own anxieties, an animal utterly without programmed neurophysical reactivity to segments of the world. Man alone achieves this terrifying condition which we see in all its purity at the extremes of schizophrenic psychosis. In this state each object in the environment presents a massive problem because one has no response within his body that he can marshal to dependably respond to that object. At least we could wish that an animal without instincts would be able to sink back at will into a friendly mass of flesh that he can call his own intimate and basic possession, even i
f it doesn’t “tell” him what
response to make. The schizophrenic cannot even do that. His body has completely “happened” to him, it is a mass of stench and decay. The only thing intimate about it is that it is a direct channel of vulnerability, the direct toehold that the outer world has on his most inner self. The body is his betrayal, his continually open wound, the object of his repulsion—as Catherine Deneuve portrayed so well in Polanski’s “Repulsion.” No wonder this “disease” is the one that most intrigues and fascinates man. It pushes his own protest over his dualistic condition to its limits. It represents neurotic openness ca
rried to its extreme of helplessness. Freud very aptly called the syndrome “narcissistic neurosis”: the ballooning of the self in fantasy, the complete megalomanic self-inflation as a last defense, as an attempt at
utter symbolic power
in the absence of lived physical power. Again, this is what cultural man everywhere strove to achieve, but the “normal” person is neurally programmed so that he feels at least that his body is his to use with confidence.

By pushing the problem of man to its limits, schizophrenia also reveals the nature of creativity. If you are physically unprogrammed in the cultural
causa-sui
project, then you have to invent your own: you don’t vibrate to anyone else’s tune. You see that the fabrications of those around you are a lie, a denial of truth—a truth that usually takes the form of showing the terror of the human condition more fully than most men experience it. The creative person becomes, then, in art, literature, and religion the mediator of natural terror and the indicator of a new way to triumph ov
er it. He reveals the darkness and the dread of the human condition and fabricates a new symbolic transcendence over it. This has been the function of the creative deviant from the shamans through Shakespeare.