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OUTLINE
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
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ERNEST BECKERS
THE BIRTH AND DEATH OF MEANING
INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION TO THE SUMMARY
The Birth and Death of Meaning is a synthesis - from
psychology, anthropology, sociology and psychiatry - on the
problem of man on existential problems, meaning,
freedom
of the self?
Note to Chapter Four: Phantom pain
Phantom pain, relation to referred pain, is an intriguing
aspect of the dualism of body / self It helps us understand
something about the historical dualism of soul and body, and
also of the deep rooting of one in the other. What is the
mechanism of pain and the way it is assigned a location; or of
the assignment of any perception? Phantom pain is the pain
an individual feels in a part of a body after it has been
amputated There must have been amputations and
phantom pain far back into prehistory, and so the traditional
beliefs of an invisible but sentient soul could have some
empirical basis. In other words, the idea of the soul is the
peculiar gift of a self-reflexive animal to the data of existence
CHAPTER FIVE. SOCIALIZATION: THE CREATION
OF THE INNER WORLD
It is not our parents' loins, so much as their lives that
enthralls and blinds us: Thomas Traherne, c. 1672
Theme: origin of human anxiety in the socialization process
in which the self appears in the body
One of the two most important facts about children
everywhere - their need for closeness, fondling and warm
praise! [Due to the basic need for interpersonal sensitivity
and due to natural needs expressed, indirectly, through
Mom.] The childs ego or sense of self at this time of
merger and identification with his mother must be one of
pure pleasure - the psychoanalysis have aptly named it the
purified pleasure ego Socialization refers to the training
of the child and to the process of disentanglement from
Mother in order to function as a member of a social group.
The child comes to realize that he has to abandon the idea of
instincts of his own id, but in the childs life situation and in
his social world. All this is actually in Freuds work, but he
never made the development complete and clear cut One
reason that the world of Alfred Adler is still contemporary is
that he saw what was really at stake in the early training
period more clearly than did Freud. Adler insisted that the
Oedipus complex as such was rare. The child does not bring
to the relationship with his mother any dark desires that have
to find their outlet at body orifices. Rather, he brings a
generalized need for physical closeness and support. If the
family dramatizes this closeness and support while lingering
on any one orifice, then we can say that this child is perverted
by the adult; or better, in the context of a certain kind of
relationship. Freuds term polymorphous perverse
should be changed to polymorphous pervertible
Yet infantile sexuality is observed, but what is it if it is not an
autochthonous drive? We see that after a few years children
do masturbate pleasurefully and enjoy rubbing against the
bodies of their parents. But it is now understood that the issue
is not what adults would be experiencing, but rather the
childs experience of the stimulating contact The
appendages of the body are secondary compared to the
emotions of the inner self urges for all kinds of experience
and maintenance of boundless parental love Sexual
functioning is subservient to ego functioning, to problems of
identity and freedom. Paradoxically, sex does not dominate
the child as sex, even if it shows itself as sex, as Rank
reasoned in his Modern Education. The main anxieties of the
child are frankly existential from the beginning. We know
now that a child becomes passive and oral, not because of a
rigorous weaning from the breast, but because of a whole
atmosphere that undermines his initiative and selfconfidence. A child becomes tense, mechanical and anal,
not because of strictly scheduled toilet-training or meticulous
bodily cleanliness and orderliness, but because of a lack of
of his early situation, we could all fairly early get selfknowledge. But the sense of right and wrong, our way of
perceiving the world, our feelings for it and who we are not
merely a mental matter - they are largely a total organismic
matter, as Dewey saw long ago, and Frederick Perls has
recently reminded us. We earn our early self-esteem not
actively but in large part passively, by having our action
blocked and reoriented to our parents pleasure. This triggers
introjection of parents images without digesting them - part
of our honest control So the self is largely a confusion
of insides, outsides, boundaries, alien objects and it is decentered and split off from the body in some measure. This is
what makes the study of character difficult and fascinating.
Even the person himself cannot know completely what his
experience and feelings mean because it is largely
presymbolic and unconscious
What makes the psychoanalytic corpus so compelling from
the scientific point of view is that it has mastered the general
problem of character by finding the current types, outline
groups, into which everyone more-or-less fits: aggressive,
passive, sadistic, narcissistic [or oral-aggressive, oral-passive,
anal-sadistic, phallic-narcissistic], and so on. We can rarely
know the unique character a person has, but his mode of
earning self-esteem is more or less identifiable in terms of the
basic psychoanalytic characterology. If we merge it with the
characterology developed by Diltheys followers, the modern
existentialists, and the data of anthropology, we have a fairly
complete cosmography of the inner worlds of men
CHAPTER EIGHT. CULTURE AND PERSONALITY:
THE STANDARDIZATION OF SELF-ESTEEM
We are born to action; and whatever is capable of suggesting
and guiding action has power over us from the first, Charles
Horton Cooley
behavior predictable
One of the great insights into the nature of society is that it is
precisely a drama. In sociological terms, status is something
that everybody has, a formalized cue. Culture has the most to
gain [?] from the resulting predictability
Sometimes status cues can be extremely complex [you and
thou, etc. - the Balinese have seventeen gradations of status
language]. Why complicate thus? Because there is a
challenge to ego mastery and a denial of meaninglessness. It
makes heroism possible. This is its function on a symbolic
level
There is also the physical aspect: Culture has to provide man
with safety as well as self-esteem and the area of least
dependability in social life is other people. As Sartre said,
Hell is other people. Status cues and role prescriptions for
behavior take care not only of self-esteem and the vital
matter of interpersonal safety; culture, society and nature also
provide for in other areas of physical safety: needs. More on
this later
The Paradox of Hero-Systems
Culture and personality neatly dovetail into one coherent
picture. If self-esteem and primary heroism is the vital need,
culture provides it through the hero system. The action
resulting from the provision of cues provides stability. [Not
every system will work; selection eliminates nonviable
ones [but the meaning of viable must be adaptive].] We raise
our children within a codified hero-system that will permit us
to survive and thrive according to our own peculiar needs
But there is a negative aspect to these arrangements: the cost
in freedom that they represent. This was seen by
anthropologists such as Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict.
action took place, and a greater, much more powerful world the invisible one, upon which the visible one depended, and
from which it drew its powers The problem of life, in such
a dual universe, is to control and tap the powers of the
invisible, spirit world. From the earliest times this has been
the function of the religious practitioner, that he had the
talent of bridging the two worlds: the pontifex, as the
Romans called him. In the West the belief in a dual
universe lasted right up until the Enlightenment and the
nineteenth century, and then gradually faded away for the
most part. Today we imagine that all real experience, all valid
data, exists on the level of the visible world alone; and, as we
might expect, we feel a real superiority in this belief over the
ancients. Besides, the old view is a half-million years old, the
new one a mere hundred fifty. This makes it modern and
scientific. Modern science, however, demonstrates that the
commonsense post-Enlightenment view of reality is not the
truth. There is, empirically, an invisible nature of
microcosmic and cosmic levels and the stuff of existence is in
many ways ephemeral. Our bodies are an organization of
ephemeral, changing entities
All of this seems to make the ancients less childish in their
beliefs. The tribal peoples who ashamedly renounced their
traditional superstitions to adopt the Western worldview
now appear to have been too hasty. We are learning that the
Bantu peoples possessed an ontology, a philosophy of
existence, as sophisticated as any we can think up today - in
fact, need to think up to explain the whole of experience.
Once you train yourself to imagine an invisible dimension of
experience, you begin to understand what the ancients meant
by heaven, the realm of timeless entity
The major lesson of the dualism of worlds, the relative
psychologies that result from these beliefs, is somewhat as
follows. For believers in the dualism, the invisible world has
more power and authority than the visible one. So, the people
in the visible world can renew and augment the powers of the
invisible one by proper ritual observances. Their major duty
in life is to the invisible spirits and gods. Put this baldly, it
sounds humanly demeaning - a tyranny of the departed
spirits. This tyranny was a real one in life under the great
dualism; but there was an important, positive side. In
traditional and primitive societies, the family was essentially
a religious group, a priesthood, because of its sacred ritual
duties to the departed ancestors. This is hard to grasp today
everything a person did was done, in other words, partly
in heaven. This is the meaning of Pascals beautiful, primitive
prayer which went something like this: Lord, help me to do
the great things as though they were little, since I do them
with Your powers; and help me to do the little things as
though they were great, because I do them in Your name
The visible world was like a stage The individual pops
into the physical embodiment from the entrance, comes to the
center of the stage, plays out his role in life
Becker continues: We can now understand why the problem
of heroism, or self-esteem, is so acute in modern life A
main function of culture - men together finding, making
meaning - is to provide the individual with a primary sense of
heroism to answer the question, How does the dignity,
control, bearing, talent, and duty of my life contribute to the
fuller development of mankind, to life in the cosmos? We
can see that primitive and traditional hero-systems provide a
clear-cut answer to precisely this question, and we can also
judge that modern society provides no easy answer if it
provides any at all. The allegiances of modern man are
material and limited to a single lifespan [and this, as observed
above, has no basis in experience - only in a highly distorted
view of experience]. These are easily undermined, and when
they are, the heroic is undermined with them. What is more,
whole masses of men are deprived of these allegiances, of a
meaningful place in the material culture hero-systems, and
DOCUMENT STATUS
I maintain this document because I learned much from it
and, therefore, in case I need occasional reference to it
but not because I am in agreement with the content
The chapters after the tenth are omitted. The sense of those
chapters, for me, is presaged in the earlier ones
No action needed for Journey in Being
The document may be useful if I return to write on the topics
I maintain no claim to originality or copyright on the material
of this document. However, the document formatting is my
property
Anil Mitra, January 6, 2015