The Psychology of Death in Fantasy and History

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DEATH IN FANTASY AND HISTORY

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THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DEATH rN FANTASY AND HISTORY Edited by Jerry S. Piven

PRAEGER

Westport, Connecticut London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The psychology of death in fantasy and history / edited by Jerry S. Piven. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-275-98178-9 (alk. paper) 1. Death—Psychological aspects—History. 2. Fantasy—History. I. Piven, Jerry S. BF789.D4P79 2004 155.9'37—dc22 2003062438 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright © 2004 by Jerry S. Piven All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2003062438 ISBN: 0-275-98178-9 First published in 2004 Praeger Publishers, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.praeger.com Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48-1984). 10

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Byrne Piven Actor, Poet, Father, and Uncle Who faced death with rarest courage

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Contents

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Acknowledgments Introduction: Approaching Death Jerry S. Piven Death, Fantasy, and the Politics of Self-Destruction Siamak Movahedi Buddhism, Death, and the Feminine Jerry S. Piven Uncanny Dolls: Images of Death in Rilke and Freud Eva-Maria Simms Death, Fantasy, and Religious Transformations Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi Europe's Culture of Death Rudolph Binion Creativity and Death in Psychoanalysis Hans-Jurgen Wirth

7 The Idol and the Idolizers: Ernest Becker's Theory of Expanded Transference as a Tool for Historical Criticism and Interpretation with an Addendum on Transference and Terrorism Daniel Liechty

ix 1 13 37 71 87 119 137

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CONTENTS

8 Thoughts for the Times on Terrorism, War, and Death Hans-Jurgen Wirth 9 Love, Separation, and Death in a Japanese Myth Yuko Katsuta 10 Fundamentalism, Defilement, and Death George Victor 11 Death, Neurosis, and Normalcy: On the Ubiquity of Personal and Social Delusions Jerry S. Piven 12 Unveiling Mexican Cultural Essences: Death and Spirituality Luz Maria Solloa Garcia 13 Adaptive Insights into Death Anxiety Robert Langs 14 Laughing at Death NeilJ.Elgee Index About the Editor and Contributors

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Acknowledgments

Sincere thanks are owed those who encouraged and facilitated this anthology without desire for fame or financial reward. I would also like to express my gratitude to Debora Carvalko of Praeger Press for her patience and generosity Of course, I will always thank most my dear wife Miyoko for her love, intelligence, fortitude, assistance, and sense of humor.

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Introduction: Approaching Death Jerry S. Piven

Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of Eternity, Until Death tramples it to fragments. —Percy Bysshe Shelley (1821), Adonais, stanza 52 The articles in this volume seek a psychological understanding of death in fantasy and history. Studies of history are rarely psychological, and accounts of death most often chronicle what people consciously stated without questioning whether such statements truly reflected the depths of their emotions and fantasies. One can read countless narrations of medieval deathbed scenes. Do w e assume that the dying individuals merely accepted death quietly, or may w e question this appearance, discern the inspiration of faith in salvation, explore the language and imagery further to learn just h o w one might have conceived of death, the inevitability of decomposition, the thought that a beautiful bride might be consumed by maggots, or rot in Hell? If w e read Victorian poets limning sexual intercourse with corpses, do w e dismiss it as fashionable trope, banal necrophilic perversion, histrionic dramatics, or perhaps, w o n d e r w h y someone might be sexually aroused by death and rotting women? When members of numerous cults bask in apocalyptic imagery and bathe in the joyful thought of being reborn in a purified world, does it not behoove us to delve into their psyches?

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This being said, even psychoanalytic interpretations of history virtually ignore the impact of death, the fear of mortality, nonbeing, and decay. For the most part psychoanalysis disdains the idea that the fear of death plays a central role in our emotions, both reducing death to a displacement of castration or guilt, and adhering to the notion that the fear of death is a symptom of a psychological problem (cf. Piven, in press-a, in press-b). However, this volume follows in the wake of an emerging tradition that sees death as a critical motivation for the genesis of belief systems, fantasies, delusions, and numerous psychopathological syndromes. The psychoanalytic denial of death does not preclude us from interpreting death psychoanalytically and psychohistorically Below I illustrate how death is a deeply intricate, elusive, crucial, and ubiquitous influence on human psychology and history, thus intimating the spectrum of issues examined in this anthology. POINT OF DEPARTURE: THE PSYCHOANALYSIS OF CULTURE AND HISTORY From a psychoanalytic and psychohistorical perspective, a significant portion of history can be interpreted in terms of childhood conflict and trauma, the repetition and projection of infantile fantasies into religion, social order, and cosmos. How a culture or individual envisions god(s), worship, the worth of humanity, good and evil, derives from the complex matrix of conflict, compromise, rage, terror, and love. God may be vengeful or compassionate. Human beings may be sinful, shameful, and filthy, or they may partake of the cosmic divinity of the gods themselves. Cultural worldviews, religion, and even politics may be understood as transferences: repetitions of past relations and images which not only distort the present and imbue it with imperceptible fantasy, but also serve as defenses against present reality. From a Freudian perspective, religion is a neurotic repetition of the past and a pathological evasion of reality. History can be read as the genesis of particular mental illnesses and the symbolism of their corresponding delusional fantasies on a social scale (Freud, 1907, 1913, 1927, 1930, 1939).1 Psychoanalytic research into childhood discovered how the provision of contact, comfort, and security, not just bodily satiation, are imperative for healthy growth (cf. Eagle, 1984; Fairbairn, 1941; Mitchell & Black, 1995). For the infant there is either pleasure and security or terrifying helplessness and agitation. The child learns to differentiate himself from his mother and emerge from her protection slowly, with much trepidation, and so vulnerably, that disturbances in psychological development centering on object relations and identity formation can lead to critical deficiencies and pathologies.2

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Cadences of childhood pain and conflict are manifested in beliefs, fantasies, and the sacred. For instance, one might recognize the longing for an afterlife or salvation, the erection of a church, burial mound, omphalos, 3 or pyramid, as symbolic fantasies of reunion with the mother of infancy. The symbolism of these structures is elusive, and they mean many things at the same time. Egyptian pyramids are not merely massive tombs; they emerged from archaic images of the god being born as a flower from a mound of earth, gradually increasing in majesty and magical immortality for individual pharaohs. A pyramid is a denial of death and disappearance, a testament to narcissistic grandiosity, an alchemical sanctum suspending the mummified corpse while its soul is transported to the afterlife. And the rebirth of the god from the earth is still manifested in its holy symmetry, a womb from which the pharaoh is regestated and reborn. His coffin is a neb ankh, a house or lord of life, inside which the image of the goddess Nut is depicted so that the deceased may pass through her body in rebirth. We can always find fantasies of surrogate wombs, protecting and sheltering architecture, substitutes for the lost body of mother. This matrix is also highly conflicted, which is why the feminine also contains a terrifying and evil aspect beside the nurturing one. In addition to the sheltering womb we find innumerable images of the murderous goddess or siren, all derived from the infantile terror of maternal cannibalism, punishment, and rage. History must also be seen in terms of the male reaction to the feminine, to his fear of her anger, her power to give life, and her sexuality.4 How a culture conceives and derogates the feminine reflects its conflicts and trauma, how terrified, resentful, or loving toward its maternal origins.5 In sum, cosmos is psyche symbolized (Ricoeur, 1967). TERROR, DEVELOPMENT, FANTASY, AND HISTORY It is these intricacies of development and their concomitant terrors that circumscribe history. Amidst these psychosexual tribulations, the terrors of violent injury, abandonment, helplessness, and disintegration saturate the emotional life of the child and lead to defensive responses and derangements. The substratum of psychopathology is the dread of annihilation and death, whether these terms imply a conceptual understanding of death or inchoate and even pre-categorical images or feelings of being killed. The anxiety impelling defense and pathology is ultimately an overwhelming terror, a threat which scares the human organism into fearing for its life, whether it knows death as a concept or not. The impact and defensive management of these terrors evolve into the conscious and unconscious imagery of death: beliefs and concep-

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tions about the end of life, and the fantasies which contain the terror, expiate its danger, arrest its conscious awareness, deny its permanent reality. It is this horror of death which generates fantasy, illusion, and history. Within the matrix of conflict and illusion, the terror of death always holds sway as impulsion for religious fantasies, and the psychological investigation of history must contend with the horrific facts of human frailty, transience, and putrefaction. Culture itself may be understood as the innumerable ways societies defend themselves against helplessness and annihilation, how they mould and recreate the world in accordance with their wishes and anxieties, the social mechanisms employed to deny annihilation and death. Whether one speaks of the construction of massive burial tombs, magical transformations of death into eternal life, or afterlives and resurrections, the need to cope with death and deny its awesome terror and affect are the sine qua non of religion, culture, ideology, and belief systems in general. These are imagined in order to palliate the terror of death, decay, and annihilation. For some this should be obvious. Can one explore the history of religion without perpetually being struck by the sheer terror of death motivating the invention of afterlives, necromancies, and mortuary cults? Robert Jay Lifton (1970) arrives at similar conclusions with his concept of "symbolic immortality," where societies transform their belief systems in accordance with their changing needs in order to defend themselves against the threat of annihilation and impending mortality. Ernest Becker (1973) describes death as "the worm at the core" of human fantasies of importance and significance. The belief system must enable the society to feel as though it were protected and had a place in the continuity of life and the divine. The sacred must be able to instill a cohesive conviction of the meaning and significance of life, that individuals may find some measure of immortality in the belief system. Indeed it is because these beliefs and practices deny death, the threat of annihilation, and insure symbolic immortality that they are sacred. As such the sacred often becomes the impetus for mass movements and revolutions, which provide feelings of moral victory, personal meaningfulness, and transcendence through the ceremony, ideology, and fervor driving them. Lifton (1970) calls this "revolutionary immortality," the "shared sense of participating in revolutionary ferment, and of transcending individual death by 'living on' indefinitely within this continuing revolution" (p. 34). Symbolic immortality can take a variety of forms, all of which are reflected in the sacred and transcendent, whether ideological, revolutionary, religious, even secular and occupational. One can live symbolically through works of art or literature:

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Now stands my task accomplished, such a work As not the wrath of Jove, nor fire nor sword Nor the devouring ages can destroy. Let, when it will, that day, that has no claim But to my mortal body, end the span Of my uncertain years. Yet I'll be borne, The finer part of me, above the stars, Immortal, and my name shall never die. (Ovid, 8 C.E., p. 379) One can live through the continuance of nature: "The state may collapse but the mountains and rivers remain" (Lifton, 1979, p. 22). Or one can live through one's children, in the comfort that part of one will survive. However, as mentioned, social ideologies, religious beliefs and practices, may be viewed as transference phenomena, imbued with conflict, fantasy, and denials of reality. In sum, this unites the developmental complexity and fantasy-life of individuals with group semiotics and the sacred.6 This is a framework in which we can view cultural development and change as transference dynamics, regression, restitution, and the projection of defense mechanisms and compromise formations into new modes of belief and practice which insure symbolic immortality. Lifton (1970) states aptly "the shifting modes of immortality mark the great turning points in history" (p. 38)7 The analysis of religion in history should demonstrate the universality of death terror, and numerous empirical studies support the proposition that death anxiety is a general phenomenon, not an aberration or anomalous case.8 If infinite fantasies on death emerge from development, death anxiety cannot be reduced to childhood conflict or trauma because death anxiety is universal and exerts its influence on the psyche regardless of upbringing, trauma, or abuse. The particular problems of infancy will impact on the severity and particular evolution of death anxiety in the individual. Thus the gradual expansion of consciousness and self-awareness will include its own burgeoning of terror management or disorder. In recent decades, researchers have been exploring the manner in which childhood development and character disorder reflects the management of death anxiety. James McCarthy's (1980) analysis of clinical findings indicated that death anxiety correlates with depression and separation-individuation phenomena. Irvin Yalom (1980) also did extensive studies of children and their relation to conception and imagery of death, arguing further that death pervades our fundamental emotions, fantasies, and occupations. Noel Walsh (1996) explored how death anxiety impacted on development and the stratification of neurosis. While empirical studies seem to indicate the universality of death anxiety, terror management depends on both cultural and individual factors.

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Recently Leifer (1997) and Loy (1996) have deftly elucidated Buddhist wisdom on death and its importance for psychology. One of the most radical perspectives on death anxiety comes from Langs (1997, in press-a, in press-b), who asserts that there is a fundamental, defensively motivated flaw in the basic psychoanalytic focus on intrapsychic processes like unconscious memories, needs, fantasies, relational patterns, and narcissistic needs. Langs points out that biological organisms have evolved and are designed to adapt first and foremost to environmental conditions, especially those that are traumatic and life threatening. Inherent to the appreciation of the role played by external dangers in emotional life is the recognition of the fundamental role played by death and death anxieties in the vicissitudes of both emotional health and maladaptations. Indeed, according to Langs, the very core of psychoanalytic thinking is, in part, constructed as a defense against the experience and processing of the death anxieties that humans acquired when they evolved language capabilities and which, to this very day, plague us all even as they fuel our most creative moments in life. AWAKENING TO DEATH How is this useful for psychoanalytic or psychohistorical inquiry? This dimension has been thus far both neglected and resisted in a true psychoanalytic sense. Death anxiety and mortal terror have been salient and driving forces which have shaped history and culture. One can barely examine the Egyptian mortuary cult, its obsession with disrupting decay, with demanding eternity and denying evanescence, without incorporating an understanding of the symbology and psychological complexity of death anxiety Weary, weary are the members of Osiris! They shall not be weary, they shall not putrefy, they shall not decay, they shall not swell up! May it be done to me in like manner, for I am Osiris. (The Egyptian Book of the Dead, chapter 45)9 Here the pharaoh recites the incantation which catalyzes his godhood and denies the corruptibility and putrescence of his mortal flesh. It is a magical act of denial and undoing, a hallucinatory act of narcissistic inflation which transforms the reality of death into the fulfillment of the wish for transcendence and immortality. Nor can one grasp the complexity of Christianity and Buddhism without recognizing the horrific disgust with the flesh, with that which decays, with the noisome feminine, and the obsessive fantasy of purification and rebirth.10 St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153) echoes Augustinian disgust: "Man is nothing else than fetid sperm, a sack of

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dung, the food for worms. . . . You have never seen a viler dunghill" (Seldes, 1985, p . 41). Consider Gautama's thoughts after encountering the sufferings outside his castle, as written in the Digha Nikaya, xiv [the Mahapadana suttanta]: "Shame verily be u p o n this thing called birth, since to one born the decay of life, since disease, since death shows itself like that!" (Eliade, 1967, pp. 472-475). We read in the Visuddhimagga (Path of Purification): When this being is born in the mother's womb, it is not born inside a blue or red or white lotus, etc., but on the contrary, like a worm in rotting fish, rotting dough, cess-pools, etc., he is born in the belly in a position that is below the receptacle for undigested food (rectum), between the belly-lining and the backbone, which is very cramped, quite dark, pervaded with very fetid draughts redolent of various smells of ordure, and exceptionally loathsome. And on being reborn there, for ten months he undergoes excessive suffering, being cooked like a pudding in a bag by the heat produced in the mother's womb (Faure, 2003, pp. 80-81) In the Bhikkhunisamyutta, a Buddhist n u n laments: "I am repelled and humiliated by this foul, putrid b o d y " (Bodhi, 2000, p . 224). Such sentiments are not anomalous but comprise recurring strains of Buddhism and Christianity and are ripe for psychological analysis of death, disgust, and misogyny. Finally, an examination of fanatical and ecstatic violence remains elusive without recognizing the terror of death, helplessness, and nothingness which suffuse fantasies of eternal reichs and leaders. What an abyss of insignificance, non-being, vulnerability, and incipient decay is decimated by ecstatically crushing and slaughtering an enemy! On my right was mounted a heavy machine gun. The gunner (normally the cook) was firing away with what I can only describe as a beatific smile on his face. He was exhilarated by the squeezing of the trigger, the hammering of the gun, and the flight of his tracers rushing out into the dark shore. It struck me then (and was confirmed by him and many others later) that squeezing the trigger—releasing a hail of bullets—gives enormous pleasure and satisfaction. These are the pleasures of combat, not in terms of the intellectual planning— of the tactical and strategic chess game—but of the primal aggression, the release, and the orgasmic discharge. (Grossman, 1995, p. 136) I secured a direct hit on an enemy encampment, saw bodies or parts of bodies go up in the air, and heard the desperate yelling of the wounded or the runaways. I had to confess to myself that it was one of the happiest moments of my life. (Bourke, 1999, p. 19) Death is never death plain and simple. As I have attempted to explain, the manifest imagery of death is intricate and overdetermined,

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elusive, stratified, displaced, and repressed. Thus this volume is an intimation of how the complex nature of death anxiety may be incorporated into further researches by capable psychoanalysts and p s y c h o historians w h o can determine the specifics of how the imagery and conceptuality of death were formulated, nurtured, and inculcated in a particular culture or individual, h o w that culture symbolized death, and defended itself against the terror of annihilation and decay. In what manner did a people experience trauma, strife, catastrophe, bliss, or conquest such that they w o u l d conceive death in their o w n way? With w h a t imagery did they deny death and proclaim their eternity, immortality, or aplomb in the face of impending disintegration and putrescence? What w a s conscious and unconscious about death? The purpose of this introduction was to introduce a set of salient propositions into the extant corpus of psychoanalytic and psychohistorical theory I have argued that the complex fear of death pervades the psychic life of the h u m a n organism and is inextricably b o u n d with the matrix of psychopathology, fantasy, and illusion. If indeed w e evade and deny death anxiety, even resist awareness of its significance in h u m a n motivation, then incorporating this awareness will complicate any analysis of culture or history. It will complicate the manner in which inquiry is conducted in the first place, if w e are excluding death from our own cognitive processes. I hope that this volume may influence readers to ponder these ideas, as it seems essential to the history of the psyche that death has always lingered as an immanent source of terror and despair. NOTES This introduction contains elements previously published in The Journal of Psychohistory 29 (2), 143-158, and later expanded into "Death, Fantasy, and History" (unpublished manuscript). 1. It should of course be stated that the pathological elements do not comprise all worldviews, or all religion. One might even suggest with Jung and Campbell that religion is a defense against the experience of God. The imagination and the depths of the unconscious are only pathological when externalized and taken literally as concrete realities. It is this pathology which I am analyzing here. Nevertheless, it must be recognized that some theology is iconoclastic and illusion demolishing rather than idolatrous and illusion creating. The religion which dispels illusion will have to be treated elsewhere, as it is beyond the scope of this introduction. 2. Cf. Eagle (1984), pp. 25 and 73; Winnicott (1953), p. 266; Lax (1980), pp. 346-363. 3. Omphalos literally means "navel" in Greek. It is white stone ovoid, hemisphere, or pillar which is thought to be a navel, womb, or egg (occasionally a clitoris has been suggested), representing a symbolic world center from which life emanates.

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4. There are also several works on the psychology of male reactions toward women worth examining. I cite as just a few examples, Bettelheim (1954); Burke (1998); Rheingold (1967); Homey (1967); Lederer (1968); Monick (1991); Neumann (1994). 5. One may object that this argument blames women for all the violence toward children and ensuing psychopathology in history. Nothing could be farther from the argument of this paper. I am proposing that children are born into a world where their own helpless neoteny renders them susceptible to severe physical and emotional injury. Both the mother and father contribute toward guiding a child into mature and healthy adulthood or arresting them in traumatized and deranged infancy. What I was emphasizing here is that, in addition to what Freud said about oedipal trauma and conflict, pre-oedipal injury is also significant and engenders significant fear, loathing, and envy of women. It should also be noted that these feelings toward women are not found only among men. 6. Semiotics is the study of signs, that is, the study of significations of meaning, how language refers to phenomena by attributing meaning. 7. See also Lifton (1973), p. 277. 8. In the past decade, a host of studies undertaken by the team of Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski have aptly demonstrated the salience of death anxiety in normal individuals. The authors describe the transformation of death anxiety into security-inducing fantasies as "Terror Management." For a concise summary of their work, see Solomon, Greenberg, & Pyszczynski (in press). Hurvich (in press) has also demonstrated the ubiquity of annihilation anxiety and realistic (rather than unrealistic, or neurotic) death anxiety. 9. This is the "Chapter for Not Putrefying in the God's Domain." It should be noted here that the pharaoh is saying the prayer and becomes the undecaying God through the liturgy. 10. One must of course examine the specific Christianity or Buddhism in question, since these theologies and philosophies were complex, variegated, and diverse enough to have sects which opposed one another dramatically. One must always ask "which Buddhism?" and "which Christianity?" REFERENCES Becker, E. (1973). The denial of death. New York: The Free Press, 1975. Bettelheim, B. (1954). Symbolic wounds. Glencoe: The Free Press. Bodhi, B. (Trans.). (2000). The connected discourses of the Buddha: A translation of the Samyutta Nikaya. Somersville, MA: Wisdom Publications. Bourke, J. (1999). An intimate history of killing: Pace to face killing in 20th century warfare. New York: Basic Books. Burke, N. (Ed.). (1998). Gender and envy. New York: Routledge. Eagle, M. N. (1984). Recent developments in psychoanalysis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987. The Egyptian book of the dead: The book of going forth by day (1250 B.C.E./1994; R. Faulkner, Trans.). San Francisco: Chronicle, 1998. Eliade, M. (1967). Essential sacred texts from around the world. San Francisco, CA: Harper.

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Faure, B. (2003). The power of denial: Buddhism, purity, and gender. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Fairbairn, W.R.D. (1941). A revised psychopathology of the psychoses and psychoneuroses. In P. Buckley (Ed.), Essential papers on object relations (pp. 71-101). New York: New York University Press, 1986. Freud, S. (1886-1939). The standard edition of the complete works ofSigmund Freud (J. Strachey, Trans.). London: Hogarth, 1953. Freud, S. (1907). Obsessive acts and religious practices. SE 9 (pp. 115-128). Freud, S. (1913). Totem and taboo. SE 13 (pp. 1-161). Freud, S. (1927). The future of an illusion. SE 21 (pp. 5-56). Freud, S. (1930). Civilization and its discontents. SE 21 (pp. 64-145). Freud, S. (1939). Moses and monotheism. SE 23 (pp. 7-137). Grossman, D. (1995). On killing: The psychological cost of learning to kill in war and society. New York: Little, Brown. Horney, K. (1967). Feminine psychology. New York: Norton. Hurvich, M. S. (in press). The place of annihilation anxieties in psychoanalytic theory. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 51 (2). Langs, R. J. (1997). Death anxiety and clinical practice. London: Karnac. Langs, R. J. (in press-a). Fundamentals of adaptive psychotherapy and counseling. London: Palgrave-Macmillan. Langs, R. J. (in press-b). Death anxiety and the emotion-processing mind. Psychoanalytic Psychology. Lax, R. F. (1980). The rotten core: A defect in the formation of the self during the rapprochement subphase. In R. F. Lax (Ed.), Essential papers on character neurosis and treatment. New York: New York University, 1989. Lederer, W. (1968). The fear of women. New York: Harcourt. Leifer, R. (1997). The happiness project. Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion. Lifton, R. J. (1970). On psychohistory. In R. J. Lifton (Ed.), Explorations in psychohistory (pp. 21-41). New York: Simon and Shuster, 1974. Lifton, R. J. (1973). The sense of immortality. On death and the continuity of life. In R. J. Lifton (Ed.), Explorations in psychohistory (pp. 271-287). New York: Simon and Shuster, 1974. Lifton, R. J. (1979). The broken connection. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Press, 1996. Loy, D. R. (1996). Eack and transcendence: The problem of death and life in psychotherapy, existentialism, and Buddhism. New Jersey: Humanities Press. McCarthy, J. (1980). Death anxiety: The loss of the self New York: Gardener. Mitchell, S. A., & Black, M. J. (1995). Freud and beyond: A history of modern psychoanalytic thought. New York: Basic Books. Monick, E. (1991). Castration and male rage. Toronto: Inner City Books. Neumann, E. (1994). Fear of the feminine. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ovid (8 C.E.). Metamorphoses (A. D. Melville, Trans.). New York: Oxford University Press. Piven, J. (in press-a). Introduction. Psychoanalytic Review, special issue on death. Piven, J. (in press-b). Death and delusion: A Freudian analysis of mortal terror. Westport, CT: Information Age Publishing. Rheingold, J. C. (1967). The mother, anxiety, and death. Boston: Little, Brown.

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Ricoeur, P. (1967). The symbolism of evil. Boston: Beacon. Seldes, G. (Ed.). (1985). The great thoughts. New York: Ballantine. Solomon, S., Greenberg, J., & Pyszczynski, T (in press). Fear of death and human destructiveness. Psychoanalytic Review, special issue on death. Walsh, N. (1996). Life in death. In C. Strozier & M. Flynn (Eds.), Trauma and self (pp. 245-254). Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield. Winnicott, D. W. (1953). Transitional objects and transitional phenomena. In Playing and reality (pp. 1-25). New York: Routledge, 1971/1994. Yalom, I. D. (1980). Existential psychotherapy. New York: Basic Books.

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CHAPTER I

Death, Fantasy, and the Politics of Self-Destruction Siamak Movahedi

Jacques Lacan's (1966/1977) notion of the pleasures of death, no matter how macabre it may strike us at first glance, is a profound statement on the symbolic nature of the human body and its destruction or death. The human body is as much a social object as is a biological entity, and death is as much a physical happening as it is a social event. The biologically living body may be symbolically dead, and the physically dead may be more powerful than the living. Mortification of the human soul in an alienated and castrating symbolic order may bring about a "second death" separate from the animal death of the biological body (Ragland, 1995). In the same vein, a self-destructive political act aimed as a challenge to an entropic order of oppression and domination— the genesis of the death drive—might be characterized paradoxically as death in the service of life. The redefinition of life, the politicization of death, and the Utopian pursuit of immortality through the destruction of the biological body, as exemplified in the ongoing ritualistic bombing suicides in the Middle East or in America on 9/11 are not new phenomena. The "carnival of atrocity," as described by Michel Foucault (Foucault, 1982; Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1982), through its use of excessive violence acted against the body with the audience as its cheerleaders, has been with us for centuries. What is now running in various power theaters by both the oppressor and the oppressed in the East and in the West under various

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ideological headlines is an old script written for that carnival. Not a novel political reaction is also the "experts 7 " practice of objectivizing the subject in their pursuit of "object-ive" knowledge. The only thing that may strike us as new is the subject's audacity to assume the role of the sovereign in the violent destruction of his or her own body and in its use as a weapon for resistance. This is enough for the subject to gain the experts' trusts in himself or herself as paranoid, psychotic, psychopath, or perverse. One method in the study of the economy of power relations is to focus on forms of resistance (i.e., antagonistic strategies against different forms of power). That is, to study sanity, legality, and antiterrorism, the researcher should try to investigate what is happening in the field of insanity, illegality, terrorism, and other forms of resistance (Foucault, 1982). When the two sides reinvent one another in a game of power, how can we study the terrorism of the slave without investigating the terrorism of the master? Although the investigation of the subject as an object outside of its historical context—the conceptualized object—has been deemed "intentionally" confused (Foucault, 1982), I have here undertaken such an analysis by default. In what follows, I have attempted to present a version of a theory of the object relatively devoid of historical contexts. Yet, it is an analysis of some texts similar to what Foucault has called "death speeches" which exemplify the resistance of subjects in asymmetric equations of power. These death speeches consist of a collection of notes that a Middle Eastern freelance writer had been compiling to edit as an anthology of the human experience of war. These notes were all final letters or wills and testaments of some militant men who had volunteered for dangerous or suicidal missions. These missions involved various regional conflicts in the Middle East between 1980 and 1990. The letters were either sent by the volunteers to their families right before a dangerous mission that took their life or were found in their possession when they later discovered their bodies. The war anthology never took form. A severe depression of the writer hampered the completion of the work. He later committed suicide. Within limits set by confidentiality, I was permitted to study the letters.1 I thought I might have stumbled over some symbolically significant psychoanalytic texts. A communication that a person makes while he or she is anticipating an impending death is an overloaded message. It may be comparable to the first or the last dream in psychoanalysis. It may provide important clues not only to the person's immediate psychic experience—needs, feelings, or images—but also to one's characteristic mode of encounter with the object world.

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Although one cannot speak of a writer separate from his or her linguistic and cultural forms of self expression, differences in the pattern of such expressions should reveal something about the writer's own psychic voice. For this analysis, I tried to bracket off the notes from external data as much as possible to see whether I could detect any pattern that I could attribute to the individual's characteristic state of mind. This was not to underestimate the importance of the sociocultural context for the intelligibility of human action. Rather, I wished to focus primarily on a written piece of work to see how much we could legitimately trace to the writer's psychic dispositions. A writer does more than just describe things, make contact, or express his or her feelings and desires. Somewhere in that description or contact the writer presents a self. The self resides in the projected consciousness of the object. The internal representation of the object is not separate from that of the self. Reading, listening, observing, and understanding are all forms of contextual interpretations. A pure phenomenological method is an illusion. We need instructions to observe and understand. A theory serves exactly that function. My focus being the inner dialogues of individuals, rather than the social institutions that structure them, I tried to conduct a psychoanalytic reading of the notes. That is, I tried to read them as though they were clinical process notes, and "listen" to layers of "messages" through a psychoanalytic "ear." Just as in the analytic situation, my intention was to be able to feel myself into the writer's self-experience to pick up his dominant affects, identify his wishes and defenses, unearth his inner representations of self and other, and depict his world view. For an observational instruction or conceptual lens, I relied on certain formulations of the object relation theory. Works of Bateson (1968) on communication and Shneidman (1993) on suicide notes served as my magnifying glasses. I began with the assumption that unconscious object relation fantasies structure the person's attitudes and expectancies about the external world. Contact with the world, as articulated in one's writings, should reflect such attitudes and expectancies. Within the same social-cultural environment, people display a unique pattern of interaction with one another and with things. Through the medium of social-cultural patterns people also express their own characteristic syntax of object relations.2 A letter exhibits an object relation event, a communication episode. It represents a ritual of engagement with an audience, a manifestation of a wish for relatedness, an attempt to contact a symbolic world. A letter, as with any other mode of communication, carries what Bateson (1968) terms a "report" and a "command." The report component of a

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message, or its content, conveys information about the external world. The command aspect, on the other hand, addresses the particular relationship between the communicants. It carries instruction as to how the message is to be taken, that is, metacommunication. The major function of communication is not to convey some content but to negotiate a particular relationship with internal or projected objects. This is where the psychoanalyst departs from the literary deconstructionist. A psychoanalytic deconstruction involves a close reading of the metacommunication levels of a text rather than its discursive content. Final letters, near-death, or suicide notes have a particularly demanding, commanding, and pleading quality. They are intended to produce a certain effect on the survivors (Leenaars, 1988). Such notes are not "pointless" accounts of some sort. As for their structure, they strongly exhibit what Brunner (1992) calls the "tell-worthiness" of a narrative. For a narrative to be tell-worthy, it should be about the breach of a human plight, a deviation of a canonical script. Suicide and intentional pursuit of death are tell-worthy events. Jacobs's (1971) analysis of suicide notes suggests that many suicidal individuals experience a need verbally to justify their violation of the sacred trust of life. The final dialogue with the object world, in reality or in fantasy, may hold the key to the person's subjective relational script. Yet, we cannot be totally blind to the possibility of dealing with the manifestations of social institutions rather than individual psychic expressions. Given the political nature of the self-destructive acts to be discussed here, it is plausible that an engulfing and enslaving group identity may masquerade as individual self-expression (Durkheim, 1897/1951). On the other hand, we may argue that the group furnishes only a menu from which the individual may choose a self-destructive course of action. PREVIOUS RESEARCH ON THE THEMATIC ANALYSIS OF NEAR-DEATH NOTES The bulk of research that might bear on this topic is in the area of suicide notes. Many writers have undertaken thematic analyses of suicide notes (see Leenaars, 1988 for a comprehensive bibliography on suicide notes research). Shneidman and Farberow's (1957a, 1957b) classic studies of suicide notes are the most notable. They undertook a content analysis of 717 suicide notes to gain some understanding into their writers' cognitive-affective dispositions and attitudes toward life and death. They failed to find what they had expected. The notes sounded "surprisingly commonplace, banal, and even sometimes poignantly pedestrian and dull" (Shneidman, 1993, p. 94). They attributed this to the person's attempt to reinforce the suicide decision by shutting off the field of consciousness.

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They then compared those notes with some thirty-two simulated suicide notes written by a group of nondepressed and nonsuicidal graduate students whom they instructed to put themselves emotionally in the place of a person who had reached the point of committing suicide. The difference between the two sets of notes was quite revealing. The genuine notes were primarily content oriented, whereas the simulated notes were full of processes.3 The genuine notes often contained specific information, such as names of people, places, and things, and instructions concrete enough to be carried out. The simulated notes, in contrast, contained many "thinking" words, suggesting the operation of problem-solving modes. It seemed that the decision to commit suicide was problematic for the graduate students whose notes displayed much thinking, reasoning, or rationalizing. An entirely different sense of self emerged in the two sets of notes. The simulated notes reflected a self as experienced by the individual himself or herself, that is, the person's own experience of pain, ache, sensation, and feeling. The genuine notes reflected a self as the individual felt others experienced it. That is, they were frequently concerned with their reputation or with what others might think of them.4 Other studies (Gottschalk & Gleser, 1960; Darbonne, 1969) all report similar findings. Suicide notes exhibit a truncated vision of the world. However, they convey an overriding preoccupation with making contact or maintaining some tie with a love object. The suicidal person usually wishes to produce some tenacious effect on the object. Only one researcher (Henken, 1976) has compared the ordinary suicide notes with the notes of those who were either facing forcible death or believed their death would soon be imminent. A preoccupation with self rather than object seemed to reflect the experience of an impending death. The forced-death notes were abstract and exhibited an obsession with nonspecific objects and with political responsibility. Reviewing over a dozen studies of suicide notes, Shneidman (1993) contends that a person who wants to commit suicide cannot write a "good" note. A person who can write a "good" note will not commit suicide. To write a "good" suicide note, Shneidman contends that the person has to write it in an open frame of mind at least two weeks before the act. He would then prefer to call such a note a journal or diary rather than a suicide note. In a similar vein, the notes to be analyzed in this paper are not really suicide notes. They were not written right before engagement in suicidal acts. Most important, the writers did not commit suicide. They did undertake dangerous missions that may be characterized as suicidal. Yet that is not to say that the writers would have killed themselves if they had survived their missions. Nevertheless, it should be added that a few of the writers had persistently sought additional assignments each time after surviving a dangerous mission.

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TOWARD AN ANALYSIS OF THE NOTES The preceding studies all involved cases of quantitative content analysis. Written materials always lend themselves to some form of quantitative analysis with fixed groupings. However, when rigid categories such as word counts are automatically imposed on a writing, the outcome will be a "boring" and tortured picture that put the writings in some kind of order while destroying their authors. This was one thing that I consciously tried to avoid. There were 106 notes. I approached them in some phenomenological mode similar to a reading of clinical process notes. My aim was to read between the lines, decode, decipher, and interpret while remaining faithful to the content and structure of the notes. I began this task trying to identify the author, the audience, the message, and the mode of expression in a note. I then tried to see what I could find in and about a note. Notes as texts are open systems that yield many different readings. I found myself making a distinction between the communication of content and communication of relationship. I was looking for what was being communicated and what was being communicated about the communication, that is, metacommunication. I looked also for themes, patterns, feeling states, self-object modes of encounter, forms of self-object representations, and modes of final engagement or disengagement with the external world. I was cognizant of the following: 1. The audience—the object—of the note: To w h o m is the writer speaking? 2. The nature of the emotional appeal: What types of self-object experience are being evoked? 3. The nature and the imageries of the enemy (e.g., external, internal, real, imaginary, concrete, abstract, clearly identified, or vague). 4. The nature of the discourse (e.g., ideological preaching, emotional connection, expression of the need for affiliation, expression of the need for power, communication about concrete things or events). 5. The style of the discourse (personal, semi-personal, editorial). 6. The level of abstraction of the note. 7. The process versus the static level of the discourse. 8. The length of the note.

Methodologically, these letters are highly selective. They represent the universe of letters that families wanted to share with a stranger or with the public. This excludes the letters that may be addressed to a highly private audience concerning private family issues. In that sense, the letters have certain features of public documents.

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DIFFERENT MODES OF RELATEDNESS TO THE WORLD Although these notes were all collected from the same socio-historical context, and belonged to the same political discourse, they did tend to fall into three distinct types: disengaged, abstract, and intimate object relation modes. Differences between these types can be most simply explained by the variation in the quality and intensity of the object relation content of the notes. The three types may each represent a different m o d e of contact with the world. Disengaged Mode These notes (17 out of 106, or 16%) display a pattern of resolute disengagement from the world. They are formal, descriptive notes consisting of instructions about the m a n a g e m e n t of p r o p e r t y or the settlement of debts. The text is instrumental in that it structures around someone formally asking someone else to do something for the writer. The audience is a moral-legal self that requires the person to settle his affairs before he departs. There is no expression of anxiety, anger, conflict, hope, or regret. There are no emotional or ideological appeals, and no evidence of being a zealot: In the Name of God. If I am killed in this mission, I like to be buried next to my father in . . . . I have X money in X Bank. Use that fund for my funeral expenses. Give the rest to the needy. Give my house with all the furniture to my mother. Sell my X property and give the proceed to any family that has lost its breadwinner in the war. Give my car to my brother, X. In the Name of God. I do believe I will not return alive from this trip. I want Mr. X to serve as the executor of my will. I have several debts. He has the list. He should sell the store to settle all those accounts. The rest should be given to my wife. I leave my house and my car for my wife. I seek forgiveness from all my friends and relatives. The writer gives no justification for his voluntary quest of danger. Nevertheless, the notes convey some sense of fatalism and resignation. The person seems ready to die. The notes are short and parsimonious. The object relation content is somewhat narrow. There is no description of the immediate external world and no reference to its affective ambiance. Little reference is m a d e to the self. The notes are cross-sectionally static. They lack any movement or dynamism. The average writer of this type of note is over thirty-five years of age, married with two or three children, and not in the military There is enough

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evidence in the notes that the person has volunteered for the mission. However, based on the content of the notes, no plausible inference can be m a d e as to the individuaTs conscious or unconscious reason for the pursuit of death. Abstract Mode These notes (71 out of 106, or 67%) represent long philosophical and ideological monologues. The communication mode tends to be cognitive rather than evocative. There is m u c h editorializing about moral principles such as truth, justice, virtue, and religious piety: I believe in the creator of the universe, he who has designed the world in perfect harmony, and has under his control every movement of that universe. I believe in the fact that he has made all his faithful followers immune of all deviations from truth and justice. And has asked us to be equally considerate of all the manifestations of his creation, material and spiritual. To insure the realization of his desires, he has sent us prophets to guide us. I believe that after this life, there is a higher level of existence that begins on the judgement day, when and where the ultimate evolution of the mankind will take place. And it is at that time that the reward and punishment that are one's due, and for one reason or another were not awarded in this life, will be administered. It is at that time that you have to give back anything that you have unjustly seized from your fellow man. The private self is h i d d e n behind a public self that is either heroic or undefined: We follow the footsteps of great historical heroes. We are responsible to the generations of the past, present, and future.... We cannot be concerned with personal needs and shortcomings. The object of the address is vague. References are made to abstract entities such as community, society, nation, generation, class, or to some symbolic socio-political entity or historical heroes. The spouse, parents, or other family members are not the manifest objects of the notes. They are rarely addressed directly. When there are references to them, they are addressed indirectly in the third-person pronoun and in formal language. The self is presented as transcendent and beyond need for self-validation. Nevertheless, there is much preoccupation with how the self is viewed. The writer frequently requests that his letter be read during his funeral service or be conveyed to all young people or to all college students. Death is sought to prove the writer's sense of moral superiority, virtue, religious piety, and his uncompromising sense of justice:

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We are ready to destroy this morally corrupt enemy. We will inflict on it the greatest blow while calling its bluff even if it costs our lives. Hopefully we all will return unharmed. If I do not return, I want you to stay loyal to our leaders. I want you to pursue our sacred cause. I expect you to follow my path since this is the only sincere path to the salvation of our spirit. One day we will all die. Why not die in pursuit of truth and justice? The enemy is challenged, discounted, and belittled. In contrast, the projected self experiences no fear, no intimidation, and is beyond any seduction and compromise. The writer presents a persona that is unimpressed, unshaken and u n m o v e d by threats and power. By challenging death, the writer attempts to disarm the hostile other of its pride of power. The note is intended as a communication that no venture can induce fear in the heart of the writer. With this nonchalant attitude toward life and death, the writer intends to remain in a superior moral position. The private audience is asked to present the same front in public. The community is to congratulate the spouse or parents for the writer's self-sacrifice. The spouse and parents are to act p r o u d and happy. They are enjoined against the public cry or expressions of grief since such responses might be interpreted as weakness and delight the enemy. Through their reactions, the family members should save face by impressing the enemy that no degree of death and destruction may cause fear or submission: I like you to be proud of me, and pay no attention to the critics' empty commentaries. Do not cry for me. I want all of you to stand united like an invincible pillar. I want you to be dignified rather than the object of others' mercy or sympathy. Paradoxically, in the notes the enemy similarly remains diffused, abstracted, and undefined. Although the writer is in the midst of a revolutionary or military mission against a clear-cut external power, the enemy is not clearly named. Although there are references to superpowers, they do not seem to represent the psychological object of anger in the notes. The anger is more often expressed against some vague domestic political groups with competing ideological agendas. The dangerous enemy seems most likely to be internal. The external enemy's incentives and moves are predictable. The internal enemy is a wolf in sheep's skin, deceptive and unpredictable: All this has generated much worry for the deceitful enemy and its proxies including the liberals that has used all possible schemes to incite war and bloodshed to prey on our innocent brothers and sisters How stupid are those

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who think they can succeed in fighting the voice of people through coercion and intimidation. And how naive are those liberals, who swallow the rhetoric of this cunning enemy who has no agenda but treachery and exploitation.

There is frequently a sense that some close family members are indirectly being attacked for failing to understand the writer's political position. They seem to have disagreed with the writer, opposed his decision to join a suicide brigade, or failed to validate his ideological commitment. In a few notes, there are some angry remarks, such as: "You would rather I die like a sick old woman in bed, would you not?" The self is not experienced as satisfactorily validated. Others are not perceived as responsive. They have not cooperated with the writer in self-validation. They have failed in their understanding of the writer's point of view. There is much anger toward others for their mere "stupidity." Pursuit of death or suicidal missions seems to function as an ultimate attack on those who did not share the writer's perspective. They now have to be quiet and take notice. The writer's sincerity, piety, and ideological commitment are now beyond reproach. His blood has fortified his position. One who is more interested in preserving his own life or property than in defending his principles has no moral stand to pass judgment on the writer. How could one argue with a view secured by blood?5 In the entire note, the writer seeks the audience's undivided attention. He commands certain critical courses of action, demands ideological loyalty, asks for a change in the survivors' lifestyles, and offers moral advice. The mother and father are asked to act like certain religious and historical legends. They are reminded that they are parents to the writer, himself a historical hero. These letters all begin with some religious quotations assuring immortality for those who lose their lives in defense of justice. There is a clear affective distinction between getting killed and dying. Getting killed in a just mission is different from death or annihilation. The audience is assured that the writer is not really dead. He is to be assumed as observant on a much higher level of existence. "Those who lose their life in the pursuit of truth and justice will never die. They just transcend to a higher level of existence." These notes, despite their length, contain no description of the "external" reality. They do not allude to the emotional ambiance of the writer's immediate situation. The communication contains quite constricted interactional content between self and object-representations. The object remains precarious. However, compliance with one's cherished wishes is demanded.

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Intimate Mode These notes (18 out of 106, or 17%) display a highly romantic rapprochement with the object world. A profound sense of loneliness in the shadow of impending death calls for the most nostalgic reminiscences of the shared experiences between the self and object. The writer struggles to recreate and regenerate a particular feeling state that is familiar to him through his past relationship with the object. The mother represents the most emotionally intense part of the object field. The letters are mostly addressed to her. Although there are references to others (e.g., the father, brothers and sisters, wife, and children), the mother remains the principal recipient of the communication: My Very Dear mother, There is a wet curtain of tears between me and the letter that I am writing you. I can hardly see what I am writing. I am thinking about you while I am trying to look through this wet curtain at these mountains. I see a tired mirage of a dream fading high into infinity too afraid to look back. That is my life, my hopes and fantasies. They are painfully trying to kiss your memory goodbye, and leaving the ruins of the humanity by gently stepping over the tired body of my brothers who are lying everywhere in blood, like red poppies cut so harshly and so soon.... I am sitting here under a huge rock that may explode anytime without leaving any piece large enough to become my tombstone My dear mother, please forgive me for the blood all over this letter. This is the only gift I can send you. I like you to keep it for ever. These are the blood of my brave brothers whose beautiful bodies were just destroyed by the enemy guns. Yet their spirits are standing tall in front of me cleaning my tears and laughing at the stupidity of those who think their gun can destroy our souls. Please be proud of me. Tell everyone that my son willingly embraced death to defend his homeland. The wish is for the mother to protect the child, to give him reassurance, to make his internal world safe again. The wish is to "re-feel" the m o t h e r ' s soothing presence. The mother is often requested to pray for the writer's safe return. When the writer visualizes his impending death, the wish is to be missed profoundly by the mother: My Dear mother, I am tired. As I am getting ready to take my final nap, I hear your voice singing lullabies for me in those comforting warm summer nights when I was a little boy. Do you remember when you used to read me stories of love and hope? But, my dearest mother, here I hear the story of death and destruction, of cruelty and inhumanity. I wish that tonight I could hear one of your stories before I close my eyes permanently. The writer empathizes with the mother over the death of her dear son. He begins the m o t h e r ' s mourning over such a devastating loss. He

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then pleads to the mother to be strong and bear this loss. There is a common appeal to the mother not to cry. Yet the writer reminds the mother of all the wonderful times that she had with him as a little boy, and how tragic it would be to lose such a beloved young son to a cruel death. Such passages are often so sad that they may easily bring tears to the eyes of a stranger, let alone the writer's own mother. In this sense, the rendezvous with the object at times feels sadomasochistic. It may be pondered if the mother is being punished for not rescuing the son from an angry father who set him up for self sacrifice. These notes read as poetry and engage the reader's passion and strong sense of empathy. The reader may easily emerge in the writer's feeling state and in his representational world. The notes are all in the process mode. They involve feelings, needs, wishes, conflicts, and action. They function to elicit wish-fulfilling responses from the object. They contain little abstract, philosophical, or intellectual content. They convey detailed, emotionally laden descriptions of the immediate external reality of the writer that feels dangerous, cruel, and lonely. The writers in this category are mostly military officers or draftees. In light of certain information in the notes, some of these writers might have volunteered either out of social or professional obligations or were simply assigned to missions that claimed their lives.6 Discussion On a first reading of the notes we may not discern any marked tendency toward the dominance of a collective identity over the individual identity. However, in the notes of the abstract type, the writers' identities share a common boundary with a socio-historical order. On the manifest level, the objects are abstract and social; the audience is a collectivity of some sort; and the self is defined in reference to some public cause. This group comes close to exhibiting some of the features of Durkheim's ideal type of altruistic suicide. Although this study was a qualitative analysis, contrasting my findings with previous research reveals some interesting similarities. The disengaged group displays a pattern similar to that of genuine suicide notes in previous studies, whereas the intimate object relation group shares many features of the simulated notes. The notes in the disengaged mode represent a discourse of relatively concrete and simple events. They are primarily static, whereas the notes in the intimate mode are quite dynamic. The notes in the abstract mode fall in between, exhibiting certain features of both the genuine and the simulated suicide notes. They come closer to Henken's (1976) forced-death documents. One marked feature of the abstract type note is a preoccupation with what others may think of the writer. The overemphasis on the self as

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experienced by others is seen by Shneidman and Farberow (1957a) to be a characteristic feature of cultural and religious suicides. That observation is also consistent with Durkheim's (1897/1951) notion of altruistic suicide. The subjective experience of identity is an established pattern of anticipated responses of others to one's act. This anticipation is confirmed constantly in fantasy. Anticipated responses of others, the voice of the internal objects, may even structure one's will to live, die, kill, or be killed. In the abstract type, the notes are populated by bad and persecutory objects, which are to be controlled and attacked. The ego is in a retaliatory mode. The enemy is experienced as a diffused toxic entity to be ejected from the personal world. Our sense of self is always conveyed in a dialogue with the "other." When the "other" is abstract and public, the self will display similar features. That seems to be happening in this group. That is perhaps why it is difficult to empathize with these writers. The notes are lacking the necessary affect for such an object relational engagement. There is plenty of intellectualized anger that might resonate only with an equally angry and intellectualized reader. Although abstract notes are addressed to a public audience, they are conversations with the self. The long pedantic notes are for the writer's own defensive consumption. He needs to persuade himself that the course of action that he has undertaken is sane, rational, and desirable. There are strong identifications with certain socio-political heroes who sought martyrdom for similar causes. When the fantasy of one's death actualizes the person's ideal ego, one may suspect the working of self-destructive drives. However, these fantasies may serve the defensive function of reducing the volunteer's own cognitive dissonance through culturally prepackaged means. Certainly the abstract writers are using many defenses to bolster their denial of death. Their writings all display a tough-minded, rigid, impersonal, distancing, and ritualized mode of object relationship. In the abstract discourse, the self and object are fully masked to avoid any genuine affective contact. The internal dialogue takes place through some illusory dramaturgical characters that function to shield the writer from the overwhelming reality of death and to separate him from his "flesh and blood self." Hoffer's (1951) comment on a need for a makebelieve grandiose self-object world here is quite apt: Dying and killing seem easy when they are part of a ritual, ceremonial, dramatic performance or game. There is a need for some kind of make-believe to face death unflinchingly. To our real, naked selves there is not a thing on earth or in heaven worth dying for. It is only when we see ourselves as actors in a

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staged (and therefore unreal) performance that death loses its frightfulness and finality and becomes an act of make-believe and a theatrical gesture. It is one of the main tasks of a real leader to mask the grim reality of dying and killing by evoking in his followers the illusion that they are participating in a grandiose spectacle, a solemn or lighthearted dramatic performance, (p. 64) The destructive fantasies in notes of the abstract type may not be explained simply in terms of impulses, urges, or tension reduction mechanisms. The apparent limited mentalization in these cases is partial and defensive. The dynamic is more in line with that of sadism in that the anticipation of the other's suffering is part of the act (Fonagy & Target, 1995). This is particularly true about the cases involving revenge, or missions undertaken on the anniversary of the loss of a loved one. The rehabilitation of an offended sense of dignity fits the puzzle better than the acting out of some impulse. An aggressive act may rehabilitate the ego if and only if the ego can conceive of the alter's reactions, thoughts, and feelings toward the retaliatory act. Contrary to the moralistic and dry character of the abstract type, the intimate type notes exhibit the fullest spectrum of object relationships. There is a marked tendency to attach oneself to an object experienced as good. One gets the impression that attachment is sought to extend the self, to revitalize the spirit, and to escape annihilation. The dialogue with the mother is the most striking feature of the notes in the intimate mode. The need for a primary soothing object may be so strong that no other object can replace her in fantasy. Some of these writers speak of holding on strongly to certain objects that may be considered as transitional, such as the mother's medallion or her last letter. It is the relationship with the mother that harbors the child's core sense of selfhood. Therefore, it makes sense that in a time of danger, she should be sought to dispel any threat of self-annihilation. The mother is as much a party to the birth of the self as to its death. Lewin (1946) maintains that the wish to die represents the infantile wish to sleep in union with the mother. The fantasy of returning to her body or hiding in it is a common oral fantasy. The mother seems to play various emotionally powerful roles in the dynamics of most suicides. Tabachnick (1957) cites the disturbance in the interpersonal relationship with the mother as the single most recurring pattern. Patients in his study all reported a strong ambivalent attitude toward the mother. They typically found it impossible to express any dissatisfaction with her. Despite much interpersonal conflict, they never defied her. Suicide was an attempt either to escape the anger toward the mother or to seek punishment for harboring such feelings. Sometimes, suicide represented a kind of symbolic killing of the hateful self-object. In other cases, the destruction of body repre-

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sented the fantasy of merging with the idealized mother and insuring the survival of the self. Campbell (1995) similarly observes a pattern of an inner struggle with an image of a mother who is felt to be ungiving, dangerous, and untrustworthy. In the suicidal patient's fantasy, the body comes to symbolize a bad mother. Getting rid of this bad mother becomes the object of attack on the body. The conflict between the wish to merge with the mother and the subsequent primitive anxieties about annihilation of the self is worked through in the suicide fantasies. In this study, the notes containing intimate dialogue with the mother display the least suicidal themes. They all exhibit a strong will to survive the misadventures. Although in some notes, the pattern of fantasy relationship with the mother has a touch of sadomasochism, the mother is clearly perceived as good and soothing. This is in contrast to the abstract notes in which the mother is absent, and the fantasies as articulated in the notes rarely contain any soothing or transitional objects.7 SELF-DESTRUCTIVE BEHAVIOR AS OBJECT RELATIONSHIPS Psychoanalysis involves both understanding and explanation. Both tasks involve nothing but interpretation, although on different levels. Using Ricoeur's (1993) language, we understand through our personal engagement with a text, and explain through our disengagement with it by means of the language of cause, functions, structures, or demands. This analysis began with the intention of understanding the neardeath notes. Although the line between understanding and explanation is never clear, I found myself being increasingly engaged in explanation. I became intrigued by the question of possible links between the structure of the note and the writer's personality organization. Since I had analyzed notes rather than characters, I did find myself on quite shaky ground for any strong inference as to such links. Nevertheless, as in any meaningful analysis of this form, I felt the need for all kinds of bold conjectures and interpretations on interpsychic and intrapsychic levels. In classical psychoanalytic thinking, there has been much interest in the psychology of heroism. The heroic pursuit of death may be viewed as a manifestation of narcissism (Becker, 1973). On one hand, the narcissistic omnipotent self-image disposes the person to feel immortal and impervious to danger, to march into open fire in wars convinced of his invincibility. On the other hand, the pursuit of danger serves as a defense against the fear of death, the ultimate source of narcissistic injury. The heroic pursuit of danger may also represent the enactment of oedipal wishes (Segal, 1990). If we were to follow that theoretical line

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in this paper, we would have to put the complex in the context of a power relationship in which the son had either to die or be castrated, and usually both. The heroic pursuit of death would then become a symbolic challenge of the authority. Symbolically the hero would become heroic because he dared to challenge the repressive authority. The repression had to be so overwhelming that the father would be disguised as a corrupt and cruel "alien" for whose destruction one had to obey a "benevolent" father. This will always culminate in the hero's death. He is never victorious. The power he achieves relies on his challenge of the oppressive power at the known cost of his life, a symbolic fulfillment of a wish in action. He loses the battle of earthly power, but wins the war of dignity. For Brown (1959), Oedipus complex is the project of becoming God through flight from death. Flight from death is the flight from helplessness, and obliteration. There is a widespread belief that those who commit suicide, particularly religious or altruistic suicides, attempt to seek immortality rather than death. It has also been suggested that ritualized homicides and suicides in various societies throughout time are based on a belief in immortality through union with the departed (Lewin, 1946; Pollock, 1975,1976; Zilboorg, 1936). Methodologically, we are not able to decipher the individual writer's unconscious motivations in this study. However, on the manifest level, communications about death or immortality may be understood more plausibly as the expression of the pursuit of power in life rather than the search for immortality through death. Psychically we cannot pursue something of which we have no experience. Fenichel (1945) argues that even the so-called "fear of death" was not about the real death. He contended that since the idea of one's own death is subjectively inconceivable, every fear of death would in all likelihood function as covers for other unconscious ideas. In this study, I see no direct or disguised allusion to immortality in the disengaged type notes. The individual has psychically prepared himself for death and shows no eagerness to establish a bridge to some symbolic order. In the notes of intimate mode, there are some references to immortality. However, the fear of object loss is so intense that the defense of immortality is not of any use. Death is experienced as a lonely life. The writer pleads to the mother not to forget him if he is killed. However, every abstract type note is prefaced with a claim to immortality. One might interpret this as a defense against annihilation anxiety. The constricted and impersonal quality of object relations in this group may very well represent a psychic reaction that Hopper (1991) calls encapsulation. Encapsulation is a psychic strategy of fending off the fear of annihilation by enclosing, encasing, and sealing off

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the threatening sensations, affects, and internal representations. In abstract type notes, the impersonal and detached representations of self and object protect the ego, particularly against the overwhelming dependency needs that might surface when the security and safety are threatened. Insistence on immortality is part of a dialogue of the self with itself. Such a dialogue is more likely to follow when the self is aware of its own impending destruction and needs reassurance. In intimate type notes, the writer continues to hope for a safe return. He sees the danger, but not the death. However, in the abstract type, there is no hope for a safe return. A safe return on one mission is the occasion for the need to move onto the next potentially fatal encounter. The writer gives lip service to death but not to danger. The claim to immortality in the abstract type notes cannot be explained away only as a cultural belief or a psychological defense against the fear of annihilation. The claim is also a political communication signifying "object relations politics." On one hand, the claim to immortality is launched as a final attack on the enemy. Its aim is to prove the enemy's ultimate powerlessness in its attempt to destroy the ego. On the other hand, given the self's need to control the object, existence at a higher level furnishes a sacred source of sanction for enforcing compliance with one's wishes. The writer achieves a status of social, emotional, and metaphysical power. The objects of the internalized relationships are expected to take notice of the force behind the commands. Thus, the communication of belief in immortality is nothing but a disguised object relation fantasy. One's conception of life and death is always in relation to the self and object. Self-destructive behavior may be based on deeply ingrained religious or cultural beliefs about the nature of life and death. Yet, they represent nothing but a culturally sanctioned form of object relationship. They are forms of engagement with the world of objects rather than the strategies for the annihilation of the self. Suicide is an act with death as a consequence. The experience of the finality of the outcome is not part of the act. The act is a symbolic ritual that makes sense only within the individual's system of fantasies and beliefs. Although the person may embark on a dangerous act, he might not really want to die. Personal death or annihilation is beyond the human experience. Revival of some sort of relatedness is always behind the suicide fantasies. Pursuits of death and danger are clearly forms of engagement with the personal or impersonal worlds. They may even be regarded theoretically as fulfillment of certain object relation fantasies. However, the pursuit of death in search of nourishment and affirmation sounds paradoxical. Yet, Sandier and Sandier (1978) argue that even the most distressing and painful of relationships can be safety giving, reassur-

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ing, and affirming, as is exemplified by sadomasochistic relationships. Freud (1924) points to similar dynamics in his analysis of moral masochism, where he argues that even self-destruction cannot occur without libidinal satisfaction. He also explains one case of attempted suicide as an instance of the enactment of a wish, an unconscious object relation fantasy (Freud, 1920). Constructive or destructive engagements with the world are symbolic expressions of inner struggles that seek resolution in relation to the internal objects. Self-destructive and dangerous acts may be initiated as a form of symbolic dialogue with a universe that has failed to validate the self (Taylor, 1978). Such acts may simultaneously serve as a symbolic ritual for disentanglement from a particular perceived entrapment in the world. In certain cases of suicide, the wish to destroy the fantasy objects is clearly the motivating force behind the act. Suicide becomes either the outcome of a struggle with bad objects or the point of interruption of a sadomasochistic course of action. To Winnicott (1950/1975), suicide represents the dramatization of ejection of badness. The aim is to destroy the inner world's bad elements, rather than the self. Although people can experience the death of others, they are incapable of experiencing their own deaths. As Freud (1915) observes, the defining feature of the fantasy of death or suicide is a self that is participating in the individual's own funeral and mourning. This is again an object relation fantasy involving gratification of some wish or resolution of some conflict. To Wilhelm Stekel (1910/1977), revenge is the motivating factor behind the suicide act. The destruction of the self is intended to inflict the greatest punishment on the instigator of the person's suffering. Stekel writes about the child's attempt to rob the parents—the real objects—of their most treasured possession, his or her own life. He could have easily argued for the person's attempt to inflict the greatest pain on his or her fantasy objects. Attachment to primitive love objects who are sadistic and idealize suffering has been suggested to contribute to the formation of social masochistic characters (Asch, 1976). We know that all cultures embody a variety of sadomasochistic symbols that can function as proxies for the primitive objects. Theodore Reik (1941) similarly discusses the revenge fantasies of the social masochist. According to him, the rehabilitation of an offended self-esteem and the gratification of an unsatisfied pride are the driving forces behind such fantasies and their enactments. Sadistic and revengeful fantasies soothe the pain of defeat and mute the bitterness of being maltreated or wronged. To Reik, "the daydreams of nations maltreated by brutal neighbors, of disdained religious or social mi-

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norities living amongst an oppressing people, must be considered as mass-phantasies of the same kind" (p. 322). The social masochist is driven, according to him, by the anticipation of future power, by fantasies of conquering the oppressors and taking revenge on them. Clearly there is no limit to the kind of interpretations that one may advance. We have to be open to all views, particularly when the data do not warrant a strong inference. Yet some analysts tend to see the world in a much more systematic and ordered form than is presented here. They take an exclusionary theoretical position and claim a privileged status for their own interpretation. That approach is increasingly under attack today. Post-structuralists, similar to the sociologists of knowledge, contend that meaning is not an independent representation of the real world grasped by an independent psychoanalytic observer. It is rather a reflection of a meaning-making system that produces our theories, our world, and the possibility of a psychoanalysis. For instance, my own discourse in this paper is highly context specific. The object relations discourse includes constructs that may represent the cultural fantasy or ideological slant in the West. As an example, the distinction between self and object, the idea of self-object differentiation, the preoccupation with individuation, and the notion of symbiotic relationship with its pathological overtone may themselves reflect a Western individualistic Weltanschauung. Some writers (Chang, 1988) assert that in the West, our notions of self and other— with their corollaries of self and object representations—are grounded in the ideological dogma of methodological individualism. It is alleged that the Eastern self is of such a nature that it often eludes our grasp, particularly when we try to analyze it with our ideologically tortured spectacles. Self and object representations are cultural constructs with much cognitive and affective loading. In the East, the traditional mode of explanation of psychosocial phenomena is some form of system analysis. What Western journalists call the Easterner's "conspiracy theory" is primarily a tendency to avoid attribution of agency, responsibility, or blameworthiness to the individual. The enemy is some super structure, super organization, or super power (Movahedi, 1996). Perhaps the discovery of the enemy as a well-defined individual awaits the birth of the notion of the individual. That is, it may take an individualistic Weltanschauung for the enemy to become individualized. Thus one may even argue that the writers of the disengaged or abstract type notes represent not less differentiated and mature levels of object relation functioning in a Kleinian sense, but a more traditional form of self-object organization. Actually, there was some indication in the data that the notes clustered together in terms of their writer's social class or level of modernization. It has already been suggested

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that traditional cultures are more anal, obsessed, paranoid, and likely to engage in action rituals to fight fear and anxiety (Becker, 1973). Whether these notes represent (a) different levels of object-relation functioning, (b) attempts to establish symbolic continuity with a sociohistorical order, (c) the unfolding of narcissism through heroic pursuits, (d) manifestations of social masochism, (e) different discourses of death, or (f) simply pseudorational justifications for the enactments of destructive impulses cannot be empirically settled. In all likelihood, they may represent the working of all these processes. The information contained in the notes does not allow for the choosing of one inference over the other. The typical data that come from the psychoanalytic process by themselves usually do not fare any better. The appreciation of the complexity of human behavior enhances our psychoanalytic understanding and helps us avoid fixation on any one specific interpretation. To refine our theories we should use various approaches to the data and be able to entertain a variety of plausible interpretations. As a postscript, I admit that bracketing a text from its socio-historical context, the subject of my analysis, is a problematic exercise, particularly, from a poststructuralist perspective. There is noting in a text that can be interpreted outside of its socio-cultural surround. To bracket a text means nothing but an exclusion of certain interpretive contexts in favor of some others. In one sense it does violence to the text by allowing the analyst's interpretive framework to structure—or to suffocate— the "voice" of the original writer, should we assume that there is such a voice. Any listening to a voice in a text or any close reading of a text is within interpretation and is by definition contextualized. This is particularly true if we jump from a phenomenological analysis of a text to a psychological analysis of its writer. Although analyses of object relations, i.e. power relations, are by themselves political, some are "intentionally" more confused than some others. An analysis in terms of a theory of the object—the conceptualized object outside of its historical context—the "terrorist bomber" as perverse or "sick"—is a confused, albeit a politically powerful conceptualized tool (Foucault, 1982). The analysis of any resistance against domination is itself subject to the vagaries of power in so far as all pursuits of knowledge are in the final analysis nothing but pursuit of power. Strategic power relations may be read not only in the texts of political technology of the body but also in the analyses of "experts'" claims of knowledge on matters of the perversity of individuals who have been subject to the violence of the oppressor. Bracketing the action—taking the action as a text—of a fighter on a suicidal mission against an invading, dominating or occupying force from the socio-political context of the domination, is itself a political move in the service of oppression. Much too

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often w h a t the sovereign fails to impose on the subject in h i s / h e r life, using Foucault's language, its experts try to do in h i s / h e r death by imposing a law of psychiatric truth on h i m / h e r which h e / s h e must recognize (the experts' wishful fantasy) and others have to recognize in h i m / h e r . In that sense, although this analysis m a y come across as an attempt to "un-situate" action, m y intention has not been to present a theory of the object— a psychology of the suicide bomber or "the theorist." Although psychoanalysis is itself a discourse of power, I believe it should be used to liberate the subject from the shackles, constraints and delusions of the symbolic order. It should not be used in the service of the subject's objectification and moral servitude. NOTES This article is an expansion of "The Utopian Pursuit of Death," which was previously published in American Imago 56 (1): 1-26,1999. 1. I have intentionally changed or omitted certain details to keep the confidentiality of the people involved. However, it should be emphasized that all these writers had participated in military combat missions, and none had engaged in a "terrorist" attack against a nonmilitary target. 2. By the term "object" here, I refer to a symbolic "other" that is in part a dimension of the "self" as a fantasy. 3. In the analysis of suicide notes, investigators often make references to process and content. For instance, while genuine notes tend to be content oriented, pseudo notes are highly process oriented. Process here refers to the dynamic state of change in a system. This also includes communication about an intended change, recurrent pattern, or function. Content, on the other hand, is a communication about the state of a system at a given time. As such, it is cross-sectional and static. The codependence of verb and noun bears on the distinction between process and content. A verb is part of the process language; it expresses function and change. A noun is a content term; it names the person, thing, or quality that acts or is subject to action (see, for example, Olinick, Poland, Grigg, & Granatir, 1973). 4. The overemphasis on the self, as is experienced by others, according to Shneidman and Farberow (1957a), is a characteristic feature of cultural or religious suicides. This observation supports Durkheim's (1897/1951) concept of altruistic suicide. 5. In connection with the working of persecutory objects, the operation of a punitive superego can also be detected. In "Mourning and Melancholia," Freud (1917) wrote that "the ego sees itself deserted by the superego and let itself die." Here, it seems that these writers felt they had to embrace death or they would be deserted by the superego. 6. There is certain direct and indirect information in the notes on the basis of which the extent to which the writer's decision was voluntary may be inferred. These include information on age, marital status, or some indirect reference in the letter, such as "the commander said he couldn't do anything

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about changing my assignment." Married men in their late thirties or forties were more likely to have been volunteers. Letters that signal some tension between the writer and the family over the writer's repeated acceptance of dangerous missions reveal a certain level of choice on the part of the writer. 7. According to Winnicott (1969), a transitional object may be employed only if the internal object is alive and "good enough," that is, not too persecutory. REFERENCES Aguinis, M. (1995). A masterpiece of illumination. In E. S. Person, P. Fonagy, & S. Figueira (Eds.), On Freud's "creative writers and day-dreaming." New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Aries, P. (1985). Images of man and death. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Asch, S. (1976). Varieties of negative therapeutic reaction and problems of technique. Journal of the American Psychoanalytical Association 24: 383-407. Bateson, G. (1968). Information and codification: A philosophical approach. In J. Ruesch & G. Bateson (Eds.), Communication: The social matrix of psychiatry. New York: Norton. Becker, E. (1973). The denial of death. New York: The Free Press. Brown, N. (1959). Life against death: The psychoanalytic meaning of history. New York: Viking. Brunner, J. (1992). The original story and the invited story. Invited symposium, American Psychological Association, Division of Psychoanalysis, Twelfth Annual Spring Meeting, Philadelphia. Campbell, D. (1995). The role of the father in a pre-suicide state. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 76: 315-323. Chang, S. C. (1988). The nature of the self: A transcultural view. Transcultural Psychiatric Research Review 25:189-210. Darbonne, A. (1969). Study of psychological content in communications of suicidal individuals. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 33:590-596. Devereux, G. (1961). Mohave ethnopsychiatry and suicide: The psychiatric knowledge and psychiatric disturbances of an Indian tribe. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute, Bureau of Ethnology, Bulletin 175. Dreyfus, H., and Rabinow, P. (1982). Michael Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Durkheim, E. (1897/1951). Suicide (J. A. Spaulding & G. Simpson, Trans.). Glencoe, IL: The Free Press. Fenichel, O. (1945). The psychoanalytic theory of neurosis. New York: Norton. Fonagy, P., & Target, M. (1995). Understanding the violent patient: The use of the body and the role of the father. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 76:487-505. Foucault, M. (1982). The subject and power. In H. Dreyfus & P. Rabinow (eds.) Michael Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Freud, S. (1915). Thoughts for the times on war and death. SE 14 (pp. 289-300). Freud, S. (1917). Mourning and melancholia. SE 16 (pp. 239-258). Freud, S. (1920). The psychogenesis of a case of homosexuality in a woman. SE 18 (pp. 145-172).

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Freud, S. (1924). The economic problem of masochism. SE19 (pp. 157-173). Fromm, E. (1947). Man for himself. New York: Henry Holt. Gottschalk, L., & Gleser, G. (1960). An analysis of the verbal content of suicide notes. British Journal of Medical Psychology 33:195-204. Henken, V. (1976). Banality reinvestigated: A computer-based content analysis of suicidal and forced death documents. Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior 6: 36-43. Hoffer, E. (1951). The true believer: Thoughts on the nature of mass movements. New York: HarperCollins. Hopper, E. (1991). Encapsulation as a defense against the fear of annihilation. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 72: 607-624. Jacobs, J. (1971). Phenomenological study of suicide notes. In A. Giddens (Ed.), The sociology of suicide. London: Whitefriars Press. Joseph, B. (1982). Addiction to near-death. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 63: 449-456. Lacan, J. (1966/1977). Ecrits: A Selection (A. Sheridan, Trans.). NY: Norton. Leenaars, A. (1988). Suicide notes. New York: Human Sciences Press. Lewin, B. (1946). Sleep, the mouth, and the dream screen. Psychoanalytic Quarterly 15:419-434. Movahedi, S. (1976). Methodological schizophrenia: A problem in the sociology of science. International Journal of Contemporary Sociology 13 (January and April): 79-92. Movahedi, S. (1996). Metalinguistic analysis of therapeutic discourse. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 44 (3): 837-862. Olinick, S. L., Poland, W. S., Grigg, K. S., & Granatir, W. L. (1973). The psychoanalytic work ego: Process and interpretation. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 54:143-151. Pollock, G. (1975). On mourning, immortality, and Utopia. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 23: 334-362. Pollock, G. (1976). Mourning, homicide, and suicide. Annual of Psychoanalysis 4: 225-249. Pulver, S. (1987). The manifest dream in psychoanalysis: A clarification. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 35: 99-117. Ragland, E. (1995). Essays on the Pleasures of Death. NY: Routledge. Reik, T. (1941). Masochism in modern man. New York: Grove Press. Ricoeur, P. (1993). Hermeneutics and the human sciences (J. B. Thompson, Ed.). Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Sandier, J., & Sandier, A. M. (1978). On the development of object relationships and affects. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 59: 285-296. Segal, R. (Ed.). (1990). In quest of the hero. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Shneidman, E. (1973). Suicide notes reconsidered. Psychiatry 36: 379-394. Shneidman, E. (1993). Suicide as psychache. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson. Shneidman, E., & Farberow, N. (1957a). Some comparison between genuine and simulated suicide notes in terms of Mowrer's concepts of discomfort and relief. Journal of General Psychology 56: 251-256. Shneidman, E., & Farberow, N. (1957b). Clues to suicide. New York: McGraw-Hill. Steiner, J. (1981). Perverse relationships between parts of the self: A clinical illustration. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 62: 241-251.

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Stekel, W. (1910/1977). Symposium on suicide. In P. Friedman (Ed.), On suicide (pp. 33-141). New York: International Universities Press. Tabachnick, N. (1957). Observations on attempted suicide. In E. Shneidman & N. Farberow (Eds.), Clues to suicide (pp. 164-169). New York: McGrawHill. Taylor, S. (1978). The confrontation with death and the renewal of life. Suicide and Life Threatening Behavior 8 (2): 89-98. Winnicott, D. W. (1953). Transitional objects and transitional phenomena: A study of the first not-me possession. In Collected papers: Through paediatrics to psychoanalysis (pp. 229-242). New York: Basic Books. Winnicott, D. W. (1967). The location of cultural experience. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 48: 368-372. Winnicott, D. W. (1969). The use of an object. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 50: 711-716. Winnicott, D. W. (1974). Fear of breakdown. International Review of Psychoanalysis 2:103-107. Winnicott, D. W. (1950/1975). Aggression in relation to emotional development. In Psycho-analysis (pp. 204-218). New York: Basis Books. Zilboorg, G. (1936). Suicide among civilized and primitive races. American Journal of Psychiatry 92:1347-1369. Zilboorg, G. (1937). Considerations on suicide, with particular reference to that of the young. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 7:15-31.

CHAPTER 2

Buddhism, Death, and the Feminine Jerry S. Piven

Life undergoes destruction night and day; Women are the stain of the holy life.. . —Samyutta Nikaya; Devaputtasamyutta (135: 76) I am repelled and humiliated By this foul, putrid body, Subject to break up, fragile: Fve uprooted sensual craving. —Samyutta Nikaya; Bhikkhunisamyutta (224: 530) This paper is an attempt to elucidate h o w certain developmental issues and conflicts are constellated in non-Western theologies. Despite a prevailing view of Buddhism as a philosophy of detachment that enlightens us about our illusions and the psychological causes of our suffering, n u m e r o u s Buddhist texts also evidence marked disgust for the body and physical decay, disparage the putrescing body as a real thing, and finally blame w o m e n for death and contamination. It is the task of clinicians to trace the origins of ideas, feelings, and pathological character structures in their patients. Psychohistorians and psychologists of religion, on the other hand, attempt to shed light on constellations of emotional arrest and injury, the determinants of motive, fantasy, and imagination in historical individuals, groups, and cultures. While this task may seem epistemically complicated, and indeed any psychological methodology may be justly susceptible to a

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variety of criticisms, the discoveries of psychoanalysis may be invoked to identify certain specific patterns of behavior and fantasy which might not be discerned as clearly without a psychological lens. When one examines the fecal obsessions of Martin Luther, for example, his furious scatological declarations, and his defeat of Satan in the Wittenberg Castle lavatory with "a mighty anal blast," one is hard pressed without a psychoanalytic framework to make any sense of such bizarre history.1 An obsession with anality usually derives from specific experiences of developmental conflict, the struggles with parents and caregivers over toilet training and bodily cleanliness which induce rage, guilt, disgust, the fear of punishment, and loss of love. Excrement can become a symbol of defiance, self-loathing, as well as besmirching revenge. Anality and excremental imagery can pervade the imagination and vocabulary of the person whose world view is despoiled with such ineradicable conflicts and obsessions. Martin Luther's biography further accords with the psychoanalytic paradigm. Luther was obsessed with the contaminating and uncleansible ubiquity of feces, proclaiming for example, "scatet totus orbis," the whole world shits, and "the world is a gaping anus and I am a rife shard."2 This is but one instance to highlight the complexities that may be brought into focus through a psychological exploration—not as a means of reducing phenomena to categories or diagnoses, not applying labels or inherently pathologizing the thing investigated, but sounding something against psychological researches, exploring the resonances between psychology and thing observed, and being aware of a deeper spectrum of psychological complexities; thinking psychologically. Thus this paper uses psychoanalysis to sound and understand the psychodynamics of certain Buddhist texts and practices from India, China, and Japan. Though one may be able to distill certain central tenets of Buddhism, one cannot assume a priori very much about how any particular Buddhism is actually conceived or practiced. As Faure (1996) writes, "In theory, Buddhism recognizes only two levels: the absolute, characterized by the absence of individual nature, and the relative, the world of egocentric illusion" (p. 156). Nevertheless, the attachment to lineage, funerary ideology, sacred and magical relics, and a host of idolatrous literalisms abound in Buddhism, in Zen monks as well as peasants. Keizan not only deposited the sacred bones of his master Dogen in a funerary mound behind Yokoji, but counted himself as one of the "Five Elders" and "preposthumously" declared his own bones to be relics venerated in "all the monasteries" (p. 158). Reverence for regalia like the "Dharma robe" (kasaya), teeth and hair clippings of the Buddha, his "heavenly" tooth or finger, reflected the widespread belief in the magical powers of relics to protect the country, ensure rich harvests, and even modify karma, assure one of Bud-

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dhahood, and enable one to enter the Pure Land or Tusita heaven. As Faure writes, "The cult of relics is one of the basic components of Buddhism, in India as in the rest of Buddhist Asia. A priori, we should not expect to find it in as theoretically 'iconoclastic' a school as Zen. But practice often tends to belie theory, and all the Chan or Zen masters seemed to have attached a certain importance to the fate of their remains" (p. 160). Despite the image of Buddhism as a meditation on detachment, of sagacious monks at one with the universe, and despite explicit messages on the illusory and impermanent nature of appearances, Buddhism could be utterly literalistic, fanatical, even violent. The Tendai monks of Mount Hiei are notorious for descending suddenly and ripping their enemies to shreds. On three occasions they assaulted Nishihonganji (whether because Jodoshinshu was somehow heretical to them or because its increasing popularity threatened Hiei's political influence is difficult to say). In the Japanese medieval epic The Tale of the Heike, suffering victims of war implore Amida to save them. They simultaneously lament that the world is illusory, ephemeral, and tormenting, and fight wars and commit suicide as though it were real. And they pray that Amida bring them to paradise while expressing the saddest and most pathetic attachments to the decimated world they love. People pray to Buddha as though he were a deity. Sutras are recited that Buddha heal the sick, grant them both worldly amelioration of pain so that they may live happily, and salvation in the afterlife. Sages such as Kuya (903-972) promulgated the view that "he never fails to reach the Lotus Land of Bliss who calls, if only once, the name of Amida," and Honen (11331212) insisted that the mere invocation of the Nembutsu would bring salvation (Eliade, 1967, pp. 503-505; cf. also Faure, 2003; Kitagawa, 1987). When the Tendai priest Shinsei died in 1495, "several nuns tried to drown themselves, apparently in the hope of following him to the Pure Land" (Faure, 2003, p. 47). Whatever the "authentic" message, people took these ideas very literally. If Buddhism seems to teach that all is illusion, there are nevertheless schools of Buddhism that believe still today in a literal paradise which adherents may enter if they chant the name Amida with enough devotion. In Kyoto one may visit the Zen temple Ryoanji, where the goal is inwardness, detachment, and recognition of perception as a projective process. One seeks self-understanding, or in a more Buddhistic language, how "self" is an illusory construct that must be understood in order to detach from destructiveness and pain. Buddhist scholar Nobuo Haneda compares Amida to Hamlet or Faust, saying that one derives wisdom from Amida as a fictional character and would never worship him as a god.3 Nevertheless, elsewhere in Kyoto, in such temples as Chioin, Sanjusangendo, or Nishihonganji, devotees

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believe in distinct divine entities, an afterlife, salvation, or reincarnation. These may all be called Buddhisms but they are diametrically opposed; the Zen approach being (ostensibly) nontheological, and the others mentioned being distinctly literalistic and theological. A practitioner of Zen from Ryoanji might well see the theology of Chioin as distinctly opposite Buddhist truths, believing in the idol, worshipping rather than recognizing belief and supplication as the very illusions and attachments from which one must free oneself. Thus one may have trouble essentializing Buddhism, and the purpose of this paper is to trace certain fantasies that pervade the Buddhist corpus despite the possibility that such fantasies may not be considered "authentic" Buddhism to scholars or practitioners. While there are numerous forms of Buddhism, a close reading of many Buddhist texts reveals fantasies and emotional dispositions which either contradict the stated philosophy (and conventional interpretations) or remain trenchant themes in the text regardless of whether the authors are aware of these motives. How a Buddhist (or any person) might define his or her conscious feelings and ideas is no indication of what may be going on unconsciously. Stating that Buddhism is itself aimed at discovering the nature of one's attachments and deceptions is not proof that one has actually achieved this goal. Indeed, a central tenet of psychoanalysis is that the psyche deceives the conscious self about its true motives. Certain forms of Buddhism have been well aware of this thousands of years before psychoanalysis: "Trying to know ourselves is like trying to glimpse a shadow in a hall of mirrors" (Leifer, 1997, p. 106).4 In the Buddhist view, the basic cause of suffering is ignorance, avidya, literally, "the failure to see." The ego is the locus of our ignorance. We think of the ego as the locus of our knowledge, and indeed it is regarded as the locus of our logical faculties, but the ego itself is formed out of ignorance, in the sense that it is built u p o n a view of itself and the world which denies, represses, or distorts the facts of existence, especially the facts of suffering and d e a t h . . . . The mechanisms of defense are all falsifications of reality. They are lies w e tell ourselves, (p. 78)

The task is therefore not to claim that a culture or theology knows its true motives and fantasies, but to read the unstated, the repressed, the displaced, and the symbolic, that which is being said despite the conscious desires of the subject. BUDDHISM, DEATH, AND DISGUST The argument of this paper is that many Buddhist texts reveal an immense disgust for life itself, for the body, and for death. Further,

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this fear and hatred of death engenders a tangible disgust and moral derogation of the feminine as the source of life and physical decay. One can only ask the reader to approach this strange perspective with an open mind, and to notice when one finds an idea stressful, that perhaps such anxiety may reflect a threat to our own wishes, attachments, and fantasies. The story of Buddha is a simple one: Prince Gautama lives secluded within the walls of his opulent castle. When he ventures out one day he encounters aging, sickness, and death. He thus ventures to the Bodhi Tree to find enlightenment of the meaning of existence and determines that the suffering which is life can be escaped by extinguishing desire. The fundamental asseveration of Buddhism is that life is a painful illusion caused by emotional attachment. Enlightenment consists of the attainment of this understanding, and enlightenment of the Buddha realm is also achieved by eradicating desire. Buddhism is therefore operating under a paradox: If the suffering of life is an illusion that can be overcome by detachment, then it is the emotions which are here criticized. But in the ubiquitous condemnation of birth, death, human decay, disease, and mortality, Buddhism is attributing evil to the physical world. Consider Gautama's thoughts after encountering the sufferings outside his castle, as written in the Digha Nikaya, xiv [Mahapadana suttanta]: Shame then verily be upon this thing called birth, since to one born old age shows itself like that! Shame then verily be upon this thing called birth, since to one born decay shows itself like that, disease shows itself like that. Shame verily be upon this thing called birth, since to one born the decay of life, since disease, since death shows itself like that! Verily, this world has fallen upon trouble—one is born, and grows old, and dies, and falls from one state, and springs up in another. And from the suffering, moreover, no one knows of any way of escape, even from decay and death. O, when shall a way of escape from this suffering be made known—from decay and from death? (Brewster, 1926, pp. 15-19) Shame and disgust are hardly detachment, and they rather motivate disparagement, which is actually an emotional attachment. What is at issue is the problem of mortality, and this is the unacceptable, ineluctable fact which motivates the defense dynamism of denial and the moral categorization of life itself. Consider these aphorisms from the Dhammapada: 47. He who is busy culling pleasure, as one plucks flowers, Death seizes and hurries off, as a great flood bears away a sleeping village.

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48. The Destroyer treads him underfoot as he is culling his worldly pleasures, still unsated with lusts of flesh. 147. Look at this painted image, wounded and swollen, sickly and full of lust, in which there is no permanence; [sic] 148. This wasted form is a nest of disease and very frail: it is full of putrid matter and perishes. Death is the end of life. 149. What delight is there for him who sees these grey bones scattered like gourds in autumn? 150. Here is a citadel of bones plastered with flesh and blood, and manned by old age and death, self-will and enmity. 151. Even as the king's bright chariot grows old, so the body of man also comes to old age. But the law of the holy never ages. . . . 170. The King of Death sees not him who regards the world as a bubble, a mirage. . . . 202. There is no sorrow like existence: no bliss greater than Nirvana [rest]. 238. Make for thyself a refuge; come, strive and play the sage! Burn off thy taints, and thou shalt know birth and old age no more. 289. Knowing this clearly, the wise and the righteous man straightaway clears the road that leads to Nirvana. (Eliade, 1967, pp. 581-583) Death itself is the evil, which must be evaded by extinguishing the self. The dread of life's irrevocable conclusion and cessation is the motivating factor, and thus the defense mechanism of denial sets in. The horror of decay and mortality engenders a way to escape and subsequently insinuates a causal factor between the morally objectionable and corrupt fact of existence and the attachment to life which despairs of death. In other words, despair motivates denial, while it also condemns that which cannot fulfill wishes for security and permanence, that is, life itself. Without such wishes (needs), there would be no denial, no condemnation, no need to escape. Great disappointment engenders resentment, moral approbation, and the drive to transcendence, not objectivity or compassion. Hence the desire for life is blamed for the cause of life itself, since one is rejecting that which one cannot have. And one subsequently deceives oneself into believing that if one abandons such futile desires, that one will therefore escape the pernicious phenomenon causing such disappointment. Hence life, not merely desire, is condemned, while actually being considered the progeny of desire. It is attachment that is most often emphasized in describing or discussing Buddhist ideas, but this is only an evasion of what the true source of misery is. The source of misery is life and death itself, and

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desire must be extinguished as the solution. Once we focus on death as the essential problem, and attachment as only a deceptively misemphasized causal factor, then we realize the significance of moral condemnation of life and death, and the defensive, wishful quality of the metaphysical drive for transcendence. Consider the words of the Shikshasamuccaya [Vajradhvaha-sutta] 280-282: The whole world of living beings I must rescue, from the terrors of birth, of old age, of sickness, of death and rebirth, of all kinds of moral offence, of all states of woe, of the whole cycle of birth-and-death.... I must give myself away as a pawn through which the whole world is redeemed from the terrors of the hells, of animal birth, of the world of Yama. . . . (Conze et al, 1954, pp. 131-132) One contemporary Japanese Pure Land Buddhist text cites the eternal truth of the Pali Anguttarra Nikayas Samana-sutta that "all living things are born from i g n o r a n c e " — " t ^ T t ^ t. l/£(;t<5 &#)(£&&&* #J£^b££tl<S" (The Teaching of Buddha, p. 95). In the one-hundredth discourse of the Pali Itivuttaka, the Buddhist allegory of human life as a man rowing down a river beset with whirlpools, crocodiles, and demons, actually attributes "decay and death to a life of lust and indulgence"— " P l C ^ o T M O ^ f e ^ J a I/' (p. 179). Another parable from the Matanga-Jataka quotes Buddha as teaching his pupils to think of their bodies "as secreting impurities of all kinds such as blood, pus, sweat and oils . . . " (pp. 256-258). Several Buddhist sermons from the Samyutta Nikayas Dhammacakrapravartana-sutta attribute evil to the "will-to-live"—"£[C*f-f<5$UO&3t£*> 11 U T ( , \ T " (pp. 75,163)— and hence imply that life is a corruption which must be extinguished. This recalls the Hindu disparagement of incarnation, as the goal of life is to shed the defilement of birth. One is reborn with the corruption and burden of life, and mortality is conceived of as evil. Hence Nirvana is the cessation of life itself. Enlightenment for Buddha is not just the recognition that attachment is suffering, but that life itself is something to be transcended. Indeed, what is desired is a cessation of pain, again, as an escape. Life is seen as predicament which must be solved. As Dogen says in the Zen Shobogenzo Zuimonki: Great is the problem of life and death; fleeting indeed is our transitory existence. Upon these truths both the scriptural and meditation schools agree. What sort of illness awaits us tonight, what sort of death tomorrow? (Tsunoda et al., 1958, p. 248) Despite their critical differences, many Buddhist texts across cultures and ages are concerned with the same quest for transcendence of mor-

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tality. We have to cease pursuit of mortal passions, 5 "free ourselves from bondage to birth and death," 6 and find "rest and security" in the "Other World" (Eliade, 1967, p p . 475, 507, 509). And indeed, the pervasive theme is that the extinguishment of desire will actually cause the continual cycles of life and death to vanish (pp. 572-573). 7 As it says in the Samyutta Nikaya, II, 86: In one, monks, who abides reflecting on the enjoyment of things that fetter, craving increases. With craving as a cause there is grasping. With grasping as a cause there is becoming (the desire to be). With the desire to be as a cause there is rebirth. With rebirth as a cause old age and death, grief, lamentation, pain, dejection, and despair arise. Even so is the cause of this whole mass of pain. Even so, monks, in one who abides reflecting on the wretchedness of things that fetter, craving ceases. With the ceasing of craving grasping ceases. With the ceasing of grasping the desire to be ceases. With the ceasing of the desire to be rebirth ceases. With the ceasing of rebirth old age and death, grief, lamentation, pain, dejection, and despair cease. Even so is the cessation of this whole mass of pain. (Thomas, 1935, pp. 22-23) In this text the alternative to lamentation, despair, and mortal existence is "cessation" and "tranquility" (Eliade, 1967, p. 571),8 the "consummate peace of Nirvana, which knows neither sorrow nor decay, neither disease nor death, neither sorrow nor i m p u r i t y . . . " (p. 477).9 The alternative to the world of decay is the Pure Land, where "everyone hears the pleasant sound he wishes to hear . . . of the unborn, of non-production, nonexistence, non-cessation, of calm, quietude and peace . . ." (p. 383).10 By contrast, the decay of mortality is the horrific reality one seeks to escape through extinguishment of life, desire, thought, and conception: When the light of gnosis has dispelled the darkness of ignorance, when all existence has been seen as without substance, peace ensues when life draws to an end, which seems to cure a long sickness at last. (p. 481 ) n In sum, we are to conclude that all evils—grief, sickness, squalor, menstruation, the putrescence of a corpse—are caused by desire. There is a vast difference between the statement that desire causes suffering and the iteration that bodily infirmities, sickness, menstruation, and childbirth are evil. Could the Buddhist escape hunger or death by extinguishing emotion? Or is this perhaps a disgust for mortality veiled in the condemnation of suffering? If one rebukes emotions as the cause for suffering, w h y emphasize the evils in the world over the ostensible causes of the suffering in the heart? Why blame mortality and the objects of disgust rather than the motives which engender such illusions? Why accuse h u m a n decay as an evil in itself, as something to avoid

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lest one be tainted with its corruption? A case in point is the Buddhist repudiation of women. THE HORROR OF THE FEMININE AS THE HORROR OF DEATH It is no accident that Buddhism had the propensity to fear, revile, and vilify women. If life and death are condemned, so will be that which spawns earthly life, along with their corruptions of menstruation, amniotic fluids, and placental albumen. If one believes that life itself is not condemned, but desire, then one might ask wherefrom comes the derogation of women, if all is illusion. N u m e r o u s Buddhist texts actually acknowledge the fact that gender is meaningless w h e n all is transient and illusory (cf. Faure, 2003). Nevertheless, Buddhist parables often w a r n those on the p a t h of enlightenment to avoid women, since they are evil (Cabezon, 1992; Paul, 1985; Ury, 1985).12 The Aganna-suttanta blames w o m e n for the fall of the h u m a n race (Paul, 1985, p . 4), and the Buddha states that Those who are not wise, Act like animals, Racing toward female forms Like hogs toward mud. (p. 9) We read in the Anguttara Nikaya that Womenfolk are uncontrolled, Ananda. Womenfolk are envious, Ananda. Womenfolk are greedy, Ananda. Womenfolk are weak in wisdom, Ananda. That is the reason, that is the cause why womenfolk do not sit in a court of justice, do not embark on business, do not reach the essence of the deed. (II, 82-83, in Cabezon, 1992, pp. 18-19) The Saddharmasmrtyuupasthana

asseverates that

Women are ever the root of ruin, and of loss of substance; when men are to be controlled by women how can they gain happiness? . . . A woman is the destruction of destructions in this world and the next; hence one must ever avoid women if he desires happiness for himself, (p. 19) Finally, not to belabor the point, w e read in the Maharatnakuta: All desires are suffering, the vilest of evils, The impurity of pus, extremely despicable.... Like the overflow from a toilet or a corpse of a dog or fox, In the Sitavana cemetery pollution flows everywhere.

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The evils of desire are contemptible like these. Fools lust for women, like dogs in heat. They do not know abstinence. They are also like flies who see vomited food. Like a herd of hogs, they greedily seek manure. Women can ruin the precepts of purity. They can also ignore honor and virtue.... As the filth and decay of a dead dog or dead snake is burned away, So should all men burn filth and detest evil. The dead snake and dog are detestable, But women are even more detestable than they a r e . . . . (p. 22) Thus w e have w o m e n as sources of corruption and temptation, defilement and decay, despicable as temptresses akin to vomit and excrement. As Faure (2003) observes, "In the early Buddhist literature, the Buddha himself keeps repeating that the female body 'is a vessel of impurity, full of stinking filth. It is like a rotten p i t . . . like a toilet, with nine holes pouring all sorts of filth'" (p. 56). This is no mere moral condemnation of women. Erotic temptation may arouse resentment and rage: fear of arousal, loss of emotional and sexual control, being overwhelmed by female sexuality, the fear of castration, impotence, or sexual inferiority, and even envy of w o m e n most certainly engender misogyny and disparagement of the feminine. However, the equation of w o m e n with defilement and excrement reveals a further stratum of terror and disgust. The equation of w o m e n and death is a hatred and fear of the body, of decay, and for those experiencing such massive loathing and disgust, sexual fluids and secretions are too reminiscent of gelatinous carrion, of putrefaction. Sexual desire, w o m a n ' s procreative organs and fecundity identify her with life and the cycles of birth and death, while the "quivering jelly" of the w o m b , embryo, placenta, and menses recall death and decay, the noisome sights and odors of a rotting corpse or excrement, from which men so often flee into fantasies of transcendence and non-corporeality (de Beauvoir, 1949/1989, p p . 146-147; Piven, 2003). Hence, hatred of life and decay, of the body, will cuhriinate in a disparagement of the feminine. When this being is born in the mother's womb, it is not born inside a blue or red or white lotus, etc., but on the contrary, like a worm in rotting fish, rotting dough, cess-pools, etc., he is born in the belly in a position that is below the receptacle for undigested food (rectum), between the belly-lining and the backbone, which is very cramped, quite dark, pervaded with very fetid draughts redolent of various smells of ordure, and exceptionally loathsome. And on

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being reborn there, for ten months he undergoes excessive suffering, being cooked like a pudding in a bag by the heat produced in the mother's womb. (Faure, 2003, pp. 80-81)

Once again, the thing that is feared is given the most insidious moral valuation, as a thing evil in itself, rather than being understood as independent of one's desires or fears. The threat is termed evil, as in so many moral valuations. The pathological conflicts of those reacting to the women are displaced onto those feared and detested women, and they become sirens, murderous temptresses, and sewers, while the men gain moral victory and seek salvation from life, death, and woman as repositories of evil. As can be found in so much Near Eastern and Greek religion, again we arrive at the vilification of women, sexuality, birth, and mortality, and this far exceeds the detached compassion for the suffering who cannot suppress their desire.13 It has been argued that the history of Buddhism has also been permeated by a "soteriological inclusiveness," that while misogyny undoubtedly existed, many texts revealed the spiritual capacities of women, extolled their virtues, and stated explicitly their capacity to attain Nirvana. Alan Sponberg (1992) argues this case admirably and with solid supporting textual evidence (pp. 3-36), but he ignores an essential psychological nuance. The support of women becoming nuns and attaining enlightenment is no indicator of inclusiveness or egalitarianism, or a denial of misogyny at all (Faure, 2003). Indeed, the spiritual conversion of women to doctrine and practice removes them from their own inherent sinfulness. By inculcating in women the repudiation of the body, of its corruptions, of desire, of life and death, woman is being cleansed of all her impurities, that which makes her a source of sin and filth, of the evil of birth, and of temptation to men. Once her desire is gone, once she no longer gives birth, once she purifies herself, and thus acknowledges her own contemptibility and recants her status as a source of impurity and evil, she destroys her own threatening capacities and becomes a symbol of the victory of man and spirit over the corruption of death and femininity. She becomes a symbol of the defeat of corruption, and of empowering conquest by the men, who can feel a sense of victory having broken the insidious will of the evil feminine. And they gain a sense of moral triumph, if not compassion, for cleansing the world of one more bit of corruption, even saving woman from herself. Like Mother Mary, she has been cleansed of her threatening attributes, and as such is not only acceptable but becomes a source of wisdom and purity. She is the good mother whose split image has been repressed and displaced in the defensive process.14 This is ex-

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tremely significant. "Splitting" is a psychological process whereby conflicting images are separated from one another so that danger and contamination are avoided. Children split the image of the angry, hostile mother from the benign, nurturing mother because the combined image of a nurturer who might randomly become vicious is too terrifying to endure. Ideally this defense is overcome in the course of development, when maturation enables men to recognize and accept the complexity of the other as human being. Nevertheless, we historically find women divided into dichotomous categories of purity and sin (the goddess of birth and the goddess of death, the good witch and the bad witch, Cinderella and her wicked stepmother, as prominent examples). In the case of Buddhist nuns, the evil feminine cleanses herself of her own disgusting and vile qualities by submitting to the doctrine. Woman will be embraced, adored, and extolled once man has remade her in his image. Converting her is the ultimate victory of his dominance, not an acceptance of her femininity. Despite the fact that Buddhist women could sometimes attain significant positions of power and status, this does not alter the fact that they were still considered morally and karmically inferior, were denied entry or equality in the Buddhist sanga (community), were subject to profuse misogynistic disparagement, loathing, and condemnation, and were even required to become physically male through a nebulous magical/moral/symbolic means before being rid of their innately ferninine defilement. In Amitabha's thirty-fifth vow in the Sukhavativyuha-sutra we read: "In my land there will be no women; if you want to be reborn in my land, you will become men" (Faure, 2003, p. 100). She is still too often considered "an emissary from hell" (Vijnaptimatratasiddhi-sastra, ibid., p. 60). The way a culture conceives its women reflects its valuation and fear of life and death, and Buddhism throughout the ages never ceased to find decay and mortality sources of evil. Not egolessness and compassion are revealed by many Buddhist texts, but contempt and hatred of physical life. This is what Campbell (1962) terms "The Great Reversal," the loathing and rejection of life, embodied in the Buddhist concept that the world is contemptible illusion: "O priests," declared the Buddha in his Fire Sermon, "the learned and noble disciple conceives an aversion for the eye, conceives an aversion for forms, conceives an aversion for eye-consciousness, conceives an aversion for impressions received by the eye; and whatever sensation, pleasant, unpleasant, or indifferent, originates in dependence on impressions received by the eye, for that also he conceives an aversion. He conceives an aversion for the ear... for sounds ... for the nose ... for odors ... for the body... for things tangible ... for the mind . . . for ideas . . . for mind-consciousness. . . . And in conceiving this aversion, he becomes divested of passion, and by the absence of passion he

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becomes free, and when he is free he becomes aware that he is free; and he knows that rebirth is exhausted, that he has lived the holy life." (p. 212) In the Ashvagosha, Buddhacarita, the Gods of the Pure Abode are also said to have "contempt" for the things of this world (XXVI, 83-86, 8 8 106, in Eliade, 1967, p p . 481-482). While the Majjhima Nikaya [Mahasihanada-sutta] m a y expressly state that asceticism and intentional suffering are irreligious (XII, p p . 458-462; Cabezon, 1992, p p . 23-24), world abandonment and disgust with desires of the b o d y imply selfloathing, the will to self-punishment, and death. In the Nikaya Samyutta s Sakkasamyutta w e read: The humans stuck in a putrid body, Those submerged inside a corpse.... (Bodhi, 2000, pp. 336.20.932-933) Submersion in a corpse refers not merely to the sense that one's own body is putrescent, but also alludes to immersion in the mother during the fetal stage, that one is "submerged for 10 months in a corpse, namely, in the m o t h e r ' s w o m b " (p. 499). ORIGINS A N D DEVELOPMENT OF TERROR A N D DISGUST Be engrossed in revulsion. —Nikaya Samyutta, Vangisamyutta (284.4.724) What are the origins of such ideas and feelings? Of all possible attitudes toward life and death, what engendered Buddhistic disgust? As Campbell (1962) asks: "By what principle of delusion, then, has it come to pass that so m a n y beings . . . suppose their own and others' sufferings to constitute a problem, saying, 'Life is something that should not have been'?" (p. 273). For this w e must look to the development of I n d i a n t h o u g h t , to the cultural soil from w h i c h this w o r l d view emerged. Campbell (1962) locates world-loathing in a p h e n o m e n o n he terms again "The Great Reversal," a period worldwide w h e n a pervasive attitude of optimistic joy was transformed into lamentation. Campbell believes that the first appearance of such loathing can be attributed to the Jains, whose obsessively systematizing cosmology w a s about as bleak and bizarre as anything conceived by h u m a n madness (p. 225). The Jain mythology is an attempt to Blot the universe out. Its function is psychological: the unsettling and dissolution of the will to live and the guidance of the sentiments away from their natural earthly concerns, even past all the usual religious imageries of hope

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and fear—hells, heavens, and the rest—to an absolutely transcendent, absolutely inconceivable goal, to which every effort of the will is to be turned. And so we have in this mythology of the Jains an example of something absolutely new in the history of our subject, at least as far as the evidence goes; namely, a mythology designed to break (not foster) the will to live and blot out (not enhance) the universe, (p. 232)15 It is a universe lacerated with such severe sorrow that the spiritual task is escaping from "this exquisite nightmare" (p. 233). Campbell believes that this attitude contrasts the affirmation of the Upanishads (p. 210).16 One can find numerous examples of loathing in these texts, however, where liberation from the loathsome body and death provide immense joy. Though the chronological appearance of ideas in texts does not signify a linear evolution, since in India a maelstrom of theology and philosophy could exist for centuries without being preserved in writing (Eliade, 1978,1982), there is nevertheless a dramatic evolution from Vedic religious affirmation of life and the body to a later Upanishadic disgust with flesh, death, and decay (Hoick, 1974b, p. 56; Shinn, 1974, p. 79). The Vedic religion derives from the seminomadic tribes of East Europe and Northwest Asia, who called themselves Aryas, and invaded the Indian subcontinent around 2500 B.C. These were a carnivorous and pastoral people who gradually became more agricultural as they conquered the indigenous population. Hoick (1974a) describes the literature of the Vedas as reflecting "an uninhibited, merrymaking people" who enjoyed dancing, singing, music, intoxication, and gambling (p. 25). They believed in the divine protection of Varuna and Mitra, along with numerous other nature deities, dwelling under the cosmic principle of rta. Worshippers made sacrifices for long life and deliverance from evil. "I cherish and sustain the high-swelling Soma, and Tvastar I support, Pusan, and Bhaga" (Radhakrishnan & Moore, 1957, p. 15). "May Indra come to us for our protection" (p. 26). The Vedics were primarily concerned with prolonging life. Later a concern with the pleasures in the afterlife developed, and a gradual amplification of the idea of hell from a dark abyss to a place of imprisonment, punishment, a place for female goblins and sorceresses (Hoick, 1974a, p. 33). If the Vedics feared death it was the consequence of old age, perhaps even fear of punishment for transgressing human or divine laws. Though Vedic poets could limn splendorous immortality and a state of "boneless, cleansed" perfection purified by the gods, Hoick asserts that an earthly life of delight was preferable to any uncertain existence beyond (p. 35). Go hence, O Death. . . .

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We have gone forth for dancing and for laughter, to further times prolonging our existence. Live your full lives and find old age delightful, (p. 35)

Ritual commentaries known as Brahmanas composed by priests around the tenth century B.C.E. implicate the gradual evolution from joyful affirmation of life to a theological concern with magical, shamanic, sacrificial means of attaining immortality, averting evil and consumption by death. One becomes "undecaying and immortal" through the sacrifice, through knowledge (vidya) and holy work (karman). Fear and lamentation of death are mitigated by the optimistic belief that death is a necessary destruction that eliminates the decaying body (p. 40). The appearance of the Upanishads marks the conclusion of the Vedic literature, the Vedantic texts, which question the veracity of sacrifice and advocate mystical means of attaining eternal liberation. "Deeming sacrifices and gifts as the best, the imbeciles know nothing better" (Mundaka Upanishad, I.ii.10, in Olivelle, 1996, p. 270; cf. Radhakrishnan & Moore, p. 52). According to Hoick (1974a) and Zaehner (1966), the central teaching of the Upanishads is "the recognition within the human soul of an immortal something that participates in, is of the same nature as, or is actually identical with the immortal Brahman which sustains and ensouls the entire objective cosmos" (Hoick, p. 30). Focusing on Atman (or Brahman, or Purusa), the essence of the soul and cosmic processes, Vedantic thought seeks liberation (Moksa) from death (mrtyu) through asceticism and extinguishment of desire: When all the desires that dwell in the heart fall away, then the mortal becomes immortal and here attains Brahman.

When all the ties of the heart are severed here on earth, then the mortal becomes immortal. Thus much alone is the teaching. (Katha Upanishad, II.iii.1415, in Nikhilananda, 1963, p. 82; cf. Olivelle, 1996, p. 246; Radhakrishnan & Moore, 1957, p. 50)

The Upanishads are unequivocal in their conviction that desire must be eradicated—they say not that desire must be managed to avoid interpersonal strife and enjoy life's pleasures in a mature way, but that one must exterminate emotion altogether (including the desire for asceticism): "there is no freedom from joy and sorrow for one who has a body. Joy and sorrow, however, do not affect one who has no body" (Chandogya Upanishad, VIII.xii.1, in Olivelle, 1996, p. 175; cf. Radhakrishnan & Moore, p. 76). It is only with the eradication of desire that one can attain Brahman and deny corporeal death. In the Katha Upanishad, a conversation between Death and Naciketas makes it clear that ephemerality is the crisis that must be abolished and transcended.

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[Death:]

For all desires at pleasure make request. These lovely [maidens] . .. By these, from me bestowed, be waited on! [Naciketas:] Ephemeral things! . .. When one has come into the presence of undecaying immortals, What decaying mortal, here below, that understands, That meditates upon the pleasures of beauty and delight, Would delight in a life over-long? (1.25-28) [Death:] Those abiding in the midst of ignorance, Self-wise, thinking themselves learned, Running hither and thither, go around deluded, Like blind men led by one who is himself blind.... (II.5) The wise one [i.e., the Atman, the Self] is not born, nor dies. This one has not come from anywhere, has not become anyone. Unborn... Is not slain when the body is slain. (11.18, in Radhakrishnan & Moore, 1957, pp. 44-45) Evil acts generate the karmic impetus toward transmigration through the ceaseless cycle of births, deaths, and rebirths (samsara). Life is now evil because of its transience and decay. We read in the Maitri Upanishad: In this foul-smelling, unsubstantial body, a conglomerate of bone, skin, muscle, marrow, flesh, semen, blood, mucus, tears, rheum, faeces, urine, wind, bile, and phlegm, what is the good of the enjoyment of desire? In this body which is afflicted with desire, anger, covetousness, delusion, fear, despondency, envy, separation from what is desired, union with the undesired, hunger, thirst, old age, death, disease, sorrow, and the like, what is the good of the enjoyment of desire? (Hoick, 1974a, pp. 44-45; cf. Radhakrishnan & Moore, 1957, p. 93) "And we see that this whole world is decaying." Only through dispelling ignorance (avidya) and proper karma can one attain liberation and immortality. It is unclear w h a t circumstances of suffering, calamity, violence, or disease (and psychological trauma or conflict) may have transformed a religion basking in the joys of life into one of revulsion. Campbell (1962) speculates that the arrival of the Vedic warriors catalyzed a period of collapse, from which a mood of world- and life-negation overcame m u c h of the indigenous non-Aryan populace (p. 285).17 This sounds plausible, and the suffering of people decimated by violence, defeat, misery, and death might explain virulent reactions against the religion of conquest, but the disgust with the body and life appears in

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the Vedic Upanishads, and only later in the heterodox systems. The question remains h o w Vedic theology evolved. Life after death w a s no longer a transcendent and pleasurable afterlife, but release from imprisonment in the decaying body through yogic asceticism, or a series of painful rebirths caused by the accumulation of moral pollution. 18 While simultaneously denying the permanence of death, and positing the survival of the (non-corporeal) self beyond the decaying body, reincarnation also condemned and disparaged life as a negative consequence (Raju, 1974).19 One w a s ensconced within putrid flesh, and liberation w a s the goal, but rebirth w a s a dreaded consequence of evil karma. Birth itself elicits intense feelings of anguish, regret, sorrow, and despair in the embryo and fetus (Ibid., p . 17 and passim). Buddhism emerged from this disparagement of the putrescing body. Buddhism w a s a heterodox reaction against the sacrificial focus of the Vedas, and maintained significant differences from Upanishadic thought, such as the belief in Anatman, denying the immortality of the self. Though Buddhism was considered a doctrine spread by Nastika (deniers), it was born of what must be understood as a cultural disgust with the body and death, the nauseous conviction that life is inherently excruciating, repugnant, and corrupt, that one must dispense with all pleasure, that sensual joy and desire are intrinsically degenerate, and result in the painful cycle of rebirths. 20 One reads in the Dhammapada: Why is there joy while this world is always burning? Behold this painted image, a body full of wounds, put together, diseased, and full of many thoughts in which there is neither permanence nor stability. This body is worn out, a nest of diseases and very frail. This heap of corruption breaks to pieces, life indeed ends in death. What delight is there for him who sees these white bones like gourds cast away in the autumn? Of the bonds a citadel is made, plastered over with flesh and blood, and in it dwell old age and death, pride and deceit. (XI, 1-5) You are now like a withered leaf. . . . When your impurities are purged and you are free from sin you will reach heaven, the land of the elect... . When your impurities are purged and you are free from sin, you will not again enter into birth and old age. (XVIII, 1-4, in Radhakrishnan & Moore, 1957, p. 310) This brings us to a critical problem. There is clear textual influence of Upanishadic derogation of the body and sexuality on Buddhist thought, but this cannot explain w h y such ideas took hold outside India. Buddhism evolved dramatically through history, so it remains to be explained w h y messages of disgust migrated to Japan and resonated with enough people for it to remain Pure Land doctrine to this day. One

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must ask rather why someone propounds, is attracted or adheres to an idea or fantasy, and thus several questions remain: What social and psychological conditions rendered certain Japanese susceptible to a philosophy that, among other things, asserted how loathsome were desire, sexuality, the body, and women? Further, why has this attitude persisted textually and pedagogically for so long, especially when it contrasts other conspicuous Buddhist messages of compassion, detachment, and the illusoriness of reality, which could very well awaken adherents to the notion that blaming women, the body, and sexuality are themselves attachments?21 Since its introduction into Japan in the sixth century C.E., Buddhism was suffused with superstition, witchcraft, necromancy, demonology, the occult, magic ritualism, shamanism, exorcism, divination, and idolatry. It was influenced by Chinese yin-yang dualism, geomancy, astrology, and omen lore, as well as Shinto concerns with pollution, lustration, taboo, and the horror of illness and death.22 Buddhism was disseminated and understood by many as a religion of salvation— Tendai Buddhism came to worship Shakyamuni (Gautama Buddha), the Cosmic Buddha (Vairocana) of the Shingon sect, Amida Buddha, Kannon (the Bodhisattva of Mercy), and "countless other Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, as well as the many Shintoist deities with whom they were identified" (Morris, 1964, p. 112). Also popular among the aristocracy because of its penchant for gorgeous displays and ceremonies, Esoteric Shingon Buddhism also had its pageant of rituals, magical formulae, and deities, many of whom seem to have been Hindu (cf. also Faure, 2003; Kitagawa, 1987; Snelling, 1991; Suzuki, 1970). During the Heian period (794-1185) disastrous typhoons, tidal waves, floods, epidemics, disease, and famine afflicted Japan. People were agonized by superstitious fears, the belief in avenging ghosts, possession by living spirits, the wrath of innumerable gods who might castigate one for violating taboos (monoimi) like washing one's hair at an inauspicious time. Nail clipping and bathing were permissible only on specific days, and then only on auspicious occasions. Nobility and populace consulted oracles, heeded omens, feared their dreams, altered their movements to avoid calamity.23 The daily itinerary was gleaned from physiognomic and calendrical calculations. On certain taboo days people would stay indoors and abstain from as much activity as possible. Once every sixty days on a Day of the Monkey, people were advised to remain awake all night to avoid being murdered in their slumber by "noxious powers that always circulated at that time" (Morris, 1964, p. 140). Soothsayers also based their pronouncements on the motions of the planets, portents and omens (such as the auspicious discovery of a large tortoise), and

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also on dreams. Any unusual phenomenon in the skies was promptly reported to the Bureau of Divination for their expert opinion. The following entry in the chronicles is typical: "On the fourth day of the Eighth Month something (ki) appeared in the sky over the Datchi Gate. It looked like smoke, but it was not smoke; it looked like a rainbow, but it was not a rainbow.... People declared that nothing like it had ever been seen before." The Masters of Yin-Yang announced that this odd manifestation presaged a typhoon, floods, and fire, and the terrified people rushed into the streets for safety; shortly afterwards there was an earthquake (the only disaster that had not been predicted), (p. 141)

People were terrified of disasters, portents, sneezes, demons, goblins, foxes, irregular planetary movements, and misshapen clouds. Wandering mendicant ascetic shaman/sorcerers cured agues, chanted prayers for rain, and dispensed vatic counsel. Doctors would apply moxabustion—a powdered leaf cone excruciatingly burnt down to the skin over the affected organ. Exorcists of the Buddhist clergy would fall into trances, have seizures, speak in tongues, groan and wail, recite mystic incantations and sacred syllables, and cast demons into shamanic mediums (pp. 147-152). If these fears seem irrational, real plagues, fires, and ceaseless earthquakes razed cities, leaving dust, wreckage, and corpses in the streets. Under these conditions life was indeed suffering, transient, ephemeral, often rife with decay and gruesome death (Kitagawa, 1987; Morris, 1964, p. 30ff). The evangelical theology of Tendai Buddhism propounded a doctrine of universal salvation that accorded with the ubiquitous terror of death, disaster, and decay, the unavoidable sense that one was immersed in a frail body that could so easily be mangled or eaten by disease. The Essentials of Salvation (tenth century) depicted the "horrors of hell and of the paradisian bliss that awaited any believer who was prepared to put his faith in Amida Buddha" (Morris, 1964, p. 115). Though this text undoubtedly scared children and adults exposed to it, hell and paradise must also be seen as metaphors and wishes, terrible fear and the fantasy of salvation from eternal suffering, expressive of the author and the cultural psyche that resonated with such imagery. The anxious need for divine rescue, oracular guidance, ritual purification, avoidance of defilement, inauspicious, and calamitous actions, the fear of enraging some unseen spirit, and rumination on the transience of life, were so prevalent and intense that one might interpret these as cultural symptoms of prolonged mourning, obsessive compulsiveness, and the near-paranoia of ceaseless post-traumatic stress. Catastrophe, anguish, death, and decay were so pervasive that realistic anxiety engendered delusional responses—both hallucinatory fantasies of evil threats and equally hallucinatory fantasies of averting evil

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and death. As Faure (1996) writes, "Buddhism can also be interpreted as a response to fear: fear of ghosts, of death, of mysterious kami. It provides a set of protective exorcisms, an apotropaic teaching" (pp. 20-21). Heian Japan is famous for its literary works and aesthetic sensibilities. One must not assume, however, that the love of art and beauty must be equated with love of the body (the Nazis were infamous for both despising the body and collecting works of art. Cf. Theweleit, 1977, 1978). The same Murasaki Shikibu who could invoke the most poignant emotions and evoke immense beauty also found the naked body "unforgettably horrible" (Morris, 1964, p. 214). Their bodies hidden by numerous layers of kimono, women were expected to whiten their faces, blacken their teeth, remove their eyebrows, and paint simulated brows high on their foreheads. The young heroine of The Lady Who Loved Insects disgusts her attendants by refusing to pluck her brows or blacken her teeth. A Captain of the Guards is intimidated by her eyebrows, and by the horrible gleam of her unblackened teeth when she smiles (p. 216).24 The Lady herself believed that "Ghosts and women . . . had best remain invisible" (p. 222). Aesthetics are more than a refined pleasure in beauty, but in many cases can also be understood psychologically as a cleansing beautifying alternative to ugliness, decay, and revulsion, hiding and masking a body that decays, bleeds, and excretes foul offal, with strata of beautiful robes, lurid paints, and seductive fragrances. Even among the aristocracy, death by plague, infant mortality, and maternal death in childbirth were frequent occurrences (Faure, 2003, p. 80; Morris, 1964, 231-248 passim). As Morris notes, "A preoccupation with evanescence and death runs through The Tale of Genji. One after another, the characters sicken and die, leaving the survivors with an ever deeper sense of the transience of worldly things" (p. 124). I suspect that a portion of the famous aloofness, resignation, and melancholia of Heian poets reflects the traumatic impact of pervasive death by infant mortality, disease, and catastrophe on the way they were parented and later related to their own children. Dissociation and melancholy reflect trauma and yearning. A dissociated mother will have trouble relating to her children, providing attention, love, and mirroring. Consequently the child may grow up somewhat withdrawn, with unresolved need for intimacy, and depressive ruminations, exacerbated traumatically by the continuing catastrophe and mortality of those times. She may both desire and dread intimacy, thus hidden behind numerous kimono and cosmetics, as well as darkness and screens (of course, this again reflects male fantasies and anxieties as well). Depressive behavior and resignation reflect both her yearning and reproach against isolation and having felt neglected by a withdrawn parent. These feelings are expressed and displaced in a melan-

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cholic worldview, and in part create the Buddhist sentiment of resignation and need for salvation, divine intimacy, and paradise as cessation of pain and symbiotic union with mother (Buddhas may be male, but are rarely masculine and are often androgynous—not just sexually ambiguous but possessing features of both sexes). In fact Heian (and later) women of the wealthier classes seem to evidence dissociative symptoms, appearing emotionally withdrawn, if not schizoid. And they neglected their children, handing them off to nursemaids, rarely breastfeeding, and abandoning them until they were no longer undulating, ululating, wailing, messy things. Hence the world view and theology are recycled as trauma affects parenting, which affects psychological development, which generates (and sustains) world views, and so on, even though other social and natural factors also lead to changes. If the nobility famously limned the sadness of transitory beauty, lamented evanescence, and resigned themselves to retreat from the world, so a less affluent population exposed to squalor, disease, and famine might be even more terrified, disgusted, and receptive to a doctrine that promised salvation, echoing their own disgust with the body that decayed, with death itself. Among this population, there were those whose experiences of despair, disgust with the body, revulsion of sexuality, rage toward women, and terror of gelatinous decay, rendered them most susceptible to the influence of those who preached similar ideas in the guise of divine wisdom. Individual conflicts and fantasies could be granted religious sanction.25 Buddhism continued to evolve into a salvation religion following the end of the Heian period, as military strife ravaged the land and amplified the presence of death and violence. Aristocracy and populace alike pleaded for salvation, and monks such as Honen (1133-1212) propounded the doctrine that Paradise could be attained by recitation of the Nebutsu. Shinran (1173-1262) implored people to place their faith in Amida. Nichiren (1222-1282) declared salvation could be found in the Lotus Sutra, and that one could achieve enlightenment in this life and rebirth in Paradise by repeating the formula "nam my oho renge kyo"—"homage to the Lotus Sutra." It cannot be a coincidence that Honen, Shinran, and many other monks propounding such salvation doctrines were left by fathers (or mothers) who died young—fantasies of salvation reflect the trauma and misery of immersion in death. If such ideas and fantasies have persisted for over a millennium (even being exacerbated by the ubiquitous martial conflict following the Heian period), we must consider a psychological undercurrent of misogyny, the fear of death, and disgust for the body that afflicts enough of the population for these messages to survive to varying degrees, even as culture and life conditions undergo drastic transition, as

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plagues and fires seldom afflict the populace today. There are nevertheless earthquakes, and the impact of World War II, with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, inflicted deep apocalyptic trauma whose cadences have not disappeared (Lifton, 1967,1979/1996).26 This discussion has dwelt upon these themes to substantiate the argument that misogynistic and body-despising Buddhist ideas, feelings, and texts can survive even today because they resonate so well psychologically with enough of the population. One might attribute the survival of such misogyny and sexual loathing to the religious instruction itself, and yet there is a diverse spectrum of religious and nonreligious ideation in Japan. One must rather emphasize again that among the vast diversity of Buddhist teachings, why people adhere to a particular doctrine (especially when most Japanese are only formally Buddhist), says more about those drawn to its message of revulsion than the social impact of instruction. This discussion has not yet mentioned those who disseminate such theological ideas: the monks themselves. Without dwelling at length upon the complexities of the Buddhist clergy or the strata of monastic personalities, it might be useful to mention the dynamics of the person who is not only attracted to the message of a doctrine, but effectively devotes his life to it and even teaches it zealously. One cannot again consider monks one form of personality, and they do vary from fanatics to dissociative personalities to integrated sages. However, one must consider the psychodynamics of the monk who becomes the official representative of a misogynistic and sex-despising doctrine, especially if such monks are sequestered from society and women (cf. Eilberg-Schwartz & Doniger, 1995; Faure, 1998, 2003; Obeyesekere, 1981). One cannot ignore the retreat from women for a cloister of men, and certainly homosexual and pedophilic fantasy and practice is a common thread in the history of Buddhism in Japan. Thus for certain monks (not all), one must consider the fear of female sexuality, misogynistic loathing, and homoeroticism as a complex that attracts some individuals to specific Buddhist doctrines, enables those with such character dynamics to thrive in a sanctioned niche, and allows them to propound their fantasies as sacred doctrine. CONCLUSIONS Buddhism flees life, which is a burning house of suffering and futile passions. This psychology is comprised of not only wisdom on impermanence, vanity of desire, and the destructiveness of attachment, but of the fear of death and a loathing for life, and the demand that reality should conform to the complexes of those wishing life and death be ultimately unreal. Life is suffering, so it must therefore be an illusion

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because it is not satisfactory. Some Buddhists may see self and world as illusions because everything is in flux, impermanent, insubstantial, and ego as a self-deceptive fantasy. The world is a projection, delusory categories, causes, and beliefs thrust upon the world in ignorance and desire, that can be dismantled by dreams and enlightenment (cf. Doniger OTlaherty, 1984; Faure, 1996, p. 118). But other Buddhists refuse reality, condemn life, and claim the unseen is real. The emphatic denial of life and abandonment of the world are not the only viable reactions to death and suffering. A psychological interpretation may see despair, anger, and resentment in world disparagement and abandonment, a rebellion against reality comparable to a child holding his breath until he gets his way By wearing the mask of cosmic significance, one's actions convince the creator of the illusion that the dream is real and proven. The suffering of the meaninglessness of life and the fear of death cause despair and act as an impetus to create wish-fulfilling illusions. This is evidenced worldwide (even in Buddhism) by the denial of reality manifested in elaborate mortuary cults, Utopian afterlives, resurrections, redemptions, saviors, and the relentless attempt to deny reality what substance it has. Myths and symbols can reconcile the individual with "the grave and constant in human sufferings," but they can also become painkilling, narcotic obstructions to both the perception of reality and cognitive/emotional development. What is therefore conceived as a mythic solution may be in reality a dogmatic defense of pathological illusions. Enlightenment about the nature of reality, decay, and death causes nausea, panic, terror, and despair, and it is the need for soothing illusion which often motivates the creation and adoption of religion and myth. In other words, enlightenment of reality causes the need to achieve (or invent) enlightenment of its falsehood. Enlightenment of death and suffering as the lot of human life is met with terror and disbelief. One needs to find a solution to that problem in metaphysical laws and a truth beyond the visible which makes reality unreal. Enlightenment is traumatic, hence one needs to be enlightened how to escape. This is the sickness resulting from an awareness masked by flight from reality in beliefs of a beyond, of transcendence, or mortuary cults, in the desperate hope that reality will not impose itself on the conscious mind. And so Buddha, too, became enlightened concerning life's futility and evanescence; life is suffering and sorrow, and thus the world is to be abandoned. This is not an indictment of Buddhism. As specified earlier, there are innumerable Buddhisms. One may seek an "authentic" or "originary" message from Buddhism (or any religion), but this has little bearing on how individuals resonate with that message. As I elsewhere

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argued in regard to militant Islam: Religion (any ideology) reflects the fantasies of its adherents (Piven, 2002). Believers are not violent because their religion commands them to be such. There are messages of love and death in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism. The question is why one message is isolated, or gleaned from a religion to the exclusion of other messages, why one interprets the tidings a certain way and ignores other annunciations of peace (or even violence). If one argues that Buddhism teaches compassion and the illusoriness of existence, Zen Buddhists still supported violence during World War II (Jalon, 2003; Victoria, 1997), and devotees of many schools believe in the literal existence of paradise, karma, transmigration, and Nirvana. The wisdom or enlightenment of religious texts has little bearing on how individuals adjust or distort those messages to accord with their wishes, needs, psychological conflicts, and defenses, fantasies that require evasion of reality, replacement of the real with illusions or delusions. A socially legitimate or noble act may be a conduit for private fantasies to be enacted under the guise of religiosity, piety, or devotion. If there are those who seek enlightenment, there are also those with masochistic compulsions, antisocial tendencies, terror of intimacy or sexuality, a deep need for surrender and oblivion, violent rage, or who even experience auditory or visual hallucinations, who may find the pious path ideal. I have known Christian monks who utilized their theology as a pious means of cloaking their guilt, homosexuality, rage, and masochistic impulses even from themselves as they unconsciously acted these impulses out with unremitting compulsion. Theology and sacred praxis were socially ennobled means of enacting private pathologies without ever having to acknowledge their feelings or the significance of their impulses to themselves. Similarly, one may be awed by religious devotion, monasticism, the sight of mendicant monks chanting, as though this inherently connoted a deeper relation to something transcendent. Visitors climbing the steep road to Kiyomizudera in Kyoto may imagine the deeply spiritual nature of the monk by the wayside, his face covered by a sugegasa hat, a bowl for alms at his feet. But we must be wary of our fantasy here. Is this monk enlightened or dissociated in a state of trance? Is he engaged in a process of inward discovery and detachment, or ascetic oblivion, or ardent devotion in the hopes of entering a pure land of bliss? Religion is not a spiritual system, if by the term spiritual one means an inward meditative relation to humanity, nature, divinity, cosmos, and the like. Spiritual also has other meanings, such as that which is explicitly opposed to the physical, escapes the body, sexuality, and mortality, consequently condemning or despising sexuality, the body, and nature, and fleeing into fantasies of disembodied purifi-

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cation. Spiritual often connotes a need to punish the despised body. We ought to be wary of the term "spiritual," as it is sometimes a euphemism extolling what may often be a pathological defense against sexuality, bodily weakness and need, the fear of decay, and being terrified and overwhelmed by physical desires (cf. Barrett, 1958/1990; Corrigan & Gordon, 1995; Phillips, 1996; Winnicott, 1949). Religion is a fantasy system designed for the experience of illusory merger with omnipotent forces that protect cultures and individuals from death, predation, the terror of the unknown, catastrophe, and the viciousness of nature. It allows people to feel secure, ensconced within a predictable system of meanings and realities that provide rules to follow, prohibitions enabling them to avoid disastrous evil or calamity, and rituals which magically alter the world to displace anxiety and hostility, unite the community, and control nature (cf. Becker, 1973; Freud, 1927,1930; Gay, 1979; La Barre, 1970,1991; Roheim, 1932). A central component of many religions, as intimated, is evading death through both palliative illusions and even violent acts of murder and sacrifice. Defining religion this way inherently omits meditations or wisdom (such as certain modes of Zen) opposed to worship or prayer, supplication of entities in the universe to whom people can beg, sacrifice, or declare obedience—anything which literalizes metaphors by projecting them onto the universe as distinct sentient beings. It also excludes experiences which again are not literal, for instance a Christian theology which understands the Eucharist and transubstantiation not as a magical act consuming a real son of God, but a metaphorical and psychological transformation of the self through the ritual (Brown, 1966, 1991). It must exclude mythologies which expose and abjure literalism, or narratives which fictionalize but do not provide beings or entities to worship or believe in (such as the story of Shakyamuni Gautama's enlightenment). By contrast, some versions of Buddhism expose our attachments to fictions, while Buddhism elsewhere condemns women for introducing death and desire into the world, and other Buddhisms command devotees to call Amida's name to get into Paradise. The Buddhisms which expose attachment to illusions are not religion (are negative theologies, so to speak), while the latter are religions in the most conventional and psychologically regressive sense— meaning they rely on literal belief which narrows and distorts reality in dependence upon that system at the expense of both reality and the adherents' own individuation (cf. Gay, 1979; Ostow, 1958). I am making these distinctions because not all of what we call religion must be implicated, but one central characteristic of religion which I am separating from other philosophies or spiritualities (in the positive sense), is its quality of being a system of literalized beliefs de-

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signed to sanctify fantasies of merger with omnipotence, escape from death, and often, commit immensely violent acts. As Jung said, religion can be a defense against the experience of God—by the word "God" Jung means not a blissful feeling of merger or power with a literal deity (conventionally taken as religious experience), but as an inward connection to one's psyche (Campbell, 1988, p. 261). I have argued that many Buddhist texts conspicuously locate evil in death and the decaying body, consequently identifying women, birth, the fluidic secretions of the feminine as fonts of wickedness to be abjured. Such messages do not encourage people to consider the destructiveness or futility of desire, do not encourage reflection on the nature of desire and its emotional or social consequences. There is nothing meditative here, but rather a malicious disparagement that seems to reflect all too human fears of death and decay, the need to escape desire and death by escaping the body and devaluing the erotic and anything that decays. If this too closely resembles any number of non-Eastern theologies, hence risking the reduction of all religion to identical patterns, this chapter argues that human beings may indeed be terrified of death and decay in any culture, and many transcendent theologies are fantasies, escapes that distort a wiser message. As opposite as some might claim these to be, Buddhism and Christianity may both lapse into immortality fantasies and hostile disparagement of the body, decay, and women. For whatever wisdom they have each discovered, death, putrescence, and nonbeing are the lot of all living things, and most of us can only transcend our terror and misery through fantasies, denial, distortions of reality, escaping our own emotions. Indeed this is a central purpose of religion, East, West, or elsewhere. A Buddhist interpretation of Buddhism itself is that many devotees find themselves attached to the very fantasies and projections that Buddhism seeks to expose. Zen master Dogen would instruct us not to evade or condemn the body, that enlightenment requires corporeality. In the Shobogenzo Zuimonki, he proclaims that "the Way is doubtlessly attained through the body" (Solomon & Higgins, 1995, p. 12; cf. also Tsunoda et al., 1958, p. 249).27 This abstruse idea seems to mean that intellectualization can be a defense, indeed that interpretation itself is a defensive fantasy that imagines false causal connections and preoccupies the mind with ceaseless imposition of illusions on the world. The mind rushing to impose interpretation out of fear is thus also out of joint, whereas meditation allows a process of physiological withdrawal from intellectualized defensiveness, and, in principle, calms one enough to withdraw the compulsive urge to interpret and the rigid beliefs one holds (including Buddhist beliefs).28 In the essay Shoji, Dogen writes that loathing death is a problem:

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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. (Tanahashi, 1985, p. 74) As LaFleur explains: For Dogen it seems that the root of illusion and also of pain lies in the psychomental attempt to be other than where one is at any time. To imagine that life/ death is an evil from which one wants release and entry into a Nirvanic state is precisely that which transforms life /death into something experienced as loathsome; this occurs when man becomes attached to a "Nirvana" which is imagined to be other than the time and the place of his present existence. Paradoxically, one has a real release from Samsara, existence apprehended as evil, precisely when one realizes that existence in the Samsaric realm is the only existence man has and is for that reason good. And death for that same reason is good; it is something to which one ought to have no attachment either positively or negatively, (p. 237) As Dogen asserts, "Do not avoid them or desire them. . . . Only w h e n you d o n ' t dislike birth a n d death or long for them, do you enter Buddha's m i n d " (Tanahashi, p. 75). For Dogen, abandonment of life impairs life. Dogen's advice is applicable to Buddhists of m a n y schools w h o disparage life and attach themselves to theological fantasies. Even if we may be enlightened that death is an ordinary process, a fact of nature and dissolution into the cycle of life, even if nonbeing and recognition of non-self can be a liberation from the egotistic b u r d e n of trying desperately to be something in the face of terror and death, despite ourselves w e m a y p l u n g e terrified into fantasies of death denial a n d immortality, any number of ideologies, and compulsive, frenetic, violent, or narcissistic activities that become sacred or magical means of evading awareness of our own inevitable death and insignificance. If this interpretation of certain aspects of Buddhism is upsetting, consider the idea of Zenbyo—"Zen sickness," the arrogant or narcissistic fantasy of feeling one is enlightened and knows the truth of Buddhism. H o w attached are w e to our fantasy of Buddhism as wisdom, salvation, enlightenment? Our fears of death and insignificance create this fantasy, are at the heart of so m a n y metaphysics of presence, the privileging of any discourse or interpretation, possibly even this one. NOTES 1. See Brown (1959) for the most perspicacious, extensive, and graphic psychoanalysis of both Luther and anality in any literature.

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2. See also Erikson (1958) for a detailed biography and skilled psychological examination. 3. Haneda writes: "Amida is 'a personal symbol.'" In other words, Amida is "a fictional character" like Hamlet or Faust. Let me explain this definition by first discussing what Amida is not. Since "Amida" is a fictional character, he is (1) not a god (or a divine being) and (2) not a historical person. First, Amida is not a god. Just as Hamlet symbolizes certain spiritual qualities of human beings and does not have any superhuman (or divine) meaning, "Amida" symbolizes certain spiritual qualities of human beings and does not have any superhuman (or divine) meaning. Second, Amida is not a historical person. Just as Hamlet is a fictional character created by Shakespeare and is not a historical person, Amida is a fictional character created by ancient Indians and is not a historical person. Hamlet is supposed to be a prince of Denmark but we cannot find his name in the actual chronicle of Denmark. Similarly, there is no actual history of "Amida"; being a symbolic (fictional) figure, "Amida never lived in a specific time and place" (available at: http://www.livingdharma.org/ Living.Dharma. Articles/Whatls Amida-Haneda.html). 4. See Leifer (1997) for a careful explication of the comparative modes of discovering self-deception in Tibetan Buddhism and Psychoanalysis. 5. Majjhima Nikaya, XXVI [Ariya-pariyesana-sutta]. 6. Tannisho. 7. Mahavagga, I: 6,17-30. 8. Majjhima Nikaya, I: 426ff. [LXII Cula-malunkya-sutta]. 9. Majjhima Nikaya, XXVI [Ariya-pariyesana-sutta]. 10. Sukhavativyuha, stanzas 15-18. It should be noted that the term "noncessation" in this context refers to permanence and eternity in the Pure Land paradise, as opposed to the cessation of decay and desire. 11. Ashvagosha, Buddhacarita, XXVI: 83-86,88-106. 12. See, for example, "How a Monk of the Dojoji in the Province of Kii Copied the Lotus Sutra and Brought Salvation to Serpents" in Ury (1985), pp. 92-96. 13. According to Campbell (1962), Buddhism may also be viewed as the need to escape not only the world of suffering, but the lunar, Vedic mythology of darkness and descent; from the ritual slaying of the lunar bull to the turning wheel of the sun which eliminates all other fields of vision by its bright dispelling of illusions. It may be noted that the Vedic symbolism of the "antisocial dragon" Vritra coincides with the worldwide connection in mythology of snakes, who shed their skin and are reborn, to the processes in nature of birth and rebirth, deified in woman, which the Vedics would consider as antisocial and evil in their violent attempt to subdue nature and matrifocal symbology. In the Buddhist symbology, the adversary is also the snake, the dragon and nature: life itself, which is an earthly illusion destroyed by enlightenment. The Buddha as savior functioned in the minds of the populace as an apotropaic sun which dispelled the shadows of chthonia, and their deaths. 14. Faure (2003) discusses this throughout his text, without (I would guess) formal psychoanalytic knowledge of the process of splitting. Nevertheless, his observations are apposite: woman is not bifurcated just because of the influence of archaic religious or mythic images, but because there is a psychological need to derogate the feminine, disparage her sexuality, and purify her from her threatening and evil qualities before she is at all acceptable.

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15. Though the Jain teacher Mahavira (death c. 485 B.C.E.) is a contemporary of the Buddha, Campbell (1962) believes he taught a far older doctrine (p. 218). 16. Strangely, Campbell (1962) later claims that "the mood of absolute world loathing of The Great Reversal, appears to have been known to the teaching kings of the Upanishads" (p. 284). 17. This of course contradicts his earlier statements regarding the Upanishadic affirmation of life and the attribution of world loathing to the Jains. 18. The circumstances for the disgust with the body and the terror of death are clearer in Japanese history, as will be discussed. 19. See Raju (1974) for a discussion of the distinctions in Vedanta and Hinduism between the jiva (soul) that transmigrates, while the Atman is the larger spiritual support that is not subject to transmigration. While the jiva is reincarnated, Atman is the transcendent self beyond transmigration (p. 15). For the evolution of Atman from breath to cosmic principle, see Hoick (1974a). 20. This does not mean it represented Indian culture in its entirety or diversity. One must not forget the incredible complexity of Indian culture, and its playful, erotic side. 21. It is all the more remarkable that Jodoshinshu (Pure Land) Buddhism should resonate so strongly with the Indian texts quoted earlier. They were only translated into Japanese in the twentieth century, which means that oral transmission and indigenous Japanese works carried enough of the same message for Pure Land monks to find an accord with the newly translated texts after some nine hundred years of Pure Land Buddhism in Japan. 22. Morris (1964) notes that the native Japanese religion was "so vague and amorphous" that it only acquired the name Shinto (the way of the gods) after the arrival of Buddhism (p. 107). Morris believes that the Shinto horror of death could not have influenced Buddhism because the latter attitude toward mortality is one of resignation (p. 123). I would argue on the contrary that the indigenous horror of death evolved into resignation, which does not preclude horror even if it does not express it outwardly. The appearance of resignation represents defeat in the wake of horror and the inevitability of death, an inability to mourn the fact of death that manifests itself in depression, longing, protracted sadness and lamentation, even dissociation (detachment and aloofness). The impression of passivity and resignation is also accompanied by wishes for salvation, and actively terrified (almost paranoid) avoidance of danger, calamity, and defilement, alongside compulsive purification, as will be explained below. One must also consider the psychological means of avoiding conscious horror, such as faith in salvation, aestheticization and evasion of exposure to physical reminders of death and decay (such as elaborate cosmetics and clothing), as well as repression and dissociation of horror. 23. According to Morris (1964), the commoners only began observing directional taboos in the fifteenth century (pp. 138-139). 24. One must wonder when a man requires the body of a woman to be scented, hidden, and painted, why he requires the gleam of her teeth to be hidden in a darkened mouth painted by red lips. It is almost as if he were rendering the vagina dentata invisible and harmless as he reddens and accentuates the labia. Aesthetics and eroticism here undo the fear of castration and death. 25. Though the working classes seemed less inclined to avoid their children, they toiled and were beset by the same plagues and geological disasters.

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They were hardly aristocratic melancholies, but they too suffered the trauma of disaster and death, thus ripening them for fantasies of salvation. 26. We must also consider childhood separation-individuation struggles, the impact of repeated shame, relentless hygienic instruction and a language of bodily and cultural purity, emotional neglect, cultural patterns of emotionally castrating mothering and authoritarian or affect-distant fathering, as well as the social suppression of individuality and emotional expression, on the psyches of developing children. These also mold a personality suffering immense rage, resentment toward women and mothers, derogation of the feminine, disgust for impure aspects of the body. Certainly the extreme of such loathing for the feminine could be observed in the rape of Nanking, where the vicious brutalization and derogation of women far exceeded any ostensible military purpose (Chang, 1997). Forcing fathers to rape daughters, sticking spears in vaginas, etc., are not merely the consequences of group frenzy, but must be considered the flagrant acting out of ordinarily suppressed fantasies and urges that implicate a misogynistic cultural undercurrent, even if the population in general was not ordinarily anywhere near as vicious. Though patterns of childrearing, development, and fantasy are changing, the dynamics of severe shame, neglect, conflict, and rage outlined previously are nevertheless trenchant and cannot be considered mere stereotypes. They are reflected today in a preponderance of sexless marriages, alongside affairs where married men court teenage (junior high school) girls as mistresses, a very common practice which tends to indicate splitting of the feminine into images of mother and virgin/prostitute (here the mistress or prostitute is a purified, innocent, submissive image, but she is therefore dominated, used, and in no way considered an equal companion, but a pretty, dumb sex object). There is also an immense profusion of animated pornography where tentacled monsters rape virginal teenage girls (who nevertheless have huge breasts) in every orifice, defeating them by forcing orgasms upon the helplessly sodomized victims. This is not an anomalous theme secreted away somewhere, but the explicit fantasy dominating a very common and popular pornography industry. The image we have of a modernizing society where sex roles are changing only obscures the fact that such conflicted and violent sexualities persist, and that while society is in fact evolving, misogynistic loathing and fantasy are in no danger of disappearing. Japan is still a country where women are considered inferior, where they are considered vulgar if they are outspoken in their convictions, or shame their husbands by being more intelligent or skilled. They are still required to be obedient and faithful even while their lovers cheat, are still considered pretty objects, are despised when independent, are blamed for marital discord, are expected to suffer quietly when men molest them on trains (a common occurrence), and cannot be tolerated as intellectual or sexual equals. In a rapidly evolving society, primitive splitting that requires women to be cute dolls and punishes them for threatening men with any intellectual and sexual aggressivity is still the norm. Despite mythic stereotypes that laud Japanese eroticism and claim that they suffer no sexual guilt, compared to our lingering Judeo-Christian sinfulness, shame is still the dominant experience and ethic. Consequently rage and contempt accompany sexuality as well, forcing women to be pristine girls. Fantasies of sexual violation and sullying in-

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fuse the erotic need for virginal purity. There is still a pronounced anal sadism concerned with physical and symbolic hygiene, the experience of deep shame and disgust for bodily processes, emissions, and excrescences. It is the contempt and disgust that require beauty to be virginal, pristine, and nonthreatening. 27. This is also stressed by "Kukai, who asserted the identity of mind and body and the possibility of achieving liberation 'in the body'" (Tsunoda, De Bary, & Keene, 1958, p. 248 and Chapter VII). 28. Such defensive intellectualization and interpretation on the basis of the fear of unknowing are discussed by Phillips (1996) and Ogden (1989). Here Dogen actually resembles Nietzsche (1878/1989,1885/1989,1889/1988, etc.), who also asserted throughout his writings that interpretation is a fantasy and compulsive urge deriving from the need to eradicate fear. REFERENCES Barrett, W. (1958/1990). Irrational man: A study in existentialist philosophy. New York: Anchor. Becker, E. (1973). The denial of death. New York: The Free Press. Bodhi, B. (Trans.). (2000). The connected discourses of the Buddha: A translation of the Samyutta Nikaya. Somersville, MA: Wisdom Publications. Brewster, E. H. (1926). The life ofGotama Buddha. London: K. Paul, Trench Trubner &Co. Brown, N. O. (1959). Life against death. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan. Brown, N. O. (1966). Love's body. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Brown, N. O. (1991). Apocalypse and/or metamorphosis. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Cabezon, J. I. (1992). Buddhism, sexuality, and gender. Albany: State University of New York Press. Campbell, J. (1962). Oriental mythology. New York: Penguin. Campbell, J. (1988). The power of myth. New York: Anchor. Chalmers, R. (1926). Further dialogues of the Buddha, Volume I. London: Oxford. Chang, I. (1997). The rage of Nan King: The forgotten Holocaust of World War II. New York: Penguin. Conze, E., et al. (1954). Buddhist texts through the ages. Oxford: Bruno Cassirer. Conze, E. (Ed.). (1959). Buddhist scriptures. NY: Penguin. Corrigan, E. G., & Gordon, P. (1995). The mind object: Precocity and pathology of self-sufficiency. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson. de Beauvoir, S. (1949/1989). The second sex. (H. M. Parshley, Trans.). NY: Vintage. Dogen (1257/1985). Shoji (birth and death). In K. Tanahashi (Ed.), Moon in a dewdrop: Writings of Zen master Dogen (pp. 74-75). NY: North Point Press, 1995. Doniger O'Flaherty, W. (1984). Dreams, illusions, and other realities. University of Chicago Press. Eilberg-Schwartz, H , & Doniger, W. (1995). Off with her head! The denial of women s identity in myth, religion, and culture. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Eliade, M. (1967). Essential sacred texts from around the world. San Francisco, CA: Harper.

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Eliade, M. (1978). A history of religious ideas, volume 1: From the stone age to the Eleusinian mysteries (W. R. Trask, Trans.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Eliade, M. (1982). A history of religious ideas, volume II: From Gautama Buddha to the triumph of Christianity (W. R. Trask, Trans.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Erikson, E. H. (1958). Young man Luther. New York: Norton. Faure, B. (1996). Visions of power: Imagining medieval Japanese Buddhism (P. Brooks, Trans.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Faure, B. (1998). The red thread: Buddhist approaches to sexuality. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Faure, B. (2003). The power of denial: Buddhism, purity, and gender. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Freud, S. (1886-1939). The standard edition of the complete works ofSigmund Freud. London: Hogarth, 1953. Freud, S. (1927). The future of an illusion. SE 21 (pp. 5-56). Freud, S. (1930). Civilization and its discontents. SE 21 (pp. 59-145). Gay, V. (1979). Against wholeness: The ego's complicity in religion. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 47:107-120. Haneda, N. (1996-2003). What is Amida? Available at: ; June 2003. Hoick, F. H. (1974a). The Vedic period. In F. H. Hoick (Ed.), Death and Eastern thought (pp. 24-52). Nashville, TN: Abington. Hoick, F. H. (1974b). Sutras and the Mahabharata epic. In F. H. Hoick (Ed.), Death and Eastern thought (pp. 53-77). Nashville, TN: Abington. Jalon, A. M. (2003, January). Meditating on war and guilt, Zen says it's sorry [Electronic version]. New York Times. Available at: . Kitagawa, J. M. (1987). On understanding Japanese religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. La Barre, W. (1970). The ghost dance: The origins of religion. New York: Doubleday. La Barre, W. (1991). Shadow of childhood: Neoteny and the biology of religion. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. LaFleur, W. R. (1974). Japan. In F. H. Hoick (Ed.), Death and Eastern thought (pp. 226-256). Nashville, TN: Abington. Leifer, R. (1997). The happiness project: Transforming the three poisons that cause the suffering we inflict on ourselves and others. Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion Publications. Lifton, R. J. (1967). Death in life: Survivors of Hiroshima. New York: Basic Books. Lifton, R. J. (1979/1996). The broken connection. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Press. McCullough, H. C. (Trans.). (1988). The tale of the Heike. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Morris, I. (1964). The world of the shining prince. New York: Penguin, 1985. Nietzsche, F. (1878/1989). Human, all too human (R. J. Hollingdale, Trans.). New York: Cambridge. Nietzsche, F (1885/1989). Beyond good and evil (W. Kaufmann, Trans.). New York: Vintage.

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Nietzsche, F. (1889/1988). Der Antichrist. Berlin: Walter deGruyter. Nikhilananda, S. (Ed. and Trans.). (1963). The Upanishads. London: George Allen & Unwin. Obeyesekere, G. (1981). Medusas hair. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ogden, T. (1989). The primitive edge of experience. Northvale, NJ. Jason Aronson. Olivelle, P. (1996). The Upanisads. NY: Oxford, 1998. Ostow, M. (1958). The nature of religious controls. American Psychologist 13: 571-574:. Paul, D. (1985). Women in Buddhism. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Phillips, A. (1996). Terrors and experts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Piven, J. S. (2002). On the psychosis (religion) of terrorists. In C. Stout (Ed.), The psychology of terrorism, volume 3 (pp. 119-148). Greenwich, CT: Praeger. Piven, J. S. (in press). Death, repression, narcissism, misogyny. Psychoanalytic Review 90 (2). Radhakrishnan, S., & Moore, C. A. (Eds.). (1957). A sourcebook of Indian philosophy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989. Raju, P. T (1974). Foreword. In F. H. Hoick (Ed.), Death and Eastern thought (pp. 7-23). Nashville, TN: Abington. Roheim, G. (1932). Animism and religion. Psychoanalytic Quarterly 6: 59-112. Shinn, L. D. (1974). Death and the Puranas. In F. H. Hoick (Ed.), Death and Eastern thought (pp. 78-96). Nashville, TN: Abington. Snelling, J. (1991). The Buddhist handbook. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions International. Solomon, R. C , & Higgins, K. (Eds.). (1995). World philosophy: A text with readings. New York: McGraw-Hill. Sponberg, A. (1992). Attitudes toward women and the feminine in early Buddhism. In J. Cabezon (Ed.), Buddhism, sexuality, and gender (pp. 3-36). Albany: State University of New York Press. Suzuki, D. (1970). Zen & Japanese Buddhism. Tokyo: Japan Travel Bureau. Tanahashi, K. (Ed.). (1985). Moon in a dewdrop: Writings of Zen master Dogen. NY: NorthPoint Press, 1995. The teaching of Buddha. (1966/1986). Tokyo: Kosaido. Theweleit, K. (1977-1978). Male fantasies, volumes land II (S. Conway, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Thomas, E.J. (1913). Buddhist scriptures. London: John Murray. Thomas, E.J. (1935). Early Buddhist scriptures. London: Kegan Paul. Tsunoda, R., De Bary, W.M.T., & Keene, D. (1958). Sources of the Japanese tradition, volume 1. New York: Columbia University Press. Ury, M. (1985). Tales of times now past. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Victoria, B. A. (1997). Zen at war. New York & Tokyo: Weatherhill. Winnicott, D. W. (1949). Mind and its relation to the psyche-soma. In Through paediatrics to psycho-analysis (pp. 243-254). New York: Basic Books, 1958/ 1975. Zaehner, R. C. (1966). Hinduism. New York: Oxford.

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CHAPTER 3

Uncanny Dolls: Images of Death in Rilke and Freud Eva-Maria Simms

We pulled our dolls along behind the bars of our crib, dragged them into the heavy folds of illness. They appeared in dreams and were tied up in the disasters of feverish nights. They did not make any effort of their own; they were lying at the edge of childhood sleep, maybe filled with rudimentary thoughts of falling off, and they let themselves be dreamed. Just as they were accustomed to be lived tirelessly through someone else's power during the day. —Rainer Maria Rilke, " Dolls "l "PULLING HER FROM A PILE OF MORE SYMPATHETIC THINGS"

The doll, although featuring prominently in many female children's lives, has found little attention from the academic community. In the history of psychoanalysis, as in the history of traditional psychology, the doll has not been found worthy of examination. Freud (1919) dismissed the doll in his discussion of the uncanny because she did not symbolize oedipal issues very well. Psychoanalysts since then who have worked with children discuss dolls in the context of play therapy, where they, like other toys, allow the child to project unconscious processes and facilitate the resolution of conflicts which the child is unable to articulate (cf. Bettelheim, 1975; Erikson, 1950; Klein, 1961). Once in a while, we find a case history where a female child uses a doll in an

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aggressive manner, which is interpreted as a substitute for the absent penis (Erikson, 1950, pp. 226-227), or where a little boy is brought to the therapist because he plays with dolls, which is interpreted as his pathological identification with the mother (Dahl, 1988, pp. 351-365). Yet here, too, the phenomenon of the doll is not explored but taken for granted as a symbol within the oedipal struggle of the preschooler. D. W. Winnicott (1965, 1971) groups the doll together with teddy bears, blankets, and other soft toys as transitional objects which make the gradual separation from the mother possible. The attachment to the consistent, transitional object allows the child to shift the cathexis away from the mother and so gains the child a certain amount of independence and control. In the attachment theories, the doll is not differentiated from other toys, and her particular symbolic place in the world of the child is not discussed. And like other transitional objects, she represents the erotic attachment to the mother. In the history of psychotherapy the doll of play therapy has become the "anatomically correct doll" in recent years, and the controversy rages over whether these dolls are an appropriate tool for discerning sexual abuse in children (cf. White & Santili, 1988; Yates & Terr, 1988). Here the focus is on the doll as a representation of the sexual body which allows the child's play to enact (or imagine?) sexual relationships symbolically, and allows the therapist to discern precocious and disturbed sexual knowledge in the child. Yet no particular attention is paid to the nongenital, symbolic function of the doll, which comprises most of her significance in the young girTs life. With the rise of feminism, a revisiting of the girTs toy corner is in order. Through the recent inclusion of the female subject in psychological theory and practice the world of the female child attains new prominence (Gilligan, 1982), and the doll as a key carrier of female childhood fantasy needs to be examined. The presence of the doll in the girTs life is more, though, than a patriarchal tool for socializing the mothers of the next generation. She profoundly attracts the child's desire, evokes passionate love and hate, and fulfills needs that are difficult to articulate in any other way than through play. In short, the doll barely exists in psychological theory. Dolls are not distinguished from other toys; they are identified either with the erotic field of the mother or seen only as the girTs substitute penis (doll = baby = penis), and their symbolic significance has been limited to the sexual/genital representation of the human body. Together with the psychology of the female child, they have been dismissed from the history of psychology. In the following essay, I would like to invite you to follow the poet Rainer Maria Rilke through the psychological world of the doll as he reveals it to us through poetry, short story, and essay. Rilke will show

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us that the doll in the symbolic universe of the child is a human body, but that its meaning goes beyond its sexual/erotic signification. He will draw the line that separates the doll from the rocking horse and the teddy bear, and will lead us into the dark and deadly reaches of the transitional object, showing us the uncanniness of the doll at home in its preoedipal playground. And even though Rilke's perception of the doll is tinged with aversion, and he makes no attempt to represent fairly all aspects of the dolTs impact on the child's life, his work nevertheless can shed new light on the psychological reality of dolls and their place in the experience of the child. "THE BIG BLUE THING" There is nothing ambiguous about Rilke's relationships with dolls: He despised and hated them with a passion that is surprising to anyone familiar with Rilke's usually reverent and gentle concern for the world of things. The image of the doll had haunted Rilke for a long time, and we find in his writing various attempts to cope with the terror which the doll had inspired in him since his childhood. Witness, for example, the following fragment which did not make it into the Duino Elegies: If there is a dead body in the room— cover it, that it does not become the gruesome doll of the (childish) house that he does not play with it erecting it, against.... (Rilke, 1923/1965, 3: 461)2 The essay "Dolls," written at approximately the same time as the fourth of the Duino Elegies (which also tries to come to terms with puppets and dolls), gives us Rilke's reaction upon seeing a collection of dolls in Paris. It is a scathing critique of the doll's existence, addressed to the doll itself and written like one of those letters young adults sometimes write (but do not mail) to their fathers in order to even an old score, to understand the emotional entanglements of the past, to free themselves from a still haunting presence. When faced with images of angels, Rilke's terror is aesthetic and beautiful. When faced with dolls, Rilke's terror is urgent and real, and his emotions lie barely under the surface. At the root of Rilke's hatred of dolls lies his encounter with the dolls of his childhood. For the first years of his life Rilke's mother raised her son like a little girl and, like a doll, dressed him in curls, dresses, pinafores, and bows. He was named Rene, which is a boy's as well as a girl's name, and his mother called him Sophie for a while. He dusted the piano and played with dolls (Leppmann, 1984).

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In "Dolls," Rilke struggles with the gender confusion of his early childhood by contrasting the doll with the more masculine rocking horse: Oh, how you lifted one up, soul of the rocking horse, up and further into an irresistibly heroic being, where one perished, hot and gloriously, with his hair most terribly messed up. Then you lay next to it, doll, and you did not have enough innocence to understand that your holy George was rocking upon the animal of your dullness, the dragon, who let our most flooding feelings become matter in you—a perfidious, indifferent, unbreakable thing. (W 3: 540) In this fantasy, the heroic boy almost violates and crushes the doll as he assigns her the role of the dragon to his St. George. But in her dullness the doll does not respond. She overcomes the "hero" in the end by her very unresponsiveness. The doll is indifferent to the existence of the child, and therein lies her power. It would be possible to further analyze Rilke's gender confusion, to point out the equation of doll with woman, to reveal Rilke's idealization of women and his inability to respond truly to them with love. We could study his disturbed relationship with his mother and the ensuing metamorphoses of the mother image in his unfolding work. But I would like to suggest a different direction. When the doll appears in Rilke's work she is 'Tying around in our earliest uncanny loneliness" (W 3: 534), she reveals herself "as something unknown, and everything familiar with which we had showered and filled her becomes suddenly unknown in her" (W 3: 539), and she is generally accompanied by images of emptiness, death, and futility. The aura of uncanniness surrounding the doll penetrates Rilke's works, even the mature work of the Duino Elegies. And on the level of his work, the image of the doll becomes more than a vestige of his disturbed childhood. Rilke perceives something true and truly uncanny about the very existence of dolls. In 1899 Rilke wrote a strange, uncanny, and very "un-Rilkean" short story called "Frau Blaha's Maid." In a detached, almost journalistic style Rilke tells the story of the murder of an infant. The maid is a simple country girl who lives her life inside the grey, dark walls of a kitchen in the city. Unnoticed by anyone, she gives birth to a child whom she strangles, wraps in a blue apron, and then hides as her "big doll" in a trunk. During one of the next days, she measures the corpse and proceeds to buy a puppet theater with a king, a peasant, and a tower but which, alas, are much smaller than her "doll." She sets up the theater in the kitchen, and the neighbors' children come to watch her perform little dialogues and stiff movements, "but they never turn out to be a real play" (SW 4: 629).3 She tells them about her "really big doll," and they press her to show it to them:

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Anushka went to the back to her trunk. It was already getting dark. The children and the puppets faced each other, very quiet and alike. But from the wide open eyes of the punch, which were as if they expected something terrifying, a sudden fear swept over the children so that without exception they began to scream and run away. Anushka came back with the big blue thing in her arms. Suddenly her hands trembled. The kitchen had become so quiet and empty after the children had gone. Anushka was not afraid. She laughed softly and kicked the theater over with her feet and broke all the thin boards which were meant to be the garden. And then, as the kitchen was completely dark, she went about and split open all the dolls' heads, also the big blue one's. (SW 4: 629)

This is the sudden end of the story. Anushka can only transcend the confines of her life through an act of violence. The puppets never truly come to life; they stiffly bow before each other and knock each other over. This strange and ritualistic limitation of imaginative possibilities, this inability to truly enter into play is deeply linked to Anushka's act of violence. The puppets fail because they are nothing but the receptacle of Anushka's imaginative creations. She does not know what to do with them, as she does not know what to do with the newborn. Imprisoned in the kitchen, alienated from the social and cultural life of the city, she has no reference system for making sense out of her life in the act of playing. Even her own biological identity is undisclosed to her, and she bears a child without knowing that she is pregnant and murders the newborn without any emotional or moral response. Violence is the ultimate answer to a world which does not respond. The coldness and absurdity of her actions, which are not explained by the story, lead to the uncanny and depressing effect of the tale. Her coldness, though, is not premeditated, and we even feel pity for this human beast, who is homesick and longs for music, companionship, and the splendor of a king's life as she, almost in passing, murders her child. The logic of the tale is like the logic of the ctream: meaningful but inconsistent, senseless on the surface but pointing toward a deeper, unconscious order. Examined critically as a piece of fiction, "Frau Blaha's Maid" does not work because the character of the maid is not convincing. Could a woman have sexual intercourse on various occasions without knowing that she does, especially if she grew up in the country and watched the procreation of animals? Could she be pregnant for nine months and not know it, bear a child as if it suddenly fell out of her? Could she strangle the child because it cries and then go into the parlor and serve Sunday morning breakfast—all a few minutes after delivery? And furthermore, while the character of the maid is drawn without conviction, it seems that Rilke also does not care about the logic of the plot of this story. We are never asked to understand Anushka or to identify with her. As she wraps the corpse in the blue apron, converts the dead

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child into the big blue doll, and finally destroys the puppet theater and all the dolls, we find the progression of the story arbitrary and baffling. Rilke's language remains cool and detached. He does not convey to us an understanding of the girl's feelings and motives, and makes no attempt to reveal the psychological motives for her gruesome deed. However, the failure of the tale should give us pause for thought, for we have to admit that despite its literary inconsistencies it still conveys a certain mood of strangeness, depressiveness, and uncanniness. While poetically it may be a failure, psychologically it seems to work. The narrator gives us the impression of distant objectivity as he retells the surface events of the story. The style of storytelling, though, is too indifferent to be convincing, and whenever we notice an indifference that seems to be out of proportion to the traumatic content of the story told, we suspect an overcompensation of extremely disturbing emotions. Something has been repressed. "SPREADING HERSELF LIKE A BOORISH DANAE" For a psychological reading of this tale, let me turn to Freud's (1919) work on "The Uncanny" which discusses some of the haunted and uncanny qualities of dolls. Through a careful study of a series of uncanny images and tales from the stories of E.T.A. Hoffmann, Freud examines the production of uncanniness in literature. He explores the psychological structure of the uncanny, which has as its core function a very particular and paradoxical relationship to the repressed: It conceals and reveals it at the same time. Freud refers to the uncanniness of dolls in the context of an argument that he has with E. Jentsch (1906), author of the study Zur Psychologie des Unheimlichen. Jentsch claims that the key element of uncanniness is a confusion between animate and inanimate processes, which leads to an intellectual uncertainty in the reader. Referring particularly to Hoffman's character of the doll Olympia, Jentsch writes: In telling a story one of the most successful devices for easily creating uncanny effects is to leave the reader in uncertainty whether a particular figure in the story is a human being or an automaton; and to do it in such a way that his attention is not directly focused upon this uncertainty, so that he may not be urged to go into the matter and clear it up immediately, since that, as we have said, would quickly dissipate the peculiar emotional effect of the thing. E.T.A. Hoffman has repeatedly employed this psychological artifice with success in his fantastic narratives, (p. 227) Freud wants to push our understanding of the uncanny beyond Jentsch's notion of intellectual confusion and introduce a dynamic

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model which includes conscious and unconscious processes. And although Freud quotes at length from Jentsch's book, he plays down his argument by introjecting: "But I cannot think—and I hope that most readers of the story will agree with me—that the theme of the doll, Olympia, who is to all appearance a living being, is by any means the only element to be held responsible for the quite unparalleled atmosphere of uncanniness which the story evokes; or, indeed, that it is the most important among them" (p. 227). Discarding the doll, Freud moves on to discuss a different, and according to him more terrifying, figure, Hoffman's Sand-Man, who repeatedly threatens the hero with barely disguised castration. At home at last with the Oedipus complex, Freud is on familiar turf and continues to explore the uncanny through the terrifying but forgotten childhood wounds of eros. Yet we are still in need of understanding Rilke's uncanny dolls, and Freud seems to deny us his psychological insight by refusing to take the doll seriously as an uncanny character. Yet Freud's abrupt dismissal of the doll and the quick turn toward the familiar castration issues make me wonder if there is not an unconscious undercurrent at work which disturbs the smooth flow of Freud's thought. Maybe the kind of uncanniness the doll evokes has to do with the refusal to entertain her seriously? I agree with Freud that Jentsch's argument is not sufficient to penetrate the dreadful nature of the doll experience, or better, that Jentsch touches a certain level of psychological experience which is still tied to the function of consciousness. Through Rilke's "Frau Blaha's Maid," we can affirm Jentsch's observation that one of the technical elements which support our experience of the uncanny is that the story distracts our attention from the intellectual uncertainty whether we are dealing with a doll or a corpse. Rilke euphemistically calls the dead child/doll "the big blue one," and the story gives us no pause for reflection on the cruel transformation between the living child and the inanimate doll. But Jentsch still leaves the "particular emotional effect of the thing" unexplained. Our dilemma is that Freud refuses to look at the doll, while Jentsch's glance only touches the surface. It is almost uncanny: Both authors either repress or rationalize the emotional impact of the doll. "THE DOLL, SHE WAS THE FIRST TO INFLICT THIS LARGER THAN HUMAN SILENCE UPON US" Since Freud denies us a quick answer, we are forced to take some detours, and those lead us through the labyrinth of Freud's other insights into the uncanny. Hopefully we will come out at the other end with a deeper understanding of the doll's uncanniness. Let us begin

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unraveling the thread by looking at the doll's rival, the Sand-Man/ castrator. The image of the Sand-Man is uncanny because he touches upon a fear from our early childhood. Freud (1919) generalizes from this insight to say that a fear or a wish from the oedipal scene is evoked by an uncanny image. The fear or wish can also have its origins in infancy, namely in the fall from the grandeur of the infant's early narcissistic world, which is evoked through the image of the double in uncanny tales. Freud writes: "The other forms of ego-disturbance exploited by Hoffman can easily be estimated along the same lines as the theme of the 'double.' They are a harking-back to particular phases in the evolution of the self-regarding feeling, a regression to a time when the ego had not yet marked itself off sharply from the external world and from other people. I believe that these factors are partly responsible for the impression of uncanniness, although it is not easy to isolate and determine exactly their share of it" (p. 236). Regression is the key word in this passage, and it implies a disturbance in the ego's sense of time. The ego regresses to an earlier identity formation which is marked by a relationship to reality different from the adult's ego, namely to a developmental stage where self-perception and perception of the world are not clearly distinguished. With respect to the doll, these reflections of Freud lead us to the following questions: What is the nature of the repression concealed by the uncanny atmosphere of Rilke's dolls? Or, to ask more directly: What stage of infantile ego development is reactivated through Rilke's description of the doll? "Frau Blaha's Maid" conceals the regression, but the essay "Dolls" gives us many clues as to the psychological presence and function of the doll in childhood development. In the lives of many children, as in Rilke's childhood, the encounter with the doll is of primary importance and set apart from the play with other toys. As we saw before, part of the terror the doll inspires in Rilke comes from her lifelessness and her indifference and unresponsiveness to the child's emotions. Things, too, are without life, but they, as Rilke says, almost acquire a heart by being the silent companions and memorabilia of human existence. They are "thankful for tenderness" and, although fading and vanishing with use, they come to life under the "demanding caresses" of the "hardest wear": If we would become aware of all this, and at this very moment would find— pulling her from a pile of more sympathetic things—one of our old dolls: she would almost upset us by her terrible, thick forgetfulness. The hatred, which unconsciously has always been a part of our relationship with her, would flare up, and she would lie before us, finally without disguise: as that gruesome alien body for which we have wasted our purest warmth; as that superficially painted drowned corpse, lifted and carried by the floods of our tenderness until it dried out and we forgot it somewhere in the bushes. (W 3: 535-536)

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Here again we see the confusion between toy and corpse, and the rage and hatred which this image inspires. If the doll is this unresponsive, thickly forgetful, hate-inspiring alien body, why do we give such a toy to the child? Rilke asked himself the same question, and his answer is startling and reveals a deep psychological insight: we give the doll to our child because the soul of the child would get lost in a human presence. "The simplest exchange of love far exceeded our understanding," he says, and so we, as children, practice our existence and our loving with the unresponsive, unloving doll (W 3:536). The doll exists on the threshold of ego-identity, where subject and object are undifferentiated and merge in an erotic fusion. At a certain point in the child's development primal narcissism poses the threat of self-annihilation in the narcissistic union with the mother. While the child would "get lost" in the other by "pressing itself into her" (W 3: 536), the doll does not respond to the child's cries and other outpourings of emotion. She does not mirror the young self, does not smile, does not affirm good or bad, does not take the infant into her arms. In fact, she is usually smaller than the child and her function is to be an object against which the child must assert its own identity. She stands at the threshold of narcissism, forcing the child to assume an identity of his own, and to distinguish between I and the world: "We were forced to assert ourselves against the doll, for if we gave ourselves up for her nobody would be left over. She did not respond, and hence we found ourselves in the position of taking over tasks for her. We split our slowly widening being in part and counterpart, and kept, so to say, the world at bay through her, which before was unlimited and merged with us" (W 3: 536). In terms of regression, the doll in Rilke's work evokes the period of awakening self-consciousness in the child. Self-consciousness comes with the severing of the narcissistic, symbiotic union with the mother, and is a painful and terrifying process which brings with it feelings of helplessness and limitation. Where before was the engulfing love of the mother who was the world, there is now an absence, an abyss. And the doll can never take the place of the mother. I think that a large part of the rage, hatred, and aggression against the doll is the memory of the lost union with the mother, for which the doll is merely a poor substitute. The position of play in Freud's work is central to his understanding of desire and the psychological mechanisms for coping with loss. The child, as Freud points out in the discussion of his grandson's "FortDa" game, fills with fantasies the space of the absent mother and symbolizes the fulfillment of his wishes. The doll, as do other toys, offers itself as an object for the attachment of the child's erotic and aggressive fantasies. Her very unresponsiveness, although it does not gratify the child's desires, leads to a continuous effort on the part of the child to invent an imaginary world and to hallucinate satisfaction:

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Like in a sample glass we mixed in her what happened to us before recognition, and there we saw it change color and boil up. That is, even this we invented again, for she was so bottomlessly without fantasy that our imagination became inexhaustible in her. For hours, for whole weeks it might satisfy us to drape the first feathery silk of our heart into folds around this quiet mannequin, but I cannot imagine it otherwise than that there were certain endless afternoons when we grew tired of our doubled ideas and when we suddenly faced her and expected something. (W 3: 536-537) But w h y is it the doll, and not the rocking horse or any of the other toys, that functions as this primary entry into the world of the imagination? The answer, I think, lies in the fact that the doll, among all the toys, comes closest to imitating the child's own body. Because the body of the doll resembles the h u m a n body it lends itself to an imaginative representation of the h u m a n world. The child plays family, school, grocery store, and so on. During play the doll can assume the child's place in the adult world, while the child plays all the others: mother, father, teacher, grocer. Through the doll the child can explore some of the parameters of the adult world. Rilke would agree with this sociological explanation of the doll's function in the child's universe. In "Dolls" he expresses a very similar idea: "We found our orientation through the doll. By nature she was lower than we were, and so w e could gradually flow d o w n into her and collect ourselves and recognize, although somewhat dimly, our n e w surrounding w o r l d " (W 3: 539). But Rilke also reminds us of another, less optimistic aspect of the doll which does not fit into the slick picture of the child practicing to be an adult with her doll. What about those "endless afternoons w h e n w e grew tired of our doubled ideas and w h e n w e suddenly faced her and expected something" (W 3:539)? What w h e n the fabric of the child's fantasy world tears apart and she suddenly recognizes that through the web of fiction she is faced by a lifeless body? It is in those terrifying moments, Rilke thinks, that the child glimpses an aspect of h u m a n existence even adults find difficult to accept. When the imagination ceases to perpetuate itself, w h e n bored o m sets in, the world that w e h a d taken for granted suddenly takes on dark and unfamiliar hues. Behind it w e sense a threatening emptiness which begins to permeate the solid floor, the walls, the chair, the rocking horse, and the doll: When nothing was lying around to captivate and change our train of thoughts, when that idle creature continued to stupidly and heavily spread itself like a peasant Danae who did not know anything else but the infinite golden rain of our feelings: I wish I could remember whether we started up in anger and told that monster that our patience was at an end? Whether we did not face her, trembling with rage, and wanted to know, post for post, what she was

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doing with all our warmth and what had become of all this wealth?—Then she was silent, not because of arrogance, but silence was her continuous excuse because she was made of a good-for-nothing, completely irresponsible stuff—was silent and did not even think to be proud of it, although it provided her with great importance in a world where fate and even God himself have become famous for facing us with silence. At a time where everybody made an effort to give us quick and soothing answers the doll was the first who made us suffer this immense silence which later on would often breathe at us out of space whenever we stepped on the limits of our existence. Facing her as she stared at us we experienced for the first time (or am I wrong?) that certain hollowness in our feeling, this pause of the heart in which one would perish if not the whole, soft, far-reaching Nature would carry us like a lifeless thing across the abyss. Are we not strange creatures that we obey and let ourselves be instructed to invest our first tender inclinations where they must remain unsatisfied? (W 3: 537-538) Suddenly the doll has become a harbinger of a universe unresponsive and indifferent to the h u m a n cry for meaning. In her the absurdity of life finds its first dark abode. The "hollowness in our feeling" and the breathless "pause of the heart" bespeak an instant of utter terror. A sense of futility and helplessness interrupts the newly found identity of the child and threatens to annihilate all boundaries—yet not in a blissful union with the motherly universe, but through a sudden ceasing of the meaningful structure of reality. The great fear which the doll inspires is the fear of a silence and emptiness at the heart of our existence. It grasps the possible absence of transcendence, the possible unreality of a spiritual invisible realm, the possible meaninglessness of our life beyond the fragile clearing of the present. While in Rilke's work the angel affirms existence beyond and without h u m a n beings, the doll, in her small and silent way, denies being itself. "THAT SUPERFICIALLY PAINTED DROWNED CORPSE, LIFTED A N D CARRIED BY THE FLOODS OF OUR TENDERNESS" But in more than one w a y the doll is a harbinger of the death principle in Rilke's work. We already saw h o w her unresponsiveness supports a n d destroys the imaginative reality of the child's play. We examined h o w nothingness glares at the child through the doll's glassy eyes in moments of boredom. But there is another connection between the doll and death, one which w e have hinted at and which is so obvious that it is easily overlooked. The doll is a dead body, an inanimate child, an unresponsive, rigid corpse. This morbid sense of the doll can clearly be seen in the fragment from the discarded early fifth Duino Elegy which w e mentioned be-

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fore. It gives a warning to the adult to be aware of the child's naive confusion of the corpse and the doll, and the advice to cover the dead body lest the child play with it like she plays with her doll. The gruesome picture that Rilke paints here of a child playing house with a corpse and erecting it against an unspecified surface comes to a sudden stop in mid-sentence, as if the poet suddenly became aware of the absurdity and terrifying importance of this uncanny, dreamlike scene. Let us return to Freud (1919) at this point and remember his psychodynamic explanation of the uncanny. The uncanniness inspired by a dead but seemingly alive object is that it reminds us of a primitive period in our personal and cultural development where the boundaries between the I and the world were less clearly defined. He summarizes it in the following way: "An uncanny experience occurs w h e n either infantile complexes which have been repressed are once more revived by some impression, or w h e n primitive beliefs which have been surmounted seem once more to be confirmed" (p. 249). The child of the above fragment does not distinguish between the doll and the corpse, and neither does Anushka in "Frau Blaha's Maid." Both of them cross the b o u n d a r y between life and death and break the taboos surrounding the h u m a n corpse out of ignorance and simplemindedness. For us as observers this failure to respect and understand the nature of death is extremely uncanny because it reminds us of a developmental stage where the distinction between life and death was not as clear cut as it seems to be to the adult mind. Yet to blur the distinction is a threat to our continuous effort to keep death at bay through technology and medicine. In one of the papers developing the concept of the death instinct, "The Economic Problem of Masochism," Freud (1924) expresses the thought that at an early stage of h u m a n development the death instinct is actually the primary instinct ruling the organism, and that the desire to regress to an inorganic state expresses a fundamental tendency of all life forms: In (multi-cellular) living beings the libido meets the instinct of death, or destruction, which is dominant in them and which seeks to disintegrate the cellular organism [composing it] into the state of inorganic stability (relative though this may be). The libido has the task of making the destroying instinct innocuous, and it fulfills the task by diverting that instinct to a great extent outwards—soon with the help of the special organic system, the muscular apparatus—towards objects in the external world. The instinct then is called the destructive instinct, the instinct for mastery, or the will to power. A portion of the instinct is placed directly in the service of the sexual function, where it has an important part to play. This is sadism proper. Another portion does not share in this transposition outwards; it remains inside the organism and, with the help of the accompanying sexual excitation described above, becomes

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libidinally bound there. It is in this portion that we have to recognize the original, erotogenic masochism, (pp. 163-164)

Ultimate regression would be a regression to a state of primary masochism, which is characterized by the absence of Eros and the desire to level all tensions through "inorganic stability," that is death. As primary narcissism is the first stage of erotic development, primary masochism represents Eros's primordial counterpart, the death instinct, in its early and unsublimated form. Through Freud's concept of primary masochism we have come a step closer to understanding the uncanniness of the doll. Through her "thick forgetfulness," her unresponsiveness, her coldness, her inanimate body we encounter an image of the human form in the ultimate realization of the death instinct: inorganic stability. Prior to the threat of annihilation of one's gender through castration— which Freud mentions as a major cause of our sense of the uncanny— comes the threat of the body to annihilate itself. The uncanniness of the doll in Rilke's work has its roots in this regression to primary masochism, which is a regression to an even earlier stage of development than the love triangle of the castration complex. As Rilke's child stares at the doll through the window of boredom, he unconsciously faces the final futility of Eros's imaginative constructions. The undercurrent of destruction from within the world, within the body, slowly hollows out the heart of his world and threatens to render meaningless the work of Eros. The child's response to this threat is hatred directed against the silence of the doll and rage against the waste of affection and imagination on a being that assumes the human form but is ultimately without love. The aggressive response, though, directs the destructive impulse away from one's own body and toward an object "out there." Remember the sadistic scene of the little boy with the tousled hair phantasizing about crushing the doll under the rails of the rocking horse, or Anushka destroying her puppets and splitting open her baby-doll's head in the darkness of the deserted kitchen: Both acts seem to say that if the image, the representation of the human form, does not fulfill its promise of warmth and companionship, it will be destroyed. Better to rip the comforting fiction and bring about an absolute and unthinkable darkness that knows no pain than to suffer the futility of one's own creative act. Especially with Anushka we get the impression that her final act of violence is not just a destruction of a puppet theater, but the symbolic annihilation of everything that gives comfort and meaning to her life. She destroys her world. And although directed against the object, the destructive impulse seems to have the ultimate aim of selfdestruction by abolishing the world necessary to human survival.

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There is an absurd element to this rage against the world. The doll, experienced in itself and apart from the world of play, reveals that there is a limit to life, that brute matter cares very little for human feeling, and that death is everywhere. It also shows that our involvement with the material stuff of the universe constitutes its meaningful structure. Without the child's compassion and imagination, the doll is a corpse. Rage denies this participation in the meaningful structures of the world and tries to raze the limits of our imagination and the boundaries of our life. It tries to overcome death and destruction by willingly killing and destroying the very harbingers of death and destruction. In a strange and disconcerting way Rilke's doll seems to share an inhuman space with the figure of the angel. The angel is the idealized, pure form of Eros prior to organic involvement and differentiation into sexes—the archetypal image of primary narcissism. The doll, on the other hand, embodies the victory of death and destruction over the life of the organism—the archetypal image of primary masochism. While the angel is the ideal, unattainable achievement of perfect being, the doll is the grim threat of nonbeing. Both can paralyze the imagination: the angel by luring the soul into dreams of paradise, and by revealing our human fallibility, insufficiency, and ultimate dependence on the material world; the doll by inspiring a petrifying fear of death and meaninglessness. The one leads to narcissistic dispersal of the self in search of the impossible ideal, the other to masochistic depression and a doing away with the terrifying human body. Our reflections on Eros and Thanatos through the images of angel and doll pose the startling question whether the goal of both instincts is not the same, namely narcissistic union with the universe—which is first the fusion with the mother and then the fusion with the earth in death. In terms of Freud's work we can understand now that primary masochism comes prior to primary sadism, for sadism already presupposes a distinction between body and world. The self-destruction of the organism, on the other hand, comes before the awareness of the world as separate. It attempts to restore a state prior to "organic instability," or life, and is retrogressive toward a narcissistic wholeness void of tension and movement. Masochism is the shadow side of original narcissism, the dark side turned away from the blissful smile of Eros. We could call masochism by another name: narcissism of the death instinct. The uncanniness of the doll is a reminder that primary masochism is still familiar and present, albeit repressed and forgotten. Although dismissed by Freud, the doll can show us the vicissitudes of an instinct other than Eros. Its uncanniness reveals and conceals the dynamics of the death instinct.

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NOTES This article was previously published in New Literary History 27 (4): 663677,1996. 1. Rainer Maria Rilke, //Dolls,,, in Werke (Frankfurt a/Main, 1966), 3: 534; hereafter cited in text as W by volume and page number. All translations from Rilke's works are mine. 2. Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, in Samtliche Werke; hereafter cited in text as SW by volume and page number. 3. Rainer Marie Rilke "Frau Blaha's Maid," in Samtliche Werke; hereafter cited in text by volume and page number. REFERENCES Bettelheim, B. (1975). The uses of enchantment. New York: Vintage. Dahl, E. K. (1988). Fantasies of gender. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 43:351365. Erikson, E. (1950). Childhood and society. New York: Norton. Freud, S. (1919). The "uncanny/' The standard edition of the complete psychological works ofSigmund Freud, volume 17 (J. Strachey, Ed.; pp. 219-252). London: Hogarth. Freud, S. (1924). The economic problem of masochism. SE 19 (pp. 157-172). Gilligan, C. (1982). In a different voice: Psychological theory and women's development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jentsch, E. (1906). Zur Psychologie des Unheimlichen. Psychiat. neurol. Wschr. 8:195. Klein, M. (1961). Narrative of a child analysis. New York: The Free Press. Leppmann, W. (1984). Rilke: A life (R. M. Stockman, Trans.). New York: Fromm International. Rilke, R. M. (1923/1965). Duino elegies. In Samtliche Werke, volume 3. Frankfurt a/Main: Insel Verlag. Rilke, R. M. (1966). Dolls. In Werke, volume 3. Frankfurt a/Main: Insel Verlag. Rilke, R. M. (1899/196?). Frau Blaha's maid. In Samtliche Werke, volume 4. Frankfurt a/Main: Insel Verlag. White, S., & Santili, G. (1988). A review of clinical practices and research data on anatomical dolls. Journal of Interpersonal Violence 3 (4): 430-442. Winnicott, D. W. (1965). The family and individual development. New York: Basic Books. Winnicott, D. W. (1971). Playing and reality. London: Routledge. Yates, A., & Terr, L. C. (1988). Anatomically correct dolls: Should they be used as the basis for expert testimony? Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 27 (2): 254-257.

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CHAPTER 4

Death, Fantasy, and Religious Transformations Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi

Religious ideologies promise a cosmic collective transformation, through which the laws of nature will be changed. Secular ideologies (e.g., nationalism) promise historical transformations but do not overcome the laws of nature. What I have called private salvation (BeitHallahmi, 1992) involves cases of conversion (most often religious, but sometimes secular) where individuals change dramatically and radically. Religious collective transformation is often envisioned through apocalyptic changes, involving death and destruction. The essential ingredients of the apocalyptic dream are first a total destruction of the world as we know it, with all its present evils, and then a birth of a "new heaven and a new earth," for the elect, who are only a remnant of humanity. These ideas appear both in schizophrenic or borderline individuals, and in many religious scriptures and doctrines. Millenarian groups promise imminent collective salvation for the faithful in an earthly paradise that will rise following an apocalyptic destruction ordained by the gods. In some cases this destruction will be hastened by human acts. In some contemporary groups, such dreams are clearly tied to acts of violence, including mass suicide. In this chapter, examples of apocalyptic thinking in old and new religions are examined, with particular attention to Aum Shinrikyo, the Peoples Temple, Heaven's Gate, and the Solar Temple. A case study of Brahma Kumaris, a contemporary group characterized by an apocalyptic vision (kept hidden from non-members) is presented to illuminate the possible psychodynamics of apocalyptic visions.

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The general phenomenon of religion-related violence (cf. BeitHallahmi, 2001b) is extremely complex and has to be studied with the help of various disciplines, but it could be somewhat elucidated through explanations informed by a psychodynamic understanding of religion. This means looking at the paradoxical connection between dreams of salvation and dreams of violence. We will need to ask why religious love and devotion are tied to hate and destruction. Our perspective will be theoretically individualistic, but will mostly examine the reality of religious groups. Our universe of content is that of religious visions of salvation and destruction. We will look first at dreams and fantasies, while other approaches will seek to examine concrete action. What we are looking at here is the amazing association of miraculous transformations and great disasters, all created by human fantasy. We are going to look at dreams of collective rebirth together with dreams and realities of individual rebirth, because we think that the mystery of rebirth gone wrong may be related to that of rebirth gone right and well. Successful rebirth is a mystery and a miracle. We must wonder about the internal dynamics of each such case of success, just as we must wonder about failures. What is the secret of balance and growth, in the face of deprivations and difficulties, for both individuals and groups? Cases of rebirth gone tragically wrong have come to our attention in recent years. They include the Peoples Temple, Branch Davidians, Aum Shinrikyo, the Solar Temple, and Heaven's Gate. Each case is unique. What is involved in all cases is an authoritarian leadership which sweeps the members into a cycle of violence. Where does the violence come from in these groups? How does the balance fail? The terms apocalyptic, millenarian, and end-of-times will be used interchangeably in this chapter. End-of-times fantasies are of three kinds. There are those that are most general and most common, promising world rebirth sometimes in the future. There are those promised very soon, and there are those rare cases where a date is specified. Norman Cohn (1970) defined Millenarianism as "an ideology characterizing religious groups that promises imminent collective salvation for the faithful in an earthly paradise that will rise following an apocalyptic destruction ordained by the gods" (p. 13). Ostow (1986, 1988) stated that apocalyptic fantasies consist of two elements: First, the idea that the world will be destroyed, and second, that a remnant of humanity will be rescued from the catastrophe. It is interesting to note that when the ideological content of twentieth century fascism was being investigated by Adorno et al. (1950) the idea of world destruction was found to be a component. The Adorno et al. F scale included the following item: It is possible that wars and social troubles will be ended once and for all by an earthquake or flood that will destroy the

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whole world. In this fascist vision there is no promise of rebirth but a certainty of destruction, which brings to mind the way the three fascist regimes of Germany, Japan, and Italy ended. We will present concrete examples of individual and collective transformations, taken from the contemporary world of salvation movements. Some of those involve growth and integration; others extreme violence. Do they have something in common? We are going to look at a progression of cases, from individual success through salvation, to group success, and then to group failure, violence, and tragedy. We will observe cases in which eschatological dreams are held central, and then at attempts to make them a reality through violence. The real issue and the real mystery is why and how, following specific forms of rebirth, the psychological balance is disrupted and lost, and what solutions are reached in an attempt to reestablish balance. Our most serious fear is that of the disintegration of the self, and it is clear that dreams of the coming end and the impending victory of justice and good keep the self moving on. There are probably many possible solutions, but we are interested here in those involving violent fantasies, as in the case of Brahma Kumaris, and in those involving violent acts, as in the case of Heaven's Gate and Aum Shinrikyo. CONCEPTUAL TOOLBOX In this chapter, we offer interpretations, speculations, and hypotheses, and our theoretical framework is largely that of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic writings can be recognized through their use of a common vocabulary which has become, over the years, part of everyday intellectual discourse: conscious and unconscious, id, ego, super-ego, neuroses, anxiety, and defense mechanisms. What is psychoanalytic theory? We can recognize it either through its vocabulary (to some, its "jargon") or through its bibliographic ancestry, its references. In terms of interpretive tactics, what everybody knows is that psychoanalysis tells us that we need to look beneath the surface, because behind happy and loving faces sometimes there lurk madness and violence. Two assumptions were suggested by Freud himself (1915/1916) to characterize his approach. The first states that all psychic processes are strictly determined (no accidents, chance events, or miracles); the second, that unconscious mental processes exist and exert significant influences on behavior. These unconscious forces shape much of the individuaTs emotional and interpersonal experiences. We all are ready to admit momentary, fleeting, childish, irrational thoughts, as in hypnagogic experiences. These experiences are marginal. Psychoanalysis claims that they may be more than that, and that unconscious processes are possibly the main determinants of observable behavior.

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The emphasis on the unconscious part of the personality can be summed up as follows: 1. Part of the personality is unconscious, and it is quite influential. 2. The unconscious is the repository of significant early experience. 3. In the adult, unconscious ideas are often projected, creating distortions of reality, especially interpersonal reality. Primary process, which rules the deeper, unconscious layers of the personality, obeys the pleasure principle, starting with the baby's attempt at achieving a hallucinated reality of the desired object. The secondary process obeys the reality principle, and involves the postponement of immediate gratification and the testing of imaginary ideas against the real world. Psychoanalysis is a theory of struggle, conflict, and compromise, assuming the dynamic nature of human behavior, always resulting from conflict and change. Additional assumptions deal with overdetermination and the multiple functions of behavior. The overdetermination assumption states that any segment of behavior may have many preceding causes. This is tied to a developmental or historical emphasis, leading us to seek first causes in any individuaTs personal history and unique experiences. The psychoanalytic view of human motivation is often regarded as utterly pessimistic. Judging by their conscious and unconscious drives, humans are nasty and brutish, aggressive, infantile, and libido driven. However, beyond this bleak picture of immorality and even perversity lies the capacity for sublimation, love, and culture. Psychoanalysis is a theory of reality distortion. The psychoanalytic view of maladaptive behavior emphasizes its continuity with adaptive behavior and leads to viewing pathology as a useful analogy of cultural structures. Psychoanalysis assumes the psychic unity of mankind, which is significant when we deal with cultural traditions. Universality is found at the most basic level of body, birth, sex, and death. Psychoanalytic approaches of all theoretical stripes (classical, egopsychological, and object relations) claim universal, transcultural, and ahistorical validity. Universal themes in religious fantasies are the result and reflection of the psychic unity of mankind, which in turn is the consequence of common psychological structures and common early experiences, shared by all of mankind. The same basic psychological processes and complexes are expressed in individual products (dreams, stories, or daydreams), and in cultural products (art, literature, folklore, wit, religion, law, or science), because these complexes are basic and central to human experience. What unites most strands of psychoanalytic theory is the governing metaphor of conflict. Beyond visible conflicts, invisible ones are found,

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even if it's hard to locate them. The family, locus of love and devotion, is actually a battlefield, but it only reflects the reality of both individual souls and human society as a whole. This is the source of what has to be called the tragic dimension in psychoanalytic literature, a deep recognition of human limitations and a realistic approach to one's chances of achieving happiness. Conversion experiences start with conversion dreams. Salvation stories appear in response to dreams of a new self, a new society, a new world. It is with the help of this tradition that we approach the phenomenon of the religious imagination, and the inevitable collisions between religious fantasies and reality. The phenomenon of fantasies about self-transformation and world-transformation, which is so common among humans, plays a major role in the history of religious movements. Here we are trying to clarify its relationship to violence. Successful rebirth means finding a way to handle aggression by directing it toward an ideal outlet, real or imaginary. The question is indeed why should a rebirth always be tied to a total destruction? Our hypothesis is that rebirth is always tied to imagined death and violence, and that handling these fantasies is the real problem which often upsets the precarious balance in the born-again. Because the conversion solution is not truly balanced, aggression will break through. Every successful case of individual rebirth is the result of an internal truce among opposing personality elements. One possible interpretation assumes that in conversion we see what is called a "super-ego victory" (Beit-Hallahmi, 1977; Wittenberg, 1968). An internal conflict between the conscious ego-ideal and the unconscious, archaic, parental, introject is won by the latter. The child becomes more parental, and this often happens in post-adolescence as the child grows older. Another interpretation of successful conversion uses the concept of moral masochism (Freud, 1916). According to classical psychoanalysis, the super-ego is formed as sadistic impulses directed at the parent are recoiled and internalized. Then the super-ego, parentally derived, commands self-effacement, if not self-sacrifice, as the punishment for aggressive fantasies. In moral masochism, the super-ego is satisfied through submission and humiliation. The outer peace and happiness observed in many converts is the result of this final peace between ego and super-ego, which releases all the energy that was put into the conflict for productive use. This may be the source of many positive, altruistic behaviors. The yearning for peace and wholeness is met by religion through the internal peace between super-ego and ego. At the conscious level this is experienced as acceptance by God or Jesus, forgiveness and love, reported by converts ever since St. Augustine of Hippo. Freud (1928) suggested that what is achieved through super-ego victory is a reconciliation with one's father and with all paternal authorities, in-

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eluding father gods. We forgive our parents and are forgiven by them in turn. Of course, this happens in fantasy, and we are not talking of real fathers but imagined ones, consciously and unconsciously. Another possible explanation is that the convert has gone through the internalizing of a loved and loving imaginary object, which then supports the whole personality system. This internalized object may serve as a new super-ego, supplying the ego with a control system, which has been missing, and making possible a real control of destructive impulses. A similar process may take place in secular psychotherapy. Within a slightly different framework, Fauteux (1981) suggested that early infancy splitting of the mother into good/bad object operates in converts who reach a state of complete euphoria, denying negative impulses and negative realities, which are bound to resurface nevertheless. What should we make of all these different and sometimes contradictory speculations? Only the realization that in cases of true selftranscendence, something important and far-reaching must be going on beneath the surface. The process is one of accepting authority, loving authority, internalizing a loving and supportive (but still demanding) authority. What happens in these conversion miracles is an experience of love, both giving and receiving of love. On a conscious level, this is the unconditional (or maybe conditional) love of God, and St. Augustine has already reported on that. On an unconscious level, it is the unconditional love of the parent. The conversion experience has been viewed as ego-enhancing. Illusions and delusions may be helpful, up to a point, energizing a weak ego through narcissistic hopes. Behind the explicit, outspoken fantasy of a new self or a new world there lie unspoken processes, which always parallel those on the surface. And the meaning of our fantasies about the self may not be far from that of our vision for the whole world. For in our parallel, primary process thinking, we are the world. The invention of the new self may involve only magical gestures, but it may involve some actions as well. DREAMS OF THE REBORN SELF An examination of apocalyptic dreams should start with the individual search for security and wholeness and with the general idea of self-transformation. Susan Sontag, in an interview on the BBC, on May 22,2000, said that the American dream is to reinvent yourself, be born again, but this is not just an American idea, it is a universal modern dream, and possibly a universal human dream. The broadest frame of reference we can use is the common human phenomenon of attempts to escape and transcend destiny and identity. I include here any attempt to redefine biography and identity against "objective" condi-

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tions defining that identity. Such attempts at rebirth, at identity change through private salvation, may be quite common in certain historical situations (Beit-Hallahmi, 1992). We may speak about a private Utopia, as collective Utopias are less and less in vogue. Dreams and actual attempts at escape and rejuvenation should be examined on the basis of context, content, or consequences, and point to a whole range of possibilities. The fantasy of escaping one's destiny, the dream of identity change, is all too human. So many people see their lives so far as a first draft. We all dream of being or becoming somebody else and something else, breaking with our destiny. This is the dream of private (and collective) salvation. Often we feel "I am stuck in this life situation but I should be somewhere else." Edouard Zarifian, in his book Les Jardiniers de la Folie (1988), has written about the common escape fantasy of middle-aged men who want to give up their identities and their histories in favor of a new existence. Umberto Gallini of Milan, Italy, opened in 1991 the Alleanza nationale per Tespatrio felice, a service for individuals who wish to disappear from the real world and start a new life under a new identity. His clients have been middle-aged men who want to leave behind families and obligations. Gallini arranges for escapes to the Third World (Madagascar) with a new identity, provided you have $100,000 in savings. Of course, private salvation is a minority option. Most of us do not dare to escape from destiny in such ways and will continue to cope collectively, normatively, realistically, possibly in quiet desperation. In a preliminary study of escape fantasies, I have constructed a questionnaire which includes options for alternative careers and truly alternative identities ("I can imagine myself as a Tibetan monk"; "I can imagine myself as a rock singer"; "I can imagine myself as a heroin addict"). My students' favorite alternative life was, "I can imagine myself winning the Nobel Prize in literature." These are fantasies without obligations, of course, but conversions are for real. Part of our own salvation fantasies are our fantasies about converts. We envy their courage to take such a step, to change in the midst of crisis, and we envy their enthusiasm, self-confidence, optimism, "wholeness," and strong convictions, once they have taken this step. Conversions are dramatic turning points in life, tied to external or internal events (personality or trauma) leading to the reassessment of one's life, then identity change, and the "biographical break" with the past. It is higher self-esteem, or self-love, which allows us to define the new identity. During times of stress and crisis, as during times of individual distress, there is a regression to "artistic," religious, or magical ways of thinking. When realistic coping fails, magical thinking takes over. When realistic coping seems to be failing or futile, individuals may turn to magical or religious ways of coping. When all hope is lost, these ways of coping do seem worthwhile.

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Magical gestures which aim at reaching a conscious break with past and the shedding off of one's identity, include name changes, body changes, and "sex change." These magical or symbolic gestures are not usually sufficient for a real metamorphosis in personality. A name change does not lead to personality change, and a new nose does not do it either. Even a "sex change" often fails to bring about happiness, and these intentional scripts often end in disappointment. In many religious traditions pilgrimage is the magical route to achieving private salvation and healing. Pilgrimage is an institutionalized way of reaching "the inward transformation of spirit and personality" (Turner, 1973, p. 214). This miracle of rebirth through conversion has been described in another context: "The true believer who becomes a Muslim casts off at last his old self and takes on a new identity. He changes his name, his religion, his homeland, his 'natural' language, his moral and cultural values, his very purpose in living. He is no longer a Negro, so long despised by the white man that he has come almost to despise himself. Now he is a Black Man—divine, ruler of the universe, different only in degree from Allah himself. He is no longer discontent and baffled, harried by social obloquy and a gnawing sense of personal inadequacy. Now he is a Muslim, bearing in himself the power of the Black Nation and its glorious destiny" (Lincoln, 1961, pp. 108-109). SUCCESSFUL REBIRTH Every religion tells us stories of miracles and transformations. For most people, they remain stories about events that happened long ago and far away. For others, they become part of their own personal history, which they are ready to share with us. These cases of rebirth should command our most serious attention, because what they represent are indeed immensely positive transformations, which are impossible under any other conditions. The lame do not start walking, and the blind do not enjoy the sweet light of day; these miracles do not often happen. But the psychologically lame, the self-destructive and desperate, sometimes emerge from darkness and belie everything that happened earlier in their lives. In all conversion stories a past of doubt and error is transformed into a present of wholeness in one great moment of insight and certainty. This is a new birth, leading to a new life. And the new birth often follows reaching the lowest depths of despair, and consists of "an unexpected life succeeding upon death . . . the deathlike terminating of certain mental processes . . . that run to failure, and in some individuals . . . eventuate in despair" (James, 1900/1943, p. 303). And the new birth creates a wider belief in "a world in which all is well, in spite of certain forms of death, indeed because of certain forms of death—death of hope, death of strength" (p. 305).

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Our conceptual model views the source of self-reported rebirth in internal, conscious and unconscious conflicts. These conflicts are solved and a balance is reached through an attachment to a set of beliefs (delusional), specific ritual acts, changes in everyday behavior and functioning, and support by a group structure. The problem with psychological rebirth is its inherent instability. Real transformation is hard to come by. The illusion of rebirth may lead to good outcomes, but is often insufficient to maintain balance inside a personality system long beset by disharmonies and imbalances. This is clear when a variety of purely secular strategies, from psychotherapy to plastic surgery, are followed on the road to self-transformation. Testimonials of conversion tell us of a miraculous transformation, from darkness to a great light, from being lost to being found. There is a sharp contrast between earlier suffering and current improvements. The conversion narrative always includes a wide gap between the past and the present, between corruption and redemption. The power of transformation through enlightenment is proven through this gap. To illustrate the phenomenon of psychological rebirth, we are going to present a successful, almost perfect, case: The story of H (BeitHallahmi, 1992). This is a happy tale, a case in which the trauma of war is overcome through self-transformation, and no violence is contemplated. H, sitting across the table from me, as he told me his story in 1983, was unusually handsome, confident in his manner, and articulate. He was a chain-smoker, and looked more like an athlete than like the academic that he was. H really wanted to tell me the story of his individual salvation, his conversion from great misery to great happiness, a metamorphosis which only a few may know. His life was transformed in an instant of revelation, and he was telling me about that instant. Ten years before our meeting, in October 1973, he was wounded in battle, and his injuries, while not serious, left him handicapped psychologically and physically. He simply could not do anything, could not study or work. And so he stayed home, preoccupied with his narrowing world, considering ways of getting out of his predicament, including suicide. Then, one day, in one instant of revelation, he realized that there was an answer. It was in turning to the spiritual world, which existed, invisible, above and beyond our obvious material world on Earth. This world is only an illusion. It is the spirit world that determines what happens here, in the material one, through positive and negative energies. Death just means that the soul moves on. In that instant, his physical and psychological sufferings ended. He became committed to relations with the spiritual creatures inhabiting the invisible world and later formally joined one of the new religions. Now, he was no longer a member of that group, but held to a combination of Hindu and Jewish beliefs. The other dimension of living,

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that of the eternal soul, colored his perceptions of others and of his own experiences. He related to people on the basis of their spirituality. Some people were recognized as having "spiritual connections" with the invisible world. Others were judged inferior, lacking in spirituality. Events in this world were determined by spiritual "forces" and "energies." Political and ideological changes were the result of positive and negative "energies," which could be stored and used over time. Thus, there had been negative political developments in Israel since the 1967 War, caused by the release of enormous negative energy, stored for centuries around the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. These energies, left there by successive generations of praying and mourning Jews who came to the Wall to bewail their bitter fate, were let loose when structures around the Wall were torn down in June 1967 by the Israeli government. It will take time until the negative energies dissipate. On the whole, however, things in the Middle East were moving in a peaceful direction, as positive energies were taking over. He believed that death was not such a terrible thing, because it meant a liberation of the soul from its material shackles, but suffering, which often precedes death, is a problem. His attitude toward war was ambivalent, therefore, as it brought liberation to some souls, but suffering to others. While he was no longer a member of a recognized group or a movement, he met regularly with spiritual teachers, whose identities had to be kept secret. Occult knowledge was an important part of his life, but it was not shared with his academic colleagues. Such knowledge could be shared only with the saved and the enlightened. What he told me was more in the way of a personal odyssey, a miraculous transformation, but he was not sure that I could appreciate the fine points of his occult observations of people and events. H was really able to overcome the weakness of his own body and his own soul, and to give birth to a new self. Following a year of dark paralysis, he emerged to become a fully functioning member of society. Eventually, he became a well-known "spiritual teacher" himself, got married, had children, and made a living. Almost thirty years after his war trauma, he can be judged an impressive story of self-transformation. Actually, H is quite a narcissist, but a dose of narcissism may be good for you, especially when faced with a trauma as H once was. CONCEPTUAL INTERLUDE The presentation of this case is necessary and important because it represents all true believers (and especially leaders) we are going to encounter further on as we look at various movements and their visions. The case of H represents successful rebirth with a perfect balance. Similar individual cases may be easily found, but when we move to the group level, achieving balance is obviously much harder. Many

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groups of reborn individuals run into trouble sooner or later. This perfect case may still seem problematic to some, first, because of H's beliefs and values, which may seem immoral. But at another level, a psychological analysis may direct us to noting that cases of rebirth actually represent a way of expressing hostility toward one's parents. In terms of individual and family dynamics, every identity change is a rebellion against one's parents, who usually created the earlier identity, and against one's past. When a young individual, who grew up in the average family, joins a new religion, he is declaring a revolt against his parents. He may rebel also through finding a new, better parent in his secular psychotherapist, and psychotherapists are always better parents. The message of a child's conversion is often one of denouncing parental hypocrisy and shallowness. On a collective, generational level, finding new identities is a total ideological rebellion. The new religious identities constitute in many cases a rejection of the faith of the parents, and of the parents' everyday lifestyle. At the same time, the rebellion against the parents may also mean the assumption of the parental role. One great insight we were led to by classical psychoanalysis is that the child is totally confused by the notion of parenthood and family relations. Learning that we have two parents and that father and mother are also man and wife is beyond the child's comprehension at first blush. This oedipal confusion stays with all of us forever, processed, accepted, and sometimes denied. The denial of birth is no less important than the denial of death in the making of cultural fantasies. Both lead to much psychic tension, and sometimes to real violence. The idea of individual rebirth and world rebirth is a denial of the reality of our birth and our life so far. This denial of birth is an expression of our disappointment with our parents. Not only will we give birth to ourselves and to our new selves, and not only will the oppressed minority rule the cosmos, and not only will history end, but nature itself will stop its course of death and rebirth. The end of our surrender to the body and its many weaknesses will finally come. The eschaton is the time when human history ends and the laws of nature are abolished. Only the true believers, a small segment of humanity, have been chosen to share in the secret of total redemption and to bring it about. No wonder they feel superior to others, whose lives may be expendable, especially because the infidels are not entitled to eternal life. Sometimes our own parents and our own families are among those destined to perish on Judgment Day THE CASE OF THE IMMORTALS Let us now look at another example of miraculous rebirth, this time in the form of a group. It is known as People Forever International,

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formerly the Eternal Flame Foundation, and known also as the Arizona Immortals or the Forever People, and it is "dedicated to building a deathless world." It was founded in Scottsdale, Arizona, in the late 1960s by Charles Paul Brown (1935- ), a former Presbyterian minister and nightclub singer. In the spring of 1960, Brown had a vision of Jesus Christ together with the revelation of physical immortality as a reality, or "cellular awakening." The group's doctrine is connected to Christian theology, but claims that "death is actually a fabrication or lie imposed on our minds and bodies by a ruling death consciousness in order to control the species of man and keep him in eternal bondage There will never be lasting peace on earth until the LAST ENEMY OF MAN, WHICH IS DEATH is abolished.... Most religions believe that physical immortality will eventually take place in the bodies of mankind upon the earth. However, it is always projected into some future dispensation due to misconceptions and religious dogmas. We feel the time IS NOW for an immortal species of mankind to be birthed upon the planet" (quoted in Beit-Hallahmi, 1998, p. 277). Here is humanity's fondest wish, bluntly and directly expressed. And this is, of course, not unheard of in religious life. Father Divine, an African-American "messiah" famous in the first half of the twentieth century, was supposed to have given his followers everlasting life: "Many of us who are in this place will never lose the bodies we now have. God is here in the flesh, and he is never going away from us, and we will remain here forevermore. This is heaven on earth" (Fauset, 1944, p. 105). In People Forever International, ancient prophecies of the end of times are supposedly fulfilled as death is abolished. Members are reborn as immortal beings, according to their own testimony. What does this delusion do for its members? My own observations of the membership show that members who remain loyal to the group and to the idea of physical immortality are able to function quite well in society. They are far from delusional, despite the delusional nature of their beliefs, and some hold positions of power and wealth. They are totally nonviolent, and seem to have solved the problem of directing aggression. They still die, however, just like the rest of us, and explain deaths among members as evidence of insufficient faith or will power. THE ESCHATON To prepare for the creation of the new world, present reality needs to be destroyed and erased from memory. This will happen through trials and tribulations, whose detailed descriptions enable believers to indulge their violent imaginations and fantasize various forms of revenge on the wicked. In the individual imagination, the creation of the world equals birth, while the end of the world equals one's own death. The apocalypse is

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first the denial of death. It is a miracle where instead of death we should expect victory and rebirth in a perfect world. We will wake up in heaven, in a new reborn world. The dream of perfect rebirth demands first total destruction and only then rebirth. "For, behold, I create new heavens and a new earth: and the former shall not be remembered, nor come into mind" (Isaiah, 65: 17). Instead of facing death we reach rebirth and victory. In the words of ancient prophets, "Arise and sing, ye that dwell in dust" (Isaiah, 26: 19). Eschatological dreams promise us an end to the cycle of birth and death. In addition to our cosmic victory over nature, whose laws are to be abolished, there will be a human victory of our own group of the elect over all others. The believer is in ecstasy because near the eschaton he is living at the center of history and at the heart of the cosmos. This is the climax of the universal religious drama, played out on the cosmic stage. Following rebirth through blood and fire, birth and death will disappear. There will be no body, no aggression, and no sex. People will be liberated from the constant demands of the body and its impulses. Vivid fantasies about the destruction of the world are the consolation and the revenge of the downtrodden and the oppressed. The end of the old world is not only a cosmic victory over evil, but a response to frustration. Prophecies of earthquakes, epidemics, and floods, that only the elect are going to survive, are an immediate outlet for aggression. In the new world being born, the meek shall rule, after they inherit the Earth and all its riches. It seems reasonable to assume that as objective conditions become more difficult, and realistic coping does not lead to any change, humans will turn to imaginary ways of coping. Our thoughts about the end of the world have to do with what will happen to us at the end of times and that is our death. In the group fantasy about the end of times, shared by so many religious groups, they will die, following Judgment Day, and we will live forever, and rule the world. The dead will come back, but only if they are found righteous. What unites all religious fantasies about the end of times is the denial of death and the denial of birth. The self is able to create a new world, create himself anew by sharing the group fantasy of a new heaven and a new Earth. By undergoing individual transformation, one may join the elect and become part of the world-transforming project. This entails both honor and responsibility. The religious dream is about overcoming the limitations and presses of the body in life and in death, as well as the victory of justice over evil. The dream is of the resurrection, Judgment Day, and the abolition of death. The profane world of the body and its demands has to be destroyed. Who can resist the wishes for a victory of justice and life over evil and death?

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In conversion and rebirth we reinvent ourselves and even try to reinvent the world. What does the individual destroy when transforming oneself? An old identity, old body, old name, old social network. What do we want to destroy and get rid of? Ourselves, parts of ourselves, all others, or the world. Total destruction takes the place of pregnancy in giving birth to the new world. In the rebirth fantasy, I am the destroying and the procreating father. I am stronger than my own father, the man who created me. I am the creator. The world starts with me and it will end with me. If I die then the world ends. I want to be reborn, but only in a new world, made to my specifications. Religious fantasies often include ideas of bloody sacrifice ad gloriam dei, even when the world does not end. Cynically, we might suggest that religions advocate sacrificing others, rather than oneself, on the road to salvation. We may point out that the fantasy of a world without evil in the form of illness has cost the lives of many children. A case in point is that of the Faith Assembly, led by Hobart E. Freeman. In this group one hundred members and their children were reported to have died between 1970 and 1990, because of their refusal to seek medical care. Freeman himself, a scholar of Hebrew and Greek and the author of ten books which were well received within the evangelical Christian community, has been described as schizophrenic, but was able to persuade and control his followers to continue risking their own and their children's lives. He died in 1984, but his ideas live on among some (Beit-Hallahmi, 1998; Hughes, 1990). Freeman's victims are less well known than those of other deranged leaders, but some of his followers were convicted and sent to prison for what some observers called infanticide. Richardson & Dewitt (1992) note that public opinion "seems to favor protection of children over parental rights and freedom of religion," as it certainly should (p. 561). In fairness to some other believers and their fantasies, we should mention that selfsacrifice in the most literal sense has been a reality and an ideal in many traditions, in the form of martyrdom. Ostow (1986,1988) suggests that apocalyptic thinking is tied to the dynamic structure of the incipient psychotic episode, as in schizophrenia and borderline disorder. Libido is withdrawn from the world so that the latter disappears, to be replaced by a delusional fantasy of world rebirth. THE PREVALENCE OF APOCALYPTIC DREAMS In addition to the well-known end-of-times historical traditions, there are several interesting cases of new religious movements, founded since 1800, where apocalyptic dreams are prominent and sometimes lead to nonviolent acts, such as the stocking of food. In the Church of Jesus

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Christ of Latter Day Saints (Mormon Church) there is an expectation of upheavals and imminent disasters before the Second Coming, which would leave only the Mormons unharmed. This leads to a preoccupation with physical survival and the stocking up of emergency supplies of food and water in every Mormon home. Members are expected to have in storage one year's worth of food, in preparation for the coming global catastrophe. The Bahai movement, which started in the late nineteenth century as a heterodox Moslem sect and, having distanced itself from Islam, now claims to be a universal religion, preaches the religious unity of humankind and supports the ideal of a world government and the activities of the United Nations. Its founder, Baha'uTlah, is believed to be the messianic figure expected by Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, and Buddhism. With the coming of Baha'uTlah, the "Manifestation of God," a new era has begun, lasting 5,000 years. It will lead to the Bahai Cycle, lasting 500,000 years, but this will happen only after a global catastrophe and the disintegration of the present world order. Dissident Bahai groups in the United States have predicted catastrophic floods and nuclear wars for 1963, 1980, and 1995 (Balch, Farnsworth, & Wilkins, 1983; Smith, 1987). In the movement now known as Osho Meditation or Osho Friends International and formerly known as Rajneesh Foundation International (RFI), which was founded by Bhagwan Sree Rajneesh (real name: Chandra Mohan, 1931-1990), there were many proclamations of apocalyptic catastrophes. The movement became known for its emphasis on free sexual expression and the valuation of sexuality, described as part of the "tantric-oriented" tradition. At the same time, members were allowed no marriage and no children. There was a belief in an expected cataclysm that will end life on earth. Only Rajneesh followers may survive, and even that wasn't certain. In 1983 Rajneesh predicted an earthquake that would devastate much of the U.S. West Coast. In 1984 he announced that AIDS was the scourge predicted by Nostradamus, and billions would die from it within the next decade. This led to the use of various means of protection, beyond condoms, during sexual encounters. In 1985, the group's official publications predicted floods, earthquakes, and nuclear war within the next decade (Beit-Hallahmi, 1998; Belfrage, 1981; Carter, 1990; Gordon, 1987; Palmer, 1994). A modern version of the end-of-times fantasy is the move to another planet, following the total destruction of all life on planet Earth. These ideas have been known for at least fifty years (Festinger, Riecken, & Schachter, 1956), and have played a role in the tragedies of Heaven's Gate and the Solar Temple, where the collective death ritual was to lead members to a rebirth on another planet. We can readily conclude that violent end-of-times fantasies are quite prevalent in thousands of

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religious traditions, and may be even universal. What should concern us is how often will those fantasies lead to any violent actions. We may hypothesize that violent fantasies, as opposed to real acts, actually contribute to the achievement of an internal psychic balance. THE CASE OF THE GHOST DANCE: MASS SUICIDE? The Ghost Dance tragedy seems to us today like a mass suicide because we are faced with a totally nonviolent apocalyptic dream, the opposite of the eschaton, which led to a disaster. The Ghost Dance represented a traditional response to externally imposed oppression and deprivation and to an internal crisis of authority. Its doctrine was based on the theme of the coming triumph of the natives over the Europeans, material prosperity of the natives at the expense of Europeans, the resurrection of the dead and the return to precolonial blissful conditions, including the reappearance of buffalo herds. The eventual outcome would be a renewal of native existence, forever free of death, disease, and misery. To bring about this salvation, natives had to perform the sacred Dance. Believers were also exhorted to discard all warlike behaviors (La Barre, 1970; Lanternari, 1963; Miller, 1985; Mooney, 1973). The largest wave of the Ghost Dance native movement occurred in 1890 in the western United States, when forty-five North American tribes were involved. In 1890, the movement was inspired by the prophet Wovoka. In his visions, the native dead appeared around God's throne, and Wovoka received an assurance that he was the messenger of a messianic Kingdom, soon to be established under Jesus Christ. There the natives would recover their lands and their lost way of life, while the whites would disappear. The Ghost Dance itself was designed to secure communication with dead, hasten the coming of the messianic age, and gain further assurances for Wovoka's messages. Men and women, dressed in white, danced in circles, singing "revealed" songs and reaching ecstasy. Wovoka's followers also believed that they were immune to bullets. The Ghost Dance of 1890 ended with the massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, on December 29, 1890, in which Chief Sitting Bull and between 150 and 300 Sioux were killed. The Ghost Dance of North America has been compared to Cargo Cults, which is a collective term for a variety of nativist, syncretistic movements, which have appeared most often in Oceania, and promoted the belief in obtaining "cargo," or manufactured goods and wealth, through spiritual means. Sometimes the expectation is that ancestors would return, delivering the "cargo" (Lanternari, 1963; Maher, 1961; Worsley, 1968). In all these cases, as we judge them today, we regard the natives as victims of European colonization, and we recognize their depriva-

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tion and oppression. We should recall that earlier generations saw them as savages, committing acts of what today is called terrorism (which they sometimes did). BRAHMA KUMARIS AND THE HIDDEN DOCTRINE OF THE APOCALYPSE Sometimes, dreams of world destruction and rebirth are kept secret; in other cases, they are widely advertised. In the case of several wellknown new religious movements, there has been an expectation of an apocalypse which would spare only the membership, and which is kept secret. We are going to examine one such case in detail. Brahma Kumaris (Raja Yoga), officially known as the Brahma Kumaris World Spiritual University (BKWSU) or BK, and sometimes known as RAJA YOGA or World Spiritual University, is an international Hindu revival movement, founded in 1937 in Karachi by Dada Lekh Raj (1877-1969). He was a wealthy diamond merchant, who started having visions at the age of sixty and adopted the name of Prajapita Brahma. In the early 1970s, the group opened its first branch outside of India in London, and since then has spread to Europe, North and South America, Africa, and Australia. The group's international headquarters are located in Mount Abu, Rajastan, India. The group teaches the practice of what they call Raja Yoga meditation, which does not require the use of mantras, special postures, or breathing exercises, but focuses on visual contact with the founder's picture and with red lights representing the "supreme soul." The founder is regarded as divine, and members are devoted to loving him and fulfilling his commandments. Rules about ritual purity are strictly observed and they are very similar to those observed by Hindu Brahmins. There is a total suppression of aggression and sexuality in everyday life, and an ideal of love without sex, with much social support and positive expressions in interactions among members. The expression of any negative feelings is avoided, and there is no discussion of politics and social conflicts. Love is supposed to dominate life, even if physical love is absent, and they advocate pacifism. Courses in "stress management and positive thinking" are offered to nonmembers. Sexual activity is proscribed, and the sexes are strictly separated. It is suggested that this separation allows "released energy" to be used for meditation and good works. Members are known as BKs or brahmins. Most active members of the group are celibate women, and the leadership is not only exclusively female, but visibly feminist as well. While the requirements for full membership include a strict vegetarian diet, celibacy, and daily meditation, "partial members" are also recognized.

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Brahma Kumaris is an example of a success story. Its members have experienced a dramatic rebirth, giving up sex and aggression, and achieving bliss and balance. They have fulfilled part of the ancient prophecies about world rebirth. To all observers, Brahma Kumaris members look impressive. They are calm, kind, forever smiling, and promoting a culture of peace and beauty. They have created a "spiritual" reality. Most members are Indian women who have been born again as Brahmins, released from the bondage of being subservient women in Indian society, and becoming independent and enterprising leaders. But behind the bliss and human warmth lies a secret. Behind the mask of love and kindness hides seething aggression. Brahma Kumaris doctrine predicts a nuclear war which will come soon. Within a short time, this world war, together with a series of natural disasters, is expected to wipe out all of humanity, with the exception of the Brahma Kumaris membership. Following the destruction of humanity, a new era will begin, one of peace and prosperity. Procreation will take place spiritually, and that is why sex is already superfluous. This belief in the imminent apocalypse in the form of World War III is kept secret from nonmembers. Eschatological dreams are always like that. They include blood, fire, and heavy smoke covering the Earth. Following trials and tribulations, Judgment Day leads to the destruction of the wicked. In the case of Brahma Kumaris, we observe a jarring contrast between the total commitment to love and peace, constant smiles, and meditation to the sounds of beautiful music, and the secret fantasy of world destruction behind it. The contrast is even more shocking given the feminine and feminist nature of the leadership. This secret was revealed to me by mistake in February 1994 during a visit to Mt. Abu, and once the secret was out, group members and leaders were quite eager to offer detailed commentaries on world politics and military strategy. The case of Brahma Kumaris is interesting because of the presence of both a total suppression of sex and aggression and a secret dream of total destruction. Classical psychoanalysis, in what seems today an overly mechanical fashion, assumes that aggression, as a permanent instinctual force, must find its outlet either in fantasy or in action if a serious imbalance in personality functioning is to be avoided (cf. BeitHallahmi, 1971). If you are perfectly pacific and loving, where is your aggression going to go? Is the secret fantasy necessary for maintaining psychical balance? It should be emphasized that we have no reason to suspect that this fantasy is going to lead to any violent action. THE CASE OF THE BRANCH DAVIDIANS The tragedy of the Branch Seventh Day Adventists, commonly known as Branch Davidians, is well-known. Its members in its vari-

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ous organizational forms have followed of the teachings of Victor T. Houteff, who deviated from established Seventh Day Adventist teachings in the 1930s by predicting the coming of a Davidian kingdom in Palestine, preceding the Second Coming of Christ. In the 1960s, Ben Roden (7-1978) renamed the group Branch Davidians, and was succeeded by his wife Lois (1915-1986). Their son George Roden (1938-7) tried to become leader in the 1970s, but was then ousted by a new leader. This new leader was Vernon Wayne Howell (1960-1993), known after 1990 as David Koresh, who came from a Seventh Day Adventist family and grew up in that movement. Howell joined the Branch Davidians in 1982, became the lover of Lois Roden, and then assumed the leadership in 1987, after she died. Under his leadership, the group became known as "Students of the Seven Seals/' Howell claimed a revelation that showed him to be the seventh and final angel of God. He claimed to be the Messiah, and also had exclusive sexual access to all women members and their female children. In 1989 he officially announced to the members his rights to all females. Some followers left because of this announcement. At age twelve, girls were moved to gender segregated adult quarters, where they became available to Koresh. By 1993, there were more than a dozen women in the group who considered themselves wives to the leader. His legal wife, Rachel Howell (1970-1993) was married to him at age fourteen. Koresh gathered a veritable arsenal in the 1990s: 350 guns and two million rounds of ammunition, and gradually attracted official attention. On February 28,1993, the Mount Carmel compound near Waco, Texas, was raided by more than 100 agents of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF), searching for illegal weapons. The Branch Davidians opened fire, and four agents, as well as six group members, died. This led to a fifty-one-day siege by the FBI and the ATF, around what the Davidians now called Ranch Apocalypse. On April 19, 1993, as millions around the world watched the unfolding events on television with horror, the Mount Carmel compound went up in flames. We know now that the fire was started by group members. Eighty-six group members and their dependents died, including seventeen children. Five of the children were believed to have been fathered by David Koresh himself. Following the end of the siege, nine members of the group were sentenced to prison terms for their involvement, five of them for forty years (Beit-Hallahmi, 1998; Reavis, 1995; Wright, 1995). In the history of David Koresh, both sex and violence were heightened and visible, as was the prediction of the coming end. One aspect of the Branch Davidians tragedy which has received some attention is the sexual exploitation and domination of group members and their children by their leader. In 1989, Koresh dissolved all marriages in the

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group. He decided on a new policy, following a divine revelation. "The sexual practices of the Branch Davidians involved a strange mixture of celibacy and polygamy" (Tabor & Gallagher, 1995, p. 66). We all know what this mixture meant: celibacy for all men in the group, and polygamy for David Koresh, who monopolized all women, just like the primal old father in Freud's primal horde (Freud, 1913). Tabor and Gallagher even quote one member of the group as saying, "We as Branch Davidians aren't interested in sex. Sex is so assaultive, so aggressive. David has shouldered this burden for us" (Tabor & Gallagher, 1995, p. 72). Regarding the leader's sexual partners, Tabor and Gallagher (1995) report the following: After arriving in Mt. Carmel in 1981, Koresh had an affair with the sixty-seven- (or 69) year-old Lois Roden, the Branch Davidian prophetess, and announced that she would soon give birth to the Messiah. In January 1984 he legally married Rachel Jones, the daughter of a long-time Branch Davidian, Perry Jones. In 1986 he announced his "marriage" to fourteen-year-old Karen Doyle, whose father was also a group member of long standing. Later that year Koresh "married" Michelle Jones, twelve-year-old sister of wife number one. The contact with Michelle started in what seemed to some who were told about it by Koresh himself like a rape (Ellison & Bartkowski, 1995). Later he took at least three more wives, aged seventeen, sixteen, and twenty, who had children by him (see Tabor & Gallagher, 1995, pp. 4243). And later on we learn of another "wife," whose relations with Koresh started when she was thirteen. It is also clear that in some cases Koresh had sex with both a daughter and her mother. It has been alleged in the popular media that Koresh fathered numerous children in his many liaisons. Tabor and Gallagher (1995) report that he had fathered at least twelve children in the group. "During the March 7 videotape, which the group sent out. . . Koresh affectionately introduced all twelve of his children on camera and several of his wives ... he also held up photos of several of his 'wives' who had left the group. He had not always been so forthcoming. He realized that the practice of polygamy itself, not to mention sexual relations with girls as young as twelve or thirteen, could cause him serious legal problems" (p. 66). As a result, "he even arranged sham 'marriages' for his wives with selected male members" (p. 67). There was evidence not of violent potential, but of real murderous acts in Mt. Carmel long before the ATF got involved. In November 1987, David Koresh, fighting for the leadership of the Branch Davidians, was challenged by George Roden (the son of the two former leaders, whose mother Lois Roden was Koresh's lover) to a final showdown. Roden dug up the body of a Davidian who had been dead for twenty years and told Koresh to raise her from the dead, if he could. This led to a forty-five-minute gun battle in which Roden was slightly wounded. Koresh and seven of his followers were charged with attempted mur-

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der. The seven followers were acquitted, while Koresh won a mistrial and was never retried. George Roden left the group, and in 1989 shot his roommate and then cut the body to pieces. He was found innocent by reason of insanity by a court in Texas and hospitalized. In 1995 he escaped to New York but was caught and returned to Texas. The previous paragraph should at least raise some doubts in your mind as to whether the Branch Davidians were just like your average Texas family as far as firearms were concerned, and indeed, "when asked about the weapons . . . Koresh defended them as part of the biblical understanding of the group" (Tabor & Gallagher, 1995, p. 65). The confrontation between the Branch Davidians and the federal law-enforcement machinery had nothing to do with religion, and everything to do with guns. As Fogarty (1995) says, "They were defending their turf with guns, protecting their messiah with an arsenal. They seemed to have stockpiled their weapons with as much ease as they stockpiled feed for their animals. . . . It does not take a prophet, or a psychologist, or even a cult deprogrammer, to see that a little gun control might have gone a long way toward preventing this pending apocalyptic confrontation" (p. 14). THE CASE OF THE PEOPLES TEMPLE CHRISTIAN (DISCIPLES) CHURCH Popularly known as the Peoples Temple, this U.S. Christian group was one of the most notorious religious movements of recent history, becoming the subject of worldwide horror when 913 of its members committed suicide on November 18, 1978, in Jonestown, Guayana. It started as a typical, locally organized, lower class U.S. congregation, founded in 1956 in Indiana as the Community National Church, by James Warren (Jim) Jones, who was born near Lyon, Indiana, on May 13,1931. From early childhood he imitated preachers. According to some reports, he claimed being able to perform miracles soon after becoming a minister in Indianapolis. Jones later on practiced "faith healing" and his followers claimed various miracles attributed to him. He was very active in integration when the idea was quite unpopular, and he was always very popular with African-Americans. In the late 1950s, Jones started developing an integrated church. He became an ordained minister of the Disciples of Christ in 1965, and then moved to California with 150 followers, first to Ukiah and then to San Francisco. Most members were poor AfroAmericans, but Jones was able to establish ties with political leaders in the San Francisco area. Throughout its existence in San Francisco, Peoples Temple was actually a mainline Protestant congregation, belonging to the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). At the same time,

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based in the Fillmore district of San Francisco, it was a community of activists fighting racism and poverty. It operated drug rehabilitation programs, soup kitchens, and daycare centers. According to some reports, Jones was influenced by the Father Divine Movement (Fauset, 1944), and was addressed later on as "Daddy" Jones. In 1974 the group started gradually moving its members to the communal settlement of Jonestown, in Guyana, South America, and in 1977 Jones himself and several hundred followers moved there. The departure from California was caused by growing frictions with ex-members and critical media reports. During the 1970s, Jones was becoming increasingly abusive, dictatorial, and paranoid. Members were subjected to beatings, sexual abuse, and constant humiliation. In 1977, relatives of members and some ex-members described Jim Jones in more than just unflattering terms. There were reports of rehearsals for mass suicide in the Peoples Temple, which took place before 1978. There were very serious accusations, but still no one could have predicted what happened in November 1978. When U.S. Congressman Leo Ryan traveled to Guyana to investigate claims of abuse in the group in November 1978 he was received by Jones and shown around the settlement. After leaving the site, he and members of his party were murdered by Jones's guards. This led to the final scene of death in the commune. On November 18, 1978, 913 members died in a mass suicide on orders from Jones, who was among them. Most drank poisoned Kool-Aid; a few were shot. Among the dead, 199 were over sixty-five, 300 were under sixteen, and 137 were under eleven. It should be noted that most of the members who died with Jones were African-American females, a fact which faithfully reflects the nature of the membership (Beit-Hallahmi, 1998; Hall, 1987; Kilduff & Javers, 1978; Levi, 1982; Moore & McGehee, 1989; Naipaul, 1981). AUM SHINRIKYO: MASS TERRORISM AND THE APOCALYPSE Aum Shinrikyo, or Aleph, is an international group inspired by Buddhist and Hindu ideas, with branches in Japan, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Germany, Russia, and the United States. Aum was founded in 1987 by Shoko Asahara (1955-), whose real name is Chizuo Matsumoto. After visiting the Himalayas, Asahara claimed he had reached the highest stage of enlightenment and was ready to offer it to others. The group offers its members "Real Initiation," "Astral Initiation," and "Causal Initiation." The goal is "spiritual enlightenment," and according to its publications, "After passing through Earthly Initiation which purifies one's consciousness, Astral Initiation which purifies one's subcon-

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sciousness, over 2,000 members in Japan have promoted their spiritual growth remarkably, and experienced astral projection and feelings of supreme bliss within half a year" (quoted in Beit-Hallahmi, 1998, p. 35). Those who reach "spiritual enlightenment" will survive the coming global apocalypse. In the 1980s, the group's doctrine predicted the end of the world in 1997. Members are encouraged to leave their families and adopt a monastic life. They are also expected to sign over their worldly possessions to the group. In 1989, Tsutsumi Sakamoto, an attorney who was involved in suing the group, was murdered on Asahara's orders, along with Sakamoto's wife and son. During the same year, according to official charges, Shuji Taguchi, a group member, was also murdered on Asahara's orders. In June 1994, seven individuals were killed in Matsumoto, Japan, as a result of a sarin nerve gas attack carried out by the group. Then, on March 20, 1995, twelve persons died and 5,000 were injured in Tokyo following another sarin nerve gas attack in the subway, attributed to Aum. According to some evidence, the sarin gas was perfumed so as to make it attractive. Huge quantities of dangerous chemicals were found at group facilities later on. Scores of Aum members were arrested. After the attack, Asahara claimed that his followers were attacked by the U.S. military using "biological weapons," and that the huge chemical stores found at one of the group's compound were used to make "plastics, fertilizers, and pottery." Aum Shinrikyo was notorious in Japan long before the well-known 1995 terror events, and its belief system made it likely to attract less than friendly attention. Children in its schools were taught to regard Adolf Hitler as a living hero, and its official publications carried stories of the Jewish plan to exterminate most of humanity (Kowner, 1997). We know today that Japanese authorities were actually not just overly cautious, but negligent and deferential, if not protective, regarding criminal activities by Aum because of its status as a religious movement. "Some observers wonder what took the Japanese authorities so long to take decisive action. It seems apparent that enough serious concerns had been raised about various Aum activities to warrant a more serious police inquiry prior to the subway gas attack" (Mullins, 1997, p. 321). Based on what we know today, the group can only be described as extremely and consistently violent and murderous. "Thirtythree Aum followers are believed to have been killed between . . . 1988 and . . . 1995. . . . Another twenty-one followers have been reported missing" (Mullins, 1997, p. 320). Among nonmembers, there have been twenty-four murder victims. There were at least nine germ-warfare attacks by Aum Shinrikyo in the early 1990s, most of which had no effect (Reuters, 1998). One triple murder case in 1989 and another poison gas attack in 1994 which killed seven have been committed by the

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group, as well as less serious crimes which the police was not too eager to investigate (Beit-Hallahmi, 1998; Haworth, 1995; Mullins, 1997). Nor is it likely that this lethal record (77 deaths on numerous occasions over seven years) and other nonlethal criminal activities were the deeds of a few rogue leaders. Numerous individuals must have been involved in, and numerous others aware of these activities. On May 16, 1995, Asahara was arrested, and the group's many centers were raided. One raid of the headquarters showed that the group held $7 million in cash and ten kilograms of gold. In April 1995 Hideo Murai, the group's "science department" chief, announced that the group property holdings were worth $1 billion. He was then mysteriously killed two weeks later. Fumihiro Joyu was appointed group leader following Asahara's arrest, but he himself was arrested in October 1995. As of May 1998, 192 Aum Shinrikyo members have been charged with criminal activities (Reuters, 1998). Since then, many have been convicted and sentenced for capital crimes. Aum Shinrikyo's dream was to let the apocalypse start through mass terror attacks. The destruction of society was expected to lead to a new world, born out of chaos. THE CASE OF HEAVEN'S GATE Heaven's Gate, also known as Bo and Peep, or the Higher Source, was a Christian UFO group started in 1975 in Los Angeles by a former music professor, Marshall Herff Applewhite (1932-1997), and a registered nurse, Bonnie Lu Trousdale Nettles (1928-1985). They met in the early 1970s when Applewhite was hospitalized in Texas, following his dismissal from his teaching job in Houston. They called themselves Bo and Peep, and were also known as Winnie and Pooh, Chip and Dale, Do and Ti, "the Him and the Her," or "the Two," in reference to a New Testament prophecy about two witnesses. The group's doctrine was known as Human Individual Metamorphosis (HIM), aiming at the liberation of humans from the endless cycle of reincarnation. The leaders claimed that they would fulfill another ancient prophecy by being assassinated and then coming back to life threeand-a-half days later. Following the resurrection, they would be lifted up by a UFO to the divine kingdom in outer space. In preparation for the outer space journey, followers agreed to get rid of most material possessions and worldly attachments, including family and work. Members wore uniform clothing and identical haircuts. Marriage and sexual relations were also forbidden. Group members traveled around the United States recruiting new followers and proclaiming their prophecies. Followers were promised immortality, androgyny, and perfection, provided they followed the rules and ideas provided by the leaders. Bonnie Nettles died in 1985

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of cancer, and then the group started operating in complete secrecy. Applewhite told his followers that Bonnie Nettles was actually his divine father. In late March 1997, thirty-nine group members, including Marshall Herff Applewhite, committed suicide in Rancho Santa Fe, California, by ingesting barbiturates and alcohol. They were found lying on bunk beds, wearing cotton pants, black shirts, and sneakers. Most of them were covered with purple shrouds. They all carried on them passports and drivers' licenses, as well as small change. The victims ranged in age from twenty-six to seventy-two, but twenty-one were in their forties. There were twenty-one females and eighteen males. In videotaped statements read before committing suicide, members stated that they were taking this step in preparation for an expected encounter with extraterrestrials, arriving in a spaceship following the Hale-Bopp comet. It was discovered after their deaths that some of the male group members had been castrated several years before.

THE CASE OF THE SOLAR TEMPLE The Order of the Solar Temple (Ordre du Temple Solaire) was an international Rosicrucian-Christian group, started in the 1980s by Luc Jouret (1948-1994), a Belgian practitioner of homeopathy, and Joseph Di Mambro (1924-1994), a Canadian. The group was active in France and in French speaking areas of Canada, Switzerland, and Belgium. Joseph Di Mambro and Luc Jouret had between them a wide repertoire of fraudulent practices, from bad checks to homeopathy. The official belief system of the group, combining claims about "ancient Egypt," "energy fields," reincarnation, and the "Age of Aquarius," is so widely offered in hundreds of groups all over the world (cf. BeitHallahmi, 1992), as to be banal and harmless. But this was a highinvolvement group, not just a series of lectures. Members signed over their assets to the group, and according to some report it had more than $90 million. Jouret preached a coming apocalypse, for which members had to prepare by arming themselves. At the same time, there were promises of a "transition to the future," an afterlife for members on another planet near Sirius, the brightest star in the firmament. By the late 1980s, the Solar Temple was a target for anti-new religious movements (NRM) groups. In 1993, it became the target for police attention (for illegal weapon charges) and sensational media reports in both Canada and Australia. In July 1993 Jouret and two associates received light sentences from a judge in Quebec for their attempts to buy pistols with silencers. The early warnings were not heeded. The most sensational media reports, calling the Solar Temple a "dooms-

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day cult," turned out to be right on the mark. On October 4,1994, fortysix members and four children were found dead in two locations in Granges-sur-Salvan, and in Cheiry, near Geneva, Switzerland, and in one location in Morin, Quebec. The victims were shot and then set on fire; the leaders, who did the shootings, committed suicide. Five days earlier, two former members, and their infant son, were slaughtered in Quebec. On December 16, 1995, in a repetition of the same ritual, thirteen more members and three children met their death, laid out in a star pattern in the Vercors region of eastern France. The ritual killings were explained on the basis of the group's beliefs in a new life after death on another planet. "We leave this earth to rediscover a Plane of Absolute Truth, far from the hypocrisy and oppression of this world," said a collective suicide note. The killings in Quebec were explained as the result of the victims' disobedience to the leaders in having a baby without permission. It's possible that Di Mambro, terminally ill, wanted to take as many with him as he could. It is clear that many of the dead at this going-away party were murdered, some for revenge, while others were willing victims (Hall & Schuyler, 1997; Mayer, 1999). PSYCHODYNAMIC CONCLUSION The method we follow in this chapter has been called the hermeneutics of suspicion, but suspicion about stated motives and conscious goals is not enough. It should lead to analysis, which must appreciate the complexities of internal and external realities. But choosing the interpretive strategy of suspicion seems fully justified when we discover that behind public testimonies of happiness and joy lies despair, and behind vows of universal love lie murderous hate and wishes of annihilation. Dreams, innocent and pure, may give rise to madness and violence, as we cope, consciously and unconsciously, with the facts of birth and death, with the nature of our own birth to our own parents, and with the few choices we can make in our lives. The veneer of civilization, which we all proudly wear with pride, is awfully thin and likely to disappear in times of crisis. We should be suspicious, cautious, but compassionate as much as possible. The human condition, which we all share, is one of suffering and frustration, much of which could be avoided by human decisions and acts. Our emphasis on psychoanalytic interpretations and internal processes should not lead us to ignore external reality, which imposes pressures and demands. Violent acts are not only the result of internal fantasies, but sometimes a reaction to external violence. When and how do beliefs lead to action? We know that, in our secular world, religious beliefs most often predict other beliefs, rather than actions (Argyle & Beit-Hallahmi, 1975; Beit-Hallahmi, 1989; Beit-

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Hallahmi & Argyle, 1997). Assessing when people are going to act on their beliefs is one of our greatest challenges. Religion is defined through a unique system of beliefs that more and more often do not lead to action. When will dreams lead to action? When does peaceful and happy rebirth turn to violence? Fantasies of individual rebirth are so common as to be almost universal, and they are often not connected to religion or ideology. Religious dreams of world destruction and rebirth are also almost universal, and will rarely lead to violence. Our ability to recognize violent potential will remain limited, exactly because these cases are so unusual. LEARNING FROM DISASTERS What have we learned about the dynamics of destructive dreams from the recent tragedies of the Peoples Temple, Branch Davidians, Solar Temple, and Heaven's Gate? The dynamics we observe in these social movements are not just of ideological and organizational totalism, but of totalitarianism and fascism. We find total obedience to totalitarian leaders, which goes far beyond devotion (Freud, 1921). As Henderson (1975) so aptly reminds us, the recognition of evil within ourselves remains humanity's most important psychological challenge. That is why aggression is so easily externalized. In this situation, dreams of world destruction reflect disappointment and frustration. Mourning over our own misspent lives turns into aggressive fantasies. We find a leader even more deranged than anybody could imagine, at the head of a small-scale dictatorship system similar to the well-known dictatorships of the twentieth century. The questions we ask about these groups should be similar to the ones raised about historical fascist regimes (Adorno et al., 1950; Fromm, 1941). We can only speculate about the interactions between leaders and followers, but in all the cases described above we see an extremely narcissistic leader followed by a group of dependent, possibly borderline individuals. The feeling before the actual disaster is that the leadership, and the group, has reached the end of the road and is facing destruction or severe disruption by outside forces. For violence to appear, we need a relatively small group, totalitarian leadership, weapons, and real despair. Totalitarian leaders test their power over the membership through many displays of sadism and exploitation. The apocalypse may then follow. In the cases of Jonestown, Heaven's Gate, and the Solar Temple, suicide was the end of the world, because we, the group of the elect, were the world. Here the price of rebirth was actual, not imagined, death. It was the leaders, Jim Jones, Joseph Di Mambro, Luc Jouret, and Marshall Applewhite who decided to take their followers with them. Many of the victims had little choice.

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We looked closely at some n e w religions because it is easier to look at smaller groups, and some recent tragedies have been well researched, but this does not mean that there is no danger in the apocalyptic dreams of old religions. Some believers in those religions are ready to die for their faith, or kill others for its glory and for promised heavenly rewards. In the real world, faith is tied to identity and action, and the lethal struggles which often ensue are not over anything metaphorical. In Israel, Palestine, Sri Lanka, India, Iran, Afghanistan, and the United States, taking seriously our apocalyptically minded neighbors should be a most practical lesson. Those w h o say they wish to create a Kingdom of Heaven on Earth may be worth watching closely (cf. BeitHallahmi, 2001a). A saying attributed to Voltaire asserts that believing in absurdities will lead to the commission of atrocities. What Voltaire had in mind was clearly all religions, in all their manifestations. Another well-known judgment by Voltaire (1756) states that "religion is the chief cause of all the sorrows of humanity. Everywhere it has only served to drive m e n to evil, and plunge them in brutal miseries It makes of history an immense tableau of h u m a n follies" (in Essai sur les Moeurs et VEspirit des Nations, quoted in Smith, 1945, p . 25). Always politically incorrect, Voltaire displays no respect for any religion, of the kind that has become more common since his time. For Voltaire the violent potential, and violent reality, in religion of all varieties, is not an aberration. The destructive potential is so close to the surface that w e should be surprised only w h e n it fails to appear. NOTE This paper is an expansion of materials appearing earlier as "Rebirth and Death: The Violent Potential of Apocalyptic Dreams'7 in The Psychology of Terrorism, edited by Chris Stout, Praeger Press, and "Apocalyptic Dreams and Religious Ideologies: Losing and Saving Self and World," which appeared in The Psychoanalytic Review, special issue on death. REFERENCES Adorno, T. W., Frankl-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D. J., & Sanford, R. N. (1950). The authoritarian personality. New York: Harper & Row. Argyle, M., & Beit-Hallahmi, B. (1975). The social psychology of religion. London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Balch, R. W., Farnsworth, G., & Wilkins, S. (1983). "When the bombs drop": Reactions to disconfirmed prophecy in a millennial sect. Sociological Perspectives 26:137-158. Beit-Hallahmi, B. (1971). Sexual and aggressive fantasies in violent and nonviolent prison inmates. Journal of Personality Assessment 35: 326-330.

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Beit-Hallahmi, B. (1977). Identity integration, self-image crisis and "superego victory" in postadolescent university students. Adolescence 12: 57-69. Beit-Hallahmi, B. (1989). Prolegomena to the psychological study of religion. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press. Beit-Hallahmi, B. (1992). Despair and deliverance: Private salvation in contemporary Israel. Albany: State University of New York Press. Beit-Hallahmi, B. (1998). The illustrated encyclopedia of active new religions (Rev. Ed.). New York: Rosen Publishing. Beit-Hallahmi, B. (2001a). Explaining religious utterances by taking seriously super-naturalist (and naturalist) claims. In G. Hon & S. Rakover (Eds.), Explanation: Philosophical essays. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Beit-Hallahmi, B. (2001b). Fundamentalism. In J. Krieger (Ed.), The Oxford companion to politics of the world. New York: Oxford University Press. Beit-Hallahmi, B., and Argyle, M. (1997). The psychology of religious behaviour, belief, and experience. London: Routledge. Belfrage, S. (1981). Flowers of emptiness. New York: Dial. Carter, L. F. (1990). Charisma and control in Rajneeshpuram: The role of shared values in the creation of a community. New York: Cambridge University Press. Cohn, N. (1970). The pursuit of the millennium. New York: Oxford University Press. Ellison, C. G., & Bartkowski, J. P. (1995). "Babies were being beaten." In S. A. Wright (Ed.), Armageddon in Waco. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fauset, A. F. (1944). Black gods of the metropolis. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Fauteux, A. (1981). "Good/bad" splitting in the religious experience. American Journal of Psychoanalysis 41: 261-267. Festinger, L., Riecken, H. W., & Schachter, S. (1956). When prophecy fails. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Fogarty, R. S. (1995). An age of wisdom, an age of foolishness. In S. A. Wright (Ed.), Armageddon in Waco. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Freud, S. (1913). Totem and taboo: The standard edition of the complete psychological works ofSigmund Freud 13:1-164. London: Hogarth Press. Freud, S. (1916) Some character types met with in psycho-analytical work. SE 14 (pp. 318-324). Freud, S. (1915/1916). Introductory lectures on psychoanalysis. SE 15. Freud, S. (1921). Group psychology and the analysis of the ego. SE 18 (pp. 69143). Freud, S. (1928) A religious experience. SE 21 (pp. 167-174). Fromm, E. (1941). Escape from freedom. New York: Rinehart. Gordon, J. S. (1987). The golden guru: The strange journey of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. Lexington, MA: Stephen Green Press. Hall, J. R. (1987). Gone from the promised land: Jonestown in American cultural history. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books. Hall, J. R., & Schuyler, P. (1997). The mystical apocalypse of the Solar Temple. In T. Robbins & S. J. Palmer (Eds.), Millennium, messiahs, and mayhem. New York: Routledge. Haworth, A. (1995). Cults: Aum Shinrikyo. The Guardian, May 14,1995.

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Henderson, J. (1975). Object relations and the doctrine of "Original Sin." International Review of Psychoanalysis 2:107-120. Hughes, R. A. (1990). Psychological perspectives on infanticide in a faith healing sect. Psychotherapy 27:107-115. James, W. (1900/1943). Radical empiricism and a pluralistic universe. London: Longmans, Green. Kilduff, M., & Javers, R. (1978). The suicide cult. New York: Bantam. Kowner, R. (1997). On ignorance, respect and suspicion: Current Japanese attitudes towards Jews. The Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. La Barre, W. (1970). The ghost dance: The origins of religion. New York: Doubleday. Lanternari, V. (1963). The religions of the oppressed. New York: Knopf. Levi, K. (1982). Violence and religious commitment: Implications of Jim Jones's Peoples Temple movement. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Lincoln, C. E. (1961). The black Muslims in America. Boston: Beacon Press. Maher, R. F. (1961). New men of Papua: A study of culture change. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Mayer, J.-F. (1999). Les chevaliers de l'apocalypse: L'ordre de Temple Solaire et ses adeptes. In F. Champion & M. Cohen (Eds.), Sectes et Societe. Paris: Seuil. Miller, D. H. (1985). Ghost dance. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Milne, H. (1988). Bhagwan: The god that failed. New York: St. Martin's Press. Mooney, J. (1973). The ghost dance religion and Wounded Knee. New York: Dover. Moore, R., & McGehee, F. (1989). New religious movements, mass suicide, and Peoples Temple. Lewiston,NY: EdwinMellenPress. Mullins, M. R. (1997). Aum Shinrikyo as an apocalyptic movement. In T. Robbins & S. J. Palmer (Eds.), Millennium, messiahs, and mayhem. New York: Routledge. Naipaul, S. (1981). Journey to nowhere: A new world tragedy. New York: Simon & Schuster. Ostow, M. (1986). Archetypes of apocalypse in dreams and fantasies, and in religious scripture. American Imago 43: 307-334. Ostow, M. (1988). Apocalyptic thinking in mental illness and social disorder. Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought 11:285-297. Palmer, S. J. (1994). Moon sisters, Krishna mothers, Rajneesh lovers. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Reavis, D. J. (1995). The ashes of Waco: An investigation. New York: Simon & Schuster. Reuters News Service. (1998). Life sentence to Aum member for the poison gas attack. May 27. Richardson, J. T, & Dewitt, J. (1992). Christian Science, spiritual healing, the law, and public opinion. Journal of Church and State 34: 549-561. Robbins, T, & Palmer, S. J. (Eds.). (1997). Millennium, messiahs, and mayhem. New York: Routledge. Smith, P. (1987). The Babi and Bahai religions: From messianic Shiism to a world religion. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Smith, W. (1945). Therefore, stand. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House.

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Tabor, J., & Gallagher, J. (1995). Why Waco? Cults and the battle for religious freedom in America. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Turner, V. (1973). The center out there: Pilgrim's goal. History of Religions 12: 191-230. Wittenberg, R. (1968). Postadolescence: Theoretical and clinical aspects of psychoanalytic therapy. New York: Grune & Stratton. Worsley, P. (1968). The trumpet shall sound. New York: Schocken. Wright, S. A. (Ed.). (1995). Armageddon in Waco: Critical perspectives on the Branch Davidian conflict. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Zarifian, E. (1988) Ees jardiniers de lafolie. Paris: Odile Jacob.

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CHAPTER 5

Europe's Culture of Death Rudolph Binion

My subject is a macabre strain of European culture that was born of the same deathly mass trauma as was Europe itself. Such a twin traumatic birth sounds like idle rhetoric, yet it was sober fact. To start with the continent so born, it was not geographic Europe, to be sure, but psychological Europe—Europe as a felt identity, as a mutual affinity, shared beneath a whole mess of national and regional divides. Geography does not dictate such affective kinships or shared identities. Physical proximity need not promote them, nor will physical distance necessarily prevent them. No continental population except Europe's comes even close to feeling such an existential bond. Topographically, the European continent hardly invites human cohesion across the Alps from Scandinavia to Sicily. Nothing approaching later Europeanness shaped up west of the Urals in antiquity or in the early Middle Ages. The Roman Empire was Mediterranean: It excluded much that was territorially European and included much that was not. Besides, imperial Romans held invidiously aloof from their subject peoples. The Carolingian Empire, though bounded within territorial Europe, covered still less of it in area than did its Roman prototype, and it cohered by fealty rather than by communal spirit. Christianity spread farther across Europe than did either the Romans or the Carolingians, and it taught spiritual oneness within Christendom. But it was Oriental in origin, with non-European extensions and universal pretensions. Moreover, by the late Middle Ages much of Europe was

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still only poorly converted, with Christian brotherhood little more than a sermonic slogan for most nominal believers. Europeanness first became a reality, psychohistorically speaking, as a shock effect of the ghastliest human trauma on record: the one inflicted by the Black Death.1 This scourge, shipborne from Constantinople, struck Messina in Sicily late in 1347, gained the coastal mainland of Europe in early 1348, then spread north, west, and east until it reached Moscow by 1352. It was instantly fatal when it attacked the blood, almost instantly when, more often, it attacked the lungs, and within days when, most often, it attacked the lymph nodes, producing fearful pustules called buboes around the neck, armpits, or groin. But this last, bubonic line of attack, and it alone of the three, was not always fatal: About one victim in four survived. The Black Death recurred across Europe thereafter, mainly in this bubonic form. It recurred spottily and nonsynchronously, first at roughly ten-year intervals, then less and less frequently, and more and more locally, until the last epidemic outbreak of 1771-1772 in the Moscow area.2 The original, mammoth shock wave, the pandemic of 1347-1352, killed nearly one European in two, piling scarred, rotting, putrid corpses high on all sides. Wherever it struck, it struck indiscriminately as to age, sex, or social condition in town and countryside alike. It was above all this leveling effect of the pestilence as a social solvent that welded its traumatized survivors together across the afflicted continent. Europeans took it for granted at first that God was punishing the whole iniquitous human breed with cruel death, but when the plague in Europe came to a temporary halt around Moscow in 1352, with over half the population still alive, doctors began seeking natural causes for it instead. Those natural causes have yet to be found. Until recently a latenineteenth-century plague spread by rats and fleas from Hong Kong to Bombay and thence overseas was thought to have been the Black Death resurgent on a small scale, but this case of mistaken identity has lately been exposed (Cohn, 2002). Fortunately, the microbiology of the Black Death is not my subject. My subject is rather, as noted, a strain of European culture that derived from the Black Death and, as its vital context, the whole, comprehensive European group process set off by the Black Death. Actually that traumatic group process set off in Europe impinged not so much on culture in the first instance as on the epidemiology itself. I have said that nearly half of Europe's population succumbed to the pandemic of 1347-1352, that some three in four of those infected with the dominant, bubonic form of it perished, and that it recurred mostly in this form. It follows that at the outset, in 1347-1352, a good half of Europeans were naturally immune to the pestilence and that a fraction of the rest acquired immunity to it by contracting it and surviving. Hence wherever it then first recurred some

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ten years later, it ought normally to have infected only children up to about age ten. Their elders, as survivors of the initial pandemic, should all normally have enjoyed either natural or acquired immunity that second time round. But the children born since the first onslaught of the disease were bound to be largely vulnerable, as acquired immunity is nonhereditary and natural irnmunity is genetically contingent. And indeed, children were hit disproportionately hard in successive outbreaks, only never exclusively—far from it. The indication is unmistakable: Immunity was being lost, though less and less, from one bout of the plague to the next. Or in terms of group process, Europe stricken with the Black Death was reliving the shock again and again through immunosuppression even while combating it immunogenically—combating it, that is, by those naturally immune tending to breed more of their kind. To grasp this conflictual group process, with adaptive defense and traumatic reliving working at cross-purposes, it is important to bear in mind that, with groups no less than with individuals, disease is not simply the action of a pathogen on a host, but more complexly the interaction of the two. The Black Death, after having struck Europe from the outside the first time round, was endemic wherever it had struck and flared up periodically thereafter from the inside, much as a single human body carrying the germs of a common cold and defending against them immunogenically will "catch cold" whenever its resistance drops. In this European contest between group adaptation and group reliving, adaptation won out physically in the long haul inasmuch as the plague was licked in the end, after four-and-some centuries. But the reliving did not then cease for all that; instead it rebounded culturally in the figurative mode, as will be seen. Europe did not, though, wait four-and-some centuries, until the 1770s, to start reliving the trauma of the Black Death figuratively. On the contrary, the figurative paralleled the physical reliving from the late fourteenth century all through the fifteenth, flourishing in elite and folk culture alike. But the figurative reliving declined faster than the physical thereafter until it tapered off into near-total remission by the time of the Enlightenment. Of the diverse vehicles for that figurative reliving, I shall consider only the three most popular. The first was one of several preexisting allegorical themes that gained new currency in art and letters once the pestilence struck, whereas the second was a new allegory thrown up by the pestilence itself and the third was an allegorical spinoff of the second. The preexisting allegorical theme that the Black Death boosted specially high was the Triumph of Death. Triumphant Death emerged on a pale horse in thirteenth-century illuminated manuscripts from behind the fourth of the seven seals broken in the Book of Revelation. That fourth Rider of the Apocalypse was at first a sinister bearded

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man or else a clawed, winged, hairy demoness, but both gradually metamorphosed into a male corpse or skeleton.3 By 1348 the Triumph of Death had become a minor specialty of Italian art, though in combination with other allegorical themes as a rule—with the Triumph of Christ in an Allegory of Sin and Redemption at the Pinacoteca of Siena, or again with the Three Quick and Three Dead in Francesco Traini's famed fresco in the Camposanto of Pisa. After 1348, however, it took off on its own and spread far and wide, with Death now personified quite uniformly as a grim, leering skeletal mummy victimizing whole multitudes drawn from diverse walks of life: witness the chilling fresco painted around 1445 for the Sclafani Palace in Palermo. In the supreme, quite late specimen in paint, the elder Pieter BruegeTs monumental panel of about 1562 in the Prado, Death is ubiquitous, insatiable, and ghastly. In the supreme literary specimen, on the contrary, Petrarch's posthumous Triumphus mortis begun promptly under the shock effect of the initial pandemic, the aged poet made his peace with death even while in his correspondence he was incessantly mourning his nearest and dearest lost to the pestilence. In all post-1348 depictions of the Triumph of Death, Petrarch's poetic reconcilement aside, Death's ravages were sudden, massive, cruel, and indiscriminate. And indeed, this combination of sudden, massive, cruel, and indiscriminate was the distinctive traumatic impress of the Black Death, its sinister signature. The Black Death trauma itself gave rise almost out of nowhere to the most popular artistic channel for reliving it vicariously, one with just a few older folk elements mixed in: the Dance of the Dead.4 The indications are that the Dance of the Dead, or danse macabre, was performed first, then also poetized, and finally painted as well. Before the fifteenth century was out it had been traced on the walls of churches and charnel houses across Europe besides being circulated in prints, chapbooks, and books of hours galore. Germany and France dispute the literary priority for it; an original south German Dominican authorship within a few years after 1348 is likely, though a French text of the later fourteenth century inspired foreign imitations as no German version ever did. In its basic form, victims from Pope and Emperor or King all the way down the medieval social scale are brusquely danced off to damnation in a row one after the other, each by his own figure of death fiddling or drumming, trumpeting or piping, all protestations and supplications notwithstanding. In this stock scenario of wholesale, serial slaughter, the replay of the plague trauma was transparent, though with departures from the original that are routine in traumatic reliving. Already by reconfiguring it imaginatively in dance and music, verse and image, Europeans took imaginary control of the massive catastrophe that had in fact caught them short. They also scaled its toll up to the limit in that the stereotypical victims comprising all

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social categories stood for not just anyone, but everyone—for European society as a whole. And every victim was danced off to hell no matter what: Sudden death was escalated to sudden damnation. To the standard opposite effect of tempering the traumatic blow, the Dance assimilated the rampant, ghastly Black Death to the ineluctability of death no matter what—to death as our fated common lot, plague or no. Finally, built into the Dance of the Dead, as into all traumatic replays, was a failing effort to ward off the traumatic blow—to hold real death at bay apotropaically by its emblematic presence. The dance motif in particular had this magical purpose, dancing being popularly regarded as a specific against death. In the same vein, that graveyard Dance of the Dead threw back to the dance of love, a venerable fleshly frolic at pagan funerals meant to counteract or cancel the particular death at hand. Beneath its grim exterior, then, the Dance of the Dead sneaked that sexy pagan revelry into death—and indeed, over time the death figures grew weirdly jocular in popular engravings, as if they shared in some naughty, roguish secret. They also grew less impudent toward the newcomers to death as they contracted from dance partners one-on-one into a single sermonizing dance master. The Dance of the Dead therewith evolved into an abstract Dance of Death, a metaphoric image of dying detached from its traumatic referent (Rosenfeld, 1954, p. 83), before it lapsed from the popular cultural repertory after about 1600. In a collateral development, what began as a procession of new dead herded together to dance in step got broken up by engravers into separate tableaux, most famously by Hans Holbein in 1524-1525, with the result that the promiscuous mass impact of the Black Death ceased showing through the surface of the Dance of the Dead. In addition, from one version of the Dance to another the stereotypical cast of characters varied even as it tended to lengthen over time. An unusually radical new departure was the publisher Guyot Marchant's Danse macabre desfemmes of 1486, one year after his bestselling Danse macabre des charniers des Saints-Innocents a Paris had reproduced the celebrated mural and verses of 1424-1425 from the charnel house of the Holy Innocents in Paris. These innovations—excerpting one-on-one encounters with death from the Dance and adding new categories of victim, especially female—opened the way for the derivative motif of Death and the Maiden. This motif emerged in German art around 1500. At its most naive, it consisted of a lush lass in the nude about to be, or even already being, grabbed by a grinning mummified or skeletal rapist devoid of the anatomical wherewithal to follow through. This crude, stunted erotic thrust went all-out in a 1517 panel by Niklaus Manuel Deutsch that today hangs in the Kunstmuseum of Basel: There the bosomy Maiden is clad for a change, but she makes up for it by guid-

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ing the hideous intruder's hand up her skirts at front center, soon to be dead center. More was left to the imagination in every case by the prolific master of Death and the Maiden, Hans Baldung Grien. And a Rhenish folk rhyme of the time, "Death and the Maiden in the Flower Garden/' 5 carried only a muffled hint of deathly sexual traffic, and next to none of luscious female flesh a la Hans Baldung. In that ravishing flower garden, "Grim Death/' armed with a scythe, will not let the tender Maiden off the hook for love or money. Just join the dance, he tells her: The worms are waiting to devour your beauty. Scorning her tears, he grabs her "in the middle, where she was weakest," and hurls her to the ground to die writhing. That tender Maiden's cruel fate brought this whole sadistic, misogynic offshoot of the Dance of the Dead to a near halt—until further notice. I have mentioned the skeletal or mummified figures of Death in the early allegorical art reflecting the Black Death. The dead and dying on their side were no more realistically rendered in that early allegorical art or for that matter in nonallegorical plague scenes, even bubonic hecatombs drawn into chronicles that, by contrast, contained graphic verbal accounts of the bodily ravages wrought by the plague. Not until the late baroque did plague casualties begin to look the part in art, and even then the plague sores—the buboes—were sketchily simplified and ill-positioned or else, most often, omitted altogether. Nor were death and dying any more starkly rendered in the allegorical verses that derived from the Black Death.6 In brief, poetry and the pictorial arts shied away from the Black Death trauma in the raw. It was not that poets and artists lacked the needful skill to render the physical aspects of death and dying. On the contrary, Francois Villon was one of a swarm of vivid postplague poets of carnal rot, and so-called transis, or gruesome mortuary effigies of the dead decomposing, were sprinkled across Europe in the wake of the Black Death. But only where the traumatic Black Death was neither literally nor even figuratively invoked did the physical horror of it gain entry into poetry and art. Another aspect of the cultural repertory spawned by the Black Death is striking when seen in the perspective of its later revival: Throughout nearly its entire first run its erotic component was kept under tight wraps. Attempting to reconcile with a deathly trauma after the fact can involve, among other ploys, that of eroticizing it in the compulsive recalls or replays that ensue. Not even the Black Death escaped this fate. It might seem at first blush that little could be more grotesquely inappropriate to the ghastliness of the Black Death pandemic than for its posterity to have twisted it in the direction of a sexual orgy. Yet consider the suggestive effect on survivors of unburied naked dead, male and female together, heaped up promiscuously high, or again of plague sufferers, especially women, running naked outdoors in the

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heat of their agony. Whatever served as the stimulus, it is a matter of record that the pestilence did work as an aphrodisiac. Fertility both legitimate and illegitimate rose with the death toll, and chroniclers attested to the sexual license, or last-fling mood, that gripped much of the plagued populace, and not least the numerous monks and nuns, as in Boccaccio's Decameron. No overt obscene abuse of the victims of the Black Death transpired on the surface of its allegorical reruns even if sex with a sadistic twist did leer through the odd conceit of tortured mass death as a dance of the damned. Sex first poked out partway into the open through Death the rapist grabbing the tender folk Maiden in her soft middle, then poked out all the way through Niklaus Manuel's lewd Death feeling up the buxom Maiden with her manual compliance. If the Grim Reaper as grim rapist personified the traumatic Black Death, his compliant victim personified traumatized Europe physically reliving. But hardly did its latent erotic thrust poke through the surface of Death and the Maiden than the whole Black Death repertory fast sank into oblivion until the pestilence itself was laid to rest. It was laid to rest as a mass contagion in 1772 with over 100,000 victims right where it had first halted in 1352: in Moscow and points south. Europe's self-immunization had won out definitively over its immunosuppression—over physical reliving. But Europeans terminated their physical reliving only to resume the figurative reliving that they had long since left behind. After 1772 they punctually revived the cultural repertory of the Black Death long left in abeyance—revived it item by item, but also with variations galore now frisky, now fretful, and with free and wild improvisations in between, all in a new vein of uninhibited fantasy play at a safe remove from its horrendous real-life referent—from the pus boils, sweat, fever, stench, and decay of the Black Death itself. The revival of the cultural menu of the Black Death was facilitated by the overall medieval revival then in its fanciful beginnings in Europe: Horace Walpole acquired the site of his pseudo-Gothic mansion, Strawberry Hill, in 1747 and penned his Gothic nightmare, The Castle of Otranto, in 1765, while in the early 1760s James Macpherson reinvented the Gaelic bard Ossian in fabulous forgeries that swept Europe. Then in 1773 the whole Black Death cultural legacy resurfaced, overwritten and yet unmistakable, in the irresistible kitsch of Gottfried August Burger's mock folk ballad Lenore.7 Burger's sad heroine, Lenore, bounds out of deep dreams at dawn wondering: "Are you unfaithful, Wilhelm, or dead?" And indeed, her betrothed is not among the soldiers filing home that day from the wars. She despairs of God's goodness and yearns for death until toward midnight Wilhelm comes clattering to her on horseback. Unwilling to rest first even a moment in her arms, he has her mount behind him and gallop a hundred miles

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to their bridal chamber where, he says, the wedding guests are waiting. "The dead ride fast," he tells her repeatedly. Along their way he induces a chanting funeral procession to put its burial on hold and come sing them to bed at their wedding feast. Next he sweeps along an "airy rabble" that they encounter dancing around a gallows: "Come dance us to bed with a bridal round!" he cries. At last, declaring their ride over, he crashes the gate of a cemetery; his uniform and then his flesh drop from him bit by bit, revealing a skeleton with hourglass and scythe; his black horse rears and vanishes in flames, the air howls, the tombs wail, and the spirits dance around Lenore in her death throes, singing: "May God have mercy on your soul!" Here was Death triumphant in its old, familiar incarnation except that its pale horse had blackened. Here too was Death surprising the Maiden except that Death had come in sly disguise as a lover home from the wars. And here, most strikingly for Burger's readers, was the Dance of the Dead, itself back from the dead—choreographed anew three times over, however, and now with a single victim, Lenore, who moreover had ample cause for damnation, having despaired of God, and who was not compelled to dance along. Burger set the style for the revival of the post-1348 culture of death by playing free and loose with its received elements in his eerie Lenore. At the same time, and most tellingly, he brought out into the clear light of night, to top the new morbid cultural agenda, the erotism latent in the old Dance of the Dead, for Wilhelm alias Death conveys Lenore to their "bridal bed" in a graveyard to the frenzied rhythmic beat of fully three nuptial rounds. Burger's ballad was cited, recited, translated, illustrated, and imitated across Europe through the whole long nineteenth century ahead. Still more to the point, after Burger's takeoff on the Dance of the Dead, an antiquarian concern for the authentic original text, imagery, music, and choreography of the Dance rose high on the agenda of Europe's culture of death: Witness the huge and, despite its pretensions, somewhat fault-ridden French volume of 1852 titled The Dances of the Dead. Historical, philosophical, literary, and musical researches and disquisitions on the various monuments of this kind that exist or have existed in France as well as abroad and accompanied by a forty-four-page instrumental and vocal would-be authentic recreation of the original funerary round (Kastner, 1852).8 Pardonably less antiquarian were the wild graveside rondo concluding Berlioz's Symphoniefantastique, Liszt's flamboyant Totentanz, Saint-Saens's grisly Danse macabre, Mussorgsky's somber Songs and Dances of Death, and Glazunov's colorful From the Middle Ages. Burger's ballad featured the Dance of the Dead above the other set pieces from the Black Death repertory. Of these others, Death and the Maiden came into its own next with eclat in an exquisite eight-line lyric of 1775 by Matthias Claudius bearing that title.9 In the first of

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Claudius's two stanzas, the Maiden strikes her old note of anguish as she begs the cruel boneman to spare her youth. In the second, the boneman strikes a radically new note by replying that, far from being cruel, he comes as a kindly friend and, for a clincher, bidding her sleep softly in his arms. Death the sadistic rapist had turned into a soporific seducer. This new note sounded by Claudius resounded in Schubert's song and quartet Death and the Maiden as also later in the serenade from Mussorgsky's Songs and Dances of Death. The turnabout initiated by Claudius, with Death no longer a villain and the Maiden no longer a victim, was complete by the time of Edvard Munch's engraving of 1894 of a bold Maiden hugging a scrawny boneman to death. As for the third leading allegorical motif that had reflected the Black Death in its aftermath, Death riding a pale horse roughshod in triumph over a slew of victims, Benjamin West resuscitated it in successive versions of his Death on a Pale Horse beginning in 1783 and culminating in his spectacularly horrific canvas of 1796 now in the Detroit Institute of Arts. In this powerful masterwork, West's mass murderer, like Bruegel's, appears in several incarnations galloping in as many different directions. Unlike Bruegel's, however, or any others of the earlier breed, West's equestrian killers are full-bodied humanoid brutes rather than stereotypical skeletons or mummies, and his victims are creatures of flesh and blood, unstylized and pitiable if also extravagantly theatrical. Not just those three specific topoi were resurgent after 1772 out of the cultural complex spawned by the Black Death; that complex revived in its entirety, accompanied by outright recalls of its traumatic source. Baron Gros painted Napoleon in 1799 visiting the plaguestricken in Jaffa, where the bubonic affliction was still active; then Goya and Gericault both painted sufferers from the plague as if in contemporary Europe, where it was no longer active.10 Just as the charnel house of the Innocents in Paris was a public concourse in the time of the plague, so did the Paris morgue draw steady streams of strollers in the decadent fin de siecle. A macabre modern counterpart to the balladist of the Innocents, Frangois Villon, was Gottfried Benn with his volume of exquisitely morbid verse, "Morgue" of 1912. On the fantasy side meanwhile the received cluster of themes that allegorized the Black Death was continually renovated and amplified. After Matthias Claudius the death figure metamorphosed in the main into a temptress or seductress—one now beguiling as in Gustave Moreau's inverted Death and the Maiden, The Young Man and Death, now voluptuous and ghastly both at once as seen by Flaubert's Saint Anthony, now revolting yet riveting as in Ibsen's Little Eyolf.11 Skeletons lost their monopoly on dancing in or into death, and they lost it above all to light-clad maidens as in Adolphe Adam's ballet Giselle, in Puvis de Chavannes's

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Death and the Maidens,12 or in Giovanni Pascoli's Elegies. Death's pale horse, for all its scriptural authority, was succeeded by a blue and green dragon with black wings in Arnold Bocklin's Plague.13 And the old allegorical themes were put to new metaphorical uses, as in Strindberg's Dance of Death about a couple goading each other round and round in a deadly marital rut. All in all, the latter-day variations on the old repertory numbers differed from the originals in three striking ways. The first of these, already glimpsed, was that once the erotic underlay of the Dance of the Dead and especially Death and the Maiden had come out of concealment in Burger and Claudius, death was eroticized to the hilt culture wide from the romantics to the decadents. Thus eroticized, it ran the whole gamut from cruel to tender as in Burger and Claudius respectively, only far more pronouncedly than in either. Both extremes, cruel and tender, might even meet in the selfsame work. It would take a whole book just to suggest the main twists and turns of the pornography of death that pervaded the entire nineteenth century with its titillating corpses and sexy skeletons from the Gothic novel through the Yellow Nineties to just short of the literal triumph of death on a rampage in World War I. In fact I did already survey the subject in a short book called Love Beyond Death (1993) without, however, tracing the rich morbid literary, artistic, and musical material back to the Black Death as its source. Suffice it here to single out two illustrative specimens from the middle of the nineteenth century, one painting and one sculpture, each a macabre marvel, and to note the Black Death referents of each in turn. In my pick of a painting, La belle Rosine of 1847 by Antoine Wiertz,14 the title figure, a statuesque, ornately coifed, elegantly undraped artist's model, stands facing an armless, legless skeleton suspended by a hook atop its crackly skull. It stares sightlessly and grins liplessly at beauteous Rosine. Rosine stares back serenely and a trifle wickedly. Her luminous flesh obscures the rest of the artist's studio. Her long neck flows gracefully into her spine at an angle reflecting the slow curve of the skeleton's vertebrae. A tag above the empty socket in the visible side of the skeleton's skull reads: "La belle Rosine." So the skeleton is, or: will be, Rosine's own. It and Rosine both alike are part of the paraphernalia of the studio, a fit setting for an ironic modern vanitas such as this. The classic vanitas arose in the late Renaissance and flourished in the baroque. It was the last iconographical offshoot of the Black Death. In legends from long before the Black Death, life-loving mortals frequently ran up against their future death in the form of others' mortal remains. Thus in the fable of the Three Quick and Three Dead, three corpses admonish three dashing cavaliers: "What you are, we once were; what we are, you shall be." In the poems called Vado Mori (I

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Am Going To Die) that spread through western Christendom beginning in the thirteenth century, death was still future, but imminent. And there as elsewhere it was terrifying. Its terror for medieval Christians was not so much that of fleshly rot (for the flesh would be resurrected) as of eternal damnation if death caught them unprepared. The Black Death most often did just that. In the Dance of the Dead the new dead have been caught unprepared and are being danced off to damnation without having had the chance to divest themselves of their worldly apparel and mindsets. In Death and the Maiden too, the Maiden is caught off guard by Death, but unlike the new dead in the Dance of the Dead she is still on the life side of the great divide. The vanitas, finally, was back in the thick of life, with death seemingly remote but therefore only the more insidious. That is, death was quite future in the vanitas as in the Three Quick and Three Dead, yet present in particular to a woman at her mirror in the guise of a skull or skeleton lying or lurking beside her or else, most expressively, reflected in her mirror. Seen against this full background, La belle Rosine is tantamount to an anti-vanitas, a Maiden's revenge (or a non-Maiden's), and a triumph over Death. Fair Rosine being a model whose job is to look lovely and be copied, Wiertz needed no mirror for her. Unlike the Maiden of old, she stares the unscary boneman down. And she triumphs over death through a body language signifying that her future, brittle skeleton means no more to her proud spirit than the bygone bogey of damnation means to her self-contented post-Christian flesh. Where the old vanitas was ostensibly a put-down of the flesh, its subtle, suggestive boost to carnality in the woman-at-her-mirror variant came out of denial in Wiertz's La belle Rosine. The sculpture I have chosen to focus on—Emile Hebert's enigmatically titled Et toujours! Et jamais! (Both Ever and Never!) of 185915— outdid even La belle Rosine in eroticizing the Black Death legacy. Hebert's statuette is first off a Death and the Maiden in the Matthias Claudius lineage, though with the Maiden already sleeping snugly in her ravisher's arms. It is the farther removed from the traditional Death and the Maiden for being set on the nether side of mortality like the old Dance of the Dead. A dead man has risen from the grave to receive the exquisite Maiden only after she is beyond protesting or resisting as her predecessors had done. His burial shroud hangs in tatters around him, and his tombstone is turned up at his feet. He is no generic figure of death, no stylized mummy or skeleton; he is rather a particular, individuated, naturalistically rotting corpse—a transi. But the transis in their time had conveyed the message that they were rotting here and now only to be resurrected later, when their old physique would be reconstituted enduringly at its ideal best, as if worked over by celestial beauticians. That personalized ideal form was often sculpted

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above them, even with an explanatory inscription for good measure. Hebert's creepy phantasm, on the other hand, conveys no hint of a resurrection ahead. It hints on the contrary at the corruption in store for that ideal female form shown dozing off into death. The transi's reminder of fleshly rot ahead for her too only heightens the Maiden's allure in her last extremity of limp and drowsy lifelikeness,16 the way, a generation later, Sarah Bernhardt upped her sex appeal by sleeping in a coffin (Dijkstra, 1986, pp. 45-46). This heady sex-death mix pushed to the outre limit was, then, new to the Black Death thematic complex as it revived after Burger's Lenore. Equally new was that the depiction of death and dying was also pushed to the outre limit within that old complex as it revived. The transis in their time had been kept apart from the rest of that old complex, as if quarantined; now they were fully integrated into the rest of it, as in Hebert's statuette. It was hard to top the original transis for their gruesome accent on decomposing flesh, but romantics, symbolists, and decadents alike kept trying: Even the corrupt carcass on the receiving end of Hebert's sepulchral twosome came short of the one in Baudelaire's "La charogne," its legs akimbo like those of a woman in heat.17 While most modern poets or artists of loving Death merely glamorized single putrid corpses, Georg Heym hallucinated whole landscapes littered with them in his haunted, haunting Der ewige Tag (The Eternal Day) of 1911. The mid-century realists on the other hand went all-out the opposite way: They carried to an anesthetic extreme the dispassionate depiction of death and dying in its physical aspect that was conspicuously wanting in the art and literature of the plague in its own time. True, the transis and Villon's verses had rendered bodily death naturalistically instead of stylizing or allegorizing it, but they had also expressed intense feelings about it, lent it metaphysical meaning, dramatized it, flooded it with a lurid light. So had the later macabre masters from baroque Valdes Leal to Goya and Gericault. And so, alongside the realists, did Hebert and Baudelaire. At the top of the realists' agenda, on the contrary, stood the felt need to despiritualize death, to physiologize it all-out, to assimilate it to a still life, to reduce it to a mere "visual fact" (Nochlin, 1971, pp. 64,57-101). This impassive realist take on death right within the figurative return of the Black Death was a classic identification with the aggressor, an identification with Death triumphant—a reminder, if one were needed, that the periodic physical reliving of the Black Death had likewise turned on an identification with that same aggressor. The third striking way in which the fanciful figurative relivings of the Black Death after its physical demise differed from their period prototypes was the ironic touch, or tongue-in-cheekishness, that now

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suffused them. Already in some late illustrations of the Dance of the Dead from the waning of the Middle Ages, the piping or fiddling Death figures would cavort and cut capers with unseemly levity. Ever so much more burlesquely make-believe were their modern successors—a buried couple's "unearthly sighs" in Thomas Lovell Beddoes's aptly named Death's Jest Book, or Heinrich Heine's copulating corpses, or Maurtice Rollinat's "macabre mistress" and "skeletal miss," even if Beddoes did commit suicide and Rollinat did go mad (cf. Binion, 1993, pp. 9-10,14, 88). La belle Rosine is nothing if not black humor, and Et toujours! Et jamaisl is as ambiguously playful as its title. Benjamin West's Death on a Pale Horse, for all its visionary intensity, has been called "a kind of emotional charade" (Rosenblum & Janson, 1984, p. 59), and Bocklin's apocalyptic dragon, for all its ferocious voracity, has no little look of a circus freak about it. To recur to the Burger and Claudius ballads at the start of the cultural recycling of the Black Death, they were both pastiches from the word go. That recycling turned the traumatic mass massacre by the Black Death into a festival of morbidity often verging on a spoof. It was as if celebrants of this somewhat facetious cult of death that built up with the plague safely behind them were saying: Now we're in the clear, now we can go the limit, it's not for real any more. That going the limit was the escalation, and that touch of unreality was the denial, that are both routine in traumatic reliving. Back to square one. Once Europeans got the Black Death out of their conjoint system physically, they relaunched and revamped the artistic repertory through which they had vicariously relived its traumatic debut for a couple of centuries afterward. In brief, they "re-relived." They had relived its traumatic initial onslaught physically as well as figuratively over that first, deathly stretch; they re-relived it figuratively alone. In re-reliving it, they hyped up the sex that they had censored out of the earlier reliving, and they paraded the body rot that they had shied away from in the earlier reliving. The Europe that thus relived and then re-relived a deathly trauma was itself a product of that trauma. Unsurprisingly, it has borne an indelible traumatic birthmark ever since. The Black Death had struck to kill in all walks of life indifferently. The traumatic bond that resulted was a crisis solidarity in the face of a deadly common danger, and that solidarity has operated subsequently on the deepest existential level, invisible to the naked eye but sharp and clear when seen through the prism of group process. Its operations are not necessarily relivings. No traumatized subject can be forever reliving. Indeed, some traumatized subjects never relive. Most just remember their trauma incessantly instead. Next-most defend incessantly against its recurring—or rather, unconsciously, against its occurring in the first place. Europeans, however, put

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thoughts of the Black Death behind them with astonishing alacrity after its horrendous initial impact and defended less than obsessively against its recurrence. But relive they did. Reliving, whether physical or figurative, is remembrance in action, only that remembrance in action is unconscious: No one watching or performing the Dance of the Dead recognized it as the reliving it was. Traumatized Europe's actions in concert have been discontinuous— episodic. While not all have been relivings, even the nonrelivings have borne Europe's traumatic birthmark. This is unremarkable. Our individual births too are all traumatic, and we each bear a personal, occult psychic birthmark in whatever we do, but we do not relive our urtrauma of birth in whatever we do. A single example will serve to show traumatized Europe acting in concert without reliving its traumatic birth, yet with its traumatic birthmark clearly discernible: the European fertility transition of the late nineteenth century. Through this abrupt cutback on births all across the continent, Europeans defended collectively against a common vital threat that, as such, had reactivated their deep existential bond formed in 1348-1352. Over the few decades preceding the mid-1870s Europe had reduced its death rates, child mortality foremost, to the point where, despite steady, massive emigration, its total population was headed for a sixfold increase within another three generations.18 This huge impending inner invasion presented a critical and urgent, albeit subsurface, danger. Europeans resolved this latent existential crisis by normalizing birth control within marriage in all areas and all walks of life alike. They did so in rough unison, by group reflex (with Russia again last). And they did so without individual couples restricting their births for Europe's sake as far as they were aware: That is how group process works. Until then, natural fertility in marriage had been the moral law in Europe since antiquity or even before. The victims' guilt bound up with the Black Death found a dreamlike reflection in Europe's novels and plays at the time of the fertility transition, which competed in exposing marriage with its shrinking issue as hypocritical, degenerative, immoral—as, in a word, guilty (Binion, 1994, pp. 679-699). This guilt was pseudo-justified for good measure in that the demographic threat to Europe was endogenous, or self-generated, whereas Europeans in 1348 only imagined they had brought the Black Death upon themselves. As a rule, wherever Europeans have acted in unison openly, their traumatic birthmark of guilty crisis solidarity has been covered over. They have acted together openly in broad cultural movements beginning with the Renaissance, that upbeat, elitist, amoral reaction against the Black Death cultural syndrome centered around punitive, humbling Death. Later all-European cultural movements as well—the Enlightenment, Romanticism, Modernism, and the like—have, like the

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Renaissance, reflected the Black Death only in being all-European. 19 Politically, however, Europe is drawing closer to its traumatic source in the integration u n d e r w a y since World War II: The European Union is advancing from west to east, defensive toward the outside world, unif ormizing within, repentant of Europe's past sins—notably the two World Wars, which heaped u p cadavers like the Black Death itself. Or are these shades of 1348 visible only at too close range? Whereas the Projection of Europe's formative Trauma, the Black Death, into macabre erotica half a millennium later stands out starkly today in remote hindsight, its projection into politics is still too recent and fluid to be brought into clear focus. The pace of life is quickening for us as individuals, but big groups act obstinately slowly, and w e know next to nothing about their inner workings. All m y representations about Europe's culture of death have established little beyond the fact of a coherent European identity born of the traumatic Black Death and active through unsuspecting individual Europeans in the bulk. This fact alone, however, opens u p a radically new perspective on Europe's past such that the study of group identities, of h o w they form and h o w they perform, must take pride of place on the future research agenda of psychohistory. NOTES This article was originally published as "Death as Rapist: Europe's Formative Trauma Eroticized" in J. Piven and C. Goldberg (Eds.), Eroticisms: Love, Sex, and Perversion: Psychological Undercurrents of History Volume V (pp. 225241). New York: iUniverse, 2003. 1. Hays (1957) finds that the idea of Europe emerged at the very time of the Black Death—which, however, Hays entirely overlooks! 2. But some local deaths were still called bubonic in the Turkish Balkans until about 1840. 3. On the iconography of the Death figure: Aberth (2001), pp. 183-196, and Brion-Guerry (1950), pp. 33 and passim. 4. On the Dance of the Dead see especially Aberth (2001), pp. 205-215; Clark (1950); Hammerstein (1880); Mollaret & Brossollet (1965), pp. 72-76; Rosenfeld (1954). 5. Included in the first volume (1806) of Ludwig Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano's collection of German folk songs, Des Knaben Wunderhorn. Erk & Bohme (1963) date the folk song to about 1600, but the text appears to be a good century older (vol. 3, pp. 850-852). 6. Whereas those verses did not spell out their unsuspected traumatic source, the monk John Lydgate did so in his English version of the Dance of the Dead that he brought home from the Innocents in Paris in 1436: Aberth (2001), pp. 201-211. 7. On a fake pretended forerunner of Burger's mock folk ballad see Erk & Bohme (1963), vol. 1, p. 597.

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8. Its chief inaccuracies were misdatings of the murals at the Innocents in Paris (to 1383 instead of 1424/1425) and in the Basle cathedral (to 1312 instead of 1512). 9. J.W.L. Gleim's ' A n den Tod" (To Death) of about 1750, a lover's taunt of death for taking "my maiden" away ("Your lipless teeth can't even kiss her!"), may be seen as precursive; Korte (Ed.) (1811), p. 32. 10. Antoine-Jean Gros, Napoleon in the Pesthouse at Jaffa, Musee du Louvre, Paris, and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Francisco Goya, A Plague Hospital, c. 1808-1812, Marques de la Romana Collection, Madrid; Theodore Gericault, Plague Scene, c. 1822-1823, private collection, Paris. 11. Gustave Moreau, The Young Man and Death, 1856-1865, Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Gustave Flaubert, The Temptation of Saint Anthony, 1874; Henrik Ibsen, Little Eyolf, 1894. The old figuration survived nonetheless, as in Arnold Bocklin's Self-Portrait with Death as a Fiddler, 1872, Berlin Dahlem. 12. Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Death and the Maidens, 1872, Clark Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts. 13. 1898, Kunstmuseum Basel. 14. Antoine Wiertz, La belle Rosine, 1847, Brussels, Musee Wiertz. 15. Emile Hebert, "Et toujours! Et jamaisl"', terra cotta, 1847, private collection, Boston. 16. Baudelaire (1958) saw Hebert's Maiden as "convulsed in ecstasy or in agony" (p. 829). 17. For further examples, see Binion (1993), pp. 7,10, and passim. 18. Counting twenty-five years per generation and an intrinsic growth rate just under 2 percent. 19. The Black Death repertory was, of course, no broad cultural movement of this kind, but a discrete strand of several such movements. REFERENCES Aberth, J. (2001). From the brink of the apocalypse. New York: Routledge. Baudelaire, C. (1958). Salon de 1859. In Y-G. le Dantec (Ed.), Oeuvres (pp. 761833). Paris: Pleiade. Binion, R. (1993). Love beyond death. New York: New York University Press. Binion, R. (1994). Fiction as social fantasy: Europe's domestic crisis of 18791914. Journal of Social History 27: 679-699. Brion-Guerry, L. (1950). Le theme du "triomphe de la mort" dans la peinture italienne. Paris: Maisonneuve. Clark, J. L. (1950). The Dance of Death in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Glasgow: Jackson. Cohn, S. K. Jr. (2002). The Black Death transformed. London: Arnold. Dijkstra, B. (1986). Idols of perversity: Fantasies of feminine evil in fin-de-siecle culture. New York: Oxford. Erk, L., & Bohme, F. M. (Eds.). (1963). Deutscher Liederhort. 3 vols. Hildesheim, NY: Georg Olms. Hammerstein, R. (1880). Tanz undMusikdes Todes. Die mittelalterlichen Totentanze und ihr Nachleben. Bern: Francke.

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Hays, D. (1957). Europe: The emergence of an idea. Edinburgh: University Press. Kastner, G. (1852). Les danses des morts. Dissertations et recherches historiques, philosophiques, litteraires et musicales sur les divers monuments de ce genre qui existent ou ont existe tant en France qua Vetranger, accompagnees de la danse macabre, grande ronde vocale et instrumentale, paroles d'Edouard Thierry, musique de Georges Kastner. Paris: Brandus, Pagnerre. Korte, W. (Ed.). (1811). J.W.L. Gleims Samtliche Werke, vol. 1. Halberstadt: Bureau fur Literatur und Kunst. Mollaret, H. H., & Brossollet, J. (1965). La peste, source meconnue d'inspiration artistique. Antwerp: Koninklijk Museum voor schone Kunsten. Nochlin, L. (1971). Realism. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Rosenblum, R., & Janson, H. W. (1984). 19th-century art. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Rosenfeld, Hellmut. (1954). Der mittelalterliche Totentanz. Entstehung, Entwicklung, Bedeutung. Cologne: Bohlau.

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CHAPTER 6

Creativity and Death in Psychoanalysis Hans-Jiirgen Wirth

THE TRAUMATIC BIRTH OF THE HUMAN BEING AS AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL PREREQUISITE FOR CREATIVITY AND FAILURE Creativity, which is one pole of our topic, comes from the French creature and the Latin creatura, meaning "to create/' The creature is the creation. Instinctively one thinks about the story of creation: According to this story, the human being is only partly a creation of God—he created the other part himself when he ate from the Tree of Knowledge. When Adam and Eve were still living in the Garden of Eden in complete harmony with nature, they found themselves, writes Erich Fromm (1963) "in nature like an embryo in a womb. They were humans but at the same time they weren't" (p. 367). As soon as they ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and disregarded God's order, they cut the umbilical cord that had tied them to Mother Nature. Human beings partly unhinged themselves from their complete instinctive natural characteristics, and through that disposed of (at least partially) the laws of nature. They became the very first human beings, that is, living creatures, which distinguished themselves from other living creatures mainly through the fact that they had control over their decision making, freedom of will, and knew about their being "throwninto-the-world" (Heidegger, 1927/1996)—that is, their own finiteness. With the loss of Paradise entered the awareness of death. The myth of Creation describes allegorically the premature birth of the human

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being, his crudity, his defectiveness, and the traumatic circumstances of his incarnation. The early expulsion from the heavenly abode in the womb is a process of "divisiveness"—to echo Schelling—from which oneness with Mother Nature is disrupted. The "tearing-away" from nature, from "absolute liquid," and the "bodily fear" experienced during this time are dreadful, but contain the potential to form the roots of human independence and self-confidence (in Bohme & Bohme, 1996, pp. 147,155). The key word "divisiveness," which is another pole of our topic, is directed at failure. Failure comes etymologically from the word Holzscheit (meaning piece of firewood) and literally means "split." The existence of the human organism is distinguished by splitting: One is part of nature and still one has transcended it, one stands in the middle of life and still has an awareness of one's own death. Helmuth Plessner (1928) speaks of the "eccentric position" and the "world openness" of man. Max Scheeler (1926/1994) stresses the "immense fantasy excesses of man over the environmentally-bound" (p. 115). Since man is a "lacking-being" (Gehlen, 1963) and "doesn't fit in any special environment instinctively" (Safranski, 1994, p. 185), he must stick to his life goals and search his own way. One has to compensate for whatever is missing in oneself naturally, at the societal level, which is created as culture, and at the individual level through considerable care and creativity. One has to "overcome his lack of specific adaptation through 'intelligence'" (Scheeler, 1926/1994, p. 114). The prize for this "eccentric position" is that one can fail at self-determined goals. The reward for "world openness" lies in the possibility of being able to create one's own life. Creativity and failure are ways of existence that are typical only to human beings. They signify the tension between self-determined goals and what one can achieve in relation to these goals. Here, the egoideal as the bearer of imagination, how we wish to be, is of central importance. Chasseguet-Smirgel (1981) interpreted the Freudian postulate of the ego-ideal as the legacy of narcissism and a substitute for primary narcissistic absoluteness. Creativity provides a way to bridge the gap between the ego and the ego-ideal. Creative work arises from narcissistic need, lost perfection, in order to reestablish the severed oneness with Mother Nature (cf. Chasseguet-Smirgel, 1981, p. 98; Schelling, 1799/1965). It isn't a coincidence that the creative act, which takes place in the character of the creator, is characterized metaphorically as procreative and gestational (cf. Auchter, 1978). It begins with the first idea, the flash of inspiration, becomes resolution, maturation within, until the creative work is born (Rauchfleisch, 1990, pp. 1127, 1122). In the selfdescriptions of most artists, the inspiration is characterized as the "voice

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of the divine" or "voice of the unconscious," as an inspiration implanted in the artist from an external source, while the artist is just building the vessel (p. 1126). This description also contains the natal metaphor. A pregnant woman is a vessel for the child she brings into the world, an event often described as a "wonder." In fact the great similarity lies in the emotional feeling in the presence of an extraordinary artistic event, for instance a musical performance. Several authors have seen the male envy of parturition as an important motive for creative work (Rauchfleisch, 1990, p. 1122). In Rank (1924/1998,1932/2000) one could also see an attempt to overcome natal trauma in creativity. Kunz (1975) thinks "the creation of artistic works [is] to a certain extent a link between conscious deliberate doing [that distinguishes man] and procreation and parturition" (p. 44ff), therefore unambiguous natural processes. In the philosophy of the Romantic period, particularly in Schelling, art is understood as an attempt at reconciliation with the initial separation from nature. OTTO RANK'S PSYCHOANALYTIC APPROACH TO CREATIVITY Among the earliest psychoanalysts, Otto Rank is the one who dealt with the topic of creativity most intensively. Rank attained a position in the circle of the first psychoanalysts around Freud with The Artist (1907), which published the twenty-three-year-old Rank on Freud's recommendation. Rank consolidated this position through the first psychoanalytical doctoral thesis, The Interpretation of the Lohengrin Saga (1911), the extensive founding work The Incest Theme in Literature and Saga (1912), the books The Double (1914), Psychoanalytical Contributions to Research of Myth (1919), The Don Juan-Figure (1922), and the book written with Hanns Sachs Significance of Psychoanalysis for the Mental Sciences (1913). In his principal work Art and Artist (1932), Rank developed a wide-ranging philosophical framework for the psychoanalytical basis of the relationship of creativity to art, early experience to Weltanschauung, individual to society. Rank attributed the anthropological aspiration to express oneself in creative works—from cave painting to children's drawings, culminating in artistic pursuits and the "creation of the human cultural works"—to the attempt to overcome the fear of death. Rank's early discovery paved the way for his later researches on parallels between the birth myth of heroes and the natal dreams of many patients, which he investigated in his book The Myth of the Birth of the Hero (1909). In The Trauma of Birth (1924), Rank postulated the historic impact of the earliest prelinguistic, prenatal, and birth experiences on the self-representations of the individual and society.

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However, Rank's new ideas were ultimately rejected by Freud and his circle, which led to his exclusion from the psychoanalytic movement and the complete tabooing of his entire works (cf. Janus, 1998; Janus & Wirth, 2000). PSYCHOANALYSIS BETWEEN THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND ROMANTIC PERIOD It became clear that two diametrically opposed human images clashed in the dispute about the psychological significance of birth and the earliest mother-child relationship for the mental development of human beings. Freud saw himself as a scientist, and his concepts were influenced by mechanistic ideas which oriented themselves toward the models of physics and physiology. In his philosophical convictions, he was committed to the ideals of the Enlightenment. According to Freud's philosophy, not only the neurosis of human beings but also their entire inner life, culture, and even history are governed by an ensemble of biological drives. In Freud, the drive of nature appears as the master of the human condition, as the creator of history. In connection with Schopenhauer, Freud understands human will as blind, the unconscious driving powers of the id. Next to the great cultural movement of the Enlightenment, Freud's thought was shaped by still another significant spiritual trend, whose influence Freud had denied in himself and had fought against in his colleagues: the Romantic period. On the one hand, Freud's implicit philosophy stands in the tradition of modern natural science, its rationalism, its determinism, its belief in objective truth and the moral neutrality of scientific investigation. On the other hand—as Ellenberger (1985), Marqaurd (1987), Due (1988), and others have shown—his thought stands in the tradition of the Romantic period and its philosophy of nature. One can understand the Romantic period as a cultural countermovement to the Enlightenment, but one can also interpret it as its supplement and advancement. While the Enlightenment proclaimed the worth of reason and society, the Romantic period cultivated a culture in which feelings, dreams, the unconscious, the irrational, and the subjectivity of the individual occupied a central place. The Romantic period opposed the view that everything human was measured only against the scale of reason (cf. Godde, 1999, p. 35), and it revalued feelings, senses, and passions. It emphasized inspiration, spontaneity, intuition, an extremely heightened emotional sensibility, and it called for understanding other cultures, historical epochs, and even nature. As Ellenberger (1985) shows in his study The Discovery of the Unconscious, there "is hardly any concept in Freud and Jung that was not anticipated by the philosophy of nature and the medicine

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of Romanticism" (p. 289). If the motto of the Enlightenment might be, "Have courage to serve your own reason," then the motto of the Romantic period could be, "Have courage to serve your own feelings." According to the contemporary view of psychoanalysis both these mottos should be indispensable. Freud denied the romantic tradition of his thinking and this led to his fallout with those colleagues whose ideas were especially strongly shaped by romantic thinking—particularly with Carl Jung, Sandor Ferenczi, and Otto Rank. However, a secret tradition of romantic thinking exists in psychoanalysis, which extends from Ferenczi and Rank, to Michael Balint and W. D. Winnicott, to Heinz Kohut and self-psychology It's true that this tradition was already presaged by Freud himself; however, its rancorous denial deprived psychoanalysis of its most creative minds because it caused the repeated division of the psychoanalytic movement (cf. Wittenberger, 1995). Furthermore, these disagreements were traumatic and resulted in ideological taboo, inhibition of scientific creativity, and suppression of thought, whose effects persist even today (cf. Wirth, 2000). Otto Kernberg (1998) satirically described "Thirty Methods for Suppression of Creativity of Candidates of Psychoanalysis." There are numerous indications that Freud's personality was Romantic: The passionate love letters to his bride (around 1,500 in four years) speak just as romantic a language as his effusive relationship with Wilhelm Fliess. A romantic philosophy arises from his identification with the lonely hero Robinson, who on the one hand "arranges himself comfortably in 'splendid isolation,'" and on the other hand has to fight against an entire army of enemies arising from the foundation of a "secret committee" of six elected devoted students who solemnly commit themselves to defending psychoanalysis, and to whom Freud presented rings as symbols of their election (1914, p. 59f). Even Freud's identification with Goethe, his ideal of beauty, his interest in art and archaeology, and his literary style, are evidence of Freud's romantic attitude toward life. Goethe's romantic and emotional hymn Nature Is Not the Decisive Factor at All impressed Freud so much "that I committed myself to medicine" (Gay, 1989, p. 34). Finally even his central theoretical concepts, the idea of the unconscious, the meaning of dreams, his interest in "Primal Phenomena" are absolutely inconceivable without Romanticism. Erich Fromm (1977) sees the most important reason for Freud's extensive influence on culture as the "fruitful synthesis" between "rationality and Romanticism." The "creative power of this synthesis" becomes clear when one compares the theories of Freud with those of Adler and Jung, who—each in his own way—would have resolved this synthesis again in favor of the original differences: Adler returned to a "one-sided rationalistically optimistic theory," while Jung lost him-

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self in romantic mysticism (p. 236). Freud, however, is enlightened and romantic at the same time—even when he himself denied his romantic side. Freud's Romanticism is "shattered Romanticism" (Marquard, 1987). His romantic side is hidden behind his skepticism, his rationalism, and his almost demonstratively accentuated pessimism. "The nature that was stressed and empowered by Freud is not 'romantic nature' anymore, but 'driving nature'" (ibid., p. 226). FREUD AND THE POETS Even Freud's attitude toward poets and artists is shaped by his ambivalence to Romanticism and is characterized partly by his envious devaluation and partly by a romantic and effusive longing. This becomes especially clear in Freud's ambivalent demeanor toward his Viennese contemporary Arthur Schnitzler, who was also a doctor working from home, and then at the same time as Freud founded psychoanalysis, became a writer of world fame. Freud contacted Schnitzler after hesitating for a long time. When Freud congratulated Schnitzler on his sixtieth birthday in his letter dated May 14, 1922, he made the following confession: I have tormented myself with the question why in all these years I have never attempted . . . to have a talk with you. . . . I think I have avoided you from a kind of reluctance to meet my double . . . whenever I get deeply absorbed in your beautiful creations I invariably seem to find beneath their poetic surface the very presuppositions, interests, and conclusions which I know to be my own. Your determinism as well as your skepticism . . . your preoccupation with the truths of the unconscious and of the instinctual drives of man . . . the dwelling of your thoughts on the polarity of love and death; all this moves me with uncanny feeling of familiarity. . . . So, I have formed the impression that you know through intuition—or rather from detailed self-observation—everything that I have discovered by laborious work on other people, (pp. 339-340)

Freud's "reluctance to meet my double" (doppelganger) is connected to the "uncanny feeling of familiarity" he feels toward Schnitzler. If we consult Freud's explanation of the uncanny (1919), this feeling arises because "the well-known, the long-familiar" (p. 231), "the secretlywell-known that experienced repression and recurred from it" (p. 259) strikes one as being odd. The doppelganger has an uncanny effect because it personifies "all omitted possibilities of shaping fate, to which fantasy still wants to hold on to, and all the tendencies of ego, which could not prevail as a result of outside adversity" (p. 248). Apparently, Freud sees the realization of wishes, fantasies, and the literary-creative potential in Schnitzler's character, which he would have liked to have developed himself. On April 1, 1884, the twenty-

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eight-year-old Freud wrote to his bride: "You will be astonished to hear that I feel poetic inclinations" (Jones, 1957/1960, III, p. 485). Schniztler represents Freud's own suppressed artist and writer identity, foreign and familiar to him at the same time, and therefore uncanny to him (cf. Worbs, 1983, p. 180). Given this background Freud's ambivalent demeanor toward Schnitzler becomes comprehensible. In spite of all the admiration, he undermines Schnitzler in a subtle way, by allowing him intuition and describing his works as "poetic appearance," whereas Freud does not grow tired in regard to his own work as a scientist, of stressing the arduousness with which he researches reality without illusions. Freud sees himself as a worker of the spirit, as the "medicus who tortures himself with the understanding of neuroses every waking moment" (in Worbs, 1983, p. 191). Freud becomes even clearer in a letter to Martha dated July 11,1882. He writes: I think there is a general enmity between artists and us workers in the details of science. We know that in their art they possess a picklock, which unlocks all feminine hearts effortlessly, while we usually stand helplessly in front of the strange sign of the lock and torment ourselves to find even one of the matching keys. (Jones, 1957/1960,1, p. 139) In Freud's eyes, an artist is an easygoing fellow, to whom the knowledge as well as the favors of the female heart come so easily and effortlessly, through intuition, for which the earnest, down-to-earth and realistic scientist has to struggle every single day with perspiration on his brow. Freud's (1907) idealized admiration for the poets and artists also becomes clear through the following words: The discoveries of psychoanalysis "about the meaningful nature of dreams" had already been anticipated by "the poets," whose "evidence is supposed to be highly regarded because they maintain that they know a lot of things between heaven and earth, of which our bookish wisdom doesn't let us dream." "Even in psychology," says Freud further, "They are far ahead of us ordinary people, because they create from sources that we still haven't developed in science . . . they are also worthy countrymen" (p. 33). Although Freud was ready to acknowledge the artists as worthy countrymen they never became his equal partners in the process of knowledge gain. In the end—that was his conviction—science would tap into the sources of artistic productivity, and without forming any illusions. Freud could not explicitly formulate how illusions not only stand for lies and self-deception but also creative fantasies, as countertransference fantasies, as free associations that can contain far deeper knowledge about reality than distant scientific contemplation, even though this attitude thoroughly shaped his clinical practice.

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Perhaps therefore he had to resignedly determine that "the nature of artistic attainment is psychoanalytically inaccessible" (Freud, 1910, p. 209). In his study of Leonardo da Vinci (1910), Freud specifically writes that he could not explain the artist's genius: "We must recognize here a degree of freedom which can no longer be solved psychoanalytically," emphasizing once again only a few sentences later the "organic foundations of character" and the necessity of relinquishing the stage to "biological investigation" (p. 209). Elsewhere Freud (1913) writes succinctly: "It is not a question for psychology to determine where the ability to create comes from in an artist" (p. 417). In spite of all his admiration for poets and artists, Freud stuck to his opinion that "the scientist would have the last and decisive word in comparison with the poet" (Stein & Stein, 1987, p. 32). Incidentally, Freud (1930) confessed to similarly kept limitations of empathy towards the "dark continent" of femininity, the "oceanic feeling" (p. 422), and music (cf. Gay, 1989, p. 193). This profoundly marked not only Freud's understanding of art but also his image of humanity and conception of creativity. On an intellectual level this inability is connected to the denial of influences of Romanticism and on a biographical level to his own traumatic birth and conflicting relationship with his mother (cf. Wirth, 2000). As much as Freud admired art, it was still an "illusion" (1933, p. 173), "a mild anesthetic" (1930, p. 439) similar to religion, however "harmless and agreeable" (1933, p. 173), "because it finds its right to exist in its compensatory function in the face of the relentless challenges of life" (Worbs, 1983, p. 201). With his undermining of art as a harmlessly naive, ineffective, and uncritical organization, Freud underestimated, however, how art can be arduous work, often containing social criticism, and that art can also bring about reality-altering consequences. Thus by no means does it have to be only "harmless and agreeable." Freud becomes almost set on an absolute belief in the universal validity of the laws of nature and the strict predetermination of all events. He cannot admit a view which allows creativity and free will a place in life since he uses his scientific distance as defense against his denied wish of "poetic freedom." The investigation of the unconscious was carried out in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and in fact finds its most concise formulations in psychoanalysis. However, artists of the Romantic period, such as Arnold Bocklin, romantic writers and poets such as Schnitzler, and even philosophers of the Romantic period such as Schelling, Carus, Hartmann, and Nietzsche, have prepared the ground that made psychoanalytic discovery of the unconscious first possible. Thus, one of the remarkable features of many pictures of the romantic painter Arnold Bocklin is a romantic-melancholic mood which finds parallels in some of Freud's compositions—for instance, in Transience (1915a), Thoughts for the Times on

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War and Death (1915b), and Mourning and Melancholia (1916) (cf. Erdheim & Blaser, 1998, p. 194). This mood arose through Freud's approach toward the unconscious, and because of his exceptional literary abilities he was able to generate the same spiritual mood even in his readers. Not only do his medical histories read "like short novels"—as he once realized in astonishment—but his theoretical treatments also partly move the reader into a state of mind otherwise known only from reading literature. Freud (1895) writes "It still affects me strangely that the medical histories I wrote are like short novels, and that they are so to say devoid of the serious character of a scientific nature" (p. 225). Freud's fear—not to be recognized as a scientist—could be a reason for his denial of Romantic influences. He wanted to commit himself completely to the Enlightenment, rationality, natural sciences, and determinism. Interestingly, Schnitzler was plagued by the same problem, namely the apparent incompatibility between science and literature. Schnitzler's conclusion, "My works are nothing but diagnoses!" is a formulation that compliments Freud's statement (cf. Boetticher, 1999). Both writers felt committed to the positive scientific ideal and were irritated over the new form of knowledge acquisition, which they still afforded neither scientific legitimacy nor a new image of humanity. Rank, on the other hand, offensively developed a tradition of romantic thought (in which psychoanalysis was also operative) denied by Freud. This was close to him since he wasn't a doctor, nor was he a scientist, but saw himself as a scholar of arts and in a broad sense an artist. His background in art and the identity of an artist allowed him to achieve what Freud described as "healing by becoming conscious," to broaden the ideas only attained by "spiritual well-being" when one "is capable of devoting his complete creative power to life and to the shaping of life," when he also places "his creative powers directly in the service of character development" and consequently achieves "complete bliss of character creation," as Rank writes in Art and Artist. Rank's criticism of Freud's ambivalent image of humanity opens one's eyes; creativity belongs to the fundamental opportunities of human beings, which among others enable them to find a way through neurosis and psychological illness. Rank understands neurosis itself—in a way similar to Alfred Adler (cf. Bruder-Bezzel & Bruder, 2001)—as failed creativity. SUBLIMATION BETWEEN DEFENSE AND CREATIVITY Oddly enough, Freud's (1930) image of humanity was conflicted: On the one hand he viewed the human being as strictly predetermined by drive, repetition compulsion, and the "heavenly powers" of Eros and the death-instinct. On the other hand, the goal of psychoanalysis

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is liberation from compulsive repetition and unconscious entanglement by increasing conscious awareness. In Freud's energetic model all energy comes from id, while the ego has no energy supply of its own. Ultimately the ego doesn't have any place in Freud's model; it is not the master of its own house. Though Freud holds the position that the human mind should only be regarded as a derivative of drives, he does not adhere to this strictly, and affords the mind and creative powers a few small loopholes. One of these loopholes is sublimation. Freud writes that the sexual drive puts exceptionally large amounts of energy at the disposal of cultural activities, and as a result can alter its aims without critically increasing its intensity. "One calls this ability to exchange the originally sexual goal for another, a non-sexual but psychologically related one, the ability to sublimate" (1908, p. 150). The phenomenon of sublimation is an alternative component of Freud's model of personality, which he did not formulate in detail. One gains the impression that Freud wanted to conceptualize sublimation in such a way that the fate of drives becomes conceivable, which makes the rights of an individual reconcilable with those of society. In sublimation, the person retains freedom because he does not have to suppress his sexual wishes and satisfies the interests of society at the same time, and in this respect sublimation makes a contribution to culture. But then again one runs into Freud's other formulations, according to which one is only at the mercy of his blind driving nature and the ego remains helplessly caught between drive, super-ego, and reality. Freud's difficulties become understandable with the great philosophical, cultural, and political controversies in the background. Especially with regard to his drive theory, Freud succeeded in making an epochal breakthrough in the human conception of itself. First of all Freud broke away from the tradition that was steeped in Christianity. Sensuality, physical urges, naturalness of man, were above all the socalled "animal," the "sinful" qualities that—according to Christian belief—stood in the way of attainment of eternal salvation (cf. Kunz, 1975, p. 250). Consequently, Freud is admittedly in danger of making the physical urges absolute and debasing the other side of the human being—our "intellectuality." Here, the intellectuality of the human organism represents reflective consciousness, the freedom to make conscious, deliberate decisions and execute actions, the ability to create oneself and to shape one's life creatively. Only the interaction of these two powers, the natural rooting in physical urges and the reflecting distance of the consciousness, on the one hand, and decision making by free will and artistic creativity on the other hand, make up human existence in its constant endangerment, frailty, and tragedy (cf. Kunz, 1975, p. 251; Schafer, 1972).

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Even if the term sublimation has a shadowy existence in psychoanalytic parlance, it is of central importance for the explicit or implicit psychoanalytic image of humanity. If one classifies it under the defense mechanisms, like Anna Freud in The Ego and Mechanisms of Defense (1936/1980), one mistakes the anthropological meaning of creativity. Freud was wise enough to leave open the question of whether sublimation was a special kind of psychological mechanism. Fiirstenau (1967) pleaded for the term sublimation not to be subsumed under the defense mechanisms, rather arguing for a theoretical term allowing the conceptualization of nonpathological contact with physical impulses beyond direct satisfaction on the one hand, and relinquishment of the urges on the other. Jlingst described sublimation as a "border term" (in Whitebook, 1996), which makes reconciliation conceivable between drive and reason, between sexuality and spirit, between intrapsychological and extrapsychological. Creativity bases itself on the fluidic diversity of human sexuality and searches for a satisfactory integration into inner life. It requires a creative search for avenues of sublimation because one cannot master surplus sexual energy through either direct satisfaction or its suppression. Creativity is therefore at the disposal of a sublimated integration of sexuality in the psyche and in object relationships, and conversely, creativity feeds on this energy. PREMATURE BIRTH AS ANTHROPOLOGICAL RADICAL In Inhibition, Symptoms, and Anxiety (1926), Freud recognized the extreme helplessness of the human organism as a result of premature birth. This essay was dedicated to the critical examination of Otto Rank's theory of the trauma of birth: The biological factor is the long period of time during which the young of the human species is in a condition of helplessness and dependence. Its intrauterine existence seems to be short in comparison with that of most animals, and it is sent into the world in a less than finished state. As a result, the influence of the real external world upon it is intensified and an early differentiation between the ego and the id is promoted. Moreover, the dangers of the external world have a greater importance for it, so that the value of the object which can alone protect it against them and take the place of its former intrauterine life is enormously enhanced. The biological factor, then, establishes the earliest situations of danger and creates the need to be loved which will accompany the child through the rest of his life. (pp. 168-169)

Premature birth and the extreme helplessness resulting from it mean that socialization and individualization play a great part in the making of man.

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Interestingly, Freud also mentions the need to be loved as an outcome of the early need for protection and help. In addition, there would also be the complimentary need for love, which is first and above all necessary from the mother. The need for love in its passive as well as its active form becomes, however, an anthropological characteristic of man per se, since this way the necessary supply of loving care, communicative response, and recognition can be definitely guaranteed. I find it remarkable that Freud makes a distinction in this citation, at least implicitly, between love and sexuality. Apparently love results primarily from premature birth and the need for response, whereas sexuality results from the biological drive. How can the relationship between love and sexual drive be characterized? Both enter into an obviously close liaison without necessarily merging into each other. Sexuality can use love to strengthen itself very well, but it probably would not depend on it. Conversely, the connection of love to sexual drive is justified because love as a tender, sensitive, and susceptible thing, searches for—so to speak—a robust and powerfully effective partner in the inner life so that it could establish itself permanently. Because of premature birth, human beings remain dependent on protection-providing and uterus-like objects, which are firstly produced in the form of mother-child symbiosis and later in human culture and community. Peter Sloterdijk's Sphere-Work (1998, 1999) is significant here, hypothesizing in reference to Otto Rank that we spend our whole life in bubbles, spheres, and shells, which are supposed to serve as lifelong substitutes for the amniotic sac from which we are driven out too early. The achievements of civilization and culture are always unconsciously compensating for our premature vulnerability. Houses, institutions, families, groups, cultural systems, all of which build worlds in miniature, are substitutes for the womb. Rank had already envisioned this in The Trauma of Birth, but Freud both formulated this idea more explicitly, and misunderstood elements of its significance as well (cf. Janus, 1994). For instance, Freud discusses the question whether caesarian children are less traumatized than those born normally (letter to Ferenczi dated March 26,1924, in Wittenberger 1995, p. 312). As a result, the very far-reaching metaphor from birth trauma and especially its anthropological meaning was overlooked. But numerous philosophers focused on premature birth—mostly indirectly—as a central theme of their philosophical reflections on humanity. For example, when Martin Heidegger (1927) characterized human existence as "being thrown into the world," anthropogenesis was understood as precipitate delivery and therefore the traumatic aspects of birth were specifically emphasized. Hannah Arendt, on the other hand, developed a "philosophy of birth . . . a philosophy of the beginning" (Safranski, 1994, p. 425) in which she made "the bare truth

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about birth," the "factor of natality" the center of her definition of being a human being (Arendt, 1958/1999, pp. 215-217). Arendt writes: "The new beginning, which comes in the world with every birth, can show itself off to advantage in the world only because the newcomer has the ability to make a new beginning, i.e. to act" (p. 18). Arendt— similar to Rank and Sloterdijk—sees the fulfillment of need in the artistic work, which is "to offer earthly accommodation to the mortal human being" (p. 201). Such art is capable of surviving for centuries and even for thousands of years without losing its meaning or value. Just because of its freedom of purpose and futility, artistic work symbolizes "steadiness of the world," in which "the mortal human being can find an immortal home" (pp. 201-202). THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF DEATH AS AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL RADICAL Otto Rank considered the consciousness of mortality and the urge to overcome the fear of death important motivating forces in the development of human creativity and culture. "We can read in works of all time, from Gilgamesh, the psalms, and Sophocles until Schopenhauer and the existentialists, that wisdom begins with mortal fear, above all with the omnipotent fate 'that raises man when it crushes him' (Schiller)," writes Max Stern (1972/1974, p. 901). Even Freud devoted himself repeatedly to death and determined in particular the general tendency to suppress of death: "We have shown the unmistakable tendency to push death to the side, to eliminate it from life" (1915b, p. 341). It is all the more astonishing that the knowledge of one's own death plays a secondary role in psychoanalysis. Freud's own remarks on this theme have been very contradictory. He writes in Thoughts for the Times on War and Death: It is indeed impossible to imagine our own death; and whenever we attempt to do so we can perceive that we are in fact still present as spectators. Hence the psychoanalytic school could venture on the assertion that at bottom no one believes in his own death, or, to put the same thing another way, that in the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his own immortality. (1915b, p. 341)

A logical and philosophical problem always in the minds of philosophers was that one's own death is difficult to imagine and the thought of one's own death leads to paradoxes, but from this, one cannot conclude that the unconscious does not know anything about death. One can accept more from philosophers Max Scheeler and Arthur Schopenhauer: that we have an intuitive knowledge of death despite a deep-seated tendency to deny it. Since these opposites coincide in the unconscious, it may definitely be accepted that ideas of immortality

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and fear of death coexist in the unconscious. In Inhibition, Symptoms, and Anxiety, Freud (1926) writes: "In the unconscious, the meaning of our term—destruction of life—does not exist. Something similar to death has never been experienced" (p. 160). It is astonishing that in numerous famous case histories Freud totally disregards the fact that his patients were confronted with death, chronologically, with the appearance of their symptoms, in a frightening and painful way. Irving Yalom (1989), who examined Freud's case histories from the studies on hysteria under this aspect, comes to the following conclusion: "Death so pervades the clinical histories of these patients that only by a supreme effort of inattention could Freud have omitted it from his discussion of precipitating traumas" (p. 62). Freud does not want to allow the knowledge of death even to the child. In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), he writes: "The child does not know anything about the horrors of decay, of freezing in the icecold grave, of the terror of eternal nothingness The fear of death is unknown to him" (p. 260). Freud accepted that there wasn't any consciousness of death in eight-year-old children. Thirty-six years later, Freud's daughter Anna, who worked with children during the German air raids on London, knew better about the childish psyche than her father: "It can be safely said that all the children who were over two years at the time of the London blitz realized the house will fall down when bombed and that people are often killed or get hurt in falling houses" (in Yalom, 1989, p. 88). Even if developmental psychological knowledge about the concept of death in children is relatively sketchy even today, we still know meanwhile that children "are extraordinarily preoccupied with death Death is a great enigma for them, and one of their major developmental tasks is to deal with fears of helplessness and obliteration" (Yalom, 1989, p. 76). Some developmental psychologists are even of the opinion that sexual themes are of rather secondary importance in comparison to the theme of death. Consciousness and fear of the inevitability of death—the death of another but also of one's own death—must be regarded as an anthropological radical which has considerable influence on our conscious and unconscious life. Even Freud seems to agree with this view when he asks a question at the end of Thoughts for the Times on War and Death (1915b): "Wouldn't it be better to allow death a place in reality and in our thoughts, which it deserves, and to emphasize our conscious attitude towards death a little more, which we have carefully suppressed until now?" And he ends with the recommendation, "If you want to brave life, prepare yourself for death" (p. 345f). In the same essay, Freud asserts that "this attitude of ours towards death has a powerful effect on our lives" (p. 343). He holds a fiery summa-

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tion for an absolutely fearless attitude, which one could describe like Michael Balint as "philobatism": Life is impoverished, it loses its interest, when the most important component in the game of life, life itself, is not allowed to be risked. It becomes as shallow and empty as an American flirtation, from the outset of which it is settled that nothing is allowed to happen, in contrast to a Continental relationship in which both partners have to be constantly mindful of its serious consequences. Our emotional ties . . . make us averse to face danger. . . . We don't dare contemplate a great many undertakings which are dangerous but actually essential, like attempts to fly, expeditions to far-away countries or experiments with explosive substances Thus the tendency to exclude death from life's calculations brings in its wake so many other renunciations and exclusions And still the motto of the Hanseatic League was: . . . one has to sail, but one does not have to live. (Freud, 1915b, p. 343) In this passage Freud imagines the spiritual state of the philobaths in epic breadth and with obvious pleasure, just as it is later described by Balint (1968) and compared with the "ocnophile," the type w h o clings to safety in terror of freedom (pp. 68-69). Actually the philobatic and ocnophilic attitudes present two sides of the same coin. The basis is a dependence-separation problem, which is typical for the anxiety neurotic. The ocnophile pacifies his fears of death and separation anxieties by clinging to an object while the philobate takes refuge in p s e u d o a u t o n o m y under denial of fears of death and separation anxieties (cf. Richter & Beckmann, 1986). Balint produces a connection between the philobatic type and the world of adventure, which matches with Freud's seafarer idea. As biographical studies about Freud have shown (cf. Jones, 1957/1960; Kollbrunner, 2001; Krull, 1979; Mohring, 1985; Richter, 1992, p. 77f; Wirth, 2000), Freud suffered from different psychosomatic symptoms. His phobia of traveling, his separation anxieties, fear of death, and magical belief in the occurrence of his o w n death on certain dates (which he always had to revise to future dates because he survived the days of his predicted death), suggest the conclusion that he suffered from cardiac psychoneurosis. His massive fear of death m a d e it difficult to acknowledge the problem of death appropriately and caused his contradictory theoretical remarks on this subject. Theoretically, the fear of death leads Freud back to castration anxiety, but he then concedes one should not overestimate castration anxiety, since it "could not be the decisive factor by the female sex, which is certainly more disposed towards neurosis" (Freud 1926, p . 173). "Especially in case of w o m e n , " the most effective cause of fear of death remains the danger of loss of an object. Freud's conception is questionable for several reasons:

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1. As we know from developmental psychology today, the knowledge of death and the fear of death arise earlier than the Oedipus complex and castration anxiety. 2. Both sexes experience object loss and mortal terror (cf. Stern, 1968, p. 25). Hence differing responses to death are less related to the isolated and stereotypic polarities of male fear of castration versus female fear of object loss, but a complex developmental matrix of separation-individuation problems, object relations issues, differing identifications and disidentifications, parental protectiveness, parental and social factors in the development of self-esteem and body image, even physiological considerations. 3. Castration anxiety is less existential than fear of death. One could say, better castrated than dead.1 4. Children are actually confronted with death whereas castration only exists in fantasy. Therefore it may rather be the other w a y around—that castration anxiety could lead back to fear of death. Max Stern (1968) suspects that "in both the sexes castration fear originates in mortal terror, the response to early object loss. . . . It might be that castration anxiety serves to w a r d off fear of death through displacement of the feared nothingness onto the genitals" (p. 25). And with Rank (1924/1998), one could accept the idea that shocking experience and trauma of birth is experienced as "something similar to death" (Freud, 1926, p . 160). The life of h u m a n beings on this Earth, therefore, begins with the elementary experience of death. As Piven (in press) argues, one need not know the idea or concept of death to be terrified and traumatized, fearing annihilation. Children can be terrified for their lives without understanding death conceptually. Thus precategorical (preconceptual) experiences of terror may indeed be the founding strata of our psychological development. Let us look at these dynamics in the Oedipus myth. Oedipus's parents decided even before his birth that they would kill their child if it w a s a boy. Oedipus is thus doomed even before his conception. Immediately after his birth he comes in contact with death through the murderous intentions of his parents, w h o abandon him with pierced feet. Oedipus suffers extreme birth trauma through the cruelty inflicted on him by his parents. Already at birth, he is confronted with h u m a n aggression and readiness to kill that does not spare even one's own children. Oedipus, even as a newborn, is exposed to an extreme and realistic fear of death. He is disturbed early on, and furthermore he is a paradigm of the meaning of early dangers and fears of death. Finally, he is probably someone w h o w a s given an intuitive knowledge about the existence of death in his journey through life. Basically, there is very

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little castration anxiety to be felt in Oedipus: He faces his father irascibly and uncontrollably, killing him and his companions without further ado. (One could naturally object that this scene represents a defense against castration fear by reversal of violence. But one isn't justified in assuming that in Oedipus, fear of death and its reversal in the murder impulse was reactivated by an encounter with his father, because the father couldn't have uttered threats of castration against Oedipus, even though Laius had attempted to kill his son.) The meaning of the awareness of death is also seen in the fact that Oedipus can solve the riddle of the Sphinx. In this riddle, one has to guess the being that walks first on four, then two, and finally on three legs. The riddle can only be solved if one has an awareness of the weakness of human beings, the finite nature of life, and the inevitability of death. Oedipus, who by birth was already confronted by death, knows about the existence and inevitability of death, he is able to look at death and at the danger of death in the form of the Sphinx straight in the eye, and is therefore able to solve this riddle. The Oedipus complex and the castration anxiety connected to it owe their central position within psychoanalytic theory to their association with early traumatization, the fear of death resulting from it, and the awareness of death, thus factors of psychological development, which Freud could not see in its complete range because of personal limitations. By contrast, Rank conceives the development of human creativity as contributing toward the alleviation of the fear of death by integrating this knowledge into life. The super-ego is not only an inheritance of the Oedipus complex but it also has its forerunner—as Melanie Klein suspects—in the preoedipal age. It is also an inheritance of the symbiotic relationship with the mother and the father, respectively, which is introjected as a power that is supposed to protect against death (cf. Stern, 1968, p. 26). One could also speculate whether the superego is an anthropological constant in human life, which could have developed from the awareness of death, from having a certain amount of freedom to make decisions in life, and from being born into this inevitable "tragic situation" that evokes so much guilt (Schafer, 1972). It corresponds to the basic idea of "idealistic" philosophy from Plato to the existentialists, to award us both creative self-realization as well as failure and self-destruction. The philosopher Pico formulated it very pragmatically: The dog [will] always live like a dog and the lion will always live like a lion. Man, however, does not have a nature that compels him, does not have a being that conditions him. Man creates himself through deeds, man is his own father. Man knows this one and only condition: the shortage of conditions, freedom. His compulsion is to be free, the compulsion to choose his own fate. (In Kunz, 1975, p. 104)

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One errs in overstating this idealistic philosophical thought. Our theme is simply the fact that the human organism is and remains part of nature, and that one must often experience the love of nature in the form of extreme pain, frailness of the body, and mortality. On the other hand, it seems undeniable that the human being emancipates oneself from nature and one's own naturalness to a certain extent, and attains a modicum of freedom unattainable by other animals. It might now be interesting to see where Freud stands with regard to this question. In his explicit philosophical comments, Freud most strongly emphasizes the human lack of freedom, our predetermination through the fateful forces of our drives, and the extreme predetermination of our behavior. But on closer examination the latent anthropology of Freud's psychoanalysis is still unclear: One could argue that "sublimation" could channel both libidinal and aggressive drive needs, which would be more beneficial not only for the individual but the culture as well. The future role of reason, the faint but persistent voice of the intellect, could impart so much strength to the weak ego that it would yet become master of its own house. Grieving could lead to the early and inevitable traumatizations being worked through so comprehensively, that they lose the character of compulsive repetition. The development of human creativity could soothe the fear of death to such an extent that its knowledge could be integrated into life. And finally, psychoanalytic therapy and enlightenment could lead to the unconscious becoming conscious, and through it the diminution of the unconscious influence of repetition compulsion on behavior. As we see it, the humanistic image of psychoanalysis is really not so one-dimensional, but also contains some starting points which emphasize the fundamentally available potential of freedom. Of course Freud surely assesses the human capability for freedom as well as his ability to mature rather skeptically. CREATIVITY AND FAILURE AS HUMAN MODES OF BEING Creativity and failure present modes of existence that are typical to human beings. They indicate the tension between a set goal and what has been achieved with respect to this goal. There must be a will that wants to reach something in the future, so that one can founder on something—there is a will to failure in creativity. The aspects of the will and the future have not often been discussed in psychoanalysis. Free will was replaced by drive in psychoanalytic theory. Freud disregarded the future since he was convinced of the determinism of the past. Death is but an inescapable factor that lay in the future and has a far-reaching influence on our present life. The denial of death leads

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invariably to an unfulfilled and superficial life determined by the "false self," according to Winnicott. The defenses of listlessness, sexual restlessness (Stern, 1968, p. 27), and the superficiality of life goals, are desperate attempts to thwart the existential fear of death. Only one aware of the finite nature of his life can be creative with his life. Schopenhauer, Heidegger, Sartre, and even Freud have always stressed how only a steady awareness of one's own death bestows on us the ability to fulfill our lives. One could modify Freud's counsel, "If you want to brave life, prepare yourself for death," with regard to our theme as follows: "If life is supposed to be shaped not by failure but by creativity and creative power, prepare yourself for death." Creativity, group formation, and the development of culture acquire a special meaning in contact with the fear of death. I will try to formulate these thoughts anthropologically. In contrast to animals, the human being is not only connected through one's genius to ancestors in the past, and through descendants to the future, but apart from this, is also connected through cultural tradition with the past, present, and future of human culture in a complete sense as regards content and time. The single creative individual—one thinks of the genius—cannot only bequeath one's special talent to biological descendants—like animals—but individual creativity flows into human culture through communication and tradition and has the potential to mould all present and future generations. Culture transcends the lifespan of an individual, and with the help of tradition and culture the identification of an individual with the group provides a feeling of immortality. We live not only in the present but also in the past of the Romans, Egyptians, Greeks, in Sigmund Freud's time, and also in a Utopian future (cf. Stern, 1968, pp. 26-28). Interestingly, many artistic works, such as architecture, need several generations to be completed. Notre Dame, for instance, was completed only after 300 years of construction. But from this example one sees an important motive—the wish of the creator to make oneself immortal through one's work. Creativity should not be restricted to art. Architecture, scientific work, and even completely different social fields require creative work. In art, in a narrower sense, only creativity stands intentionally in the middle, while in creative processes, for example in business life, creativity is only a means to an end. Nevertheless there are artists who are only slightly creative and business people who accomplish very creative feats. Creativity is not a strict alternative to neurosis. Even artists are notoriously neurotic. They are creative as well as neurotic; Muller-Braunschweig (1974) had given rise to debate about a relatively autonomous "creative system." This is accurate in as much as creativity and neurosis are two variables that can be independent of each other. Sometimes creativity may help to overcome neurosis but that isn't necessarily the case. Therapeutic treat-

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ment of an artist often stimulates his or her creativity and the fears of many artists that a psychotherapeutic treatment could dry out their creativity are unfounded. According to my experience in psychoanalytic work with artists, treatment typically stimulates their creativity. But it is also possible that creative productivity has a neurotic origin. In this case successful psychotherapy would question the present form of creative productivity, although creativity of the artist altogether increases so that one turns to other subjects or develops creativity in another way—even if others may not necessarily consider this creative development. It may be more important for one to direct creativity toward the shaping of one's own personality and his life than toward the production of artistic works in the traditional sense. One of my patients, a talented painter and sculptor, who underwent very good development during therapy that lasted for almost two decades on and off, explained that he was happy to have dispensed with creative works in the narrower sense. He experiences the creative process—if he gets completely involved with himself—like a drug, which claims him with every fiber of his personality, exhausts him, and leads him to the edge of his possibilities. He loves life and discovering the act of living, rather than feeling compelled from anxiety and unresolved agitation to create abstract "things." The tragedy of human existence is an opportunity for creativity as well as failure. As Schafer (1972) argued, the task of psychoanalysis is bringing the analyzed and analyzer closer to the tragic dimension of life and making them aware of it. Life must be accepted as a tragedy in order to develop creativity, on the one hand, and the ability to fail, on the other hand—even to accept this failure as a part of life. Failure belongs to life as well as to creativity. Human beings who do not experience and accept life in its tragic dimension are denied creativity. As Muller-Braunschweig (1984) has emphasized, the creative process is characterized by "the destruction of old structures and the creation of something new" (p. 124). "This disintegration of old structures or problems or rather forms also corresponds to a temporary disintegration of inner psychological structures" which engenders a process by which "regression and progression" take place "at the same time." "The creative process leads to a new synthesis through a phase of weakness of the personality and has . . . relations with the psychoanalytical process" (ibid.). According to Schafer (1972), the psychoanalyst is a "self-made tool." He writes: A particularly important tragic element in the understanding of one's own role lies in the cognition of the analyst that he remains a self-made tool in spite of his bond with classical and well-sounded technical principles and therefore can only analyze in a way that is appropriate to him. (p. 962)

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Later Schafer speaks about a "creative element" in analytical work and he understands "the life history" of a patient "that arises from analysis, as a mutual creation of the patient and analyst" (p. 971). Psychoanalytic treatment itself is thus understood as a creative, inventive process, just as training to become an analyst is a process of invention and creation. Creativity is a nonpathological possibility of handling unsatisfied needs, dreams, limits, losses, painful separations, and the inevitability of death. In sorrow lies the other likewise nonpathological possibility. Sorrow is a look at the inevitability of failure of ideas, hopes, and wishes. By allowing sorrow over failure, we accept failure as an inevitable component of our lives, and precisely this process brings about creative transcendence of failure. If grieved enough, there is also life beyond failure. If grief is denied or suppressed, failure is fixated in trauma, which must be repeated endlessly. Only the person who accepts failure, mourns it, and thus integrates it into his life, becomes free again, self-determines his life, that is, molds it creatively. In this respect, creativity and sorrow have very close ties. "Creativity is a form of handling disability in human life, grieving, released through life as death.. .. But the creative individual is endowed with a specific 'ability to mourn' to alleviate pain over death, which begins at the time of birth" (Auchter, 1978, p. 74). In a certain way, we have to mourn our own deaths for a lifetime, in the sense that we become aware of its inevitability time and again and it becomes, so to say, a part of our life. To accept the limitations of life, which Freud had already recognized, also means to attribute an increased value to our limited lifetime, thus to hold it in higher esteem, as if one lives under the illusion that life is unending. Creativity freezes in ritual if not completed by the process of mourning over suffered dreams, or even over the limitations of one's own creative capabilities—and the time one also loses one's genius. Creativity needs sorrow for further existence. Artists, to whom due honor is often granted only long after their deaths, always have to experience sorrow. But this connection is only generally valid. No creative work is perfect. No creation, which hasn't found its critics, would be outstripped and put into perspective by the ravages of time. Only a creative person who dolorously accepts the imperfection of his work and his partial failure, finds the strength to continue being creative without his work leading to the ritual repetition of the same thing over and over again, that is, getting stuck in repetition compulsion. The term "repetition compulsion," which gains a merciless "heavenly power" in Freud (1930, p. 506) in connection with the death instinct, could experience a similar extension of meaning as is already bestowed upon terms like transference, countertransference, and regression: All these terms also have a positive creative meaning apart from the nega-

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tive pathological meaning. Every repetition contains the possibility of new perspectives opening u p through minute variations of the repeated fundamental conflict. Every repetition presents the attempt of revision and the further development of the original pattern of conflict. It is well-known that many artists work on the same conflict their whole lives, which depicts the very theme of their lives. From this perspective, repetition is a creative act, which allows something unfinished to be seen again in a creative light. Not without reason is the principle of repetition a fundamental element of every artistic creation. Just as creativity requires repetition and sorrow, the opposite is also true: Sorrow needs repetition and creativity. Only w h e n the mourning process is experienced often enough for the mental powers to reorganize and reorient themselves, can the process of mourning really be completed. Then sorrow does not collapse into melancholia, and the psychic energies are once more able to devote themselves to the creative shaping of life. NOTES This paper is an expansion of materials originally published in The Psychoanalytic Review, special issue on death, 2003. 1. Ernest Jones (1927/1948) and K. R. Eissler (1955) both believe castration is worse than death because there would be an emasculating loss of potency and pleasure. Indeed aphanisis, the loss of the capacity for pleasure, is far worse than death, whereas death cannot be represented in the unconscious and hence is not a fundamental concern. I disagree with Jones and Eissler. Castration may or may not be the most horrific fate for many men. however, most men do not fear castration, whereas the existential fear of death, decay, and nonbeing is fundamental. REFERENCES Arendt, H. (1958/1999). Vita activa oder vom tiitigen Leben. Mimchen: Piper. Auchter, T. (1978). Die Suche nach dem Vorgestern—Trauer und Kreativitat. Psyche 32: 52-77. Balint, M. (1968). The basic fault. New York: Brunner/Mazel. Bergmann, M. S. (2000). Der Konflikt zwischen Aufklarung und Romantik im Spiegel der Geschichte der Psychoanalyse. Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse 42: 773-103. Boetticher, D. von (1999). Meine Werke sind lauter Diagnosen. Uber die arztliche Dimension im WerkArhtus Schnitzlers. Heidelberg: Universitatsverlag C. Winter. Bohleber, W. (1989). Psychoanalyse, romantische Naturphilosophie und deutsches idealistisches Denken. Psyche 43: 506-521. Bohme, H., & Bohme, G. (1996). Das Andere der Vernunft. Zur Entwicklung von Rationaliatsstrukturen am Beispiel Kants. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

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Bruder-Bezzel, A., & Bruder, K.-J. (2001). Auf einem Auge blind: Die Verleungnung der Macht in der Psychoanalyse. Zeitschrift fiir Individualpsychologie 25: 24-31. Chasseguet-Smirgel, J. (1981). Das Ichideal. Psychoanalytischer Essay iiber die "Yjankheit der Idealitat". Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Due, M. (1988). Freudsche Psychoanalyse im Widerstreit von Romantik und Aufklarung. Luzifer-Amor. Zeitschrift zur Geschichte der Psychoanalyse 1: 32-48. Eissler, K. R. (1955). The psychiatrist and the dying patient. New York: International Universities Press. Ellenberger, H. (1985). Die Entdeckung des Unbewufiten. Zurich: Diogenes. Erdheim, M , & Blaser, A. (1998). Malend das Unbewufite erkunden. Arnold Bocklin, Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst. Eine Reise ins Ungewisse. Ausstellungskatalog (pp. 194-202). Bern: Benteli. Ferenczi, S., & Rank, O. (1924/1925). Entwicklungsziele der Psychoanalyse. Zur Wechselbeziehung von Theorie und Praxis. Leipzig, Wien, Zurich: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag. Reprint: Wien: Turia und Kant, 1998. Freud, A. (1936/1980). Das Ich und die Abwehrmechanismen. Die Schriften der Anna Freud. Bd. I (pp. 193-355). Mlinchen: Kindler. Freud, S. (1895). Studien iiber Hysteric GW, Bd. I (pp. 75-312). Freud, S. (1900). Die Traumdeutung. GW, Bd. 11/111. Freud, S. (1907). Der Wahn und die Traume in W. Jensens "Gradiva." GW, Bd. VII (pp. 31-128). Freud, S. (1908). Der Dichter und das Phantasieren. GW, Bd. VII (pp. 211-223). Freud, S. (1910). Eine Kindheitserinnerung des Leonardo da Vinci. GW, Bd. VIII (pp. 127-212). Freud, S. (1913). Das Interesse an der Psychoanalyse. GW, Bd. VIII (pp. 389^20). Freud, S. (1914). Zur Geschichte der psychoanalytischen Bewegung. GW, Bd. X (pp. 43-113). Freud, S. (1915a). Verganglichkeit. GW, Bd. X (pp. 357-361). Freud, S. (1915b). Zeitgemafies iiber Krieg und Tod. GW, Bd. X (pp. 323-355). Freud, S. (1916). Trauer und Melancholic GW, Bd. X (pp. 427-446). Freud, S. (1919). Das Unheimliche. Freud GW, Bd. XII (pp. 227-268). Freud, S. (1926). Hemmung, Symptom und Angst. GW, XIV (pp. 111-205). Freud, S. (1928). Dostojewski und die Vatertotung. GW, Bd. XIV (pp. 397-418). Freud, S. (1930). Das Unbehagen in der Kultur. GW, Bd. XIV (pp. 419-506). Freud, S. (1933). Neue Folge der Vorlesungen zur Einfuhrung in die Psychoanalyse. GW, Bd. XV. Freud, S. (1960). Briefe 1873-1939. Frankfurt: Fischer. Fromm, E. (1963). Der Ungehorsam als ein psychologisches und ethisches Problem. GA, Bd. IX (pp. 367-373). Fromm, E. (1977). Freuds Modell des Menschen und seine gesellschaftlichen Determinanten. GA, Bd. VIII (pp. 231-251). Fiirstenau, P. (1967). "Sublimierung" in affirmativer und negativ-kritischer Anwendung. Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse 4: 43-62. Gay, P. (1989). Freud. Eine Biographie fur unsere Zeit. Frankfurt: Fischer. Gehlen, A. (1963). Studien zur Anthropologie und Soziologie. Neuwied.

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Godde, G. (1999). Traditionslinien des "Unbewufiten." Schopenhauer-NietzscheFreud. Tubingen: Edition Dicord. Heidegger, M. (1927/1996). Being and time (J. Stambaugh, Trans.). Albany: State University of New York Press. Janus, L. (1994). Otto Rank—der unentdeckte Pionier einer erweiterten Psychosomatik. In A.-E. Meyer & U. Lamparter (Eds.), Pioniere der Psychosomatik. Beitrage zur Entwicklungsgeschichte einer ganzheitlichen Medizin (pp. 182-194). Heidelberg: Asanger. Janus, L. (Ed.). (1998). Die Wiederentdeckung Otto Ranks fur die Psychoanalyse. Schwerpunktthema von: psychosozial, 73. Giefien: Psychosozial-Verlag. Janus, L., & Wirth, H.-J. (2000). Einleitung zu Rank, O. Kunst und Kiinstler. Giefien: Psychosozial-Verlag. Jones, E. (1927/1948). The early development of female sexuality. In Papers on psycho-analysis (pp. 438-451). Baltimore, MD: Williams & Williams. Jones, E. (1957/1960). Das Leben und Werk von Sigmund Freud. B'dnde I-III. Bern: Huber. Kernberg, O. (1998). Dreifiig Methoden zur Unterdriickung der Kreativitat von Kandidaten der Psychoanalyse. Psyche 52:199-213. Kluge, F. (1989). Etymologisches Worterbuch der deutschen Sprache. Berlin: de Gruyter. Kollbrunner, J (2001). Der kranke Freud. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. Krull, M. (1979/1992). Freud und sein Vater. Die Entstehung der Psychoanalyse und Freuds ungeloste Vaterbindung. Frankfurt: Fischer. Kunz, H. (1975). Grundfragen der psychoanalytischen Anthropologie. Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Marquard, O. (1987). Transzendentaler Idealismus, romantische Naturphilosophic, Psychoanalyse. Koln: Verlag fur Philosophie. Mohring, P. (1985). Die Schicksalshaut«. Eine Studie zu Sigmund Freuds Krankheiten. Psycho-Analyse 2 & 3:123-152. Muller-Braunschweig, H. (1974). Psychopathologie und Kreativitat. Psyche 28: 600-634. Muller-Braunschweig, H. (1984). Aspekte einer psychoanalytischen Kreativitatstheorie. In H. Kraft, (Ed.), Psychoanalyse, Kunst und Kreativitat heute. Die Entwicklung der analytischen Kunstpsychologie seit Freud (pp. 122-145). Koln: DuMont. Piven, J. (in press). Birth, death, dread, religion. Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought. Plessner, H. (1928). Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Rank, O. (1907). Der Kiinstler. Wien: Hugo Heller. Vierte, vermehrte Auflage (1925) unter dem Titel: Der Kiinstler und andere Beitrage zur Psychoanalyse des dichterischen Schaffens. Leipzig, Wien, Zurich: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag. Rank, O. (1909). Der Mythos von der Geburt des Helden. Versuch einer psychologischen Mythendeutung. Zweite, wesentlich erweiterte Auflage (1922). Leipzig, Wien: Deuticke. Rank, O. (1911). Die Lohengrin-Sage. Ein Beitrag zu ihrer Motivgestaltung und Deutung. Leipzig, Wien: Deuticke.

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Rank, O. (1912). Das Inzest-Motiv in Dichtung und Sage. Grundzuge einer Psychologie des dichterischen Schaffens. Zweite, wesentlich vermehrte und verbesserte Auflage (1925). Leipzig und Wien: Deuticke. Rank, O. (1914). Der Doppelganger. Eine psychoanalytische Studie. (Zuerst in Imago, III. Band, 1914). Leipzig, Wien, Zurich: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, 1925. Reprint: Wien: Turia und Kant, 1993. Rank, O. (1919). Psychoanalytische Beitrage zur Mythenforschung. Leipzig, Wien, Zurich: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag. Rank, O. (1922). Die Don Juan-Gestalt. Leipzig, Wien, Zurich: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag. Rank, O. (1924/1998). Das Trauma der Geburt und seine Bedeutung fur die Psychoanalyse. Leipzig, Wien, Zurich: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag. Neuausgabe, Giefien: Psychosozial-Verlag. Rank, O. (1932/2000). Kunst und Kiinstler. Erstpublikation des Urmanuskriptes von 1932 mit einer Einleitung von L. Janus und H.-J. Wirth. Giefien: Psychosozial-Verlag. Rank, O., & Sachs, H. (1913/1965). Die Bedeutung der Psychoanalyse fiir die Geisteswissenschaften. Amsterdam: Bonset. Rauchfleisch, U. (1990). Psychoanalytische Betrachtungen zur musikalischen Kreativitat. Psyche 44:1113-1140. Richter, H.-E. (1992). Umgang mit Angst. Hamburg: Hoffmann & Campe. Richter, H.-E., & Beckmann, D. (1986). Herzneurose. Stuttgart: Thieme. Safranski, R. (1994). Ein Meister aus Deutschland. Heidegger und seine Zeit. Miinchen: Hanser. Schafer, R. (1972). Die psychoanalytische Anschauung der Realitat (II). Psyche 26:952-973. Scheeler, M. (1926/1994). Der Mensch als der sorgenvolle Protestant. In Schriften zur Anthropologie (pp. 114-121). Stuttgart: Reclam. Schelling, F. W. (1799/1965). System der gesammten Philosophic und der Naturphilosophie insbesondere. Munchner Ausgabe, M. Schroter (Ed.), Vol. Ill, Miinchen. Sloterdijk, P. (1998). Spharen I. Blasen. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Sloterdijk, P. (1999). Spharen II. Globen. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Stein, A., & Stein, H. (1987). Kreativitat. Psychoanalytische und philosophische Aspekte. Fellbach-Oeffingen: Bonz. Stern, M. (1968). Fear of death and neurosis. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 16 (3): 3-31. Stern, M. (1972/1974). Trauma, Todesangst und Furcht vor dem Tod. Psyche 26:902-928. Strenger, C. (1989). The Classic and the romantic vision in psychoanalysis. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 70:593-610. Whitebook, J. (1996). Sublimierung: ein "Grenzbegriff." Psyche 50: 850-880. Wirth, H.-J. (2000). Spaltungsprozesse in der psychoanalytischen Bewegung und ihre Auswirkungen auf die Theoriebildung. In A.-M. Schlosser & K. Hohfeld (Eds.), Psychoanalyse als Beruf (pp. 177-192). Giefien: Psychosozial-Verlag. Wittenberger, G. (1995). Das "geheime Komitee" Sigmund Freuds. Tubingen: Edition Diskord.

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Worbs, M. (1983). Nervenkunst. Literatur und Psychoanalyse im Wien der Jahrhundertwende. Frankfurt: Europaische Verlagsanstalt. Yalom, I. D. (1989). Existential psychotherapy. New York: Basic Books.

CHAPTER 7

The Idol and the Idolizers: Ernest Becker's Theory of Expanded Transference as a Tool for Historical Criticism and Interpretation with an Addendum on Transference and Terrorism Daniel Liechty

During a short, stormy but productive academic career, anthropologist Ernest Becker (1924-1974) relentlessly pursued the question, "What makes people act the way they do?" Always pushing the question of human motivation to the limits, Becker almost inadvertently produced a comprehensive theoretical synthesis of anthropological, sociological, psychoanalytic, and theological material. In his mature work, he drew a bead on the thesis that the root motivation for human behavior is deeper than sexual, aggressive, power, or conformity drives. Becker demonstrated that each of these can best be understood as a particular mode of coping with massive death anxiety. This thesis has lately been the subject of a highly developed and sophisticated program of empirical investigation, and proving to be quite resilient in accounting for and predicting testing results. (Summaries of this work are found in Pyszczynski, Greenberg, & Solomon, 1997, and Solomon, Greenberg, & Pyszczynski, 1998.) I Massive death anxiety is discerned from two basic, almost deceptively obvious observations. The first observation is that human beings share in the primary, natural narcissism, the survival instinct, of all successful, living species, for without it no species would survive. The second observation is a bit more sophisticated but no less persua-

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sive. Each living species has developed mechanisms which have allowed it to thrive. In simpler species, this mechanism is very often fast and massive reproduction. Individual members of the species may become food to other species by the thousands, millions, and billions. Other species are variously blessed with speed, coloration, teeth and claws, ability to mimic, and countless other mechanisms of survival. What has allowed the human species to survive, to eat more often that we are eaten, in what for most of our species' existence is an extremely unfriendly environment? Our species developed a cerebral cortex so powerful that we are able to think abstractly, imaginatively freezing time and thinking of ourselves in the third person. We mentally construct not-yet-existing environments and then bring those environments into reality. Other species may have learned by experience, as unrelated facts, that a cave offers shelter from the rain and that fire offers warmth from the cold. Only human beings, however, have been able to abstract imaginatively from these unrelated facts a fire within a cave, imagine themselves sitting by that fire, and then act to make it so. Only human beings shape the physical world on the basis of abstract imagination. Becker's second observation is that our mental capacity to view ourselves in the third person (that the symbolic self becomes an object in the field of the ego) is the most important survival mechanism of the human species. But the consequences of these two observations, taken together, is that human nature is on a collision course with itself. We must shoulder psychologically the clash between the force of our natural narcissism to survive and continue existing, and a survival mechanism that makes us fully aware that we die just as surely as we turn to dust. According to Becker, this is a significant psychological burden. It strikes at the heart of what it means to be human and alive (Kauffman, 1995). Only by fully employing the gamut of psychological defenses can human beings function under this burden of massive and potentially overwhelming mortality anxiety with which we have been saddled by the evolutionary process. These defenses include especially denial, displacement, and sublimation, which are fostered and encouraged by the value systems of particular cultural environments and world views. Yet because both the defense mechanisms of the individual and the solidly and impassively transcendent Truth of any particular cultural world view are always subject to deflation and deconstruction in the modern world, the public face of self-esteem and self-assurance we present each day skates above a lake of anxiety on ever-thinner ice. The anxiety breaks through increasingly often, manifesting itself in the form of individual depression, neurosis, and isolation on the micro-level, and in violence, communal, and familial dislocation and general social and cultural anomie on the macro-level.

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All cultural world views become increasingly less convincing, coming to seem sectarian and provincial when placed one against the other. Becker's final trilogy, The Birth and Death of Meaning (1971), The Denial of Death (1973), and Escape From Evil (1975), outlined and elaborated this basic view of human psychological structure. In these works Becker presents a psychological anthropology adequate to interpret the wide complexity of human psychological, emotional, and spiritual reality, falling prey to neither biologistic materialism nor to ethereal esotericism. II One aspect of human behavior that particularly intrigued Ernest Becker is the behavior of people in groups and the relationship between the group and its leaders. His observations led him to a significant recasting of the psychoanalytic concept of transference (Liechty, 1995, pp. 83-95). Transference in psychoanalytic literature generally refers to the very strong emotions of the client toward the counselor that emerge in the course of therapy (Laplanche & Pontalis, 1973). It is assumed in psychoanalysis that strong negative emotions are based on unresolved childhood conflicts in which the client transfers the anger, hatred, and ambivalence experienced during that period of life onto the therapist. The emergence of strong negative transference can then be used by the therapist to uncover these unresolved conflicts of the past and, by working through these feelings with the therapist, the client can be helped to resolve the conflicts in the unconscious. Psychoanalysts are also aware that clients will form very intense and clinging attachments to the therapist. The therapist is experienced by the client as an all-wise, all-knowing, and even all-powerful being and the client magnifies the personal qualities of the therapist beyond any sense of proportion (Giovacchini, 1987). While this kind of positive transference is less valuable for therapy and can place an enormous moral strain on the therapist, it happens with consistent regularity. This fact intrigued Freud, who theorized that humans carry within themselves a strong desire for passive and dependent protection, based in the childhood experience of dependence on parental caregivers. This desire is transferred to the therapist in the course of analysis, causing the patient to view the therapist in the same light of omnipotence with which the child experienced its adult caregivers. Freud theorized that this desire was the basis for the trance state in hypnosis, as well as the reason why, especially in groups, people will so willingly submit to authoritarian leaders and leadership structures (Freud, 1921/1955). That the submission can be total was evidence for Freud that it was erotic in nature and rooted in infantile sexual desire

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directed toward the parental objects. This view was developed further by other contributors to the psychoanalytic corpus. Becker was very appreciative of Freud's interpretation on this issue and considered it "the key to a universal underlying historical psychology" (Becker, 1973, p. 131). Becker saw that this theory explained most clearly why people engage in acts of sadism in a group context that they would never even consider in another situation and for which they might later be shocked and ashamed. For if the leader comes to represent the omnipotent parent, the person wants nothing more than to submit and serve. Since it is the parents who, during the oedipal transition process, facilitate the development of the superego, a conscience, a sense of right and wrong, then an authoritarian leader acting in that role can override the constrictions of the superego and sanction any sort of behavior in its place. Becker considered this an important fact about human beings that was already tacitly suggested by Freud (Piven, in press). Reality reveals to us the fact that as individual people, we are finite, mortal, weak animals. Given the choice between accepting this reality or giving oneself over to illusions of greatness and importance that the leader imparts to followers, the mass of human beings will choose illusion over reality, lies over truth, fiction over fact and will strike out in holy rage against anyone or anything that threatens to shatter the illusion to which they have committed themselves (Becker, 1975). This is the nature of the bond between leader and follower, between individual and group behavior. It is a bond rooted in the regressive transference of individual submission to power, in the individual need to feel awe and protection from the symbolic icons of power by which the person can deny and avoid recognition of finitude. Furthermore, people do not simply find themselves passively engulfed by such feelings toward symbolic icons of power. People actively and all but consciously seek such symbolic icons of powers toward which they might submit themselves, even when, perhaps even especially when, this is done under the ideological cover of seeking independence, individuation, self-actualization, self-fulfillment, and autonomy. In Becker's view, the primary role of the leader is to impart to group members a sense of transcendent expansion, sanction for sadistic or licentious behavior, and group cohesiveness based on the dynamic of regressive transference (Becker, 1973). The leader offers the group opportunity to maintain the illusion of power in the face of ontological finitude. By assuming the burden of guilt for the self-aggrandizing actions of the group, shouldering the mantle of superhuman heroism through which group members then also participate vicariously in the realm of immortality, the leader reflects back to the group a resolution of the problem of finitude. The price each person pays for this service,

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which is obedience to the authority of the leader, is paid willingly and gratefully. This dynamic of the leader's power, ironically, also places the leader in a position of real dependence and vulnerability to the group itself. The relationship between the leader and the group is not simply unidirectional. Looked at from the other side, the leader is created by the group. While there are natural leadership qualities that will make a certain individual seem to be a born leader, the specifics of these qualities vary widely from culture to culture. It is the group that recognizes and responds to these qualities of leadership exhibited and embodied in particular individuals. In short, humans in group situations actively and all but consciously seek out people who, by the specific outlines of their particular cultural hero system, embody and exhibit those qualities of leadership required by the group members for the successful functioning of their regressive transference. When the group finds such a person (perhaps after some sequence of trial and error, and woe to the leader found to be inadequate!), the members are more than willing to surrender their will to that of the leader. In this surrender, very strong and specific demands are placed on the leader to fulfill the expected role that the group requires for regressive transference. Contrary to myriad mythological constructs, even the most exalted and powerful of human leaders are human beings and not gods. The group holds as firm a grip on the leader as the leader holds on the group, for it is only in the continuing exaltation of the group that the leader is able to maintain an image of superhuman power and magnitude. The group, therefore, holds the leader hostage to the expectations of the group, and, as the history of exiled and beheaded potentates demonstrates, the group will not hesitate to move against a leader who ceases to exhibit this ability to lead, the ability to reflect back to them a resolution of the problem of finitude. Building on the insights of Freud and others concerning transference and group behavior, Becker suggested that this transference dynamic is present in all human behavior. Transference is not simply neurotic behavior but normal behavior. Or better said, normal behavior is neurotic behavior. Human behavior can best be interpreted as a continuum of strengths and weaknesses, with no absolutely clear demarcation lines between what is normal and what is neurotic. If we view neurosis as a continuum, however, we have to become aware of those features of ourselves that we would rather pretend do not exist. Seen in this light, there is no convincing philosophical or therapeutic justification for the division between "healers" and "sick," between "we" and "they," which the medical model of psychiatry implies. This theme, which is being echoed in the current literature (Goldstein, 1990), began to dominate Becker's mature work.

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HI What Becker began to realize is that human destructiveness is not simply a matter of acquisitive appetites out of control, material conflicts of interest, or clumsy ignorance of sophisticated conflict resolution methods. Human destructiveness is rooted in the ontological fact of human finitude on the one hand and on the other hand the very real human need for illusions, lies, and fictions concerning this fact of ontology. Experience, education, material equality, and conflict mediation will lessen the frequency with which humans resort to overt institutions of violence such as organized warfare. This is to be encouraged at every point. Yet Becker began to understand that at its deepest levels, human resort to violence is rooted in an existential urge to deny and avoid ontological finitude. Freud theorized that the human desire to submit to authority is rooted in sexual motivation. Becker recast this in an existential/ontological direction. Becker sought to ground his views in the general human condition rather than in specific erotic drives. This allowed his theories to mutually influence the emerging interdisciplinary consensus concerning the fictional nature of human meaning systems and the plasticity of human character. According to Becker (1973), transference is motivated by a real terror of both life and death. As he wrote: People seek merger with the parental omnipotence not out of desire but out of cowardice. . . . The fact that transference could lead to complete subjection proves not its "erotic character" but something quite different: its "truthful" character, we might say . . . it is the immortality motive and not the sexual one that must bear the larger burden of our explanation of human passion, (p. 142)

The attraction toward heroism Becker located in the human conscience. This desire to do what is right and to feel good is an extension of what Becker earlier summarized in the concept of self-esteem. Each person has an aesthetic urge toward perfection and wholeness that is an integral component of self-esteem. Each person's sense of perfection is shaped by culture and upbringing. Within one culture, normally socialized people tend to share basic notions, with variations occurring due to individual experiences. While other species (speaking anthropomorphically) also seem to desire to feel good by living expansively in the environment according to their nature and instincts, human beings cannot easily do this. Having exchanged instinctual meaning for symbolic meaning in the course of evolution, human beings no longer have a clear and unambiguous nature by which to live in the world. Animals need not con-

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template just what truth, goodness, and beauty mean for them. For human beings this is a primary activity, sometimes even prior to basic bodily care. The reason for this is that while humans do want to merge with oceanic nature, at the same time there is an equally strong urge to stand out from nature as something unique in the universe. To deny, neglect, or ignore either pole in human beings can only be done by concerted repression of that which is basic to human character. Is it possible to reconcile these two poles of being human? Putting the dilemma in this light allows us yet another handle on what Becker meant by transference. Transference, in a nutshell, is the dynamic of drawing personal symbolic power from external sources. Transference is the psychological mechanism by which an individual feels grounded in the object world and at the same time feels powerful, important, and unique, standing, as it were, above nature. Because of the need to feel powerful, important, and unique, normally socialized people choose a combination of transference objects that symbolize strength, power, or beauty to the majority of people living in their particular culture. In contemporary American culture, for example, transference objects like the flag, money, cars, famous people, and so on are easily understood, if not shared, by the majority of people. Transference objects such as specialized collections, technical gadgets, romantic or intellectual interests, clubs, associations, or social movements are shared by fewer people, yet well understood by the majority. They are considered safely normal, if perhaps idiosyncratic, so long as one is not fanatical about one peculiar transference object (that is, has a combination of transference objects that are shared by many other people). In Becker's presentation, transference links even a perversion like fetishism to the same inner motives that we find in everyday normal living. As he wrote (1973): Transference is a form of fetishism, a form of narrow control that anchors our own problems. We take our helplessness, our guilt, our conflicts, and we fix them to a spot in the environment. We can create any locus at all for projecting our cares onto the world, even the locus of our own arms and legs. (p. 144)

Because humans are symbolic creatures and can arbitrarily invest any concept or object with talismanic power, there is nothing that limits our choice of transference objects to that which the majority prefer or approve. In Becker's view, people use transference as a way of dealing with the real terror of feeling powerless, ungrounded, weak, and alone. We symbolically invest a particular transference object with power to protect and reassure us of our place in the universe. The ambivalence felt toward both positive and negative transference objects is based on this investment of power. As Becker (1973) wrote:

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In some complex ways the child has to fight against the power of the parents in their awesome miraculousness Now we see why the transference object poses so many problems. The child does partly control his larger fate by it, but it becomes his new fate. He binds himself to one person to automatically control terror, to mediate wonder, and to defeat death by that person's strength. But then he experiences 'transference terror/ the terror of losing the object, of displeasing it, of not being able to live without it. The terror of his own finitude and impotence still haunts him, but now in the precise form of the transference object, (p. 146)

In Becker's view, transference dynamics pervade all of human life and are inseparable from the ontological fact of our human condition. Transference dynamics lay at the root of much human misery, oppression, and bamboozlement. Yet for an animal who has raised its head with the new gift of self-consciousness and, surveying the universe, finds itself alone, threatened on every side and awaiting the finality of death, life without some form of transference would be unbearable. Without transference of any kind, we would be psychotically stunned every time we lifted our minds from total absorption in all but the most mundane of occupations. As seen, transference is also the source of the human urge toward the transcendence of the heroic, toward truth, beauty, and goodness. But this is not the whole story. Becker (1973) wrote, "What makes transcendence heroics demeaning is that the process is unconscious and reflexive, not fully in one's control" (p. 156). The tragedy of transference dynamics is that our transference objects are mediated to us without our conscious control or reflective input. If we were able to exercise some thoughtful control and judgment in choosing our transference objects, the negative side effects would be greatly reduced. IV The analogy of this presentation of transference to the ancient Israelite struggle against idolatry is instructive here. Idol worship is the most explicit example of transference dynamics and the idol is the most explicit example of a transference object. In the most advanced societies of the ancient world, there were complex hierarchies of idols. And the powers these idols represented, from the central idol of the national or city-state political system, ranged from the powers of political control down to the household idols' powers of individual families and their place in the overall system of order and control. Idols are made by human hands and initially only represent external powers in the environment. But once the idols were constructed and psychologically invested with power through transference dynamics, these objects of wood, stone, and metal took on power significance

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in their own right. They became the central focus for people's lives and behaviorally had real power over the existence of the people. We might see this psychoanalytically as a process of transitional objects coming to replace the primary object itself (cf. Winnicott, 1971). The ancient Israelites did not deny the existence of external powers that governed and ordered the universe. But they experienced the dark side of the cultural hero system of monarchy in their very bodies, in Egyptian bondage for some tribes and in the heavy burden of taxes, coerced labor, and other forms of exploitation of agricultural communities by the city-states for other tribes (Gottwald, 1979). The maintenance of any social fiction has an underside, a shadow side, and demands victims. Having experienced this underside of the system in their own persons, these people were united by their determination to reject the power transference dynamics of their environment. Although it was certainly not uniform among them at all times, the genius of ancient Israelite ideology was their rejection of idols as legitimate transference objects, as the legitimate focus for the ordering of their communal life. What was the point in this? If there was a recognition of powers, what harm could there be in locating those powers in specific objects? Was it just simple stubbornness that caused the ancient Israelites to abhor so strongly the complex system of idol worship of their neighbors? The fact is that if Moloch, Marduk, Osiris, Baal, or the Pharaoh only made the crops grow and brought peace and prosperity, it would be difficult to criticize the particular cultic manifestation of the culture that produced them. But the price paid for this social fiction of idol worship was always a combination of heavy tax burdens, conscription for labor and war, and human sacrifice. The people of the ancient Near East were very accepting of a multiplicity of powers and the representation of these powers in a plethora of idols, but it was simply incomprehensible that a people would choose no thing as a transference object for the focus of these powers. A god that had no representation in a concrete transference object—an idol— was literally no-thing to these people. A tribal union based on the worship of no-thing must have struck them as not just impious and inferior, but downright "crazy." The central issue between the ancient Israelites and their neighbors was not whether there was a God, but rather what kind of God it was. To maintain a system of worship of a God who could not be focused in a concrete transference object (and therefore be controlled by the cultic system) placed a great burden of anxiety on the people, as can be seen clearly especially in those biblical passages relating to the controversy surrounding the establishment of kingship among the ancient Israelites. In actual practice the ancient Israelites also set up transference objects, in the form of special altars, the use of minor idols, and finally

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the political institution of kingship as a focus for the power of their God. But through the institution of the prophets, periodic cleansing of these idolatrous encroachments were carried out in the name of a transference object, YHWH, which could not be controlled by the people (Iwill-be-what-I-will-be) and would demand of the people social justice rather than cultic sacrifice. Although later developments in Christian doctrine concerning the divine incarnation in the form of a human being would muddy the waters of the Christian understanding of God considerably, in relation to this central issue, these dynamics reappeared in the early Christian encounter with Roman emperor worship. These early Christians, who refused to pay homage to the emperors' concrete divinity, were perceived by the Romans as not just impious, but as crazy and even atheistic (Wilken, 1984). With this historical analogy in mind, let us return to the problem of transference dynamics in the modern world. The problem with transference dynamics is not in the process itself, but rather in the fact that our transference objects are selected reflexively, without intelligent control or any awareness of the underside, the shadow side, the price that must be paid for making any particular transference object the locus for ordering our lives. Psychotherapy can be seen as the process of helping the client make conscious the transference objects by which he or she is ordering life and gaining a sense of protection and structure in the world, as well as the price that the person pays for the selection of these particular transference objects (Becker, 1973). These transference objects may be very concrete and inanimate, such as a car, a house, a job, or they may be such things as social and parental voices of the superego concerning family roles, proper behavior, and so on. For the most part, the person has already found the underside, the shadow side, to be dysfunctional. The price paid in the form of stress, broken relationships, and phobias is too high, for that is why the person sought therapy in the first place. By bringing the unconscious choices of transference objects into the conscious awareness of the client, the client is enabled to make thoughtful changes. The client is enabled to take some control in the selection of transference objects and make some reflective decisions concerning what transference objects are best suited to the reality of the client's life situation. Similarly, sophisticated and critical political commentary and historical interpretation may be viewed as the task of helping to bring to the public awareness of a people the unconscious transference projects (idols) they have been serving, and the costs and benefits entailed by this. It should be noted, however, that this is not simply an easy matter of intellectual insight alone. Just as transference objects are what psychologically allow the ego to feel grounded, secure, and safe, so

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are collective transference projects the grounds on which a people and nation base their sense of collective purpose, mission, meaning, and forward movement. To call attention to the fictional nature of transference objects may cast the individual into a sense of chaos. The psychotherapist must expect a process of constant resistance to having these sources of power revealed. Likewise, the person calling attention to the fictional nature of the collective transference project—that is, presenting it not as transcendent in nature but as chosen and as something about which choices can be made—may also find stiff resistance on the part of the people and even professional colleagues, who would much prefer to remain in the unalloyed illusion that the divine correctness of the collective vision are truths to be held as matter of factly self-evident. In conclusion, Becker's presentation of transference dynamics and transference objects, seen as analogous to the ancient Israelite and early Christian struggle against idol worship, demonstrates its power as a tool for historical interpretation, and draws the analysis into agreement with a observation of psychoanalysts commenting on human religion. While the differences between a psychoanalytic and a religious criticism and interpretation of human affairs must be respected, they share the common aim of freeing people from attachment to idols. In other words, if these approaches cannot agree on what God is, they certainly can agree on what God is not. ADDENDUM ON TRANSFERENCE AND TERROR: JANUARY 2002 Does this theory assist us in understanding the American experience with abject terrorism? I think it does, especially when we keep in mind the symbolic nature of the collective transference project. In very broad strokes, we have seen the rise of an apocalyptic form of religious belief that locates the fullness of transference dynamics for its devoted adherents in a political ideology mediated through a small cadre of religious leaders. So long as these leaders are perceived by their followers as credibly mediating symbolic immortality, these devoted followers will continue to willingly offer their actual physical bodies as a "living sacrifice" for the cause. It is a small price to pay, from their point of view (indeed, it is their gateway to Paradise). We may assume that the very fact that these leaders have become the focus of "evil" in the eyes of their enemies actually enhances the credibility of these leaders in the eyes of their devoted adherents. To a large degree, their very notoriety in this regard, their media-driven "larger than life" status, is more important than that from which their notoriety springs. These terrorist leaders were quite sophisticated in their understanding of the heart of the American transference project. The center to the

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American sense of world superiority, to an American claim of being "larger than life," is clearly nestled in the prosperity power of the American economy, coupled with the domination power of the American military. As has been often noted, that the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon were chosen as targets was hardly an accident. They obviously were chosen for direct attack as symbols of the American transference project. ("Democracy" also echoes as a third leg in the American transference project, though the dominant focus on "money and might" may directly reflect an increasing loss of faith in that aspect of the American "mission" in the world. That the Capitol building or the White House were reputedly also targets on September 11 may indicate, ironically, that the terrorists hold American Democracy in higher regard than many Americans themselves.) Becker's theory of transference suggests that when mediating symbols of the transference project are attacked, adherents will mostly rush to prop up those symbols and become even more vocal and insistent about their devotion to the project, with a corresponding vilification of the attackers. In the case of the terrorists, although we have certainly seen a fundamental rejection of terrorist ideology throughout the world, there is also myriad indication that among the circles of their most devoted followers, the ensuing American "war on terrorism" has firmly calcified commitment to the leaders and the terrorist cause even more tightly than before. On the American front, both the dramatic rise in the Presidential poling numbers and the persistent expressions of patriotism, the extolling of American greatness and might, and the urge not only to display our military might but also the pervasive need to affirm that we will "get the economy moving again," transparently indicate the extent to which the majority of Americans have reacted subconsciously to this attack by overt reaffirmations of the collective transference project. The widespread public determination to avoid repeating a pattern of racist and xenophobic scapegoating violence against those who for circumstantial reasons remind the majority of these terrorists is surely one of the most important indicators that political and social maturity is occurring in this republic. However, perhaps even especially among the intellectuals and political talking heads, there has also been no shortage of those reacting in verbally violent, frustrated anger against any and all who might suggest that these events in any way cast the slightest doubt upon the self-evident, transcendent correctness of the American transference project. It is certainly too early for a balanced view of the myriad indicators involved, and we should beware of any theory that too easily seems to explain anything and everything. Real life is always more complex than that which can be contained in any theory. I also have ethical reservations about using the massive deaths of terrorist victims to il-

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lustrate or prove the "correctness" of a theory, especially a theory which is, after all, reflective to a large extent of m y own chosen transference project. It is for this reason that in the immediate aftermath of these terrible events, I mainly chose reflective silence w h e n invited to comment. However, as w e are n o w turning from a state of immobilizing shock toward wanting more clearly to comprehend these events, I do suggest that there is m u c h in Becker's theory of transference that facilitates our u n d e r s t a n d i n g of w h a t w e n t on d u r i n g those closing months of 2001. NOTE This paper was originally published in J. Piven, P. Ziolo, & H. Lawton (Eds.). (2002). Terror and Apocalypse: Psychological Undercurrents of History Volume II (pp. 268-285). New York: iUniverse. REFERENCES Becker, E. (1971). The birth and death of meaning. 2nd ed. New York: The Free Press. Becker, E. (1973). The denial of death. New York: The Free Press. Becker, E. (1975). Escape from evil. New York: The Free Press. Freud S. (1921/1955). Group psychology and the analysis of the ego. In The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, Volume 18. London: Hogarth Press. Giovacchini, P. (1987). A narrative textbook of psychoanalysis. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson. Goldstein, H. (1990). Strength or pathology: Ethical and rhetorical contrasts in approaches to practice. Families in Society 71: 267-275. Gottwald, N. (1979). The tribes ofYahweh. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Press. Kauffman, J. (1995). Awareness of mortality. Amityville, NY: Baywood Publishing. Laplanche, J., & Pontalis, J.-B. (1973). The language of psycho-analysis. New York: Norton. Liechty, D. (1995). Transference and transcendence: Ernest Becker's contribution to psychotherapy. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson. Piven, J. S. (in press). Death and delusion: A Freudian analysis of death anxiety. Westport, CT: Information Age Publishing. Pyszczynski, T, Greenberg, J., & Solomon, S. (1997). Why do we need what we need? A terror management perspective on the roots of human social motivation. Psychological Inquiry 8:1-20. Solomon, S., Greenberg, J., & Pyszczynski, T. (1998). Tales from the crypt: on the role of death in life. Zygon: The Journal of Religion and Science 33: 9-AA. Wilken, R. (1984). The Christians as the Romans saw them. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Winnicott, D. W. (1971). Playing and reality. New York: Routledge, 1994.

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CHAPTER 8

Thoughts for the Times on Terrorism, War, and Death Hans-Jiirgen Wirth

The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance of their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction. . . . Men have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last man. They know this, and hence comes a large part of their current unrest, their unhappiness and their mood of anxiety. —Sigmund Freud, 1930 The narcissist must perpetually live with the divine. —Bela Grunberger & Pierre Dessuant, 1997 The monstrous attack of September 11, 2001, on the World Trade Center in N e w York and the Pentagon in Washington has—in Freud's words (1930)—once again demonstrated to the entire world h o w difficult it is for " m a n k i n d " to overcome "the breakdown of cooperation d u e to the h u m a n instinct for aggression and self-annihilation" (p. 506). However, Freud's hypothesis regarding aggression, self-annihilation, or the death instinct must not be truncated to a monocausal interpretation of destructive action, as though the terrorist act against the World Trade Center could be "conceptualized," explained, or understood simply by reference to aggressive-destructive h u m a n instincts.

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Instead, the theoretical achievement of Freud's death instinct hypothesis lies in the mere insistence that each of us carries within the potential toward destructiveness. The terrorist act of September 11, 2001, is not one of "unimaginable cruelty" by any means, as commentaries frequently expressed it. Rather, such a scenario was painted in detail by creative minds within Hollywood's movie industry years earlier, and a public numbering in the millions came to be entertained, fascinated, and horrified by it. The human destructive potential is everpresent: Basically people are capable of any act of cruelty the human imagination can conjure up. However, to what extent the individual is beset by such destructive instincts and whether the destructive fantasies are acted out or remain within the realm of fantasy depends on many other complexly interlinked conditions, among them, those defined by the concepts of malignant narcissism, delusions of grandeur, feelings of powerlessness, individual and collective traumatizations, fanaticism, fundamentalism, and paranoid world views. Neither are events such as the terror attack of September 11, 2001, "bestial" by the original definition of the word "beast" (wild animal, nonhuman), but on the contrary, characterize the human species. Animals—barring a few exceptions for the sake of conserving their species—have an instinctual inhibition against killing members of their own kind. The potential for committing a monstrous crime is a fundamental component of the human condition. A relative freedom from instinctual behavior on the one hand holds the potential for freedom and creativity, for free decision making, while on the other hand allowing the freedom to choose evil. "This makes evil the risk and also the price of freedom" (Safranski, 1997, p. 193). It does not mean surrendering to evil. Instead, humans are confronted with the difficult task of fighting evil, yet without being able to eliminate it from human life altogether; for all attempts to do so will inevitably bring about further evil, as they prove destructive to freedom. The tragedy is that the struggle against evil engenders further evil. Division of the world into rigidly divided categories of pure "good" and "evil" is one of the central psychological conditions for terrorism. Terrorists can only quiet their conscience by dehumanizing their opponents and equating them with absolute evil. Conversely, in calling for a "battle of good against evil," and even a "crusade against evil," U.S. President George W. Bush assumes the same psychic division that is one of the causes of the problem—not its solution. For in reality, as Freud (1915) wrote in "Thoughts for the Times on War and Death": Evil cannot be "eradicated." Psychological—or, to be exact, psychoanalytic— investigation demonstrates instead that the deepest essence of human nature consists of instinctive drives of an elementary nature, that are equally inher-

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ent in all people and designed for satisfaction of certain basic needs. These instinctive drives are neither good nor evil in themselves.... A human being is rarely completely good or evil, but mostly "good" in one relationship, "evil" in another, or "good" under certain external circumstances, and under others, decidedly "evil." (p. 331f) Indeed, evil—currently embodied in terrorism—is a hydra: Cut off one of its h e a d s , a n d ten n e w h e a d s will sprout from the s t u m p (cf. Nitzschke, 2001). The equivalent is true for American resistance. Whenever legitimate and necessary resistance itself resorts to terrorist measures and is carried out within the framework of a crusader mentality, it will continuously create its enemies anew while claiming to destroy them. An effective strategy against terrorism must address the glaring inequalities between the First, Second, and Third Worlds, and also fight the psychosocial causes of terrorism, if it is to succeed in the long run. THE SYNDROME OF FANATICISM Terrorists, in particular suicide murderers, are fanatics. Even though fanaticism as an individual and collective phenomenon is subject to historical change and is extremely complex, an attempt at a brief definition shall be made here. Hole (1995) in his book Fanatismus (Fanaticism) emphasizes the fanatic's "passion" and "rashness," on the basis of which he "uncompromisingly" and "rigidly" defends his "overrated idea" (p. 37): Fanaticism is a personal conviction with a high degree of identification, pertaining to restricting contents and values, and influenced by personality structure; it is maintained or pursued with the greatest intensity, persistence and steadfastness, accompanied by incapacity for dialogue or compromise with other systems or persons, who may be fought as external enemies, including by all means, and in conformity with the fanatic's own conscience, (p. 39) Wurmser (1989)—citing Haynal and Puymege—summarizes the traits of fanaticism as follows: Belief, an excess of zeal, exclusivity, automatic purity, complete involvement [in an overrated ideology] to the point of suicide and crime, the certainty of possessing the truth, the knowledge of good and evil, which are seen as absolute, a dichotomizing, standardizing way of thinking, an aversion to all that is contrary to this truth or would question it, an absolute faith regarding certain ideals as sacred and promising perfection and harmony in this life or beyond, as well as the destruction of what is alien to, or opposes this faith, (p. 167) Fromm (1961) stresses that not every person w h o has a "profound belief" or has embraced a "philosophical or scientific conviction" must

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immediately be classified as a fanatic. In fact, the fanatic could be identified "more easily by certain personality traits than by the contents of his convictions" (p. 61). The fanatic has killed off all feelings for other people and projected them to the party or group whose ideology seems reasonable to him. He deifies the collective and its shared ideology, to whom he has become enslaved. His complete submission under this idol creates a passion whose emotional quality is "cold fire" and "burning ice," as "passion lacking warmth" (ibid.). The fanatic "acts, thinks, and feels on behalf of his idol" (ibid.), and is prepared to sacrifice for it everything he still holds dear in life. For example, the Palestinian Nizzar Iyan confessed in a Zeit interview (cf. Schirra, 2001), that he found his greatest fulfillment in his sons' sacrifice as suicide murderers in the fight against the Israelis. When his seventeen-year-old son Ibrahim, whom he had trained as a "killer in the name of God" (p. 15), actually lost his life in a suicide bombing, his father said, "My son Ibrahim is dead. I never felt happier than at the moment when they came and said, 'the Jews killed your son.'" And when the interviewer asked, "But you, after all, are his father, you must feel pain," the father replied, unmoved, "I am quite honest, I am saying this out of conviction, I do not feel grief, I feel joy, true joy, that my son has accomplished a part of what we believed in. Life has no savor when one cannot accomplish one's dreams and one's goals" (p. 16). What Hole (1995) says about the fanatic applies to this Palestinian father: Typical fanatics "place ideas above people; their dedication to ideas is abnormally powerful, while their dedication to people is strangely blocked or defective" (p. 93). The fanatic lacks "the capacity for empathy," for "understanding," for "sympathy," which "on principle is based on a capacity for love, for openness, for letting other people come close" (p. 94). The fanatic has submerged his inner emptiness, depression, and despair "in a complete submission to the idol and in the simultaneous idolization of his own self, which he has made a component of the idol. . . . Theoretically speaking, the fanatic is a highly narcissistic personality" (Fromm, 1961, p. 61). By deadening his empathy, his sympathy toward his fellow humans, and his libidinous ties to his next of kin, the fanatic has above all rid himself of his own feelings, which he fears as the most threatening of all perils. The fanatic panics before all feelings, the "disagreeable" ones of remorse, of guilt, of shame, just as much as the "agreeable" feelings of love, gratitude, being touched and being moved, the feeling of unity. The point is a basic fear of his own emotional inner world, of the depth of his emotional life. Opening up to this world means leaving himself wide open, capable of being touched and therefore vulnerable. Love is extremely dangerous, as it is always related to a type of commitment, a self-exposure to the other, a loosening of the boundaries around the

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self, relinquishment of claims to power, and an emotional dependence on the love object. "Fanaticism is always the result of an incapacity for genuine relatedness" (Fromm, 1961, p. 61). Dependence on others and being at the mercy of the inherent dynamism of one's own feelings is felt to be the absolute risk. You must not show feelings! You must not have feelings! You must not let yourself be touched! You must not abandon yourself to feelings of love! You shall believe in the pure doctrine, in your own power, and in the power of your leader and organization alone! You shall love only your leader and the sacred doctrine!—This is what the fanatic's motto might sound like. This thesis is not invalidated by the fact that some of the terrorists were living in Germany as inconspicuous students, and at least the terrorist Muhammad Atta had a girlfriend, who reported to the police that he was missing. However, it is characteristic that he was ready to leave his girlfriend without one word of goodbye and to take off on his deadly mission, knowing it would end in his own death. Fanatics are "thus capable of inflicting suffering and pain, or to accept these unmoved as ethically justified and required by the Utopian ideology of the fanatical system" (Fromm, 1961, p. 94). The day of the attacks on the World Trade Center, terrorist pilot Muhammad Atta's luggage, which had not been transferred on time, was found at the Boston Airport (cf. "Im Namen Gottes," 2001, pp. 3233). Among other things, this contained the suicide pilot's last will, a psychologically informative document revealing Atta's inner world. Among the eighteen items in his will, three alone dealt with his fear of the impurity of women: 5. Neither pregnant w o m e n nor unclean persons shall say goodbye to m e — I disapprove of that. 6. Women shall not apologize for m y death. 11. Women shall neither be present during the burial nor come to m y grave on any occasion thereafter.

Misogyny—in particular, fear of the emancipated, self-confident, sexually active woman—is not merely an individual characteristic of Atta's but a widespread phenomenon in the Islamic world. Within the traditionally patriarchal culture of Islam, the narcissism of Islamic males was enormously inflated by the elevation of males and devaluation of females. Western influence and its egalitarian orientation causes many male Muslims to feel injured in their self-esteem and to seek reassurance in Islamic fundamentalism, which promises them an ego boost by elevating them above women and debasing females, as demonstrated by the Taliban system with graphic clarity. Piven (2002) proposes the thesis that the extreme social isolation, suppression,

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humiliation, and physical maltreatment of women, which represent the norm in many Islamic countries, must be regarded as an indirect, psychological cause of terrorism. The women, w h o are traumatized by clitoral circumcision, rape, beating, and other physical maltreatment, pass on their own traumas to their children. Suffering from depression, self-mutilation, and other posttraumatic stress symptoms themselves, they visit their humiliations on their children—not only, but particularly their sons—inducing in them the panic fears which they themselves have suffered. The boys, w h o have been traumatized in that way and burdened with (sexual) anxieties, develop an image of w o m e n determined by fear of fusion and longing for fusion, of contempt and hatred, and as soon as they are old enough, take refuge in the world of men, which is strictly separate from that of the women. The circle is completed w h e n the men—in order to stabilize their own identities—debase and humiliate their women, just as they have been debased and humiliated by their own traumatized mothers. Due to fear of women, w h o are fantasized as sadistic (= mother), small boys are often sexually abused by grown men in order to avoid sexual contact with women, w h o are simultaneously dreaded and despised. As may also be gathered from Osama bin Laden's biography, many fundamentalist men initially viewed the sexual freedom splashing into some of the Arab nations together with oil dollars and Western culture as a welcome temptation. However, during a second stage, m a n y reacted with guilt feelings and panic before the revenge of their internalized terrible mother imagoes. Western civilization came to represent their own "wicked selves," and had to be fought by all means (Piven, 2002). It is no accident that in the terrorists' justifications and accusations, the sexual permissiveness of the West has always played a prominent role. Fear of fusion with a w o m a n and "the development of armor against w o m e n " have been thoroughly described by Klaus Theweleit (1977, 1978) with respect to the personality type of the "military male." His analysis points out the psychological and psychosomatic roles played by military battle in relation to the self and the body: On the one hand, military drill promotes the creation of a "body m a d e of steel," a "body machine," an Ernst Jiinger type of " m a n of steel" ["Stahlgestalt"] (1978, p. 185), but on the other hand, the "military male" longs for the moment w h e n the body armor is blown open and the rigid body-I . . . disappears" (p. 208): Being "cold metal" without any feelings, and yet piercing through the twitching bodies—an intoxication with power, with crossing a boundary. The attacking military males are seeking a transformation, a breakout from their

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selves, by every means. They anticipate this sensation most intensely when, as missiles fired by the military machine, they finally take on the movement of the bullet themselves, racing toward the bodies under attack. The invocation of their own speed, never absent, is needed to render plausible the breakouts, the breakthroughs, the contact with the body of the enemy and its penetration. . . . The break-through occurs not in a state of intense pleasure, but rather, in a state of intense self-observation. Above all they need their icy-clear minds for this: that nothing happening to their own bodies might escape them. After all, nothing must happen to this body except when it kills, or when it dies. Icy-cold thinking—awareness of their own bodies during the anticipation of the act of killing, or their own death. (I kill, therefore I am. I die, therefore I was.) (pp. 209-223) Theweleit's remarks may also be read as a possible interpretation of the psychological processes that might have taken place within the terrorist pilots, though with the reservation that w e have very little concrete information about w h a t these people felt during their deadly flights. Still, the analogy with Theweleit's "military m e n " remains striking. According to Hole (1995), the fanatic is distinguished by a "paralysis and rigidity in the affective sphere" (p. 93), complemented by "A troubled relationship to his o w n body"—indeed, a "marked hostility toward his body." Hostility toward the body, ideals of purity, a striving for complete spiritualization, devaluation of actual existence, an exaggerated idea of the beyond, the wish to dedicate his own life completely to an illusionary idea, and finally even to sacrifice his life: These a d d u p to a characteristic syndrome for all types of fanaticism. In this respect also, Atta's last will shows agreement with the type of military m a n described by Theweleit: The National Socialists' cult of purity, w h o fought for the "purity of the Aryan race," and the "purity of the blood," has its match in the ideal of purity among the Islamic fundamentalists. Item nine of his will states: "9. The person washing m y b o d y around m y genitals should wear gloves, so that I might not be touched there" ("Im N a m e n Gottes," 2001, p . 32). The guide for suicide pilots also found in Atta's luggage exhorts them "in the evening, before you commit your act": You must recite that you are dying for God. Shave all superfluous hair from your body, perfume your body, and wash your body. . . . Cleanse your heart from all bad feelings you might have, and forget everything related to your worldly existence, (p. 38) The fear of death, the fear of the monstrousness of the intended crime, is projected onto the fear of one's o w n body and is exorcised by cleanliness rituals. These rituals not only remove the entire sphere of the physical from reality, but also the entire "worldly existence." Along with painstaking cleansing of the body, the "heart is also to be cleansed

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of all bad feelings," such as feelings of love, pity, empathy, shame, pangs of conscience, fear of death, and the like, and the monstrousness of the intended mass murder must be stripped of actuality. What appears simply unimaginable becomes an enterprise, which, due to its removal from emotional reality and dematerialization, may be prepared down to its ultimate details. Grunberger (1984/1989) describes purity as a narcissistic ideal seeking to attain a state of perfection through denial of physical instincts, indeed, through the elimination of corporeality itself. Grunberger defines purity as an "absolute and autonomous narcissistic ideal... from which the instinctual dimension has been completely eliminated" (p. 114). Purity is "stripped of every physical element" and emotion (p. 116). In holding up purity as his ideal, the fanatic removes himself from the real world, which always includes the dirt, impurities, and excrements as components of life, while dedicating his life to an illusory pure sanctity. To realize his ideal of purity, he projects the "anality, which is not integrated with the self" onto external enemies, who are fantasized as impure (Grunberger & Dessuant, 1997/2000, p. 272). In wars, particularly those designated as "holy wars" ("jihad"), the utterly unclean, the evil, the unbelievers, must be exterminated and banned from the world in the name of a "narcissism of purity" (ibid.). The "duo of terror and purity" (Grunberger, 1984/1989, p. 119) is found equally with Robespierre as with the Christians of the Crusades, in Hitler's race doctrine and anti-Semitism, and finally also with the Islamist fanatics. Consequently, terrorist Atta decreed a prohibition against mourning his death under item 3 in his will: "No one must weep for my sake, cry out, or perhaps rend his garments or strike his face—those are foolish gestures." The prohibition against mourning applies not to himself only, but to all others also. This involves armor against his own emotions and those of others close to him, and all the more, his victims. This mental state is based on a cold facade of invulnerability, rejection, hatred, and contempt through establishing the narcissistic counter-ideals of power, control, purity, and unemotionality (cf. Wurmser, 1989). Power is worshipped as an absolute value. The terrorist subjects himself to the absolute power of his community and thus achieves narcissistic gratification when the terrorist organization selects him for a suicide attack, providing an immense boost to his feelings of grandiosity. The grandiose self of a terrorist chosen for the task of assuming the role of a holy warrior experiences this like a canonization. A fusion of ego and ego ideal takes place, a submersion of the self in the grandiose self, which is fantasized to be eternal, a reason for regarding his own real death not as a threat, but even as salvation. A hate-filled resentment against the enemy makes up the psychic struc-

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ture of the paranoid narcissistic defense, which is directed against humanitarian ideals, libidinous impulses, feelings of grief, and awareness of one's o w n emotions. Suicide murderers abandon their selves and become passive instruments of the group they are fighting for. Even so they are not devoid of conscience, but have rigid, overly powerful, fanatical consciences. They believe themselves to be fighting for a good and just cause. Their conscience assigns them the task of dying for their fanatical faith (cf. Hilgers, 2001a, 2001b). To others, the personality shaped by such an ideal may appear "devoid of conscience." In reality, it involves a ruthless inner authority, an inner executioner who judges solely by the criteria of power and powerlessness, purity and contamination, self-assertion and weakness, indeed, judging oneself like all the rest. It is a cruel, categorical conscience—an anal, sadistic, pre-oedipal superego—in which, as it were, the entire trauma of a troubled past resides and keeps on working. (Wurmser, 1989, p. 157f) However, fanatics are guided for the most part by their ego ideal. Their ego ideal is totally determined by the fundamentalist ideology to which they have dedicated their lives. Thus Islamists consider the law of the Q u r ' a n an embodiment of absolute good, and the lifestyle of the West an embodiment of absolute evil, which must be fought by all means. The objective calls for harming the enemy as m u c h as possible and symbolically injuring, damaging, and humiliating him. If this succeeds, the group's objective has been achieved. At that moment, the individual's ideal and the group ideal are in complete harmony. Besides, the reward in store for the suicide murderer, w h o sacrifices his o w n life, is a place in the Beyond. It is the ideal of a person who lives for nothing but power, of someone who can never be moved by feelings, who never shows weakness and uses all other people only as means to the end of asserting his own power, a man of coldness and professional cruelty, without loyalty or love. He is the type of professional warrior and mass murderer. . . . In psychoanalytic terminology this involves a purely narcissistic ideal—an ideal figure, which calls for being diametrically opposed to love or any other form of "weakness." (Wurmser, 1989, p. 157) The fanatic develops a narcissistically overblown self-image, as if he wanted to say, "I am something very special, unusual, unique. I am an angel of light, a savior. I have been endowed with immense power. I don't w a n t people to love me, but rather, to admire me, or even better, to fear me. I have everything under control and don't rely on anything or anybody, except on the idea which alone leads to salvation, and to

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which I have dedicated myself body and soul. Even though I myself am nothing, I am nevertheless part of a greater, divine power, and therefore may also feel grandiose." Kohut (1973) points out that "human aggressiveness... is most dangerous when linked to the two great absolutist psychological constellations: the grandiose self and the archaic, almighty object" (p. 533). When the grandiose self in its megalomania and fanaticism in addition is protected and supported by the approval of the archaic almighty object, every self-doubt finally vanishes. This is why one finds that The most horrible destructive force of mankind . . . not in the form of wild, regressive and primitive behavior, but in the form of orderly, organized actions, during which the perpetrator's destructive aggression has fused with an absolutist conviction of his devotion to an archaic almighty figure, (ibid.) Narcissistic rage may be distinguished from other forms of aggression in that vindictiveness, an inexorable inner drive, an injustice, a narcissistic injury, and shame, play a prominent role. There is a "boundless desire to get even with the person inflicting the insult" (p. 536), and the thought process comes "entirely under the domination . . . of the inflated drive" (p. 537). Over the past decades a feeling of having been disparaged and humiliated by the West, particularly the United States, has grown up in the Islamic world. A fundamental cause is the inconsiderate superpower politics of the United States, who parades before other countries as a guardian of human rights yet does not hesitate to support dictatorial rulers and corrupt regimes whenever this serves its own interests. At the same time the Islamic world had to find out that within the context of globalization, their societies and their culture are not only at the mercy of the military-economic superiority of America, but even more so of the cultural and economic hegemony of the American way of life, which undermines traditional Islamic customs and values. To Islamists, fundamentalism represents an ideological barrier against the cultural pressures of worldwide Americanization. It is directed against the West, but also against pro-Western groups and governments inside the Islamic countries themselves. Within groups in the Islamic world who experience this narcissistic insult with particular intensity, the humiliations have led to narcissistic rage, the extreme expression of which may even assume a form which Hans Enzenberger (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, September 18,2001) has termed, "Pride in their own Decline." As Altmeyer (2001) stresses, Enzenberger has thus pointed out the narcissistic origins of this murderous and suicidal destructiveness:

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Prior to self-annihilation there is the expanding idea of their own greatness: the world shall finally recognize the greatness of their own ideology, their own religion, their own culture, their own race, how outstanding the individual, or the collective in themselves—and they'll be sorry if they don't. The world must all the more urgently recognize their narcissistically inflated grandiosity, the more reservations of their own they have already developed about it. . . . From this disastrous mixture of self-doubt, insult, and compensatory megalomania, not only results the obsessive vision of theocracy. It also nourishes that fatal development, which leads to murderous and suicidal terrorism. It is something like a collective narcissistic rage increased to gigantic proportions that we witness in terrorist manifestations of evil. (p. 13) People whose entire lives were molded by violence and hatred tend toward the assumption that the entire world is structured according to the victim-oppressor model and that it is therefore better to be an oppressor than a victim. As is known from the biographies of criminals convicted of violent crimes, they have often themselves been the victims of physical mistreatment and sexual abuse during their childhood and youth. We know a few things about the suicide murderers among the Palestinians. In particular, the young people who volunteer for suicide attacks have been subjected to constant traumatization from childhood. Throughout their lives they experienced extreme forms of violence, powerlessness, helplessness, and hopelessness. This has desensitized them. Since not only have many individuals been traumatized, but also the collective identity of the group, not only the individual but the collective identity declines into fanaticism. For future fanatics, who were not accepted into the terrorist groups as children, the adolescent phase offers particularly good conditions for starting such a terrorist "career" (Buttner, 2001, p. 59), since adolescents must loosen their family ties and are particularly susceptible to the guidance offered by radicalized groups during their search for new cultural ideals and values. The virtual biography of a fanatic celebrated by the larger group as their mythical hero, serves as a model biography for adolescents to mold their identities and help them orient themselves. At the same time, identification with such culturally prescribed heroes allows them to forge the necessary link between their personal, social, and cultural identity They receive a group identity that revolves around fanaticism. They cannot keep themselves, their families, and their fellow sufferers from being constant victims. However, they can ward off their feelings of powerlessness, helplessness, and hopelessness through counterviolence, through fanaticism, and through a firm belief in eternal life in the Beyond and the narcissistic fame of having sacrificed themselves for the collective. In this situation, fanaticism appears to them as their

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last means of salvation. However wretched, miserable, and bleak their own lives might be, an absolute identification with the ideals of the group compensates the individuals for their disgrace. "Group narcissism" (Fromm, 1964, pp. 199-223; 1973, pp. 179-184) provides an important prop for an individual's feeling of self-worth, and in the event of collective insults, may become a source of aggression and fanaticism. Some of today's Islamist terrorists and Al Qaeda fighters may have been traumatized in refugee camps, recruited there by the various secret services, and raised and educated in special Qur'an schools and training camps. Others are conscripted by terrorist organizations as "young people between the ages of 18 and 28, single, no children, without obligations to family" (Hirschmann, 2001, p. 12), and schooled and indoctrinated in training camps. "It is an open secret [that even] in Gaza and in Western Jordan there are places where young Palestinians are instructed by teachers in the discipline of the suicide killing" (Schirra, 2001, p. 15). In the monastic solitude of such camps, the community functions as a family substitute, and their fanatical leaders as substitute parent figures, so that children and adolescents develop an intense emotional and intellectual dependency, which makes them susceptible to fanaticism. These child soldiers are inoculated with a fundamentalist, diminished form of Islam and programmed for their mission. By means of methodical indoctrination, fanatics are raised who are members of a sect they neither wish to leave, nor would be able to leave (cf. Lachkar, 2002). On the one hand, the honor of being chosen for the sacred mission of sacrificial death provides tremendous narcissistic gratification, while on the other, every aspirant beset by doubts and anxieties must fear the disparagement and humiliation of the group and the leader—or worse. All of the mostly young Palestinian suicide murderers ("shahid"), who have blown themselves up, are venerated as the "war dead of God" (p. 16). "Palestinian Television is sending advertising spots concerning 'our dead heroes,' and its newspapers applaud the 'fight for Palestinian freedom.' Photos of the dead, blood-red, almost kitschy, are assembled into a gallery of death" (Schirra, 2001). While the holy warrior, who sacrifices his life for the ideology of the sect, is promised that he will immediately go to heaven, traitors are threatened with a shameful death. During the recruiting process future suicide murderers are systematically exposed to extreme psychological and physical stresses reminiscent of brainwashing, torture, and "artificial" traumatization methods. Thus the Palestinian Eyad Saradsh, who runs a psychiatric center in Gaza, reports that the candidates "had to sit in a room silent and completely isolated for days, or spend 48 hours underground, inside a grave next to a corpse" (Luczak, 2001, p. 89). Such extreme stress leads to

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renewed traumatization, accompanied by intense feelings of fear, of shame, of narcissistic depreciation, helplessness, and powerlessness. The obvious alternative is unreserved identification with the group, its leader, and the group's ideology. The result is a fanatical adherent, a holy warrior, who can find everything that's "good" exclusively in the ideology of the sect, and who has projected everything "bad" and hateful on the enemy. This dynamic applies in particular to people living in refugee camps under miserable conditions for several generations, who are traumatized by the everyday presence of violent behavior. However, the New York assassins were no Palestinians, but well-educated students, including some from the United Arab Emirates. Osama bin Laden hails from Saudi Arabia, one of the wealthiest countries in the world. As Kernberg (2002) emphatically stresses, traumatization not only results from violence felt by one's own body, but also from violent acts one has witnessed. If someone is forced to watch helplessly and passively while a person dear to him suffers violence, injustice, and humiliation, this too may be experienced as a trauma. Such forms of terror were known during the ethnic cleansing by the Serbs in Kosovo, when men had to watch their wives being raped or women had to watch their husbands being murdered. Analogous processes involving Palestinians have been going on in the Near East for decades. Through their collective identity, the Arabs and Muslims in the Arabic countries feel close to the suffering of the Palestinian people. They sympathize (= suffer) with the Palestinians, and have developed a collective hatred of Israel and the United States, and in part also of the Western world as a whole. Because of their strong collective identity, many Muslims feel "traumatized in the aggregate—even if they come from a middle-class environment in relatively moderate Egypt, as did Muhammed Atta" (Luczak, 2001, p. 86). Some individuals may feel a particular duty to support the Palestinians in their struggle against Israel and its powerful protector, the United States, precisely due to their privileged position. It is even conceivable that a terrorist career, in an exceptional case, may start with genuine human feelings of responsibility and solidarity, only developing into fanatical hatred over a course of years. Even the German terrorists of the Rote-Armee-Fraktion (RAF), who launched attacks on symbolic representatives of the government and the capitalist economic system during the 1970s, were people motivated by high moral principles, involved in various public-spirited projects before their violent activities. As I have argued elsewhere (cf. Wirth, 2001, 2002), the RAF terrorists were "unconscious delegates" (Stierlin, 1978) of their parents and their generation. In a certain sense they did not act voluntarily, but unconsciously, on their parents' behalf, caught up in a

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transgenerational conflict. They targeted the wrong object at the wrong time, but were making up for the parent generation's failure to resist a regime of terror during the period of national Socialism. The Islamic terrorists joining the holy war are often caught up in a similar generational context, in that the privileged and affluent Arabic families on the one hand live with an almost unimaginable oil prosperity and enjoy the luxury of Western industrial society, yet, on the other hand, ideologically support hatred against the West and solidarity with the Palestinian people. This double standard presents a difficult conflict in the clash between the generations, which is resolved when the sons of economically privileged families, sometimes at the conscious and sometimes the unconscious bidding of their parents, join the holy war of which their fathers only speak and dream. Indeed, after September 11, much information has come out about terror groups, "jihadists," that is, "professional fanatics using religion as an argument" (Hirschmann, 2001, p. 14) being financially supported by numerous Islamic businessmen, who successfully pursue their business in Europe and the United States and salve their Islamic consciences through such donations. Even and particularly in Saudi Arabia, the ruling extended royal family provides numerous Islamic terror organizations with considerable financial means, in order to buy off their moral and political responsibility that way. SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, AS A COLLECTIVE TRAUMA In addition to the psychology of the terrorists, the psychological condition of Americans exposed to collective traumatization on September 11 is of far-reaching significance for world politics. A trauma is an experience of such intensity as to overwhelm the mind's capability for dealing with it. The trauma is accompanied by feelings of extreme fear, frequently, the fear of death, terror, powerlessness, and total hopelessness. This leads to a collapse of central functions of the self and a fundamental shock to the entire personality. If this happens to a large group of people simultaneously, it is called "collective trauma." Undoubtedly the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York and the partial destruction of the Pentagon represent a collective traumatization of the American nation, which has left America's collective sense of identity and group narcissism profoundly shaken. This not only applies to people who lost relatives, friends, and acquaintances, but to the collective as a whole. As a result of the terrorist attack on their metropolis, the symbol of its economic and technological superiority, the United States was confronted with the experience of vulnerability, the finality of life, and

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helplessness in the face of "evil." What did not accord with the world and self-image of America at all became a terrifying, yet irrefutable, reality: Even the superpower of America may be harmed. Neither their secret services, the FBI and CIA, equipped though they are with the latest computers, nor her atomic weapons, could protect America from this attack—to say nothing of the nuclear shield. Should Americans not succeed in collectively dealing psychologically with the trauma they suffered, they risk developing a post-traumatic stress syndrome which could manifest itself through constant reliving of the traumatic event, as a mental fixation on the trauma, uncontrolled panic attacks, and equally violent and abrupt outbursts of aggression against others. American society might be tempted to w a r d off the collective trauma by making it the central reference point of its national identity. As a "selected t r a u m a " (Volkan, 1999), it would be constantly present, and w o u l d provide steady justification for the country's o w n paranoid aggressive attitudes. America would endlessly have to prove its military superiority by—more or less randomly—defining enemies, pursuing, and annihilating them. This might finally lead to a nationalistic ideology including delusions of persecution, of revenge, and of grandeur, to compensate for their humiliation and narcissistic injuries. If the society authorized a leader to organize a campaign of revenge, then the politician w h o championed the paranoid ideology with the greatest fanaticism, and most fervently promised to take revenge for the sake of compensatory justice in order to restore the shaken selfimage of grandeur, w o u l d enjoy the highest standing. Psychodynamic connections of this kind may well have been on the mind of Arundhati Roy (2001), one of the most prestigious and successful Indian writers, w h e n in her commentary, "Terrorism Is a Symptom, not the Disease," she compared Osama bin Laden and President George W. Bush. Her article caused a worldwide sensation—in Western countries, usually outrage—and in Germany, almost led to the resignation of well-known and popular TV talk-show host Ulrich Wickert, because he h a d cited Roy's ideas approvingly in a magazine article. To begin with, it is interesting that Roy uses a psychological and medical metaphor in distinguishing between " s y m p t o m " and "disease." And then she even explicitly refers to "family dynamics": What is Osama bin Laden? He's America's family secret. He is the American president's dark doppelganger. The savage twin of all that purports to be beautiful and civilized. He has been sculpted from the spare rib of a world laid to waste by America's foreign policy: its gunboat diplomacy, its nuclear arsenal, its vulgarly stated policy of "full-spectrum dominance. . . . " Now that the family secret has been spilled, the twins are blurring into one another and

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gradually becoming interchangeable Now Bush and Bin Laden have even begun to borrow each other's rhetoric. Each refers to the other as "the head of the snake". Both invoke God and use the loose millenarian currency of good and evil as their terms of reference. In the September 15,2001, issue of Der Spiegel (38/2001), that is, only four days after September 11 and still before publication of Roy's article, German journalist Henryk Broder launched a vehement attack against an argumentation he considers a "playing d o w n of Islamic terrorism" and "the inclination to murder." His comments read like advance criticism of Roy. Broder (2001) believes that m a n y European intellectuals tend to "soft-pedal terror." This, he said, was the expression of a "post-liberal and pre-suicidal position": We Westerners see no problem with condemning the fanaticism of Christians and Jews; only with fanatical Muslims do we incline toward a position that is normally assumed toward small children and full-grown autists: They know not what they do, but somehow they mean well. (p. 169) Broder is apparently of the opinion that it is neither necessary nor appropriate to p u t oneself into the minds of the assassins or even to look for concrete causes, motives, and backgrounds for terrorism: Samuel Huntington was right, this involves a struggle of cultures. Global justice is not an issue, and neither are the legitimate rights of the Palestinians, nor that of any other oppressed people; it is purely a matter of the desire to kill, which by this time does not even need a pretext, (p. 169) Apart from the fact that "the desire to kill" represents among other things a psychological motive—which, psychoanalytically speaking, derives from a personality model based on psychological drives— Broder may be criticized for unthinkingly equating the effort for psychological understanding of the perpetrators' mental condition with secret approval for their deeds. But even Roy does not seem to understand all the implications of relationship dynamics. One could object to her argumentation, that m a n y symptoms and m a n y carriers of symptoms are so dangerous that one must fight them by radical means. A relationship-oriented or family dynamic-based perspective does not necessarily exclude treatment methods that w o u l d limit freedom. Even if family dynamics may provide information w h y a young killer became a killer, and by this logic in a certain sense "inevitably" so, this does not preclude him from being held responsible and placed behind bars, instead of his parents, even though their unconscious conflicts contributed their share

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to making him a killer. Besides, a large part of medicine and also psychotherapy is directed primarily toward the symptoms and only secondarily toward the prevention of future pathologies. With life-threatening symptoms in particular, the physician and the therapist will concentrate their efforts toward treating, limiting, and fighting the symptoms, and only after these are held in check, will their attention shift toward preventive measures. Thus even a family dynamics-based perspective may well result in treating individual family members by different methods and in different settings. Frequently, with exceptionally severe family pathologies, hospital treatment of a particular family member—perhaps an anorexic daughter—is started first, and only after family conflicts have settled down somewhat, a family-therapeutic dialogue as such may begin for treating the cause and for prevention. How then to deal with fanatics and terrorists, and how to take action against them? Individual terrorists and terrorist groups may be tracked down militarily and wiped out. Yet terrorism is primarily a "communicative strategy" whose aim is the "provocation of power" (Waldmann, 1998, p. 13). Terrorism is the weapon of the powerless. Terrorists are fanatics, who are themselves pursuing a communicative strategy to deal with their opponents and with the public, and in the case of September 11, used "the whole world as their sounding board" (Waldmann, 2001, p. 4), while at the same time not allowing themselves to be influenced by communication, or only to a very limited degree. Their fanaticism and their paranoid "fortress mentality" shield them against attempts to influence them. In the same way that a "paranoid fortress family" during family therapy often proves "therapyresistant" (Richter, 1970, p. 224), diplomatic initiatives generally meet with insurmountable obstacles in the case of fanatical and paranoid political and religious groups. One can either not negotiate with fanatics at all, or only in a very limited way. Opposing them increases their narcissistic rage just as much as would accommodation or an attempt to soften their positions through negotiation. Their inability to compromise makes them incapable of politics. In dealing with terrorists, it is above all necessary to avoid "traps of countertransference" (Kernberg, 1975/1980). One must neither be carried away into reacting vengefully and furiously, nor be misled into underestimating the terrorists' viciousness. One must on no account allow the terrorists to dictate the logic of one's actions by unconsciously taking on their paranoid world view, resentment, and aggressioncharged interaction pattern. In addition, victims of violence must beware of identifying with the aggressor. Should Americans engage in such identification with the aggressor, they would adapt to the fanaticism of the terrorists and, to an extent, become fanatical haters themselves, launching a battle against evil without regard for the consequences.

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The American government might even identify with the terrorists in this way and retaliate on the same level. In that case, its military actions would not be guided by a military logic, but would occur for the sake of psychic stabilization. The purpose of retaliation would not be to strike the "real" opponent, but to restore the narcissistic feeling of invulnerability. The objective military function of the military actions would be secondary to their psychological importance, that of redressing the narcissistic injury. Which answer to terrorism America will choose depends on how Americans deal with the trauma they have suffered. President George W. Bush accepted the news of the catastrophe with an expressionless face and did not show any irritation, quite in contrast to former President Bill Clinton, who, in a television interview directly after the attacks, seemed downright shaken. This total separation or suppression of spontaneous feelings is not exactly a sign of success in dealing with trauma; on the contrary, to overcome trauma it is necessary to live through the phase of depression and sadness. It must be admitted—it must not be repressed. America must attempt to psychically integrate the events. It will take a lengthy grieving process, which will occupy America—but also the global public—for weeks, months, and probably years. The grief, despair, anger, and diffuse feeling of powerlessness must be discussed, including publicly. With Bush one runs the risk that he might attempt to ward off the trauma through his campaign of punishment and revenge. The World Trade Center was a symbol for the economic and technical superiority of the United States, the Pentagon for its military might, and Camp David, evidently the goal of the fourth, crashed plane, is a symbol for the peace process—evidently the terrorists' third symbolic main target. The fact that Camp David was saved from the planned terror attack might be interpreted by the government as a sign that the peace process cannot be destroyed even through this terror attack. However, this would also call for a commitment on the part of America as the last remaining world power, to support peace by all available means. It would above all apply to the escalation of violence between Israel and Palestine. During his term in office, Clinton personally sought to bring about a reconciliation. Meanwhile, Bush arrogantly proclaimed that he would pay more attention to American interests and withdrew from the mediator role. In a certain sense not only New York and not only America were struck by the terror attacks, but the entire world. The commentaries mentioned an "attack on civilization," and there were assertions that "nothing was the same" after September 11. Does September 11 truly represent an important geopolitical break? Or did these speeches only pursue a rhetoric of solidarity and a strategy of dramatization in order

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to line u p America's allies and ensure the support of the "anti-terror coalition" for American military action? Indeed, the American government took the time to prepare the military campaign against the terrorist Al Qaeda network and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan strategically and above all, diplomatically In any case, the immediate, overhasty military strike m a n y h a d expected and feared, which w o u l d have been a sign of an uncontrolled, narcissistic, furious reaction, did not occur. This gave Americans, but also the worldwide public, the opportunity to allow the terror attack in its gigantic dimensions to affect them emotionally. I believe I can tell from m y patients' reactions that the emotional distress was very deep, as it impressed and shook most people and undermined their sense of security to a greater extent than any other catastrophe of the last decades. Within the therapeutic setting it is rare for political events to take u p so much room. When patients talk about current political events during the therapy hour, they generally do so only if this event is very significant to them personally. It hardly ever happens that a certain political or social event becomes a topic during many therapies. This is d u e to the "stimulus shield" provided by the therapeutic situation, which prevents current external influences from reducing the patients' concentration on their internal world. While following the reactor catastrophe at Chernobyl, such intense fears were unleashed in m a n y people that they sought therapeutic help (cf. Wirth, 1986). Yet the topic only came u p in some of the ongoing therapies. The same also applies to the Gulf War (cf. Wirth, 1991). The terror attacks of September 11, however, went past the stimulus shields of the therapeutic situation in the case of numerous patients. To a particular degree this is true of people living in the immediate vicinity of the catastrophe. New York psychoanalyst Irene Cairo-Chiarandini (2001) reports that she found out about the catastrophe from one of her patients: It was my third session. The patient, whose body language in the waiting room already told me that something terrible had happened, came in, stopped in the middle of the office and said, shaken, "I did not know if you wanted me to come." My surprised face—I gradually understood that, whatever it was that bothered her, also included me—and my slight hand motion toward the couch, in asking her, "Why shouldn't I?" shocked her, since she became aware that I did not know and she must tell me. The otherwise eloquent, intense woman stuttered and was at a loss for words, in particular of the word for "towers." She said with surprising grotesqueness, with a kind of functional aphasia, "Terrorists in airplanes attacked them, the, the, what's their name again!!! The . . . tall buildings!" I helped her through the session. It was not until the next session that I found the inner strength to speak of the obvious, namely the reversal of roles, her wish to protect me, her panic that she did not know if I would be able to help her. (p. 36)

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Very likely the patient was terribly afraid not that the analyst might not be able to help her, but above all because she could not imagine how the analyst would react: whether she would lose her composure, whether she—the patient—would have to support the analyst, or whether the entire analytical situation would fall apart under the assault of external reality. I experienced what may be termed the reverse situation with one of my patients. I had found out about the events in a break between two therapy sessions. When the patient came in, I did not notice anything unusual about her and immediately assumed that she did not yet know of the occurrence. I wondered if I should tell her, but decided not to do so. In retrospect I would have felt better in the thought that I had told her and we might have talked about it. But at that point in time I still felt so overwhelmed by the event, and so incapable of intellectually categorizing its possible effects and emotionally processing them, that I preferred not to talk about it with the patient. During the following session it was possible to speak of the terror attacks and their effects. I shall briefly describe several other typical reactions I was able to observe with my patients. One patient who had her therapy session in the evening of September 11 reported that she had immediately felt severe stomachaches on hearing the news. The next day a patient said that he had "trembled all over his body" when he learned of the catastrophe. Over the next few days, reactions became even more varied. One patient initially needed to pull himself together in order to voice the opinion that the Americans were now "paying for their arrogant policies." This was a masochistic, aggression-inhibited patient, who generally has a very difficult time in voicing his aggressive feelings. Under the impact of the terror attacks, his usually repressed sadistic impulses were stimulated to such an extent that they were expressed through this opinion, and he apparently partially identified with the terrorists' sadistic position. A fifty-one-year-old patient, who is an airplane pilot, appeared almost completely unaffected by the catastrophe. He minimized its significance and considered the American military response and the worldwide reverberation in the media "exaggerated." In my interpretation, the patient, whose father committed suicide when the boy was ten years old, believed his narcissistic boundaries to be so threatened by the terror's destructiveness, which reminded him of the destructiveness in his own life, that he had to play down the drama of the events. In addition, his professional activity as a pilot was the only area in his life in which he felt truly secure and competent, and which he subsequently sought to protect through narcissistic denial. A forty-three-year-old patient spoke of America for an entire therapy session. He remembered having admired and idealized the United States as a teenager. When years later he fulfilled his wish of hearing

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the "Stones" live in New York, he had on the one hand been sobered and repelled by the extensive police controls while visiting this concert, but on the other hand, had quickly felt at home in Manhattan. He had developed a personal relationship toward the two towers of the World Trade Center, and therefore had been "downright wounded" when he had to witness their destruction on the screen. With about half of my patients the events of September 11 came up as a topic in the therapy sessions. This is something I had never yet experienced, not even with Chernobyl, the Gulf War, or changes in government. The enormously broad spectrum of emotional reactions evident in these few patients shows that apparently for many people the "view of the collapsing towers was an intrusion into their private world" (Sznaider, 2001, p. 25). Yet in spite of being highly affected emotionally, these people did not let themselves be compelled to react exclusively with moral indignation, but also allowed themselves to have spontaneous sensations not considered "politically correct." The secret sympathy with the terrorists, which may be glimpsed in many statements, is reminiscent of the Mescalero's "clandestine joy" (in German, klammheimliche Freude; Mescalero was the pseudonym of a leftist student, who expressed sympathy for the RAF). I think this does not involve any liking for methods of terrorism, but rather the dim recognition that the "secret power of the powerless, and the repressed power of the powerful are linked in an inscrutable mutual dependency" (Richter, 2002, p. 16). Arundhati Roy's words, that George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden resembled one another like twins, hit the nail on the head exactly. Only by perceiving the "mutuality of the suffering both inflict on each other" would they be able to recognize their collusive interrelationship—and dissolve it. Natan Sznaider (2001) compares the social thematic focus on the terror attacks with the commemorative culture of the Holocaust: "The Holocaust represents the breach of civilization in modern times, and the borderline between it and barbarism" (p. 28). An equal function could also be claimed for the terror attacks. Both offer an opportunity for civilization: Just as the greater part of humanity agrees in regarding the Holocaust as a "breach of civilization," the quintessential crime against humanity, the world public, in view of the evaluation of the crime committed in New York, might also agree on choosing September 11 as a symbol for the necessity of a global ethics. Such an ethics would commit all peoples, nations, and states, to develop a new culturally comprehensive self-concept in order to safeguard the future of all of humanity. In practical terms this would mean that establishment of an international court of law should rapidly go forward. At the moment it is Americans most of all who must learn to understand how vulnerable they are—even, and particularly, as a world power. If it assumes that it is immortal, invulnerable, and indepen-

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dent of other nations, the United States, the greatest economic and military power in the history of mankind, will be subject to a collective narcissistic delusion of grandeur. In fact even the mightiest power of the world depends on other nations and must adapt to communicating and working together with the losers on the margin of the world. Just as individuals have to accept their own mortality, the collective also faces the task of recognizing its finality and vulnerability to obtain a realistic world view. Narcissistic injuries are hard to bear, hard to accept, and even traumatizing, but they always involve opportunities to learn something about ourselves and our relationship to the world. The terrible events of September 11 might lead America to the insight that it must relinquish its self-idolization. The enormous economic, military, political, and cultural might at America's disposal is in a dialectical relationship with respect to powerlessness: the more progressive the scientific-technical development, the more grand the successes in subduing nature and man appear, the more complex— and therefore also delicate and vulnerable—are also the social processes that go along with it. The increasing social complexity on the one hand leads to an increase in power, but on the other, to an everincreasing interdependence of individuals and peoples. Paul Klee's hero with one wing symbolizes this dialectical relationship of omnipotence and impotence that characterizes the human condition. "In contrast to divine beings," Klee's hero "is born with just one angel wing" (Klee, 1905, cited in Friedel, 1995, p. 280). He "constantly makes attempts to fly. He breaks his arms and legs in trying, but he nevertheless perseveres, and remains faithful to his idea" (ibid.). This masculine hero no doubt embodies the narcissistic "omnipotenceimpotence complex" (Richter, 1979), from which he cannot escape. The contrast between "his monumental, ceremonious attitude" and the "now ruined condition" in which he really finds himself, "catches the eye" (in Friedel, 1995, p. 280) This figure is symbolic of a world destroying its own basis for living and completing its self-destruction in the illusory faith in its own grandiosity and power. We are living during the historic phase of globalization in which all parts of the world are connected. All over the world resistance is gathering within those parts of the world population who feel disadvantaged and oppressed. The terrorist acts have been generated from powerlessness, though associated with mighty sensations of triumph and grandiosity. In terrorism and its opposition, the narcissistic delusions of grandeur among the powerless, and the smug, grandiose selfimage of the powerful, act in disastrous collusion. Since not only America but also the entire world was struck by the terror attacks, this applies not merely to the U.S. government; rather, all societies must admit that due to its complexity, our modern civilization is immensely

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vulnerable. The economically and militarily powerful societies therefore ought to develop a great interest in w h a t goes on in the minds of the poor, the disadvantaged, and the oppressed. It behooves the powerful and privileged of the world to use the solidarity and sympathy shown toward America after the terror attacks from all parts of the globe as a chance to demonstrate that they are truly interested in a fairer world. September 11 could give the impetus for supplementing the globalization of world markets with a globalization of ethics and h u m a n sympathy. Translated by Ingrid G. Eansford NOTE This article was previously published in J. Piven, C. Boyd, and H. Lawton (Eds.), (2002). Jihad and Sacred Vengeance: Psychological Undercurrents of History Volume III (pp. 40-75). New York: iUniverse. REFERENCES Altmeyer, M. (2001). Nach dem Terror, vor dem Kreuzzug. Spekulationen iiber das Bose und seine Quellen. Kommune 19 (10): 11-15. Broder, H. M. (2001). Nur nicht provozieren! Der Spiegel 38:169-170. Biittner, C. (2001). Mit Gewalt ins Paradies. Psychologische Anmerkungen zu Terror und Terrorismus. HSFK Standpunkte 6. Cairo-Chiarandini, I. (2001). Eine Sicht aus New York. IPA Newsletter 10 (2): 36. Freud, S. (1915). Zeitgemafies iiber Krieg und Tod. Collected Works, Volume 10 (pp. 323-355). Freud, S. (1930). Das Unbehagen in der Kultur. CW14 (pp. 419-506). Friedel, H. (Ed.). (1995). Der Kampfder Geschlechter. Der neueMythos in der Kunst 1850-1930. Koln: DuMont. Fromm, E. (1961). Den Vorrang hat der Mensch! Ein sozialistisches Manifest und Programm. GA Volume V (pp. 19-197). Fromm, E. (1964). Die Seek des Menschen. Ihre Fahigkeit zum Guten und zum Bosen.GAII (pp. 159-268). Fromm, E. (1973). The anatomy of human destructiveness. New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston. Grunberger, B. (1984/1989). On purity. In New essays on narcissism (pp. 89104). London: Free Association Books. Grunberger, B., & Dessuant, P. (1997/2000). Narzissmus, Christentum, Antisemitismus. Eine psychoanalytische Untersuchung. Stuttgart: KlettCotta. Hilgers, M. (2001a). Kranke Hirne. Psychosozial 24 (3): 107-108. Hilgers, M. (2001b). Nationale Scham und ihre Folgen. Psychosozial 24 (3): 109-111. Hirschmann, K. (2001). Terrorismus in neuen Dimensionen. Hintergriinde und Schlussfolgerungen. Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 51: 7-15.

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Hole, G. (1995). Fanatismus. Der Drang zum Extrem und seine psychologischen Wurzeln. Freiburg: Herder. "Im Namen Gottes, des Allmachtigen." (2001). Der Spiegel 40: 32-35. Kernberg, O. F. (1975/1980). Borderline-Storungen und pathologischer Narziflmus. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Kernberg, O. F. (2002). Affekt, Objekt und Ubertragung. Aktuelle Entwicklungen der psychoanalytischen Theorie und Technik. Giessen: Psychosozial-Verlag. Kohut, H. (1973). Uberlegungen zum Narzifimus und zur narzisstischen Wut. Psyche 27:513-554. Lachkar, J. (2002). The psychological make-up of a suicide bomber. Journal of Psychohistory 28:349-367. Luczak, H. (2001). Die Macht, die aus der Ohmmacht kommt. Geo Epoche. Das Magazin fiir Geschichte. Schwerpunktthema, Der 11. September 2001, 7:86-91. Nitzschke, B. (2001). "Warum hat keiner von all den Frommen die Psychoanalyse geschaffen . . . ? " Sigmund Freuds transkulturelles Erbe. Available at . Piven, J. S. (2002). On the psychosis (religion) of terrorists. In J. Piven, P. Ziolo, & H. Lawton (Eds.), Terror and apocalypse: Psychological undercurrents of history volume II (pp. 153-204). New York: iUniverse/Bloomusalem. Richter, H.-E. (1970). Patient Familie. Entstehung, Struktur und Therapie von Konflikten in Ehe und Familie. Reinbek: Rowohlt. Richter, H.-E. (1979). Der Gotteskomplex. Die Geburt und die Krise des Glaubens an die Allmacht des Menschen. Reinbek: Rowohlt. Richter, H.-E. (2002). Das Ende der Egomanie. Die Krise des westlichen Bewusstseins. Koln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch. Roy, A. (2001). Wut ist der Schliissel. Ein Kontinent brennt—Warum der Terrorismus nur ein Symptom ist. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung vom 28 (9,2001): 49, 226. Safranski, R. (1997). Das Bbse oder Das Drama der Freiheit. Miinchen: Hanser. Schirra, B. (2001). Die Schiiler des Terrors. Die Zeit Nr. 51 vom 13 (12, 2001): 15-18. Stierlin, H. (1978). Delegation und Familie. Beitrage zum Heidelberger Familiendynamischen Konzept. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Sznaider, N. (2001). Holocausterinnerung und Terror im globalen Zeitalter. Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, B: 23-28, 52-53. Theweleit, K. (1977). Mannerphantasien. 1. Band. Frauen, Fluten, Korper, Geschichte. Frankfurt: Roter Stern. Theweleit, K. (1978). Mannerphantasien. 2. Band. Mannerkorper. Zur Psychoanalyse des weifien Terrors. Frankfurt: Roter Stern. Volkan, V. D. (1999). Das Versagen der Diplomatic Zur Psychoanalyse nationaler, ethnischer und religioser Konflikte. Giefien: Psychosozial-Verlag. Waldmann, P. (1998). Terrorismus. Provokation der Macht. Miinchen: Gerling Akademie. Waldmann, P. (2001). "Das spricht fiir sich." Die neue Dimension des Terrorismus, Die Tater benutzen die ganze Welt als Resonanzraum. Die tageszeitung vom 27 (12,2001): 4.

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Wirth, H.-J. (1986). Deutsche Dumpfheit—deutsche Sensibilitat. Uber den besonderen Umgang der Deutschen mit existentiellen Bedrohungen. Psychosozial 9 (29): 48-56. Wirth, H.-J. (1991). Deutsche Feigheit oder Mut zur Angst? Sozialpsychologische Betrachtungen zum Krieg am Golf. Vorgauge II: 614. Wirth, H.-J. (2001). Versuch, den Umbruch von 68 und das Problem der Gewalt zu verstehen. In H.-J. Wirth (Ed.), Hitlers Enkel—oder Kinder der Demokratie? Die 68er-Generation, die RAF und die Fischer-Debatte. Giefien: Psychosozial-Verlag. Wirth, H.-J. (Ed.). (2002). Narzissmus und Macht, Zur Psychoanalyse psychischer Storungen in der Politik. Giefien: Psychosozial-Verlag. Wurmser, L. (1989). Die zerbrochene Wirklichkeit. Psychoanalyse als das Studium von Konflikt und Komplementaritat. Berlin: Springer.

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CHAPTER 9

Love, Separation, and Death in a Japanese Myth Yuko Katsuta

I am going to focus on an ancient Japanese myth. The narrative is regarded as the oldest Japanese tale, distinct from folklore, written prior to the tenth century of the common era. However, it is also supposed that the author who first committed the narrative to parchment must have combined several kinds of folklore to create this tale. With this historical background, we can see culturally collective essences in this single story rather than the subjective view of an individual author. This narrative has resonated with Japanese for over a thousand years, being told and retold countless times. It is a story fundamental to Japanese identity, continuing to speak to the hearts of so many, thus rendering it a decisive mirror to the Japanese soul. I will thus address this myth to investigate how love, separation, and death appear in the Japanese ethos. Though it is always precarious to infer essential elements of a culture from examining only one story, I believe that this narrative resonates with so many Japanese by capturing certain culturally endemic fantasies. The title of the story is "Princess Kaguya," which literally means "Shining Princess." This story is very popular and is read by almost all Japanese children. During the past millennium, the story has been transformed into several versions, so that it is virtually impossible to detect its original form. I am going to relate to the most popular version of this story because tracing the original or historical text is not relevant here.

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THE STORYLINE OF "PRINCESS KAGUYA" Long ago, an old man who made his living by collecting bamboo happened to find a beautiful baby in a forest. She had been placed in the empty space inside a stalk of bamboo. The old man and his wife named her Kaguya. Because they knew that this baby was not an ordinary human and they believed that she must be a transformed goddess, they raised her in secrecy, not exposing her to the outside world. From the day they took her in, the old couple lived in peace. Merely looking at Kaguya erased their worries. Kaguya grew up unusually rapidly to become a surprisingly beautiful young lady. Rumors about her beauty eventually spread, and many men asked the old man to let them look at her. He rejected each request one after another. But he did become anxious about her future. One day he confronted her and told her that she must obey the rules of humanity to live in this human world. One of these rules was to get married and have a family. Her blunt response was, "Why do I have to do that? I don't want to do it." Then sensing his disappointment, she acquiesced with one condition: She would marry only the man who could grant her unusual requests. Several men accepted the challenge and were asked to give her things which were actually impossible to obtain. She asked, for example, for a piece of jewelry from the neck of a dragon, or a particular shell found in the body of a swallow, or a branch of a particular tree which had a gold trunk and silver roots, or a stone bowl of Buddha in India. Some of the men seriously tried to get these things, and others tried to cheat by creating these things artificially. It was no surprise that no one could bring the real objects she wanted. Some men ruined their social and personal lives by trying. And others died suffering from the aftermath of the trials. For her part, she was relieved knowing she didn't have to get married. Finally, the rumor of her beauty reached the Palace, and the Emperor asked to see her. She declined even though it was the Emperor himself. Eventually, she did agree to receive his poems, and so the Emperor and Princess Kaguya began to exchange written words. When spring came, she became pensive, in tears looking upon the moon. She told the worried old couple that she would have to go back to the moon, from whence she had originally come. She had committed a sin and had been forced to leave the moon for a while. Now she was allowed to return. While she didn't want to go back because of her great attachment to them and to the Earth, she knew she could not resist her destiny. She could do nothing to oppose the order of the moon. Emissaries would come for her the night of the Lunar Harvest.

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During the night of the full moon in autumn, the Emperor sent his soldiers to fight against the emissaries. And the couple kept her concealed in a locked space deep within their house. These human efforts turned out to be useless. The soldiers' spirit to fight failed in the face of the emissaries descending to Earth; the door to the locked space unlocked magically; the couple could do nothing to keep her. She left behind a potion for the Emperor. With this potion one could have eternal life. After leaving, she put on a robe from the moon, which erased every single memory of her sojourn on earth. Her pain of separation was gone. However, everybody else was left with great pain. The Emperor ordered his servant to burn the potion upon the highest mountain. It was burnt on Mt. Fuji (literally, "Immortal Mountain") and since that time smoky fumes have wafted from its peak. Why does this particular example of separation resonate so deeply across the years? This story can be read not only as a lyric tale, but, if we consider its latent content and symbolism, as a sublimated or displaced form of dealing with death. With this fundamental reading in mind, I am going to look into three significant dynamics of this story. One is Princess Kaguya, who is an idealized alien object ultimately lost. The second is the Emperor, who represents a human being and is the only person to take action in dealing with the psychic pain of separation. The third dynamic is Nature, represented by a Mt. Fuji more than humanly expressive. These three can be represented along a vertical line: Super-Nature, 1 Humanness, and Nature. I will discuss how these strata reflect a Japanese attitude toward mortality. THE WESTERN TRIANGLE VERSUS THE JAPANESE VERTICAL LINE Before discussing each component, it is worthwhile to examine the quality of separation in this story. We first see a separation between two distinct realms: the originally "different world" of the nonhuman realm, and the realm of the purely human. This pattern of separation appears in many Japanese tales and legends. A nonhuman figure comes down to Earth transformed into a human female figure. A man is attracted to her, and they live together for a while. At the end she has to be transformed back into her original form and go back to her original world. The bond between them is inevitably cut by their respective destinies. The world to which each belongs is different, and this difference is too distinct and deep to overcome. Having no way to struggle with the alien Super-Nature, the man has to give up his attachment and endure the pain of separation. And it implies that the power of Super-Nature is beyond human speculation and endeavor. In other

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words, the human will to change his destiny in the face of Super-Nature is completely abolished. As the Japanese Jungian psychologist Kawai (1989) notes, this pattern contrasts diametrically with many Western tales: "[In Japanese folklore], plants or animals appear in human form. By contrast, in the Western pattern, some magical power transforms a person into an animal, who in the end is able to resume human form" (p. 288). The person is in charge of making an adventure to fight against the evil power in order to get his own original human form or the form of his beloved. Typically these Western tales end with marriage as a conclusive union between the man and the woman. In contrast, Japanese tales, as "Princess Kaguya" shows, propose no union but a deep chasm. According to Plato's (trans. 1997) Symposium, Eros is the force innate in humans which "calls back the halves of our original nature together; it tries to make one out of two and heal the wound of human nature" (para. 191d). And, "Eros is the name for our pursuit of wholeness, for our desire to be complete" (para. 192e). God divided humans into halves as punishment for their audacious attempt to ascend to heaven. Here we can see a Western triangle stemming from the Greek philosophy consisting of God, man, and woman. We find in "Princess Kaguya" not a triangle but a vertical line between Super-Nature, Human, and Nature. I will elaborate upon the meaning of this Japanese system later. Here, it is sufficient to say that union is not a theme in the Japanese system because there is no lost unity from the outset. After all, these disparate entities reside in different spheres. The man is destined to be stuck on earth while the woman returns to the unknown sphere. Destined also is pain upon separation. E.T. VERSUS PRINCESS KAGUYA Among the many differences that can be observed between cultures, it is often stated that Japan is in accord with nature whereas the JudeoChristian heritage expresses a fundamental alienation from nature. In the epic of Gilgamesh we find the feral Enkidu living in harmony with nature until he sleeps with a prostitute, after which the animals flee from him. Gilgamesh battles creatures of nature and finally is so horrified by nature and death that he seeks the plant of immortality only to have it stolen by a serpent. In reiterating the story of Gilgamesh, Umehara, Nakazawa, and Yoshimoto (1995) concluded that "(European) civilization bears the original sin of the destruction of Nature. Therefore, human civilization is anti-Nature in its primitive form. It is anti-cosmos" (p. 42). In the Bible, Adam and Eve are ejected from paradise and harmony with nature. Pre-Judaic and pagan cultures seem to experience an accord with nature, as can be seen in numerous ancient

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images of goddess, snake, and tree of life. Even the mythos of Beowulf transformed a cultural expression of harmony into a Christianized alienation from nature seen as monstrous and evil (Campbell, 1968). However, this alienation also engenders the fantasy of returning to the womb of nature, of healing a wound or deepening the soul that has been deprived of nature's nurturance. This can be seen especially in American mythologies, in poetry like Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1855/1892) and Thoreau's Walden (1854/1998). It is a conspicuous feature of films like Dances with Wolves (1990) and Starman (1984), even Jaws (1975), where the viciousness of nature ultimately yields to abating of fear and harmony with the ocean. The encounter with the alien gratifies the fantasy of internalizing what has been lost. In the JudeoChristian fantasy, one is alienated from nature but can merge with it during liminal (boundary) experiences, and return with wisdom and nurturance. Even the massively popular film E.T. (1982) epitomizes this fantasy. I will dwell upon this film for a moment to illustrate my point. Compare "Princess Kaguya" to Spielberg's film E.T. (1982). In E.T., a child finds a lost alien, and they develop a strong bond. We can see a process of merging in the development of this bond (e.g., the boy gets drunk at school when E.T. consumes alcohol at home by mistake), which is rendered by separation at the end of the film. At its climax, we can see a trace of individuation in the human boy, who has surmounted his pain of separation. Spielberg illustrated how human strength and love can overcome separateness without surrendering to destiny. The children challenge and push the limits of the human capacity to make transcendence possible. E.T. tells the boy at their separation that E.T. will live in the mind of the boy for good. Through the course of their interaction, E.T. begins to reside in the boy's mind and the experiences with E.T. are internalized to become a part of the boy. In my view, this is a beautiful story of the developmental process. But it is a story between human beings, not truly between the human and alien. Even as an alien, E.T. is expected to react humanly. Although E.T.'s appearance is weird, his mental and psychological make-up is fundamentally human. Remarkably, E.T. can even speak human language! In this optimistic view, there is no hidden or forbidden territory in the alien. Facing the alien, the human succeeds in integrating the alien to be more human. In short, the human wins over the alien. E.T recapitulates the Western pattern: The human develops and is vitalized by encounter with alien experience; the boundary between the human and the alien exists to be overcome. In addition, it must be noted that there is an underlying shadow of the parents in E.T. The mother is somehow inefficient in holding the boy, and one man plays a fatherly role to help the boy achieve his development. In this vein, E.T. could be viewed as a story of becoming an individual separated

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from the parents, and E.T. represents the new experience as a gait toward the society outside of the family. And the new existence (E.T) appears in the boy's life to be discovered and known. SURRENDERING AND REMEMBERING Unlike E.T., Princess Kaguya is detached from the inception and she does not try to develop any emotional bond with humanity. Because her separateness is a given, her ultimate separation is not separation in a strict sense: There is no truly intimate contact or interaction prior to separation. Even with the old couple who raised her, she distantly withholds for years the hidden truth of her birth. She remains ever hidden, not to be exposed to reality. It is highly difficult for people even to see her. Being human, people become eager to have a look at her and are preoccupied with fantasies of what she is like. They do whatever she commands in order to keep her. They are vulnerable and at her mercy. She destroys them emotionally, physically, and socially. Surprisingly, no man becomes enraged by her harsh treatment! Everybody yearns for her. Even the most majestic power of the Emperor cannot uncover her. She remains invisible until the very end when she leaves for the moon. Although she expresses pain when leaving the old couple, she herself makes no move against her destiny. In this respect, she and people are in the same position, in which they know that they cannot challenge the will of Super-Nature, and they surrender to it. She leaves forever, obliterating every memory about the Earth. This is one of the most significant parts of the story, and the cruelest aspect. Remembering is left to the people as a task. She leaves for a world where there is no chronological dimension. Remembering requires the dimension of time. And it is only human beings who can remember. Only the people left behind are tormented helplessly by remembering her. In spite of her agony, we know that she will be free once she puts on the robe from the moon. It is cruel to know our beloved one forgets us, and it is emotionally equivalent to being killed. Separation and the loss of love here can be equated with death (cf. Freud, 1923; Mahler & Fuhren, 1968). We are not allowed even to live in her mind, and the mourning process is consigned only to the human realm. The people must endure their pain of losing her. They remember her knowing that they have been extinguished from her mind. Oblivion is cruelty, a constant equation with melancholic death in Japanese culture (Field, 1987; Shirane, 1987). And Princess Kaguya can escape from pain with oblivion. This again presents a striking contrast to E.T, in which both participants continue living in each other's mind, and suffering can be shared. In "Princess Kaguya," we cannot expect this kind of mutuality. For this

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reason I refer to this separation as an ultimate loss, namely, death. Human destiny is to face the loss of Princess Kaguya, to face their own psychic death, and to mourn the loss of her as well as themselves. And these destinies cannot be challenged. In short, the human must surrender to the will of Super-Nature, and this surrendering itself represents human destiny, though everything about its will is totally unknown to human beings. The person is precluded from knowing Super-Nature. Enlightenment is not pursued. The human being stays in the darkness of ignorance regarding Super-Nature. After the presentation of the original form of this paper, a psychoanalyst asked me if Japanese children, especially girls, tend to identify themselves with Princess Kaguya. The answer is no. Who can identify with a woman forced to separate from caring people? Children are attracted to her beauty and lyrical story. But they do not want to be like her. They want to be like Cinderella or Snow White, who can marry a prince at the end. However, I happened to know a Japanese person who wanted to be like Princess Kaguya. This man, who was in his late seventies, said, "When I die, I want to leave this life like Princess Kaguya while many people miss me." It is intriguing that impeding death made him identify himself with a beautiful young lady. He wished to transform concrete death into a purified drama of separation. It is common to wish to be loved, but taking pleasure in the yearning of others without sympathy for their sadness would suggest another dynamic: a fantasy of inflicting the pain of one's own separation angrily and vengefully on others. This accords with a fundamentally Japanese (if not human) struggle over separation and feelings of abandonment. THE SHADOW OF DEATH CAST UPON HUMANITY As I illustrated, transcendent love is not the theme of "Princess Kaguya." Love, as one of the most basic human attributes, is dismissed in this narrative. Love, as one of the strongest interpersonal powers to make us alive, has no voice here. Love, as a vigorous link with others, is overshadowed by the stern fact of death. We could say that she is purely narcissistic (or unconscious, as Jung (1952) said of God in Answer to Job); people are attracted to her on the basis of their own narcissistic needs, and they suffer from melancholia as the outcome. In line with this assumption, we could say that the Emperor's hidden aggression against her is expressed metaphorically (and synechtochally) by his act of burning the gift received from her. This needs further investigation, for this is a mythic narrative and it is misleading to see the protagonists simply as people. In my view, Princess Kaguya, deprived of any realistic female features, represents pure ideation. The moon in itself has a strong charac-

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ter to make us ponder. It brings illumination to the darkness. It symbolizes the mysterious, the unknown, and untouchable beauty. And death must be one of the most hidden territories beyond human control. Death itself cannot be experienced while we are alive, yet its image haunts us, and we cannot be free from it. Freedom from death happens only when we actually die. However, I do not mean the moon represents death. Rather the moon is considered to be beyond the dichotomy of life and death—not only death but also birth is an unfathomable mystery. The moon symbolizes death and rebirth, appearance and disappearance, and going and coming. Above all, with its infinite cyclical repetition it tells time and gives time a frame, the beginning and the end of our experience. The finite lies within the infinite. The infinite conceives the finite. Life conceives death, and vice versa. This is beyond a simple dichotomy. And the system of the moon remains unknown to human beings. What we can know is that we are given a frame of time: the beginning and the end, namely life and death. In this vein, Princess Kaguya seems like one of many goddesses who represent life in fertility and death with the disappearance of life in winter. Princess Kaguya comes from the moon. She is like a shining reflection of the moon on the water at night. We cannot touch it, or as soon as we try, it disappears in a whirl of water. The Princess is a shadow of death cast on humanity. She so allures people with her beauty as to swallow life. This seduction can be fatal, but at the same time it gives a vital force to life. Life and death are intrinsically interwoven. Kaguya is found in the empty space inside the very bamboo, which because of its rapid growth is associated with the life force. Intriguingly, the shadow of death lies in an empty air pocket inside living force. Death and its shadow lurk in the midst of life. She personifies the permeability between life and death. And because of her beauty and her attraction to the human, human attributes are enhanced: aspiration, greed, tenderness, grief, joy, and pain. All the actions which people in the story take demonstrate the gamut of humanity. The Princess extracts humanity through fierce separation. Death elicits the most human reactions and despair. TO PRAY AND TO BE MORTAL Consider the second component of the vertical line structure: Humanness. The Emperor plays a very distinct role. He renounces her gift, the potion of eternal life. That he burns it says a life without her means nothing. By his action, he accepts mortal life. He could have attained immortal life. He could have ascended to Super-Nature. But he chooses to be human with an act of will. Because of will, he is des-

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tined to die, but only so can he live as a human being. His will is not used to make him free from destiny, but to transform his pain. He decides to stay with his memory of the Princess. However, when he has deep pain, he turns toward Mt. Fuji. He chooses the highest mountain because he wishes the fumes could reach the moon. He wants to let her know his grief and pain. And his action makes his pain everlasting beyond his life. It is he who makes their personal pain transform into an eternal one. As descendents in the twenty-first century, we are reminded of his pain upon separation when we see the Mt. Fuji. His grief is to last forever in making us remember her. The process of remembering is to be passed over across time. He chooses a mortal life, but wishes some immortality of his psychic experience. And he moves toward Nature with this wish. Perhaps it might be better to say that he does not know whether he has a wish for immortality He simply turns to Nature with his pain. Here, I view one human act, which is similar to praying. To pray is a kind of meditation, in which the human gives himself up and surrenders to something beyond his power. Some pray with wishes, and others without. But in either case, they throw their whole being toward the higher power. In the case of the Emperor, it is not God but Nature to which he prays. The Emperor does not intend to make an eternal expression of his pain in the form of producing fumes forever. The outcome of his act is beyond his intention. It is Nature that responds to his prayer by altering the mountain into volcano. NATURE AS A MODULATOR OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE In this manner, the third component, Nature, appears in the act of the Emperor. In my opinion, his pain is transformed into a vital force of Nature by fusing his psychic pain with the mountain. The mountain is turned into a volcano. His conscious emotion is not anger. Of course, his act of burning, and the transformation of mountain into volcano, easily remind us of the aggression associated with fire and eruption. Indeed, Mt. Fuji has erupted many times in the past to sweep away many lives. Mt. Fuji as a volcano can be lethal. But interestingly enough, Japanese readers react to the eruption in "Princess Kaguya" with little anger or resentment. We feel sad, but not angry. We can hardly see a sign of overt aggression in "Princess Kaguya." Deprivation of an idealized beauty brings about strong pain without provoking anger. However, both deprivation and identification indicate the likelihood of rage. The fumes and smoke certainly seem hostile; creating ash that soils everything around it, including the sky. This image

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of throwing ash and dirt on the moon may indeed connote a response to pain and anger. It certainly implies that transformation of pain into smoke and magma is a narcissistic expansion and displacement. But despite these views, there is no visible trace of aggression in the story and no reaction of anger among Japanese readers. I suggest this is a sign of the denial of aggression which permeates Japanese culture. Elsewhere Japanese art eloquently describes aggression and resentment. Japanese seem to have their own way of dealing with anger. We tend to project anger and resentment on the spirits of the dead. These spirits would come down to take revenge on people who inflicted pain on them while they were alive. In such a context, how to appease their resentment is an essential strategy for living people. And the drama unfolded between the resentful dead spirits and the living comprises a significant fabric of Japanese art and literature. Anger and resentment are displaced on the dead and dehumanized. Lost aspiration leaves amorphous affects, from which aggression must be generated. But the Emperor renders his formless affects to Nature, and Nature creates a volcano and fume. We do not see any transmutative process in his individual psyche, not to mention a process of reflection with words (though he made a poem before burning the potion). Nature functions as a bridge between the known human sphere and the unknown sphere of Super-Nature. With no active endeavor from the human side, Nature responds only if people call upon it. One is not supposed to elaborate or work through his suffering. What is required is calling upon Nature, and praying to it. As I mentioned earlier, this act of calling upon Nature is the same as praying. The notion of God does not exist. Nature is, in some way, a replacement of God. However, this version of "God" does not reign over humanity. It listens to his prayer, his grief, and his pain. And it gives him back a shape of his indescribable experience. The Emperor casts his feelings on Mt. Fuji, and is given some shape of his own affects. And the important issue is that this shape must be created aesthetically Nature manifests this aesthetic process. A visual image of the sovereign mountain and its vigorous fumes is an important product in this story. Throughout Japanese literature, Nature embodies feelings. Not only feelings about Super-Nature, but any kind of feelings—from romantic relationships to small wonder in daily chores—take shape in Nature. In Japan, Nature is not overwhelmingly grand, but tender and exquisite enough to make us feel close to it. Its delicacy matches our subtle feelings. Japan is—or at least, was—rich in fine Nature. Unlike China, we do not have vast plains or gigantic chains of mountains. Among these fine natural assets Mt. Fuji is exceptionally grand in our view. Not only is it grand, but holy and sacred. It is no wonder the narrator of "Princess Kaguya" calls upon Mt. Fuji in facing the issue of death.

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However, it is important to mention that this attitude toward Nature indicates that we view her as fundamentally tender and benign. Is Nature always tender and soothing? It is striking to see this Japanese tendency particularly when we consider that chains of volcanoes traverse Japan. Beneath the surface of aesthetically gratifying Nature, there is an uncouth underground world which would destroy everything. Japanese have continually suffered from trains of severe earthquakes. It is worthwhile to further investigate the Japanese attitude toward Nature. However, it is beyond the scope of this chapter. Here, suffice to say that we love Nature and deal with it aesthetically by denying its destructive aspects. "Princess Kaguya" is a beautiful story, in which we can see no trace of human aggression. But, this aesthetic endeavor might be a perpetual prayer to Nature, which could be more ruthless and chaotic than anything else. NATURE AS THE GOOD MOTHER It is universal to associate Nature with the mother. It is intriguing to speculate that the Emperor moves to the mother after feeling devastated by the other woman. He goes back to Nature when he faces death. Klein (1940/1975) writes, "The poet tells us that 'Nature mourns with the mourner'" (p. 359). In this context, she regards Nature as the internal good mother. "In the mourner's situation, the feelings of his internalized objects are also sorrowful. In his mind, they share his grief, in the same way as actual kind parents would" (p. 359). What we see in the Emperor's action is exactly what Klein noted. But this Nature is beyond sharing his grief. As I noted previously, it gives him back a transformed shape of his grief. It is a shallow perspective to regard Japan only as a male-dominated society. Japan is deeply mother-centered (not female-centered). There seems to be a strong barrier against paternal structures in the core of Japanese culture. Even with regard to Confucianism, despite its great influence on the Japanese social system, its male-oriented quality could not shake the maternal bedrock of the Japanese mentality. As a consequence, the bond between mother and child forms the fundament of emotional relations opposed to the patriarchal system where men govern society. We cannot'comprehend the intricacy of Japanese culture without grasping this double system. I am not disregarding sexism in Japanese society. Women tend to be paid less with less opportunity of promotion compared with men. There are many girls and women who are coerced into behavior and identity formation deeply alien to their real feelings. Sex-related businesses exploiting girls are extremely rampant. These female "victims," in my view, are subject to primitive projections and forced to become the

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split-off bad mother. And they are relentlessly produced in order to protect the split-off good mother. With this dynamism, the woman's position, particularly at home, depends upon which mother the man or woman herself projects on her; in short, goddess or slave. And once she is assigned as a goddess, she can dominate her husband (at least psychologically) regardless of how it appears from the outsider's view. The husband relates to her in an attempt to supplicate and appease the bad internal mother and preserve the fantasy of the good mother, splitting off the bad one, projecting it on the other women, and acting it out. Following this context, there is no man-woman dyad in their interpersonal sphere. Instead, there is a mother-child dyad. "Marriage" as loving union between adults cannot be expected. Returning to "Princess Kaguya," the maternal theme is completely absent. Princess Kaguya is stripped of any maternal element, and the old wife of the couple is largely eclipsed by the old man. Instead, the mother appears in the form of Nature to hold human pain. We can see in this story two facets of ideal female imagos, which are represented by Super-Nature (Princess Kaguya) and Nature. And man is subordinated to them. In my view, this is another indication of splitting and denial. Woman exists to attract and save men. The dark side of the moon, namely, death, is dismissed. Fear, anger, and resentment are all obliterated, and aesthetically fabricated despair is left to cover and obscure these negative feelings. RESIGNATION, BUDDHISM, AND IMMORTALITY IN PSYCHOANALYSIS I need to explore the linkage between this priority of aesthetics and quiet resignation in the face of mortality. We cannot ignore the deep influence of Buddhism, whose discipline is detachment from desire. Although this subject is not discussed here, I would only like to emphasize that "real" resignation in a tradition of Buddhism must not be a passive psychic attitude. The issue of mortality and the human acceptance of death have been elaborated by numerous analysts (Eissler, 1955; Freud, 1915,1916,1927; Lifton, 1979/1996; Stern, 1968,1972; Yalom, 1980; Zilboorg, 1943). Here, I would like to make a reference to Kohut among others. Regarding the acceptance of transience (mortality), Kohut (1978) wrote that "Man's capacity to acknowledge the finiteness of his existence and to act in accordance with this painful discovery may well be his greatest achievement" (p. 454). He regards this achievement as "a shift of the narcissistic cathexes from the self to a concept of participation in a supraindividual and timeless existence" (p. 454). He also wrote that this achievement "does not present a picture of grandiosity and elation but that of a

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quiet inner triumph with an admixture of undenied melancholy" (p. 458). Finally, he wrote "The achievement... must also be regarded as genetically predetermined by the child's primary identity with the mother. In contrast to the oceanic feeling, however, which is experienced passively, the genuine shift of the cathexes toward a cosmic narcissism is the enduring, creative result of the steadfast activities of an autonomous ego, and only very few are able to attain it" (p. 456). Kohut's description, in my view, strongly resonates with the Buddhistic version of enlightenment despite a seeming contradiction regarding the "self" between two realms: the language of Buddhism (e.g., self-abnegation, nothingness and no self) seems to oppose Kohut's notion of self. However, I do not see in "Princess Kaguya" any flavor of his "cosmic narcissism" as a transcendent achievement. What we find is not a resolute quietness but an ephemeral beauty. The Japanese seem to have a great preference for ephemera. Japan has modified and created her own Buddhism in which resignation is blended with the aesthetic appreciation of transience, reflected in mono no aware (the pathos of evanescence), wabi (aged patina), and sabi (the beauty of remorse and loss). After all, as I have mentioned, aesthetics superimpose religion and ethics in Japan. As Kohut (1978) wrote, very few people can achieve the active acceptance of mortality without producing destructive outcomes. And for most of us, this may be impossible. Introducing Nature as a maternal savior and creating an aesthetic bond with it might have been one of many Japanese inventions for easing the pain of mortality. DENIAL OF DIFFERENCES FOR THE SAKE OF IDENTIFICATION Another train of thought concerns the Japanese inclination to identify with others. Emphasis regarding difference and its inevitable consequence of separation can be interpreted thusly: We cannot get along with each other unless we can share the same ground. It could be assumed that realizing differences is enough to give us a reason to detach. Or maybe we are inclined to deny these potential differences to form an illusion in which we can share the sameness. This assumption seems to be intriguing, taking into account the Japanese homogeneous ethnic background and isolated geography. And if this assumption holds some truth, it must be very critical for the sake of international communication. It is often said that the Japanese tend to avoid confrontation or debate. We tend to value harmony rather than individuality. We are not accustomed to the idea that a person can be a member of the group in spite of individual differences. Mutual respect, mutual consideration,

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and mutual support are highly regarded to the extent to which we suppress negative feelings for each other. On top of this, we tend not to articulate even positive feelings. The feelings are supposed to be sensed rather than expressed. Expression with words is likely to be devalued. Acquiring skills and sensitivities for a nonverbal atmosphere is given much higher value than building skills of verbal expression. Articulation is not our primal agenda. And all of these propensities not only foster our sensitivity to nonverbal communication, but can also facilitate the dismissal or denial of individual differences. We are not born with supernatural gifts to sense everything, even with this peculiar preference for nonverbal communication. It is inevitable that various components of mutual interaction are to slip away. Our communication has to rely more or less upon a kind of illusion, in which we are connected to each other disregarding divergent elements. This way of communication might have been effective as long as we could live in an insulated homogeneous society. But as noted with alarm by many in a variety of fields, Japan can no longer hold onto this style since in the contemporary international world it is required to communicate with people from different cultures and races. We have adapted, which must produce conflict with our historical values. And it is inescapable to experience a cultural mourning in this process even if the new would enrich our communication. SUMMARY To summarize my interpretation, or shall I say, my fantasy about the issue of life and death in Japanese culture, first we pose a strict line between two spheres: the known and the unknown. Death belongs to the unknown. And we don't dare challenge its territory. After all, we let it be what it is, and it lets us be who we are. Nonetheless we notice this boundary is actually very fuzzy. Life and death are interwoven in a very subtle way, and we tend to appreciate this ambiguity. We even think it savage and uncultivated to force a distinction between the two. Demarcation of the two would bring about enlightenment and would reduce the fear of death by enlarging the territory of life, as we can see in the modern medical development. However, "Princess Kaguya" chooses ambiguity rather than enlightenment. In the story of "Princess Kaguya," the Princess represents the shadow of the unknown cast on the known, namely, the human. She mediates between the two disparate realms. And aesthetic interaction with Nature serves to hold the ambiguity of the boundary. I assume that we are fond of depending on aesthetics as a value system rather than ethics or morals when we contemplate how to live and die. I believe that this proclivity has raised a uniquely aesthetic attitude to our environ-

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ment. However, it flourishes in accordance with the massive denial of raw feelings such as anger and resentment. To conclude, then, I will say that the Japanese resonate with a narrative like "Princess Kaguya" even today, in a society in which solidarity a n d the h a r m o n y of appearances is achieved b y i n n u m e r a b l e displacements of loneliness and rage. So m a n y of us feel neglected and abandoned, and yet w e have ennobled silence and are ashamed to acknowledge the need for love and our anger over feeling neglected. We identify with the melancholic lover w h o displaces his agony into impersonal violence that cannot be attributed to himself. Separation is abandonment, fury, and death. In our silences w e love Nature as aesthetic yearning that obscures the ugliness of separateness and death, and quietly finds tacit avenues for inflicting the death w e dread and experience in our abandonment. NOTES This paper was originally published in J. Piven & C. Goldberg (Eds.). (2003). Eroticisms: Love, Sex, and Gender: Psychological Undercurrents of History Volume V (pp. 242-257). New York: Universe. 1. I have coined the word "Super-Nature" to elude a particular connotation of supernatural. What I mean here is a frame or structure, which is beyond natural phenomena and ultimately unknown to human beings. It does not have to be mystical or enigmatic. REFERENCES Campbell, J. (1968). The masks of god: Creative mythology. New York: Penguin. Eissler, K. R. (1955). The psychiatrist and the dying patient. New York: International Universities Press. Field, N. (1987). The splendor of longing in the tale ofGenji. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Freud, S. (1915). Our attitude toward death. The standard edition of the complete works of Sigmund Freud (J. Strachey, Trans.), volume 14 (pp. 289-302). London: Hogarth. Freud, S. (1916). On transience. SE 14 (pp. 305-307). Freud, S. (1923). The ego and the id. SE 19 (pp. 10-59). Freud, S. (1927). The future of an illusion. SE 21 (pp. 5-56). Jung, C. G. (1952/1991). Answer to Job (R.F.C. Hull, Trans.). Princeton, NJ: Bollingen. Kawai, H. (1989). Sei to shi no setten (Interface between life and death). Tokyo: Iwanami Publications. Klein, M. (1940/1975), Mourning and its relation to manic-depressive states. In Love, guilt, and reparation and other works 1921-1945: The writings of Melanie Klein, volume 1 (pp. 344-369). New York: The Free Press, 1984. Kohut, H. (1978). The search for the self. New York: International Universities

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Press. Lifton, R. J. (1979/1996). The broken connection. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Press. Mahler, M., & Furer, M. (1968). On human symbiosis and the vicissitudes ofindividuation. New York: International Universities Press. Plato, (trans. 1997). Symposium (A. Nehamas & P. Woodruff, Trans.). In Plato: Complete works. Indianapolis: Huckett Publishing. Shirane, H. (1987). The bridge of dreams: A poetics of the tale ofGenji. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Stern, M. (1968). Fear of death and neurosis. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 16 (1): 3-31. Stern, M. (1972). Trauma, death anxiety, and the fear of death. Psyche 26: 901928. Thoreau, H. D. (1854/1998). Walden. Boston: Beacon. Umehara, T., Nakazawa, S., & Yoshimoto, R. (1995). Have Japanese done philosophy? (Nihonjin ha shiso shite kita ka?). Tokyo: Shinchosha. Whitman, W. (1855/1892). Leaves of grass. New York: Metro Books, 2001. Yalom, I. D. (1980). Existential psychotherapy. New York: Basic Books. Zilboorg, G. (1943). The fear of death. Psychoanalytic Quarterly 12: 465-474.

C H A P T E R 10

Fundamentalism, Defilement, and Death George Victor

Our age has killed more people in war, and snuffed out more innocent lives without due process of law, than all the wars and persecutions between Caesar and Napoleon. —Will Durant Before Hannah Arendt's phrase "the banality of evil" caught on, William Du Bois noted in 1903 that lynchings in the United States were perpetrated by "ordinary men." And he wrote in 1926 that those "who destroy, maim and lynch and burn at the stake . . . [are] normal human beings . . . desperately afraid of something" (Patterson, 1998, p. 173; Maclean, 1994, p. xi). So it was across the world: The twentieth century's hallmark was killing. Besides two "world" wars, it was marked by the Holocaust and holocausts of Armenians, Kurds, and Africans, the rape of Nanking, the random incineration of men, women, and children in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, "ethnic cleansing" in Yugoslavia, and probably the largest number of innocents killed in the political purifications of the Soviet Union and China. And behind many of the slaughters was fear. My thesis is that fear and terror beget the inception of religious fantasies, inducing ritual practices deeply invested with transference and projection, and that such dynamics continued into the twentieth century and underlay its prolific violence and scapegoating. Though Freud

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(1907, 1913, 1927, 1930) drew attention to the intense fear of catastrophe that underlay neurotic and religious ritual, this chapter draws on dynamics less related to sexuality. Ritual and violent sacrifice are psychological means of averting death. By sacrificing and scapegoating victims, the terror of chaos and death are eliminated, evil is displaced and cleansed from the community, order is restored, and the gods are mollified. The most awesome of the twentieth century's slaughters—the Holocaust—prompted an outpouring of studies. Nonetheless it continues to defy understanding, and to be explained in simple-minded ways. Recently Goldhagen (1996) explained it as an eruption of anti-Semitism; Germans killed Jews because they hated them. Another overly simple explanation was that they did it because of obedience to authority, ingrained in Germans. Both played a role, but nations as anti-Semitic and more anti-Semitic than Germany did not perpetrate a holocaust on Jews. And along with other German Christians, some anti-Semitic ones risked and lost their lives saving Jews. And obedience to authority is common across the world. Because familiar constructs failed to explain its violence, the twentieth century ended with a search for new ones. "Terrorism," the dread capturing our attention recently, has been explained by the intuitively powerful construct "Islamic violence." It is ironic that in explaining racist violence by Muslims, social scientists are using a racist construct. The recent focus on Muslim fundamentalism may, however, prove most useful if it effectively draws attention to religious fundamentalism in the Holocaust and in other genocide. What follows is an analysis of fundamentalist religious thinking that is far older than Islam. Before Hitler, Germans perpetrated a holocaust in the fourteenth century. The unexplained Black Death (bubonic plague) killed onethird of the population. Confused and helpless, people sought mystical explanations, and the pope declared it a pestilence sent by God to punish Christians for an unknown sin. Then their sin was identified— tolerating Jews in their midst. Sacrifice was demanded, and Jews were slaughtered. As the perpetrators saw it, the sin of the Jews was rejecting Jesus. But the greater sin was that of the Christians—tolerating people offensive to God. And that sin had provoked God to send the plague. French people, too, were devastated by the Black Death. And they, too, connected it with their usual scapegoats, but their explanation was more scientific. Jews had caused it by secretly poisoning the water. As Girard (1989) notes, the accusation of secret poisoning was effective against scapegoats because, while scientific-sounding, it required no proof (pp. 1-11). Indeed, the absence of proof—of poison that could be detected—intuitively confirmed the accusation by show-

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ing how tricky the Jews were. Later the French indicated a religious basis for their scapegoating by saying they were dedicating to God— sacrificing—the Jews they killed. The reasoning in Germany was openly fundamentalist, and better suggests what six centuries later made people receptive to Hitler's call for elimination of the Jews. In the early part of the twentieth century, racist, Social-Darwinistic, pseudobiological rationales for government policies were plausible to almost all people, even if they did not agree with a specific policy. To most people they were adequate justification for discriminatory laws and practices, although not for killing. Hitler's biological program to establish Germany as a pure racial state was hardly strange. But his focus on racial purity distracted attention from his obsession with moral purity—an obsession that appealed to many Germans less racist than he. The term "Holocaust" became established for Hitler's extermination of Jews with little consideration of its meaning—a sacrifice in which the victims are wholly burned. Nonetheless, the term was apt. As he began to establish his death camps, Hitler directed that his armies in the Soviet Union contribute by shooting Jews. Bizarre in military orders were the instructions to perform on Jews a "severe but just SiXhne"—an expiation or atonement. As far as I know, only one writer took note of the words—Lucy Dawidowicz (1976, p. 167). She commented that, by common usage, atonement meant performing something on oneself, not on others. She missed that, in religious fundamentalist thinking, atonement is a sacrament shared by perpetrator and victim; it joins them together, making both pleasing to God. By ancient tradition, "sacrifice" meant offering a god something of one's own—something of value. That was obscured in the Holocaust. Hitler had declared Jews to be subhuman aliens, of no value—lebensunwiirdig Leben (living things unworthy to live). But that was misleading. He and his key subordinates identified so strongly with Jews that in killing them they were trying to kill the evil in themselves (Craig, 1983, pp. 126-127; Victor, 1998, pp. 143-147). Another claim of theirs not taken seriously was that they—not Jews— were the true "chosen people." The importance of the order to perform an atonement on Jews is that it touched on the traditional meaning of sacrifice—the meaning that inspired followers who did not share his racist delusions to carry out Hitler's mission. Since its origins "sacrifice" has meant to make sacred. It has been a rite carried out for a lofty purpose, not only by the perpetrator (root meaning, performer) but usually also by the victim (person sacrificed, one consecrated by the rite). Root meanings are stressed here to suggest largely forgotten but still powerful motives and justifications for killing. Civilization long ago banned human sacrifice, and the open practice became repugnant across the world. But the ban hardly

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stopped it; on the contrary, under disguises sacrifice increased, reaching its peak in the twentieth century. A VIGNETTE Extreme religious fundamentalists rarely provide personal data by which to understand their thinking. An exception is the memoir of Leon Degrelle. Although he had not been a Nazi in his native Belgium, he became a hero after World War II among Nazis in the United States because his thinking mirrored theirs. Before the war Degrelle h a d been a leader of Belgium's Rexist Party (Rex, for Jesus the King). It was a small Catholic fundamentalist organization opposed to Belgium's traditional Christian party and to all other political parties. Like m a n y Belgians, Degrelle felt not only humiliated by Germany's conquest of his nation but also defiled. He feared that Germany might destroy his corrupted nation, as she seemed to be doing to France. To prevent such a disaster, wrote Degrelle (1985), he chose the following: To pursue . . . the hard struggle for order and justice, and against corruption, since I was possessed by an ideal which allowed [no] compromises. . . . A country cannot live in disorder, incompetence, irresponsibility, uncertainty, and corruption, (p. 1) Degrelle called himself a crusader, and the words italicized here are prominent in crusaders' thinking. The corruption he saw in Belgian leaders "sickened" him, and he believed it had caused Belgium to be invaded and conquered by Germany. King Leopold III and other leaders urged collaboration with the German conquerors to save Belgium. This, Degrelle disdained as immoral. He had a vague plan to save the nation by a sacrifice of Belgians. To Degrelle, Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union turned the European war into an apocalyptic crusade against evil Communism, calling for Belgians to join in carrying out God's will. And it provided a grand opportunity for sacrifice. He organized a battalion of Belgians w h o enlisted in Germany's SS to fight in the Soviet Union. He described this mission as the noblest of sacrifices, a "Calvary." Being crucified was what would give his volunteers "a moral claim on the Third Reich" and redeem Belgium. To save his nation, wrote Degrelle (1985), "We h a d rushed to embrace suffering, so that grandeur and right would spring to life anew out of our sacrifice" (p. 61). And he wrote: The temptations and dishonesties of the political arena sickened me. . . . As I looked into the pure eyes of my soldiers, cleansed by sacrifice, I felt... the wholesome gift of their ideal. . . great moral redemption would be necessary, which

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would cleanse away the blemishes of our time, which would restore our souls with the fresh air of passion and of unconditional service . . . above all else a spiritual revolution The world emerging from the killing and the hatred of war would need, first, pure hearts That winter we offered up our sufferings for the purification, (p. 61)

Again, the words italicized here identify elements in extreme fundamentalist thinking. Most of Degrelle's memoir is a day-by-day account of warfare in the Soviet Union, described in obsessive detail. Along with killing and death, he dwelt on injury, blood, disease, filth, decay, and chaos. To say that he reveled in these details is a stretch as to his conscious thinking, but for him redemption did come from the details. His claim was "in the name of our heroes, in the name of our dead, in the name of our nation, which had offered its blood" (Degrelle, 1985, p. xii). He boasted that only three in his battalion of 800 survived and that he himself was wounded five times—a claim of entitlement. According to Degrelle, he and his companions fought with unflagging passion. For a time they were stationed alongside Italian troops, whose lack of enthusiasm and any sense of apocalyptic war shocked Degrelle. He saw that defeating the Soviet Union and destroying Communism did not move them, that they wanted to get out of the war "at any cost." So he tried appealing to their patriotism: "But if you do not struggle to the very end, you are going to lose your colonies!" The answer he received was, "Bah! What good is it to kill yourself for some colonies? We are happy at home. We don't need anything. We have the sun. We have our fruits. We have love . . . " (p. 31). To Degrelle their attitude was complacent and self-indulgent. It was, therefore, devoid of morality and hope. The Italians did get out of the war quickly. Their allies in launching World War II, the Germans and Japanese fought to the end, fanatically, very willing to kill and to die. Despite other differences, in this respect the cultures of Germany and Japan were similar. The main task here is to identify features of German culture that prepared "the twisted road to Auschwitz"—features still prominent in Western cultures, still contributing to genocidal threats. Degrelle's thinking was not genocidal, and in that respect was a pure form of religious fundamentalism. It was, however, the prototype of thinking that underlay and empowered Hitler's call for scapegoating. Sacrificial acts of scapegoating are commonly done for purposes hidden from the victims, the world, and even from the perpetrators themselves. To borrow Alfred Whitehead's (1927) words from another context, they are behavior "heavy with . . . things gone by, which lay their grip on our immediate selves" (pp. 43-44).

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JAPAN Shinto (the Way of the Gods), Japan's first religion, was shaped by frequent devastation from earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Apparently from fear of such catastrophes, the Japanese worshipped their volcanoes, alongside a living cosmos believed to be divinely inhabited. They later adopted Buddhism, which even today exists alongside Shintoism. Despite significant influences from Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism, an essential Shinto theology entered the twentieth century in a relatively pure, fundamental form.1 Prince Shotoku's seventh-century edict on the veneration of kami captures the spirit of Shinto as it persists to this day: Our imperial ancestors, in governing the nation, bent humbly under heaven and walked softly on earth. They venerated the kami of heaven and earth, and established shrines on the mountains and by the rivers, whereby they were in constant touch with the power of nature. . . . May all the ministers from the bottom if their hearts pay homage to the kami of heaven and earth. (Kitagawa, 1987, p. 73) If anything, the core of Shinto veneration was only amplified in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, providing justification for the belief in the divine descent of the Emperor and a mandate for Japanese superiority and expansionism (ibid.). As will be shown, the Shinto emphasis on purification can provide a model for understanding fundamentalist religious ideas in Hitler's Germany, in militant Islamic groups, and in U.S. Christian fundamentalist groups with genocidal programs. It provides a model of the thinking of ordinary people who perpetrate, support, or at least tolerate the slaughter of innocents. According to anthropologists and some theologians (Bourdillon & Fortes, 1980), religions across the world began with ancestor worship and the need to avert disaster by divining gods' wishes and abominations in order to propitiate them. In these respects, Shinto is typical. Ancient Japanese made less of a distinction between people and gods than is common today. (Similarly, the Old Testament has passages without a clear distinction, e.g., Genesis 6: 1-8.) By dying, people became kami—great ones with supernatural powers, mainly to do harm. Therefore one needed to propitiate kami by offerings. (European and American fear of ghosts is similar. Spirits of the dead have long been feared across the world.) Shinto is thought to have begun with offerings and prayers to dead parents, later extended to the clan's or community's kami, and finally to the nation's kami—the gods. The history of Shinto suggests that fearful submission to parents' authority—which contin-

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ued after their death—was the source of religion. According to Durant (1954), "Most human Gods . . . seem to have been, in the beginning, merely idealized dead men" and among some peoples "god" originally meant "a dead man" (p. 63). The history of religions suggests that attitudes toward parents were transferred to natural forces and invisible beings. In addition, like all ritual, religious rites arose to preserve order and especially to restore it after disaster. When order breaks down, as during a plague, so does rationality. What seems possible is viewed as probable and gives credibility and license to those who advocate violent remedies. People suffering from a plague or from dread of one have no patience for judicious explanations—especially for explanations that do not provide immediate salvation. They turn instead to sacrifice based on projection and displacement. Like other religions, prehistoric Shinto developed a list of abominations—acts so offensive to the gods as to provoke wrath and punishment of the community by a natural disaster. The root meaning of "abomination" (ab omin—from an omen) suggests that taboos came from a search for signs of what offended gods. As in Judaism and other religions, the Shinto list contained a miscellany of taboos linked loosely by the concept of impurity Laws came from taboos compiled by priests; crime was originally defined by what offended gods. Japan's shift in the twentieth century from isolation toward war marked by atrocities was driven by extreme patriots, who started a wave of domestic killing—civil war and assassination. The violence was carried out mainly by samurai (hereditary knights), and behind it was fundamentalist religious thinking. The samurai were professional killers, disciplined and obedient, trained throughout their lives to achieve transcendental purity through both Shinto ritual and Zen meditation and exercise. Japanese rulers had been killed only occasionally during earlier times. The eruption of violence against national leaders came from conscious dread of a catastrophe that might result in Japan's extinction. According to James Frazer (1940), killing the king was a frequent— sometimes annual—sacrifice by which ancient peoples propitiated gods, in order to end or avert catastrophe. The myth of Oedipus came from that practice, and the dramas of Oedipus were staged regularly as part of sacrificial rites. Oedipus's killing of his father—the king— although later viewed as a crime, was originally a sacrifice. By the same tradition, it then became Oedipus's turn to be sacrificed for the salvation of his people (Girard, 1989). Japanese extremists, although convinced about the Tightness of their cause, were often unsure about proceeding with a specific killing. No

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matter how closely they followed events and how rationally they analyzed Japan's predicament, most of them could not be certain that a killing they planned was in the nation's interest. For the situation always contained an irrational, unknowable, but crucial factor—the wishes of the gods. Being close to their ancient religious beliefs, they performed oracular rites to learn if the gods approved of what they meant to do. If the results were unfavorable, they gave up or postponed their plans, sometimes repeating the rites later until favorable omens resulted. Given the chancy nature of oracular signs, repetition increased the likelihood of obtaining a favorable omen (Mishima, 1975). A comparable act by Western extremists has been to consult the Bible or Koran before an act of violence for a sign that it was right. Over the centuries Westerners needing divine guidance opened the Bible at random for signs about whether to proceed. Officials of the Inquisition insisted on confessions by their victims, using torture to obtain them. And they accepted confessions coerced by extreme torture and then recanted. Obtaining confessions was more important to them than the sincerity of those confessing and more important than whether the sin charged had been committed. The Inquisitors seem to have been using the confessions as signs, enabling them to proceed with sacrificial killing. Similarly nonreligious inquisitors of the Third Reich and of Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union tortured people to extract confessions—proof that killing them was justified. Then they exhibited the proof to the community. The importance of the confessions lay not in the sincerity of the victims but in obtaining a sign, enabling the inquisitors to proceed. Like ordeals used by their predecessors through recorded history to establish the presence of sin or crime, extracting confessions was an oracular rite. A Japanese who drew on archaic religious thinking to explain killing by his nation's extremists was the novelist Yukio Mishima. His thesis was that the Japanese felt shamed and defiled by their own parents and national leaders. To purify themselves, to win divine favor, and to redeem their nation, they deliberately engaged in depraved violence, sometimes attacking people they knew to be innocent and mutilating their victims' bodies. According to Mishima (1975), they "had to draw nourishment from the very source of sin . . . [to] join together sin and death" and "to love sin for its own sake" (p. 189). As will be seen, this was not an aberration specific to Japan. In fundamentalist religious thinking, sin, mutilation, death, blood, and redemption are joined in sacrificial rites. Degrelle obsessively (religiously) described depraved killing—atrocities—by his battalion, and approved it, as doing God's will. Many Germans and Americans similarly engaged in what—outside of its religious tradition—was depraved killing.

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GERMANY Civilized theologies which ban sacrifice are a veneer partly suppressing religious propitiatory killing. Disaster or a sense of impending disaster brings the killing out. Disaster is commonly taken as a sign that conventional thinking and action have failed. And sacrificial killing "is an attempt to hold on to order and meaning when things go wrong" (Barrington-Ward & Bourdillon, 1980, p. 131). Especially disruptive is an inexplicable disaster, and most shattering is a series of catastrophes. Germany's disasters in and after 1918 are well chronicled—abrupt surrender when the public believed their nation was winning World War I, the humiliating terms of Versailles, coups and civil wars, runaway inflation, and the Great Depression. Such events foster a sense of disintegration, decay, chaos, crashing, and impending doom, and so it was in Germany. Nazis sensed it most; their leading theorist, Alfred Rosenberg, wrote: In our time, which is confused to the point of insanity, the individual does not know any more whether he is standing on his head or his feet. He ... watches the machinery of the world absolutely fall to pieces, and finally beholds public deformity, dissociation, chaos. (In Rhodes, 1980, p. 31) Another Nazi wrote (ibid.), "The general confusion became greater and greater. No one knew where he stood." Understandably Germans yearned for a savior and turned to the candidate who most forcefully gave them a place to stand and told them what to do. Like other political leaders, Hitler offered to end the Depression, undo the Versailles Treaty, and restore Germany to a position of dignity and power. Others seeking power were also anti-Semitic, blaming Jews for limited ills—profiteering from the bad economy, promoting degeneracy by improperly controlling the professions and media, and the like. Hitler went far beyond them, not only identifying Jews as causing all afflictions but also as defiling the nation; if not eliminated they would destroy Germany. He was the only leader of a major party to call for killing Jews, and he did so repeatedly. In twentieth-century Germany, despite Martin Luther's influence, Christianity was not strongly fundamentalist. But, like people in other civilized societies, German Christians unconsciously retained the sacrificial, vengeful thinking that ran through ancient religions. The key element was the need to propitiate God by killing those who offended him, and thereby to end the nation's affliction and avoid doom. The extremity of Hitler's agenda and the fundamentalist element in it was recognized by a handful of people. Some called him a god. Galeazzo Ciano (1947), Italy's foreign minister, called him "the demon

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of destruction" (p. 119). H e r m a n n Rauschning (1940), a Nazi w h o broke with Hitler, called him "the voice of destruction." Hans Frank, a lawyer convicted and executed at Nuremberg as a major war criminal for his role in exterminating Jews, told his prison psychologist that a thousand years w o u l d not be enough to w a s h away Germany's guilt (Gilbert, 1947, p . 281). In explaining the Holocaust he likened Hitler to the Pied Piper w h o , in ridding a German town of its plague, killed its children. Frank said, "It is as if Death p u t on the mask of a charming h u m a n being and lured workers, lawyers, scientists, w o m e n and children—everyone—to destruction" (ibid.). Frank's main contribution here is the image of Hitler as the angel of death. The promise that set Hitler apart from his political rivals w a s of mass slaughter, as in these public and private declarations: If Germany every year would have a million children and eliminate 700,000800,000 of the weakest, the end result would probably be an increase in strength. (Gallagher, 1990, p. 52) There will be no peace in the land until a body is hanging from every lamp post. (Murray, 1943, p. 176) If I can send the flower of the German nation into the hell of war, without the smallest pity for the spilling of precious blood, then surely I have a right to remove millions of an inferior race that breeds like vermin! (Rauschning, 1940, p. 137) Some day, when I order war, I shall not be in a position to hesitate because of the ten million young men I shall be sending to their death. (Rauschning, 1940, p. 80) Ten million was nearly all Germany's young men. Hitler's unique offer was to end the nation's afflictions by a wave of death. He offered himself as the messenger and vicar of God, w h o brought good news and comfort but also the threat of annihilation. After World War II w h e n the Holocaust became widely known, many people—Nazi admirers, non-Nazi admirers, and even people w h o had never supported Hitler—tried to salvage a piece of his reputation by insisting he had not been the most destructive figure in the Third Reich. They argued that Martin Bormann (or Joseph Goebbels or H e r m a n n Goring) was the evil genius of the Holocaust, that he manipulated Hitler, and even that he perpetrated it without Hitler's knowledge. Another identified as the most evil was Josef Mengele, a physician who performed experiments at Auschwitz. Reportedly it was his victims who named Mengele "the angel of death" because he gave the impression of affectionate caring for his victims, especially little children. He often intervened to comfort them, telling them they would live. The good news, how-

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ever, was deceptive, for Mengele was the one who mutilated children in the experiments and sent people to the gas chamber. The original angel of death was the Bible's Gabriel, who both brought people comfort and heralded their doom. In the dual image of "the angel of death," Mengele became a symbol of evil. He was certainly more a destroyer than a savior. While he was carrying out his experiments his master, Hitler, was perceived more as a savior and hero. And Hitler was, indeed, a "hero" in the traditional sense of the word. The ancient hero was a destroyer; his main function was to kill the "evil" people in a community—to remove the offenders who provoked its god and brought down plague, flood, drought, or other disasters (Somerset, 1956). Hitler, who also had a reputation as loving and kind to children, was vastly more destructive than Mengele. He reveled in killing—the more blood, the better—for spilling blood was proof that he was a hero. He established various organizations to kill not only Jews but also German Christians. The members were professional killers; death was their main or only duty (Victor, 1998, pp. 110-113, 214). To justify killing, Hitler turned to a fantasied code of Teutonic "barbarism," which he thought of as predating and superior to Christianity and German law. This concept of what his ancient ancestors had been like was a variation on the popular illusion of the "noble savage." Revived during Europe's Renaissance, the illusion was later bolstered by anthropologists' discoveries of "primitive" peoples, whom they romantically fancied to be living relics of prehistoric humans with a natural way of life before the stifling, corrupting influences of civilization. The image of the "noble savage" portrayed a brave, free, spontaneous, innocent, happy man, having a natural sense of justice, living in harmony with bountiful nature. And the illusion portrayed his mate as a naked, young, uninhibited beauty with generous ways. According to Eliade (1967) the illusion reflected an endless yearning to return to Eden (pp. 39ff). The experience of most children, going from more or less idyllic infancy to increasing demands and harshness, fostered such yearning. And the experience of German boys, going from more or less indulgent mothering to rather harsh fathering, fostered it strongly (deMause, 2002, pp. 191ff). In this respect Hitler's childhood was extreme. During his early years his father—whom Hitler believed to be a Jew—lived away from home, leaving him entirely to his mother. And having lost three children in their infancy, she was extraordinarily protective, indulgent, and loving toward Hitler. His father's return to the home ended the boy's overindulgence and began a four-year ordeal of daily beatings (Victor, 1998, pp. 23ff). Hitler's yearnings for a return to Eden drove his dedication to create one in Germany—a dedication distorted by vengefulness.

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On coming to power Hitler ordered a pogrom, in which dozens of Jews were killed. In the Rohm purge the next year, he had a thousand people killed—"Aryans" and devoted followers of his. Later his sterilization and "euthanasia" programs killed tens of thousands, especially babies, under the banner of public health (elimination of hereditary diseases). This slaughter was of people who had done no wrong, even by Nazi standards. The killing and mutilation (by sterilization), however, had little to do with the stated goals. Under the cover of eugenics, the government killed and sterilized Jews and people with partial Jewish ancestry. Serial and mass killers' displacement of vengeance onto substitute objects brings only temporary gratification. The above measures seem to have whetted Hitler's appetite, and he soon spoke about killing innocents in the millions. Studying Hitler's speeches and writings, the psychologist Henry Murray (1943) predicted the escalation of Hitler's killing, explaining, "Having once started on a career of brutality, he can only quiet the pain of a bad conscience by going on with even greater ruthlessness to achieve successes, and so to demonstrate to himself and others that God approves of him and his methods" (p. 151). Similarly the psychoanalyst Helm Stierlin (1976) wrote, "Hitler hated and destroyed not because of a lack, but because of an excess of... guilt... he vainly tried to escape the pain of guilt by committing more crimes" (p. 94). Murray suggested that every act of destructiveness was a gamble in which winning would prove that God favored Hitler, that he was good and what he did was necessary. If Murray was right, Hitler's early, lesser killings may have served as oracular rites, in which success encouraged him to proceed with his most ambitious plans. Year by year he broadened his mission of death. From ridding Germany of Jews (less than a million), he raised his goal to ridding Europe of them, and then the world. From Jews, he expanded his goal to killing "hybrids"—part-Jews—including those who carried even one drop of "Jewish blood." And he added other, larger ethnic groups— most notably Slavs, Europe's largest. His most ambitious plan was to kill about 300 million innocents. The Third Reich's largest professional killing organization was the Death Head Division of the SS. Heinrich Himmler, the SS leader, told members of the Division that doing the most repugnant tasks made them the most moral of men: Among ourselves it should be mentioned quite frankly—but we will never speak about it publicly—that just as we did not hesitate on June 30,1934, to do the duty we were ordered, to stand comrades up against the wall and shoot them, so we have never spoken about. . . cleaning out the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish race. Most of you must know what it means when 100

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corpses are lying side by side, or 500 or 1,000. To have stuck it out and at the same time ... to have remained decent fellows, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and is never to be written. (In Conot, 1983, pp. 268-269)

Himmler also told Death Head officers: Do not lose your courage, for future generations will thank you for overcoming your Christian weakness and finishing this good but dreadful work. (In Weiss, 1996, p. 109)

The comrades slaughtered in 1934 were Storm Troopers. They had been Hitler's favorites—the followers to whom he had felt closest. And he had killed them as a deliberate sacrifice—to propitiate Germany's army leaders and to purify the Nazi movement by eliminating homosexuals. In linking the killing of Jews and Storm Troopers, Himmler suggested that the Holocaust was also a sacrifice. In a vein similar to Himmler's, Mishima (1975) wrote about the thinking of Japan's extremists, "To defile yourself, yet not really be defiled— that's true purity" (p. 406). The idea that the highest moral state is achieved by committing the most immoral act may seem illogically grotesque, but it is based on traditional rites. In early Japan, as in ancient Israel, blood was viewed as a contaminant. Even inadvertent or questionable contact with it—as by proximity to a menstruating woman or one who had just given birth—made a man unclean. But spilling blood ritually to propitiate a god—by homicide or suicide—purified and redeemed men. Defilement and purification were both by blood, and ritual turned what was otherwise evil into the greatest good. At the core of Nazis' modern ideologies—racism, Social Darwinism, and eugenics—was archaic dread of defilement, manifested in their beliefs of being poisoned by Jews' blood. And their remedies were modern equivalents of blood rituals. Across the world, the models for slaughter as redemptive were the gods themselves. According to Girard (1989), "The faithful of these cults declare that they are reenacting in rites what happened in the myths" (p. 56). The god of Jews, Christians, and Muslims who sent the Flood, along with the mire that sucked people down, thereby polluted the world and cleansed the few who survived. And he had his counterparts in cultures across the world. THE UNITED STATES Like Germany after World War I, the Old South of the United States suffered a series of disasters. Its culture had been built around an im-

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age of a male aristocracy as gentlemen soldiers—knights with a tradition of chivalry and a code of honor that put them above "materialistic" northerners. Loss of the Civil War was, therefore, especially humiliating to southern men, as was loss of respect from former slaves, newly entitled by law to equal status. And insofar as plantation prosperity had been based on slavery, abolition contributed to economic decline and chaos. Two attempts at redemption by southern men were creation of an "Invisible Empire" and a wave of religious fundamentalism. Calling themselves Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, night riders intimidated blacks to stay in "their place." And fundamentalist ministers claimed superiority for Protestant whites over blacks, Jews, and Catholics. The Klans and fundamentalists joined forces. Over the decades an estimated 40,000 ministers enlisted in the "Empire," many of them becoming Klan leaders. And together they produced a Bible-based ideology that justified their claim to superiority and specifically to the lynching of blacks, Jews, and those Christians whom they saw as traitors to the "white race." The burning cross, adopted as both symbol and tool of their terror, has long been identified with the sacrifice of Jesus. Hatred, vengeance, and assertion of machismo played a role, but according to Orlando Patterson (1998), about one-third of the lynchings were marked by overt sacrificial features. These included carrying them out on the Sabbath and in the sight of God (often in a churchyard) and burning victims at a stake. By my analysis, many more of them had a sacrificial purpose, even when lacking traditional features of sacrifice. Some of the rites seem incongruous when viewed against the Klans' stated purposes, which included protecting and controlling white women. Insofar as black men were perceived as "lust-crazed beasts in human form," contact between them and white women was considered dangerous. Black men were lynched even for looking at white women. (In the 1930s the Third Reich described Jewish men the same way and put them on trial and executed them for looking at Christian women.) Besides protecting white women's virtue from the sexuality of black men, the Klans saw their job as keeping women in their traditional role (childbearing and childrearing) and place (in the home). The Klans had "to make it easier for women to be right and do right" insofar as "women blaspheme God by disobeying their husbands" (MacLean, 1994, p. 114). Similarities to Islamic fundamentalism are no coincidence. In view of the Klans' mission to protect white women, it is remarkable that white women and girls were invited to lynchings and watched as the victims' clothes were torn off, leaving them naked, and their fingers and ears and even their genitals were cut off and distributed as relics (Patterson, 1998, pp. xiii, 194-195). In the absence of statements

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by perpetrators or their leaders to explain these acts, one can only draw inferences. One is that these elements of lynching were intended to arouse in white women and girls fear and disgust at the sight of a black man's naked body. Another, in line with Patterson's and my analyses, is that these most gruesome elements were sacrificial rites. They conformed substantially to the Biblical rules for sacrifice as described in Leviticus. While the rules were compiled for rites with animals after human sacrifice was banned in Israel, they probably originated before the ban. An eyewitness described a lynching in 1899: The Negro was placed upon a carnival float in mockery of a king upon his throne. . . . His clothes were torn off piecemeal and scattered to the crowd, people putting them away as mementos [Three men] thrust hot irons into his quivering flesh... . (Ibid., p. 193) And then he was set on fire. Whether so intended by the lynchers or not, the details are reminiscent of Christianity's greatest martyrdoms. Before his death Jesus was mocked as a "king" by a crown of thorns placed on his head. The repeated piercing of the naked black victim is comparable to the death of Saint Sebastian, portrayed as naked and pierced by many arrows. These similarities in what was done to lynched blacks and Christian martyrs suggest that—no matter how vehemently the lynchers protested the opposite—they felt an identification with their victims and fulfilled a similar psychological and expiative function. Like Jesus, all martyrs are sacrificial victims. An identification between perpetrator and victim is always a key part of religious sacrifice, whether conscious or not. And since recorded history projection has provided the identification. When ancient sacrificers deliberately laid their own sins on scapegoats, it was conscious. The imputing of sinful traits and acts to lynched black men was unconscious projection. In 1903 a white woman was raped and murdered, and a black man was accused and jailed pending trial. A crowd approached the jail, bent on lynching him. To stop them, the woman's father addressed a plea to the crowd: The culprit is shut up with his guilty conscience, a hell of itself, and knows he must meet the demands of law and justice with his life. . . . [Lynching him] would intensify the suffering of the afflicted family, possibly endangering the life of a delicate woman, and would certainly dishonor the laws of our commonwealth. Let us not try to atone for one crime, no matter how hellish, by committing another. (Patterson, 1998, p. 203)

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His plea was basically rational and worldly, failing to address the crowd's archaic dread. A reasonable inference is that to them the woman had been defiled and, through her, the community had been defiled. There was no time for a trial and a delayed execution; only an immediate sacrifice could save them from the wrath of God. They stormed the jail, seized the accused, and burned him alive. The father's plea touched on the crowd's religious motive. What made their atrocious act good was the belief that God wanted it. And for them, lynching the accused was, indeed, an atonement. All sacrifice is atonement. The Klans and fundamentalism declined at the beginning of the twentieth century, then grew again in the 1920s, aided by an infusion of ideas from an English fundamentalist movement. Founded in 1879 as the Anglo-Israel Association, by the 1920s it grew to the British Israel World Federation, with branches in English-speaking lands (Gayer, 1939, p. 137). Its purpose was to establish Britons as Israelis—descendants of the ten lost tribes. Members viewed Jews—whom they identified as descendants of the other two tribes—as their brothers and sisters, and called their church the New Israel. Identifying themselves with Jews troubled few British-Israelites, but it began to trouble members in the United States seriously. Some U.S. chapters turned anti-Jewish, although they continued to claim descent from ancient Israelis, call themselves "the chosen people," and use names linking themselves with Jews (e.g., Elohim City, their headquarters; Yahweh, their god). As World War II approached, extreme antiSemites entered the movement and gained leadership positions. But with the menace of Germany and Japan making headlines, Christian fundamentalism and the "Israelite" movement attracted little attention in the United States. The end of the war brought rapid social changes—notably racial integration, women's rights, and affirmative action—that greatly disturbed Klans, American Nazis, and "Israelites." Hitler had won power in Germany by offering to relieve the consternation fostered by social changes, especially by a breakdown of differences among people that had served to justify the prevailing hierarchy of social, ethnic, and gender classes. To American Klans, Nazis, and "Israelites," postwar social changes threatened the same kind of disorganization. And to people in those groups, Jews were most dangerous insofar as they were seen as undoing segregation and the distinctions among people on which the groups had relied. In response to the changes, the groups proliferated, became more militant, and joined together in a movement they called Christian Identity. The century ended with dozens of organizations in the United States to whom Jews are mortal enemies, dedicated to destroying the nation

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or at least its Anglo-Saxons. In addition to those mentioned, newer Skinhead groups and some militias joined or cooperated with the Christian Identity movement. And as its membership and power grew, the movement became openly genocidal to Jews, blacks, and others w h o m it calls " m u d people." While many members hate blacks most, their leaders see Jews as a more subtle menace. It is Jews, as part of their plot to take over and destroy the world, w h o foster race-mixing—the greatest of all menaces to Anglo-Saxons and their civilization. An Aryan Nations flyer declares a black m a n with a white w o m a n to be "the Ultimate Abomination." According to Dawidowicz (1981), such thinking is common in genocidal movements but, "Most historians avoid such subject matter . . . because they are uncomfortable with the irrationality.... Mass delusions . . . repel as much as baffle them" (p. 41). In my view historians are especially at a disadvantage in writing about mass delusions rooted in religion, and most of all w h e n the religion is one sacred in their culture. The horror of race-mixing is both sexual and religious. It goes back to the taboo on intercourse implied in the Bible's account of A d a m and Eve, which is crucial in Christian Identity's "Adamic" theology, based on the fall from grace. Like Eve, Anglo-Saxon w o m e n are perceived as most vulnerable to defilement—both morally and biologically. According to a Christian Identity leader (Bushart, Craig, & Barnes, 1998): If a white woman marries a black man and gives birth to his child . . . [and] divorces the black man and marries a white man . . . [and] gives birth to another child, by a white father. Is that child white? No it is not, because the woman is polluted. She's black. . . . (p. 145) Before Hitler many Germans had a similar concept of Rassenschande— shameful, polluting sex between people of different "races." It was adopted by Germany's Nazi Party, as explained by Julius Streicher in an official publication: For those in the know these are established facts: 1. The seed of a man of another race is a "foreign protein". During copulation, the seed is, in part or in whole, absorbed by the woman's fertile body and thus passes into the blood. A single act of intercourse between a Jew and an Aryan woman is sufficient to pollute her forever. She can never again give birth to pure-blooded Aryan children, even if she marries an Aryan. Their children will be [hybrids]. . . . (Miiller-Hill, 1988, p. 81) The thesis seemed biological, but had no scientific basis. Streicher added: Now we know why the Jew uses every artifice of seduction in order to ravish German girls at as early an age as possible; why the Jewish doctor rapes fe-

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male patients while they are under anesthesia. . . . He wants the German girl and German woman to absorb the alien sperm of the Jew. She is never again to bear German children! (International Military Tribunal, 1947, p. 95)

Streicher offered no evidence of rape under anesthesia. Like the accusation of Jews secretly poisoning the water to cause the bubonic plague, it needed none. The accusation itself was sufficient to show how diabolical Jews were. In Christian Identity belief, the main polluting role of the Jew is arranging intercourse between black men and white women in order to pollute and destroy the Anglo-Saxon race. Given the history of religious pollution beliefs—especially of men being polluted by women's blood—men's fear of becoming polluted themselves is probably a factor in the movement's protection of white women. Jews are seen generally as the leaders in subverting God's laws. In addition to race-mixing, their plot to destroy Anglo-Saxons includes fostering the following: Communism Liberalism Atheism Immigration Banning of school prayer Promiscuity Unwed motherhood Abortion Abandonment of babies Sex scandals Homosexuality Pornography

These are abominations to God. If not stopped, Jews will provoke God to destroy humankind. People in Christian Identity see their coming war with the federal government (which they call ZOG—the Zionist Occupation Government) and with other arms of the Jewish conspiracy as a "holy war" which will purify those on God's side. In what follows it is worth noting that not all Christian Identity churches subscribe fully to the beliefs described, nor do all Nazi groups or Klans, and less so Skinhead groups and militias. For simplicity, however, "Christian Identity" will refer also to Nazi groups and Klans, and only a few differences among their beliefs will be noted. The main differences are about the ancestry of Jews and "mud people."

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While Nazi groups in the United States continue to glorify Hitler, Christian Identity groups are more religiously oriented. Many of their names denote churches or religious sects: America's Promise Ministries Aryan Brotherhood Aryan Nations Calvary Temple Bible Church Christian America Advocates Christian Posse Comitatus Church of Jesus Christ Christian The Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord Crusade for Christ and Country Gospel of the Kingdom Kingdom Identity Ministries White Maidens Women for Aryan Unity World Church of the Creator The names that sound simply religious do not distinguish Christian Identity groups from other fundamentalist Christian churches or even from mainstream ones. A n d they share beliefs with other fundamentalist a n d m a i n s t r e a m churches. Leaders a n d followers of other churches are therefore more sympathetic to—or at least more tolerant of—Christian Identity churches than of Klans and Nazi groups. And the roots of Christian Identity in archaic religious beliefs gives the movement power to persuade and to kill—power far beyond membership size. The movement has m a d e a fully explicit crusade of w h a t underlay scapegoating for thousands of years—that God is offended by evil people and will soon wipe out h u m a n k i n d if it continues to tolerate them. Forerunners of Christian Identity believed Jews were their equals. The U.S. groups, however, introduced a distinction: Jews are descended from morally inferior Israeli tribes (e.g., Manasseh) and are, therefore, evil. Another speculation is that Jews are not descended from Israelis at all. Therefore Jews claiming Israeli descent are impostors; Christians of Anglo-Saxon descent are the true Israelites. By another, Jews are descendants of matings between Israelis and Satan. By still another, Anglo-Saxons are descendants of A d a m and Noah, through N o a h ' s son Shem, the father of Israelites ("Shem" is the root of "Semite"), while Jews, blacks, and other " m u d people" are descen-

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dants of those whom God meant to destroy in the Flood. Other interpretations cite details of the Bible as evidence that evil people are descendants of Cain, Esau, or Noah's son Ham. According to the Bible, Ham accidentally saw his father naked, and that sexual transgression was enough to damn him and all his descendants. And a more-popular speculation is that "mud people" are descendants of an animal-like species which God created before humans. These differences about the genesis of "mud people" are unimportant to members of Christian Identity. Whichever theory of origins they use, the groups believe that, after the Flood, "mud people"—especially females—tempted the good people, who mated with them, producing a race of defiled hybrids. The Bible's association of defilement with sex, reproduction, and especially with women lends support to these fantasies (Feldman, 1977, p. 32). TertuUian, widely considered second to Augustine among the great early Christian church fathers, wrote about women, "A veil must be drawn over a beauty so dangerous as to have brought scandal into heaven itself . . . [so that] it may blush and give up the license to show itself" (O'Faolain & Martines, 1973, p. 132). Again, similarity to Muslim fundamentalist veiling of women is no coincidence. TertuUian also wrote: A woman . . . [should] wear rags and mourning, weep and show . . . penance, trying to expiate by her contrite appearance the disgrace of [Eve's] first crime and the shame of having brought ruin to humanity. You are the devil's gateway. . . . Because of the death you merited, the Son of God [Jesus] had to die. (ibid.)

Imputing to women the power to defile and destroy men implies a wretched sense of vulnerability. The lesson of Adam and Eve's fall involves resisting sexual temptation. In appealing to God for forgiveness, Adam used the excuse that he was corrupted by Eve, as if helpless to resist her. To the great majority of Christians in the world, the most important lessons in the Bible are the life, teachings, and sacrificial death of Jesus. The last of these is the most powerful; it is symbolized by the Cross and celebrated in every Mass. To those in Christian Identity, however, the most important lesson is the Flood—the portent of world destruction. Failure to learn from it means doom to humankind. The Bible's account of the Flood is introduced with mysterious seeming non-sequiturs. The "sons of God" descended from the heavens and had children by daughters of "men." And Nephilim (giants) were in the land. "The Lord saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually." He said, "I will blot out from the earth the hu-

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man beings I have created. . . . " Then he made an exception because "Noah found favor in the sight of the Lord" (Genesis 6: 1-8). The Bible does not say the matings were what offended God; rather it says they produced great men. In most translations, the evil that provoked God to send the Flood is described only as violence and corruption. (An exceptional translation specifies it as "lawlessness"— a plausible translation insofar as throughout the Bible, God insisted that humans obey him and threatened death for disobedience.) Since the Bible shows God's approval for much violence, and corruption is undefined in the account of the Flood, we are left with the question of what enraged him and why he made an exception of Noah. And the question is crucial in order to prevent a second destruction of the world. Ignoring the "violence" mentioned as offending God, Christian Identity theologians focused on corruption, concluding that the matings mentioned before God's decision were defiling because they involved race-mixing. That was because the "daughters" who tempted the "sons of God" were blacks. Nowhere does the Bible say so, but this doctrine is self-evident to leaders and members of Christian Identity; it is asserted as the unquestionable word of God. The vague but terrible lesson of the Flood is reinforced by similarly vague words in Psalms 40 and 69: The Lord ... draws me up from the desolate pit, out of the miry bog, and sets my feet upon a rock.... Save me, O God, for the waters have come up to my neck. I sink in deep mire, where there is no foothold; I have come into deep waters, and the flood sweeps over me. . . . O God, you know of my folly, the wrongs I have done are not hidden from you. . . . With your faithful help rescue me from sinking in the mire. . . . Here mud seems to be both a symbol of yielding to temptation and a reminder of the flood. That "my . . . wrongs . . . are not hidden from you" is a reminder of Adam's attempt to hide himself and his offense from God. This could provide a link for the idea that what moved God to send the Flood was a sexual transgression. In Christian Identity, Adam's fall is the Bible's second most important lesson. After the Flood, God made a covenant with Noah, promising not to harm him and his descendants. That formally confirmed them as the "chosen people." In ancient times all peoples were "chosen" in the sense of being under the protection of their gods. Continuing to emphasize a claim of being exclusively chosen probably reflects a history that has made people feel guilty and especially vulnerable. According to Christian Identity theorists, some evil people managed to survive the Flood, presumably by adapting to the mud it produced (Barkun, 1994, pp. 158-159). (While I have been unable to trace the

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term "mud people," this theory and Psalms 40 and 69 may be its origin.) Not content to keep to themselves, descendants of those whom God meant to drown tempted and mated with Noah's descendants, and defiled the good people again. The "mud people" and the "hybrids" they spawned are seen as constantly threatening to seduce, attack, and defile Anglo-Saxons. Hitler justified the Holocaust by imputing to Jews the intent to destroy Germany. He imputed it to all Jews—even infants. And imputing the intent was sufficient justification. No effort was made to discover Jews' intentions before killing them. That the imputation was a projection of Hitler's own intentions is documented (Victor, 1998, pp. 126-130, 143-148). Projected ideas carry so much intuitive power that they are experienced as self-evident, and proof is unnecessary The mechanism of projection, based on unconscious awareness of prohibited impulses in oneself, makes even wild accusations believable. It contributes to sincerity in a speaker's voice. And when the projection reflects shared impulses, the audience is impressed with "the ring of truth" in what it hears. As Hitler did about Jews, Christian Identity leaders cite what they call evidence about the evil of "mud people." And as Hitler did, the citation is a rhetorical flourish of data fragments that carries weight because it supports what is experienced as self-evident. Evaluation of the fragments cited is unnecessary because leaders and followers already know what "mud people" are like. From the history of propitiation, projection of evil is to be expected in sacrifice. In ancient Israel it was conscious. By the annual Yom Kippur rites, the sins of the community were laid on a designated scapegoat—a literal goat or a child—who was expelled or killed. Through the centuries, as human sacrifice was banned in Israel and later in Christian nations, scapegoating and its basis in projection became unconscious; scapegoats came to be considered innately evil. And expelling scapegoats waned, while killing them increased greatly. Early Inquisitors targeted heretics, who could recant and be saved. But then Inquisitors came to view heretics, "witches," and other victims as Satanic—as innately evil. In this respect Christian Identity leaders take the more modern view: "mud people" and "hybrids" are evil innately by heredity. Nothing will change them. Some Christian Identity leaders advocate segregation, but as a temporary measure, for it will not stop race-mixing in the long run. No redemption is possible for "mud people" and "hybrids." The only final solution—the only solution acceptable to God—is death. The phrase "final solution"—meaning eliminating Jews—came from Martin Luther, a fundamentalist who perceived Christianity and his world to be degenerate. According to Eliade (1967), fear of the world decaying, cracking, and ending is common in Christianity (p. 68). In

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my view, such fear is common to fundamentalists of many religions because fear of the world's end by earthquake, flood, or other catastrophe was the source of religion. Luther and the Inquisitors help us understand Christian Identity and its growth during this era of rapid social change, with breakdowns of traditional order and of distinctions among people. The dread aroused by social changes contributed to the Holocaust, to other genocide, and to Muslim "terrorism"—to much of the twentieth century's slaughter. The dread and the killing performed to prevent disaster, based on fundamentalist thinking, made the 1900s the century of the scapegoat. Hitler declared that German Christians, as "Aryans—the chosen people," members of the master race—were not limited by conventional restraints. On the contrary, violating moral and legal codes was not only their right but also their duty. Similarly Christian Identity teaches that as true Israelites—"the chosen people—Aryans" have the right and duty to violate established Christian and legal codes in carrying out God's commands. And God requires them to kill "mud people." If others are killed in the process, it is unfortunate but necessary. In advocating indiscriminate killing and justifying, for example, the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma and the killing of innocents there, Christian Identity leaders have ample Biblical support. In Ezekiel (9: 6) God ordered the slaughter of Jerusalem's population, saying, "Cut down old men, young men and young women, little children and women." It is worth noting that God condemned children as no more innocent than their elders. In ancient times children were not exempt from propitiatory killing; on the contrary, they were especially chosen for it in many Mediterranean cultures. Additional Biblical justifications are as follows: There is no peace, says my God, for the wicked. Cry aloud, spare not, lift up your voice as a trumpet. (Isaiah 58:1) The Lord will appear over them and his arrow go forth like lightning; the Lord God will sound the trumpet and march forth in the whirlwinds. (Zechariah 9:14) I [God] will turn my hand against the little ones. (Zechariah 13: 7)

The words italicized here imply killing innocents. Like a flood, lightning, and whirlwind kill indiscriminately. The Bible has many accounts of priests ordered by God to kill. One of them was Phinehas, and a Christian Identity action group took his name, calling themselves Phineas Priests. They view themselves as professional soldiers, claiming a vocation based on the Bible of being God's vicars and killers. After an operation they left a note:

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Thus says Yahweh, Behold, I will rise up against Babylon and against them that . . . rise up against me, a destroying wind. . . . Make bright the arrows, gather the shields, prepare the ambush For [Babylon's] sins have reached unto heaven . . . her plagues shall come . . . death and mourning and famine, and she shall be utterly burned in fire . . . a two-edged sword; to execute vengeance upon the heathen, of punishments upon the people (Italics added; Bushart, Craig, & Barnes, 1998, p. 226)

The beliefs sketched here are by no means confined to Christian Identity in America. Leaders and followers of moderate fundamentalist churches also rely on the Bible and agree with some Christian Identity tenets. So do people in non-fundamentalist churches. Perhaps that is why many hesitate to condemn Christian Identity violence. Christian Identity leaders express their beliefs and programs of death with complete certainty, resting on the authority of the Bible. They do not perform oracular rites as ancient priests did. But the Bible is so varied a collection of ideas and injunctions that support for almost anything can be found on some page, and support for indiscriminate killing on many pages. Christian Identity leaders' scrutiny of the Bible to find signs of God's wishes may functionally resemble performing oracular rites. The attack on New York's World Trade Center in 2001 affected many people profoundly. It prompted attacks on innocent Arabs and Muslims in the United States and intemperate declarations by a variety of people. Two by Christian Identity spokesmen are relevant here: What happened this week is a direct consequence of the American people permitting the Jews to control their government and to use American strength to advance Jews' interests. Anyone who is willing to drive a plane into a building to kill Jews is alright by me. I wish our members had half as much testicular fortitude (Lotto, 2003, pp. 300-301)

Christian Identity is a present, growing menace in the United States— a menace particularly because it is rooted in ancient beliefs and because most Americans are in denial about it. Hitler and his followers killed no Jews during the fourteen years before they came to power— during the time in which they were not taken seriously. In the United States, the churches and other organizations of Christian Identity and Nazi parties, Klans, and allied Skinhead groups and militias have since the 1970s killed hundreds of blacks, Jews, and others, and injured a great many more in their attempted killing. Still growing, they are the major American bloc primed to start a holy war, the major genocidal force in the early twenty-first century.

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To followers of Christian Identity, living good lives is far from enough. There is so m u c h evil in the world that saving themselves and their Anglo-Saxon race requires them to emulate the militant prophets of the Old Testament—to go forth and kill. A small n u m b e r has been doing that for decades. The rest applaud them and wait, stockpiling arms, for a Gabriel to sound the trumpet—for a charismatic angel of death to start the coming "holy war." NOTE 1. There are those who believe Shinto is an indigenous Japanese religion remaining pure from foreign influence, but it seems that significant sophistication of Shinto emerged from a variety of sources, even if many of its central elements remain. The degree to which Shinto has been influenced or modified by Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism is discussed by Kitagawa (1987). REFERENCES Barkun, M. (1994). Religion and the racial right. New York: Harcourt. Barrington-Ward, S., & Bourdillon, M. (1980). A place for sacrifice in modern Christianity? In M. Bourdillon & M. Fortes (Eds.), Sacrifice. New York: Academic Press. Bourdillon, M., & Fortes, M. (Eds.). (1980). Sacrifice. New York: Academic Press. Bushart, H., Craig, J., & Barnes, M. (1998). Soldiers of God. New York: Kensington. Ciano, G. (1947). The Ciano diaries. New York: Garden City. Conot, R. (1983). Justice at Nuremberg. New York: Harper & Row. Craig, G. (1983). The Germans. New York: Meridian. Dawidowicz, L. (1976). The war against the Jews. New York: Bantam. Dawidowicz, L. (1981). The Holocaust and the historians. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Degrelle, L. (1985). Campaign in Russia. Cosa Mesa, CA: Institute for Historical Review. deMause, L. (2002). The emotional life of nations. New York: Karnac. Durant, W. (1954). Our Oriental heritage. New York: Simon & Schuster. Eliade, M. (1967). Myths, dreams, and mysteries. New York: Harper Torchbooks. Feldman, E. (1977). Biblical and post-Biblical defilement and mourning. New York: Yeshiva University Press. Frazer, J. (1940). The golden bough. New York: Macmillan. Freud, S. (1907). Obsessive actions and religious practices. In The standard edition of the complete works of Sigmund Freud, volume 9 (pp. 115-128). London: Hogarth. Freud, S. (1913). Totem and taboo. SE 13 (pp. 1-164). Freud, S. (1927). The future of an illusion. SE 21 (pp. 3-58). Freud, S. (1930). Civilization and its discontents. SE 21 (pp. 59-148). Gallagher, H. (1990). By trust betrayed. New York: Holt. Gayer, M. (1939). The heritage of the Anglo-Saxon race. 2d ed. London: Covenant.

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Gilbert, G. (1947). Nuremberg diary. New York: Farrar, Straus. Girard, R. (1989). The scapegoat. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Goldhagen, D. (1996). Hitler's willing executioners. New York: Knopf. International Military Tribunal. (1947). Trial of the major war criminals, vol. V. Nuremberg: IMT. Kitagawa, J. M. (1987). On understanding Japanese religion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lotto, D. (2003). Fascism resurgent. Journal of Psychohistory 30: 296-305. MacLean, N. (1994). Behind the mask of chivalry. New York: Oxford University Press. Mishima, Y (1975). Runaway horses. New York: Pocket Books. Muller-Hill, B. (1988). Murderous science. New York: Oxford University Press. Murray, H. (1943). Analysis of the personality of Adolf Hitler. Unpublished report in Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York. President's Secretary's File, Box 99. OTaolain, J., & Martines, L. (Eds.). (1973). Not in God's image: Women in history from the Greeks to the Victorians. New York: Harper & Row. Patterson, O. (1998). Rituals of blood. Washington: Civitas Counterpoint. Rauschning, H. (1940). The voice of destruction. New York: Putnam's. Rhodes, J. (1980). The Hitler movement. Stanford: Hoover Institute. Somerset, F. (1956). The hero. New York: Vintage. Stierlin, H. (1976). Adolf Hitler. New York: Psychohistory Press. Victor, G. (1998). Hitler: The pathology of evil. Herndon, VA: Brassey's. Waite, R. (1971). Adolf Hitler's anti-Semitism. In B. Wolman (Ed.), The psychoanalytic interpretation of history. New York: Basic Books. Weiss, J. (1996). Ideology of death. Chicago: Dee. Whitehead, A. (1927). Symbolism. New York: Capricorn.

C H A P T E R 11

Death, Neurosis, and Normalcy: On the Ubiquity of Personal and Social Delusions Jerry S. Piven

In this chapter Freudian theory is invoked to illustrate the connections between repression, the fear of death, and delusional fantasies. Civilization is a structure invented to protect individuals from death, but the sacrifices imposed by that social structure are psychologically injurious and terrifying, since society threatens individuals with punishment and death for having illicit desires. Annihilation anxiety may be abated by social structures, but the psychological sacrifice and threat amplify annihilation anxiety. I further argue that immersion in personal or social fantasies quells the conscious fear of death. Individuals vary in terms of reactions to death anxiety and how the complex matrix of fear and terror is nourished or abated in the developmental process. A Freudian reading of the developmental process implicates the inherently traumatic nature of nurture, and the necessity of selfdeceptive illusions. These fantasies do subdue conscious fear, but conscious feelings of security do not dispel unconscious tremors. Underneath these fantasies, dread and terror impel rigid adherence to whatever fantasy system provides subjective feelings of safety and salvation.1 Throughout his texts Freud makes it clear that both societies and individuals are anxious enough to delude themselves about the fundamental nature of life and death.2 Freud consistently blurs the distinction between neurosis and normalcy by intermingling neurosis with religion, repression with history. According to Freud everyone seems

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to adhere to some fantasy system (1930, p. 81). Whether personal or social, everyone engages in transferences as a defensive attempt to resist the present, and perhaps very few endure fears of death and annihilation without crippling themselves emotionally in attempts to escape.3 Freud's theories of civilization, repression, and religion provide a complex illustration of the pervasive frequency of neurosis and the need to flee from reality in fear and dread. The obvious defect even before this analysis begins is the reductive way Freud imagines religion. For the sake of this argument, religion is here restricted to those beliefs, faiths, or worlds which denote literal belief in deities with external reality and sentience. It is still a matter of considerable scholarly inquiry what engenders such religious fantasies, and I use Freud as a springboard for playing out the complex dynamics of delusion formation and self-deception in everyday life. Though Freud's analysis of religion pertains only to certain modes of religion, and he is by no means the alpha or omega on the psychology of religion, his dynamic subversion of subjectivity and his explorations of the ubiquity of delusion make a return to his texts a worthwhile and provocative endeavor. By returning to the "psychology of self-deception/' we may discover the hallucinatory quality of myriad "realities."4 THE FANTASY OF EVIL AND SACRIFICE In the^essay " 'Civilized' Sexual Morality and Modern Nervousness" (1908), Freud writes that repression is always accompanied by an increase of anxiety concerning life and death.5 This anxiety interferes not only with happiness and the capacity for enjoyment but the willingness of individuals to act together and for one another by risking their lives or begetting offspring, excluding them from participating in the future. Freud thus concludes his essay by raising the question whether "our 'civilized' sexual morality is worth the sacrifice it imposes upon us" (pp. 203-204). How is it possible that the society which is founded to protect individuals from death increases death anxiety? In the "civilized" societies of which Freud writes, social systems are functional defenses in that nature no longer threatens to impinge upon individual lives. Bears seldom carry off infants, snakes rarely slither into our homes, and the dark mystery of nature is kept at bay by our city walls.6 Food and medicine are readily available, and citizens rarely starve or suffer from incurable agues. Individuals can follow their bliss, pursue their projects, and retire in peace since their rights are protected.7 Nevertheless, the psychological sacrifice Freud discusses throughout his work increases the malaise of civilization and inculcates the fear of death.

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It may seem strange that Freud believes the fear of death derives from repression rather than either exposure to death or conscious awareness of the finality of life. Freud actually cited death and decay as terrors of such significance that mythologies and religions were invented to deny and disavow death (1900,1919,1927). In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud writes: "Children know nothing of the horrors of corruption, of freezing in the ice-cold grave, of the terrors of eternal nothingness—ideas which grown-up people find it so hard to tolerate, as is proved by all the myths of a future life" (1900, p. 254). However, when Freud explicitly reduces death anxiety to guilt or castration (1923, 1926) he is arguing that before the psyche can even comprehend death, we are subject to numerous annihilating experiences in childhood which actually become the templates for imagining death. Hence when Freud writes that civilization engenders the fear of death, he is expressing a chronicity of how death anxiety unfolds through helplessness, malignant parenting, and socially annihilating and repressively injurious experience. The existential fears of death, putrescence, and nonbeing come later, with the development of consciousness after the emerging psyche has experienced such terrifying vulnerabilities of helplessness, loss, injury, illness, and so forth. Thus society is the injurious force which threatens life, engenders conscious fear, and requires fantastical solutions. Society protects people and grants both leisure and freedom, but society can also be vicious, repressive, oppressive, and inherently damaging to the emotional lives of its constituents. One concludes from Freud that human beings feel anxiety when life itself is repressed. According to this view annihilation anxiety is the direct response to repression of the will to live. Repression is a diminution of life which can only feel like a threat to one's existence. Not only are individuals frustrated. The same fears of retaliation, punishment, and annihilation which threaten the child in infancy are perpetuated by society. And in this case, the threat of death is often real. The castration complex and manifold sources of annihilation anxiety nourished in childhood become law, morality, ideology, and cosmology. Socially induced repression is a crucial source of death anxiety, even as civilization protects humanity from nature and from one another. Further, repressed hostility engenders guilt and the fear of retaliation. The more civilized the society, the more trenchant the guilt and fear of being killed for illicit wishes.8 Human beings nevertheless feel terrified without society, but society is also injurious in a final way. Culture consequently enforces a morality derived from this fear with the intention of vilifying and exterminating that which threatens it. Hence both individual drives are vilified, and anything representing those wishes or their temptation will also be demonized and destroyed.9 Not just guilt, but disgust for

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life is inculcated by the sacrificial morality of civilization. Such is the nature of civilization—detestable elements of the self are killed off while simultaneously disavowed and projected onto others who become the direst sources of evil. Evil is psychologically what arouses fear, disgust, shame, and discomfort. Thus the "life instincts"—sexuality, healthy narcissistic expansion of the self, autonomy, independent thought, creativity, and the like—are considered evil by those forced to repress and despise them, and this is in fact a perennial theme in western history.10 Though described as evil, such abhorrent material is often called "other," as though it were not the self that were feeling or acting in such an objectionable fashion. Call it ate,11 Satan, or the feminine, history is replete with the mendacious ploys with which desires, ideas, feelings, urges, and prohibited impulses have been externalized. Evil is everything people have wished to repress—or expiate, frighten off, castrate, slaughter, and the like. As Freud argues, then, repression not only engenders an increasing anxiety over life and death but catalyzes a morality intended to kill the self. This is the "death drive" killing the self to preserve the self against the threat of its own living. However, the ego also externalizes this aggression for self-preservation. Self-preservation involves both a flight response from one's illicit wishes, which ends up killing the self, while it is also capable of directing this aggression outward at enemies to preserve the self from its own annihilation. The distinction of "otherness" might even be a way to strengthen the defensive power of the ego by acting as though the threat came from outside, thus fortifying the preparedness of the ego.12 Society enforces what its constituents need to constrain in themselves: their own repressed and frustrated, morally disgusting desires. While civilization constrains aggression and coerces internalization of violence as guilt, this does not mean that society becomes peaceful. While repression of aggression and reaction formations transform hostility into the love commandment, aggression is nevertheless displaced and enacted in compulsive fashion. First of all, children identify with the aggression of their parents, and adults themselves identify with the aggression of their surrogate parents, that is, society.13 Hence a society becomes oppressive to its own constituents, as each citizen rigidly enforces the aggressive constraints of society. Second, aggression is not merely contained but becomes displaced onto scapegoats who are targeted for their evil or pernicious qualities. One of Freud's great insights is that communities experience far too much hostility merely to restrain or transform into love. Groups displace hostility from among themselves onto others, siphoning their anger onto victims who become containers for communal hostility. "It

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is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggression" (Freud, 1930, p. 114). Such violence both allows individuals to destroy their own externalized insidious qualities, while reinforcing feelings of love and invulnerability within the group. Now that individuals have a target for their hostilities, and can destroy them as a community, their anger is siphoned off and the group feels empowered and loyal through the act of communal violence (Durkheim, 1897/1989, 1912/1965; Bion, 1955; Jaques, 1955/1977; Fromm, 1955; Becker, 1973/1975,1975/1976; Moscovici, 1988). Finally, the feeling of community and invulnerability is so amplified by the act of displacement and violence that it becomes ritualized in purification ceremonies, holy aggression, and institutionalized oppression or warfare. If no enemy is readily available, arbitrary differences within the community will be identified to segregate that evil group from the mainstream. Communities will search for some network of differences, some pattern of deviance which will enable them to displace their hostility, else the entire community will have no outlet for its aggression. If there is no real enemy, arbitrary characteristics will be inflated and distorted into blazons of evil. And if there is a paucity of obvious differences, vile traits will be hallucinated (Piven, 2002; Volkan, 1988). Love will persist among the community so long as an enemy can be found. This means that individuals are terrified of violence from other members of the community, since on some level they recognize the genuine hostility lurking beneath the facade of the love commandment. They are also afraid of being destroyed by the enemy group, which means that their ideologies and doxologies justifying their violence become sacred. Their beliefs sustain their feelings of both righteousness and immortality. Invulnerability entails the eternal truth of their cosmology and its ability to sustain them against their enemies. This means that the sacred also protects them from one another, since their enemies most often derive from displacement of aggression. Ultimately, the fear of reprisal from enemies, friends, and the authority of society itself is an amplification of the fear of the super-ego, of punishment and annihilation by father. The conscious fears of death from murder and warfare overlay the unconscious fear of annihilation which compels repression of hostility and submission to the authority of the state. Thus even sublimated cruelty and institutionalized oppression cannot be separated from the restraining of aggression and the internalization of guilt. To put it another way, it is the injurious effect of authoritarian suppression that generates much of communal frustration and hostility, virtually guaranteeing that some outlet will be needed, and that a scape-

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goat will be punished with a tremendous catharsis of repressed wrath. The problem is that this catharsis, like every neurotic compromise, does not liberate the aggression once and for all but repeats the struggle with guilt and hostility14 Even while the most violent societies crush their enemies, they nevertheless suffer from their own interminable struggles and self-punishments. As long as the super-ego admonishes the ego, as long as society itself demands renunciations and coerces sacrifice, the threat of death will perpetuate the repression of hostility, the inculcation of guilt, and the displacement of aggression.15 Thus even while violence is inflicted on victims, individuals still sustain their own masochism. Ironically, individuals sacrifice themselves and kill their own bodies to preserve both society and their subjective sense of safety. Freud thus conceives of the psychogenesis of individuals, societies, and epochs as similar and interrelated developmental processes. History and culture are seen to emerge from the wishes, needs, conflicts, and compromises of individuals born into and perpetuating the dynamics of their families. Freud conceives of individuals striving to relieve the tensions of their needs and suffering the struggles, trauma, and compromises of development (Freud, 1913, p. 186). But individuals and families exist within a given group and society. These developmental vicissitudes become group fantasies, prohibitions, and conflicts, repeating and amplifying individual anxieties, defenses, and socially patterned reactions and defects. Only now parental edict is reinforced by innumerable spectators, police, and adjudicators. The threat of punishment and alienation is far more deadly, the loss of love more devastating, and therefore the wish to appease others and avoid castigation are more compulsory. FEAR, HELPLESSNESS, AND MORALITY Freud (1913) claims that psychoanalysis enables us to throw some light on "the origins of our great cultural institutions—on religion, morality, justice and philosophy" (p. 185) since the psychological function of these phenomena are derived from motives other than their manifest rationale: "The whole course of the history of civilization is no more than an account of the various methods adopted by mankind for 'binding' their unsatisfied wishes, which, according to changing conditions (modified, moreover, by technological advances) have been met by reality sometimes with favour and sometimes with frustration" (p. 186). While Freud interprets history in terms of binding sexuality, he specifically attributes this motivation to the need for omnipotence (p. 186) and that the human reaction to the inner and external worlds is to

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constrain and control them. Now this has two connotations: That people do so in order to satisfy their desire for pleasure and satisfaction and also that they are defending themselves from feelings of helplessness through conquest. One is merely the complement of the other, since anxiety and weakness are sources of displeasure, and they impede the search for gratification. However, the terror of helplessness is not merely a lack of pleasure but a motive for restoring protection. As Freud writes early in his career, "The initial helplessness of human beings is the primal source of all moral motives" (1895, p. 318).16 Freud observed how conviction, obedience, and morality all derive from the need to master helplessness, create a nonpersecutory environment, evade the punishment and loss of love which might arrive if one does not conform to parental invective. Morality derives from helplessness and fear of annihilation. Morality itself is not inherently destructive or crippling. Honesty and respect for the property of others are not cruel or repressive. Nevertheless, Freud seems to view the enforcement of morality as a macrocosm of the terrors and injuries of childhood, fashioning a pathological society which compulsively inculcates fear, threat, and internalization of aggression. The pathological instances might yet be considered anomalous. But Freud is generalizing without exception. In his view morality, society, and history all derive from helplessness, fear of death, and the omnipotent fantasy of control and invulnerability.17 Indeed, people cocoon themselves within these pathologies and fantasies to evade death and suffering. Individuals cripple themselves to save themselves, as Freud states so elegantly in Civilization and Its Discontents. Adaptation is fraught with complications which frequently result in both disruptive symptoms of repressed libido and crippling inhibitions of growth and functioning. What this ultimately means is that the human organism adapts itself to reality not merely by learning amicably what it can and cannot do but by impairing its means to experience reality under the threat of injury and loss of security. The reality encountered after the repressions, inhibitions, reactions, punishments, and displacements is a severely mutilated perspective, since thought itself is shrouded with guilt and aversion, submission and denial, inhibition, distorted wishes manifesting themselves in displaced reproaches and idealized images, phobias and magical rituals, and somatic disguises of memories and desires. What this chapter has been implicating are the means Freud described for the psyche to avoid injury to the self, from external dangers, from terrifying experiences, ideas, and memories, from angry parents who may disapprove and abandon it, from its own desires which it learns are wrong and must be suppressed and forgotten. On

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the one hand, the psyche reacts to these threats by excluding them from consciousness so as to preserve itself and, on the other, is itself retarded by its own measures to avoid anxiety. The ego attempts to separate from itself anything which is a source of displeasure. Freud (1930) describes the processes of defense and pathology appositely in Civilization and Its Discontents. Whether from without or within, the drive for a "pure pleasure ego" is responsible for the disavowal of knowledge, feeling, and perception. Consequently, this entails detachment from the external world (pp. 66-68). Defense is inherently self-debilitating. Life is too painful, Freud writes, and "we cannot dispense with palliative measures" (p. 75). There are a number of diversions from pain, substitutive satisfactions, but none of these truly provides a sense of meaning and significance to life or finally quells the anxiety, suffering, and despair. Thus Freud writes that "only religion can answer the purpose of life" (p. 76). Freud describes the three great sources of pain: "We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own body, which is doomed to decay and dissolution and which cannot even do without pain and anxiety as warning signals; from the external world, which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction; and finally from our relations to other men. The suffering which comes from this last source is perhaps more painful to us than any other" (p. 77). Freud refers to the fear and disgust of bodily decay in numerous writings (1895,1900,1919,1920,1927), and he also correlates the relation of the merciless destructiveness of the external world to human wounded narcissism (1927) and terror of helplessness (1895, 1930). These have thus far been central sources of death anxiety and defensive responses which distort reality perception and generate ideology and cosmology. If Freud includes relations between human beings as perhaps the most agonizing strife, one might pause to reflect. Freud is seldom known for his sensitivity in the subject of love,18 but here Freud is describing the complex processes and failures of human development in an aphorism. Not just sexuality per se but the human need for comfort, protection, and security drive the pleasure principle. The infant may instinctively seek pleasure but depends on satiation as a sign of safety. Pain generates fear for life. The need for love from others develops from this infantile need for protection and security. Hence relations with other human beings are at the heart of strivings for invulnerability, and loss of love in adulthood may still be experienced as annihilation and death. As Freud (1930) writes, "We are never so defenceless against suffering as when we are in love, never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object or its love" (p. 82). Love between human adults is a vestigial biological defense against helpless-

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ness and death. And it is this vulnerability which renders people so susceptible to transference illusions in relationships, to being deceived and manipulated by leaders, and to religious fantasies which restore infantile dependence, approval, and protection.19 As Fenichel says, human beings have a "longing for being hypnotized" (Becker, 1973/ 1975, p. 132). Reality is more complicated and more disappointing than childhood dependence, else people would not need to project their fantasies on others or delude themselves into religious beliefs. Emergence from the primal idealized fantasy of childhood into the vicious world of adult aggression and deceit is inherently painful, and again, human beings too often experience the annihilation of alienation, rejection, betrayal, and the failure of others to meet their expectations throughout life. Ironically, the negative qualities of loved ones are often similar reactions to their own disappointments, injuries, and fantasies. Perhaps that is the crux of Freud's argument in this text: Reality cannot but fail to conform to infantile wishes, and the malaise created by the demands and sacrifices of civilization poises individuals between love, aggression, and guilt. If Eros itself is repressed, aggression and guilt only intensify to a point civilization may not be able to endure. Freud concludes Civilization and Its Discontents with the uncanny speculation that Death may emerge victorious over Eros. The question then is whether this death will continue to consume individuals with guilt, whether it will be externalized as aggression, or a deeply pathological version of both. Considering the worldwide violence in the years following Freud's text, it is difficult to imagine the advance of a civilization which does not set these pathologies in motion in the act of civilizing.20 The questions will no doubt be asked, Is it not possible to suppress some portion of desire when circumstances demand it without too much suffering and pathological consequence, and why cannot a child be taught by its parents what is expected of it without scarring or warping its psychic structure? There is undoubtedly development in the conflict-free ego sphere (cf. Hartmann, 1939/1964), the possibility of genuine love, ego strength, and sublimation. But perhaps normalcy is permeated to varying degrees by these fears and injuries elucidated here. Perhaps normalcy as an ideal of health just does not exist. Freud himself asserts that the neurosis is not qualitatively different from normalcy, just different as regards to the prominence of a trait or constellation of characteristics dominating the psychical life of each individual. Freud (1917) writes: "If you take up a theoretical point of view and disregard this matter of quantity, you may quite well say that we are all ill—that is, neurotic—since the preconditions for the formation of symptoms can also be observed in normal people" (p. 358). And again

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(Freud, 1938/1940): "We have seen that it is not scientifically feasible to draw a line of demarcation between what is psychically normal and abnormal; so that that distinction, in spite of its practical importance, possesses only a conventional value" (p. 195). In addition, the very fact that children are fragile, helpless creatures instantly prone to intense pain, anxiety, fear, and remorse means that the methods adults employ to teach children and bestow values upon them are not going to be a matter of simple rational discussion, at least for a few years. Children do not react well to deprivation, separation, or prohibition. Not only will they inevitably experience intense frustration and anxiety, but they additionally suffer from the imposition of adult limitations upon their needs and wishes. Indeed, reality itself will be inclement without adult coercion. As mentioned earlier, the child will ultimately be confronted with the fact that one's own wishes cannot be satisfied and one's fears dispelled immediately. It should also be recognized that if one were to protect the child from painful stimuli so meticulously that the child never suffered deprivation, fear, anguish or agony, the child would never attain any tolerance for pain or the ability to think or act for oneself. Thus the inevitable result is struggle. Growth proceeds by overcoming anxiety, want, fear, and frustration. Optimally, the child will learn to depend on one's own powers and gain the confidence of conquering difficult tasks without having the unfortunate experience of encountering tasks too arduous or traumatic for one's level of development— experiences which might convince one of the futility of struggle, the hostility of the world around one, or one's own helplessness. Nevertheless, children are forced to dispense with certain wishes and actions, confront the terrible fear of parental anger, admonishment, or abandonment, and stifle their wishes from both fear and need for approval. Thus, to state the point succinctly, children will inevitably be forced into defending themselves against painful stimuli, enduring frustration, postponing gratification, and suffocating much of their vitality. These are hardly benign influences the child can simply forget or shrug off. That is why Freud says that "the child is psychologically father to the adult" (1938/1940, p. 187). Early disturbances create the individual, and these injuries are unavoidable: The early efflorescence of infantile sexual life is doomed to extinction because its wishes are incompatible with reality and with the inadequate stage of development which the child has reached. That efflorescence comes to an end in the most distressing circumstances and to the accompaniment of the most painful feelings. Loss of love and failure leave behind them a permanent injury to self-regard in the form of a narcissistic scar, which in my opinion . . . contributes more than anything to the "sense of inferiority" which is so com-

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mon in neurotics. The child's sexual researches, on which limits are imposed by his psychical development, leads to no satisfactory conclusion; hence such later complaints as "I can't accomplish anything; I can't succeed in anything." (Freud, 1920, pp. 20-21)

The simple point here is that if these experiences do not necessarily involve trauma, they do necessitate limitation of wishful expression and defenses against anxiety. When a child develops an aversion to coprophilia, this is not mere instruction, nor is excluding desires for mother and resentment against the interloping father from consciousness. These remoldings of awareness operate under threat and fear, and themselves indicate this tension. So while development need not manifest any overt symptomology of pathological disturbances, the so-called normal character traits such as aversion to or avoidance of certain ideas, experiences, sensations, or desires indicates at least an impairment and distortion of experience as well as perception. And this is why normalcy must not be confused with health. Normalcy is still a matter of perceptual distortion and psychical debility. The psyche would have it no other way. Normalcy amounts to defenses and repressions enforced so flawlessly that the psyche feels no anxiety from within and feels gratified to have obtained the approval of society and its super-ego. This says nothing about the price the individual has paid for the meticulousness of the repressions, nothing about the strength of the individual to tolerate adversity, affliction, painful ideas, or calamities. Ordinary happiness says nothing about one's ability to experience consciousness and thought without aversion, fear, reactions of hatred, anxiety, and moral invective, nothing about one's limitations, inhibitions, or capacities. If the distinctions between normal and pathological behavior have been blurred thus far, it has been to imply just how much human beings are determined by psychological compulsions which undermine any sense of rationality and control, though individuals seem to bear some reality testing and may not always exhibit symptoms. This chapter has also intimated the forces which drive and compel the psyche though human beings maintain the illusion of self-control, the certainty of their beliefs, truths, and morals. RELIGION AND PSYCHOPATHOLOGY Nothing blurs the distinction between normal and pathological so much as religion. One of the most important fantasy systems that protects human beings from death is religious belief. But because so many people adhere to religious beliefs of some kind, and because such beliefs and practices are considered natural, healthy, moral, normal ex-

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pressions of culture, people sometimes forget how disassociated from reality such religious phenomena are. Since individuals are also driven to religious beliefs as a social solution to repressed desire, and since people feel comforted by such beliefs, they would be inclined to deny their disassociation from reality, indeed, would abjure any threat to their faith in the absolute reality of such beliefs: One can try to re-create the world, to build up in its stead another world in which its most unbearable features are eliminated and replaced by others that are in conformity with one's wishes. But whoever, in desperate defiance, sets out upon this path to happiness will as a rule attain nothing. Reality is too strong for him. He becomes a madman, who for the most part finds no one to help him in carrying through his delusion. It is asserted, however, that each one of us behaves in some one respect like a paranoiac, corrects some aspect of the world which is unbearable to him by the construction of a wish and introduces this delusion into reality. A special importance attaches to the case in which this attempt to procure a certainty of happiness and a protection against suffering through a delusional remoulding of reality is made by a considerable number of people in common. The religions of mankind must be classed among the mass-delusions of this kind. No one, needless to say, who shares a delusion ever recognizes it as such. (Freud, 1930, p. 81) But it is exactly these resistances, projections, and displacements of wish-fantasies which liken religious beliefs and practices to neurotic symptoms, however ordinary they seem. Individual neurotic ceremonies or fantasies reveal their disassociation from reality, social participation in fantasy and practice unites the community and prevents infantile desire from revealing itself by what would be otherwise alienating. "Devout believers are safe-guarded in a high degree against the risk of certain neurotic illnesses; their acceptance of the universal neurosis spares them the task of constructing a personal one" (Freud, 1927, p . 44). Religious morality is imposed, and often causes tangible individual problems, though desire may manifest itself through the social fantasy. The analogy of calling religion a universal obsessional neurosis (Freud, 1907,1927,1939) is relevant because projected fantasy and oedipal struggles may be interpreted in what religious adherents take to be reality. Thus not only are religious ethics imposed, they are practiced because believers fear punishment and alienation. The faithful are often forbidden to question such beliefs, and enact them not from other-regard or principles, but because salvation and damnation are at stake. Immortality resides in remaining infantile and unconditionally submissive (Freud, 1930, p p . 84-85). Hence the irony of salvation and death denial: the security and relief from terror attained by religious faith

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also reinforce the infantilism, dependence, and fear of punishment and death the believer wished to escape. The practice of being a good and perfect child to retain Daddy's love is writ large and projected onto the universe. On a macrocosmic level, the believer feels happy when one has renounced one's wishes and feels one has gotten father's love and approval. But the fear still remains, and the believer must continue one's supplication. Sadly, it would be more terrifying to individuate and stand alone than to live in fear of damnation. As Freud writes, "The derivation of religious needs from the infant's helplessness and the longing for the father aroused by it seems to me incontrovertible, especially since the feeling is not simply prolonged from childhood days, but is permanently sustained by fear of the superior power of Fate" (1930, p. 72). Repression also destroys not merely the believers but those who are different as well, since the repressed demands release and is waiting for any opportunity to express itself by unleashing its fury on others. Excessive repression causes excessive frustration and obsessiveness. Believers are thus inclined to demand renunciations from each other, and their own repression demands that others conform or suffer the consequences. In sum, religious morality serves the purpose of satisfying the human need for eternal answers, for protection and security, for an afterlife, but it cripples its individuals physically and mentally, as well as having deleterious effects on those who are not of the fold. As Freud writes, the repression of aggression and reaction formations away from hostility engender communal love, but this becomes possible only with the opportunity for displacing aggression onto someone else. The sacred truth and salvation of those answers sustaining life begets "the narcissism of minor differences," whereby the smallest dichotomies become justifications for derogation and aggression. "When once the Apostle Paul had posited universal love between men as the foundation of his Christian community, extreme intolerance on the part of Christendom towards those who remained outside it became the inevitable consequence" (1930, pp. 114-115). Human history is highly informed by religious tradition. One would hardly call neurotic symptoms a morality that corresponds to goodness or health. So while religious morality is critiqued in terms of its effects on believers and disbelievers, what we take for granted as morally good and healthy when we examine the pathology governing religious belief might also be called into question. Aside from their irreality, the fictitious nature of the externalized beliefs, the fantasy system itself might be considered a product of infantile fixation which impedes growth, autonomy, and individuation. Religion creates as many neuroses as it prevents:

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Religion restricts this play of choice and adaptation, since it imposes equally on everyone its own path to the acquisition of happiness and protection from suffering. Its technique consists in depressing the value of life and distorting the picture of the real world in a delusional manner—which presupposes an intimidation of intelligence. At this price, by forcibly fixing them in a state of psychical infantilism, and by drawing them into a mass-delusion, religion succeeds in sparing many people an individual neurosis. But hardly anything more. (Freud, 1930, pp. 84-85) Indeed, it is virtually impossible to separate neurosis from religious phenomena, even while the existence of social fantasy precludes the diagnosis of individual neurosis with individual fantasies. The fact that each individual experiences one's own conflicts which engender pathological symptoms unique to one's total composition divorces neurosis from a social fantasy provided from without. But it might also be said that since religion is the projection of infantile fantasies of protecting and punishing parents, and includes many of the magical anxiety avoidances so prevalent among those who are prone to the indulgence of infantile regression and flight into illness, that religion may be considered a transference neurosis. Thus there is no surprise when Freud not only compares religion and neurosis, but declares them inseparable: "If our work leads us to a conclusion which reduces religion to a neurosis of humanity and explains its enormous power in the same way as a neurotic compulsion in our individual patients, we may be sure of drawing the resentment of our ruling powers down upon us I have never doubted that religious phenomena are only to be understood on the pattern of the individual neurotic symptoms familiar to us" (1939, pp. 55-58). Unfortunately, enough of human history and civilization depends upon such beliefs to protect people that humanity may never outgrow its infancy or madness. "The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life" (Freud, 1930, p. 74). Indeed, this whole analysis would seem to indicate that the net result of the sacrifices required of civilization and morality is a small modicum of comfort, security, and certainty at the expense of reality, health, and a peaceful world. A final word, however, in case one is misled into thinking that religion is the only target of this critique.21 Symptomology is not confined to "religion" in the social sphere or "neurosis" in the individual one. Fantasy systems abound which symptomize the need for security, protection, gratification, pleasure, and salvation. So that whether discussing nationalism, consumption, shopping, philosophy, or psychoanalysis, human beings are driven by enough displaced wishes to affect their sense of reality.22

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CONCLUSIONS The implication of this lengthy exposition is that socially constructed illusions which ward off the fear of death are the norm. Death inspires and sanctifies illusions. Normalcy is a flight from death and annihilation, and perhaps all avoidances and illusions are acts of self-preservation. What is neurosis but a flight from reality, awareness, confrontation with struggle, toward infancy, unconsciousness, and cessation of pain? As Yalom writes, "Neurotic syndromes share one important feature: though they inconvenience and restrict a patient, they all succeed in protecting him or her from overt and terrifying death anxiety" (1980, p. 49). Freud explicitly rejected the idea that "every fear is ultimately the fear of death" (1923, p. 57). But this means that the concept of death is complex, and founded upon manifold annihilating experiences. Death can mean separation, helplessness, being overwhelmed by one's emotions, violent injury, loss of love, loss of loved ones, decay of the body, and nonexistence. With his analysis of both neurosis and religion, Freud is arguing that illusion and flight are acts of self-preservation, the escape from fear, pain, annihilation, and nonexistence. A psychoanalytic reading of religion may lead one to the conclusion that a great many beliefs considered normal, healthy, and sacred are delusional and symptomatic of neurosis, but such a reading of religion and social systems also forces one to conclude that normalcy itself—whether one is religious or no—is a subjective and self-deceptive state in which individuals are unlikely to perceive the delusions they believe to be reality. A portion of religion may be as illusory and neurotic as Freud suggested, but if we are to take his reasoning seriously, such religion is but one mode of irreality. Other theologies may expose the pathological fantasies and fictions taken to be the highest and most virtuous desiderata of secular society. We may be that self-deceptive. NOTES This article was previously published in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion 71 (1): 2003. 1. In other words, some people do have the ego strength to deal with death, but most others derive their aplomb from the social and religious fantasies that absorb the fear of death. Conscious equanimity does not mean that unconscious anxieties do not exist. Rigid adherence to fantasy systems and illusions is one way of knowing that the anxiety still lurks below consciousness. 2. Freud was inconsistent with regard to his thoughts on death. On the one hand, he maintained that death anxiety could be reduced to castration (1923, 1926), or guilt (1915), and that death could not be represented in an

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unconscious which knew only impulses (1915). On the other hand, Freud also stated repeatedly that religion derived from the fear of death and decay, that we continually remold reality and create fantasies which repress and soothe our fears of death, putrescence, and nonbeing (1900,1919,1927). I have dealt with the complexities of these arguments elsewhere (Piven, in press-a, in pressb) and for now will rely upon Freud's psychoanalyses of religion and selfdeception. 3. Transference is the repetition of previous modes of perception, experience, and conflict onto the present, especially the relation to one's parents. Hence replacing certain present perceptions with more childlike ways of seeing reality allows people to forget the present and reexperience the childlike satisfaction of magical thinking. They also attempt to work out unresolved conflicts and derive gratification from the object of transference in response to unsatisfied childhood needs. By hallucinating elements of reality in a more childlike and unrealistic way, transference is both a defense against the present and a cognitively, perceptually crippling process. Transference also enables the wish fantasy of merger with an idealized protective parental surrogate, whether a god, leader, or satisfying and protecting fantasy. 4. Heinz Hartmann (1959) called psychoanalysis the psychology of selfdeception, since it continually found how the fundamental character of the conscious psyche is infiltrated by unconscious ideas, perceptual distortions, and repression of unwanted ideas. Just how one is to determine what is reality and what is fantasy is a slippery question indeed. Can there be criteria for determining fantasy when we are all to some degree self-deceptive? The psychoanalytic determination of fantasy does not reside in the analyst's omniscience. While Freud adheres to an avowed scientific approach which bases justification for belief on sufficient evidence, psychoanalysis is also a hermeneutics of suspicion which implicates the analyst's own inherent irrationality. Freud knew he could be irrational (his logical positivism and conviction notwithstanding)—his self-analysis revealed his own fantasies and the unreliability of his own sense of reality. It is precisely because the analyst is also subject to his or her own irrationalities that analysts must be analyzed so that they may at least attempt to be aware of their own inclinations to project, be defensive, succumb to intense counter transferences. This being said, analysts are divided on their epistemological convictions. Some analysts believe that science yields the most reliable results, and that ultimately their own grounding in reality (after having been well-trained and themselves analyzed) enables them to judge what is real and what is fantasy in the patient. Other analysts defer from such scientific premises and concern themselves with irrationality in the analytic process regardless of what reality might supposedly be. In this sense, fantasy is not what the "grounded" analyst believes must be a deviation from objective reality as determined by himself. Fantasy describes the intense investment in an idea or belief, attachment and immersion in an idea such that the belief is not susceptible to alteration or disconfirming instances, the sense that the subject is bringing to the situation his or her own issues. The reality of the situation described is not at issue as much as the focus and emotions of the subject. Regardless of whether God actually exists or not, for example, the belief is endowed with significance in the believer, whose faith describes his

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or her own issues rather than something in the universe researched empirically. God's actual existence is never the issue (God may exist for all we know, but the believer is immersed in his or her emotional life and imagination and is not concerned with "objective" evidence). For the purposes of this article, we should note that Freud himself still seems to have maintained a belief in objectivity even as his own theory rendered such conviction rather slippery. One cannot ever eliminate oneself from the fantasy process, so by implication Freudian theory must be suffused with some fantasy—perhaps the occasional fantasy of objectivity. Freud never seems to have addressed the question of how one can definitively determine what is or is not fantasy when we are all fantasizing and self-deceiving, even if to varying degrees. 5. This observation relies upon Freud's early formula for neurosis, in which anxiety was the result of repression, whereas he later modified this view to state that anxiety motivated repression in the first place. However, despite this theoretical change, the observation that repression and its social agents of threat and shame do produce anxiety, fear, and frustration, are indubitably correct. 6. My hyperbole here stresses the fear of nature in addition to its genuine dangers. 7. While these descriptions may be accurate in ideal cases, it is also ironic that some of the greatest violence, genocide, and death from starvation and disease have occurred in our civilized cultures. 8. Freud's conclusion at the end of Civilization and Its Discontents (1930). Guilt here explicitly means the fear of not being loved, and of being killed by one's loved ones. This is the view taken up by Klein—the fear of punishment and death derives from retaliatory wishes, which must thereby be repressed. According to Freud and Klein, then, emotions such as love are self-deceptive and conceal the fear of being killed for one's hatred. 9. I am writing here of both the social violence enacted on those who defy the prevalent morality and the psychological damage inflicted on those who have not yet sacrificed their desires for the communal morality. If we are fortunate, however, we may have the emotional capacity to sublimate some of our impulses before they are repressed, channeling them into fulfilling, socially acceptable pursuits. In this way we may be able to evade the painful prohibition and demonization of our fantasies. Sublimation is not possible after repression, it should be noted, and if these impulses escape postrepression they become neurotic compromises imbued with conflict and guilt. They are far less fulfilling than sublimations. 10. I expanded on this in greater detail in my article "Death, Repression, Narcissism, Misogyny" (in press-a), which will appear in The Psychoanalytic Review. I refer again to these issues to play out the impact of such psychodynamics on social systems and self-deception. 11. The Greek word meaning both possession by a god or divine force, and blindness which leads one to ruin. 12. Cf. Freud, "Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety" (1926). 13. Freud is indicating here that such aggression is taken over by the child in the establishment of its own superego. In this sense, the aggression is turned against oneself. However, identification with aggression also means identifying

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with the authority and using that authority to punish others, which is one selfpreservative consequence of excessive self-punitive behavior (cf. the hallucinations of Dr. Schreber, who became the avatar of God so as not to be his victim). 14. In Freud's view the defenses continue to operate even after a threat in the external world disappears. 15. Of course the enemy could be a component of the self, or an enemy invading the self such as the devil, a spirit, or homosexuality, in which case the enemy within will be punished and destroyed. If the authorities sanction self-punishment, asceticism will be the outlet (inlet) for aggression rather than violence toward others. The point I am making here is that societies sanction aggression toward others, even while they make their constituents feel guilty. 16. Just how Freud came to this conclusion in 1895 is a matter of curiosity. Perhaps this is one of his fantasies. 17. See also Lifton (1979) and Yalom (1980), who see history as shifting modes of transcendence, death denial, and symbolic immortality. 18. That is, his analysis of love tends to be somewhat sterile, describing love in terms of libido, narcissism, objects, sublimation or displacement of sexuality, etc. There have been excellent treatments of Freud's view of love, including Rieff's (1959) and Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler, and Tipton's (1985) contentions that Freud's view of love is narrow conceptually; Wallwork's (1991) elegant discussion of egotism, object love, and the love commandment; Lear's (1990) exploration of love and its place in human nature, development, and analytic therapy; and Thompson's (1994) analysis of Dora, love, and transference, just to cite a few. 19. Cf. Freud, "Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego" (1921). See also Bion (1955), Jaques (1955/1977), Fromm (1955,1964), Becker (1973/1975) in his chapter "The Spell Cast by Persons—the Nexus of Unfreedom," Becker (1975), and Chasseguet-Smirgel (1975/1984). All these works focus on different ways human beings retreat from reality and seek safety and love in the group, through devotion to leaders and social fictions. 20. It should be noted that since Freud, sexual prohibition and the kind of neuroses Freud wrote of seem to have decreased markedly in America and Europe. Analysts often say that they deal less with sexual inhibition and guilt than with self-esteem issues, for example. However, to the extent that selfesteem is bound up with guilt and the developmental search for love and support, sexuality in the broadest sense has achieved some liberation but hardly an ideal sense of health. Self-esteem and guilt are intimately involved with sexuality, with the direction and nature of desire, body imagery, one's ability to express intimacy, the repetition of infantile patterns onto adult relationships. While classical hysterias and anxiety neuroses seem to have diminished, our own age has its own malaise derived in large part from the kinds of aggressive and unreliable parenting which produce so many problems in selfesteem. Freud's expectation of a world collapsing under sexual repression guilt, described at the end of Civilization and Its Discontents, may be unfulfilled at the inception of the new millennium, but the world is still a madhouse (cf. Brown, 1959/1985, p. 15). 21. We cannot maintain that all religion and theology conforms to Freud's model. See Wallwork (1973/1990). In all fairness, Freud's case falls short of

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understanding the great profundity of many religions, and it might take some time for psychoanalysis to catch up with the wisdom of certain theologies. See Leifer (1997) as a fine example of how Tibetan Buddhism contains many of the same core insights as psychoanalysis on suffering, attachment, and illusion. Indeed, according to Leifer, Tibetan Buddhism also recognized the primacy of the fear of death in illusion formation, which psychoanalysis, for the most part, has not yet done. 22. For instance, Guntrip (1968) and Loewald (1978/1980) called the American pursuit of money the "normal neurosis," while Lasch (1978) considered America "the culture of narcissism." Fromm (1955) called nationalism a "libidinal fixation to mother." See Lifton's (1979) explication of "symbolic immortality" for some insight into many ordinary (though in many cases neurotic) forms of the evasion of death through illusion and emotional investment. REFERENCES Alford, C. F. (1997). What evil means to us. Ithaca, NY: Cornell. Anthony, S. (1940). The child's discovery of death. New York: Harcourt. Anthony, S. (1971). The discovery of death in childhood and after. Harmondworth: Penguin. Anzieu, D. (1975/1984). The group and the unconscious. London: Routledge. Becker, E. (1962/1971). The birth and death of meaning. New York: The Free Press. Becker, E. (1973/1975). The denial of death. New York: The Free Press. Becker, E. (1975/1976). Escape from evil. New York: The Free Press. Bellah, R. N , Madsen, R., Sullivan, W. M., Swidler, A., & Tipton, S. M. (1985). Habits of the heart: Individualism and commitment in American life. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Berger, P. (1967). The sacred canopy. New York: Anchor, 1990. Bion, W. (1955). Group dynamics: A re-view. In M. Klein, P. Hermann, & R. E. Money-Kyrle (Eds.), New directions in psycho-analysis (pp. 440-477). London: Maresfield, 1977. Brown, N. O. (1959/1985). Life against death. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan. Chadwick, M. (1929). Notes on the fear of death. In H. M. Ruitenbeek (Ed.), Death: Interpretations (pp. 73-86). New York: Delta, 1969. Chasseguet-Smirgel, J. (1975/1984). The ego ideal: A psychoanalytic essay on the malady of the ideal (P. Barrows, Trans.). New York: Norton. Clark, D. (Ed.). (1993). The sociology of death. Oxford: Blackwell. Durkheim, E. (1897/1989). Suicide: A study in sociology. London: Routledge. Durkheim, E. (1912/1965). The elementary forms of the religious life (K. E. Fields, Trans.). New York: The Free Press. Feifel, H. (Ed.). (1959/1965). The meaning of death. New York: McGraw-Hill. Firestone, R. W. (1994). Psychological defenses against death anxiety. In A. Neimeyer (Ed.), The Death anxiety handbook (pp. 217-242). Washington, DC: Taylor & Francis. Freud, S. (1886-1939/1953). The standard edition of the complete works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth. Freud, S. (1895). Project for a scientific psychology. SE 1 (pp. 295-387). Freud, S. (1900). The interpretation of dreams. SE4&5 (pp. 1-338, 339-621).

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Freud, S. (1907). Obsessive acts and religious practices. SE 9 (pp. 115-128). Freud, S. (1908). "Civilized" sexual morality & modern nervous illness. SE 9 (pp. 177-204). Freud, S. (1913). The claims of psycho-analysis to scientific interest. SE 13 (pp. 165-190). Freud, S. (1915). Thoughts for the times on war and death. SE 14 (pp. 275-302). Freud, S. (1917). Introductory lectures on psycho-analysis (Part III). SE16 (pp. 243-463). Freud, S. (1919). The "uncanny." SE 17 (pp. 219-252). Freud, S. (1920). Beyond the pleasure principle. SE 18 (pp. 7-64). Freud, S. (1921). Group psychology and the analysis of the ego. SE 18 (pp. 67-144). Freud, S. (1923). The ego & the id. SE 19 (pp. 3-68). Freud, S. (1926). Inhibitions, symptoms, and anxiety. SE 20 (pp. 77-172). Freud, S. (1927). The future of an illusion. SE 21 (pp. 5-56). Freud, S. (1930). Civilization and its discontents. SE 21 (pp. 64-145). Freud, S. (1938/1940). An outline of psychoanalysis. SE 23 (pp. 14-207). Freud, S. (1939). Moses and monotheism. SE 23 (pp. 7-137). Freud, S., & Breuer, J. (1893-1895). Studies on hysteria. SE 2. Fromm, E. (1941). Escape from freedom. New York: Rinehart, 1960. Fromm, E. (1955). The sane society. New York: Rinehart. Fromm, E. (1964). The heart of man. New York: Harper & Row, 1980. Fromm, E. (1973). The anatomy of human destructiveness. New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston. Fulton, R. (Ed.). (1976). Death and identity. Bowie: Charles Press. Guntrip, H. (1968). Schizoid phenomena, object relations, and the self. New York: International Universities Press. Hartmann, H. (1939/1964). Ego psychology and the problem of adaptation. New York: International Universities Press. Hartmann, H. (1959). Psychoanalysis as a scientific theory. In S. Hook (Ed.), Psychoanalysis, scientific method and philosophy (pp. 3-37). New York: New York University Press. Hoffman, F. J. (1958). Mortality and modern literature. In H. Feifel (Ed.). (1959/ 1965). The meaning of death (pp. 133-156). New York: McGraw-Hill. Jaques, E. (1955/1977). Social systems as a defense against persecutory and depressive anxiety. In M. Klein, P. Heimann, & R. E. Money-Kyrle (Eds.), New directions in psycho-analysis (pp. 478-498). London: Maresfield. Kastenbaum, R., & Aisenberg, R. (1972/1976). The psychology of death. New York: Springer. Kernberg, O. F. (1992). Aggression in personality disorders and perversions. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Klein, M. (1932). The psycho-analysis of children. New York: The Free Press, 1975. Klein, M. (1946/1975). Notes on some schizoid mechanisms. In The writings of Melanie Klein volume III: Envy and gratitude and other works 1946-1963 (pp. 1-24). New York: The Free Press. Klein, M., Heimann, P., & Money-Kyrle, R. E. (Eds.). (1955/1977). New directions in psycho-analysis. London: Maresfield. La Barre, W. (1972). The ghost dance: The origins of religion. New York: Dell. Langs, R. (1997). Death anxiety in clinical practice. London: Karnac Books.

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Laplanche, J. (1970/1993). Life and death in psychoanalysis (J. Mehlman, Trans.). Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. Lasch, C. (1978). The culture of narcissism. New York: Norton, 1979. Lear, J. (1990). Love and its place in nature. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux. Lederer, W. (1968). The fear of women. New York: Harcourt. Leifer, R. (1997). The happiness project. Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion. Lifton, R. J. (1964/1973). On death and death symbolism: The Hiroshima disaster. In E. Wyschogrod (Ed.), The phenomenon of death: Faces of mortality (pp. 69-112). New York: Harper & Row. Lifton, R. J. (1979). The broken connection. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Press. Loewald, H. W. (1978/1980). Instinct theory, object relations, and psychic structure formation. In Papers on psychoanalysis (pp. 207-218). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. McCarthy, J. (1980). Death anxiety: The loss of the self. New York: Gardener. Meyer, J. E. (1973/1975). Death and neurosis. New York: International Universities Press. Moscovici, S. (1988). The invention of society (W. D. Halls, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 1993. Nagy, M. (1948/1959). The child's view of death. In H. Feifel (Ed.), The meaning of death (pp. 79-98). New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965. Phillips, A. (1996). Terrors and experts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Piven, J. S. (2002). On the psychosis (religion) of terrorists. In C. Stout (Ed.), The psychology of terrorism, volume 3 (pp. 113-141). Westport, CT: Greenwood/Praeger. Appears also in J. S. Piven, P. Ziolo, & H. W. Lawton (Eds.), Terror and apocalypse: Psychological undercurrents of history volume II (pp. 153-205). New York: Writers Showcase/Bloomusalem. Piven, J. S. (in press-a). Death, repression, narcissism, misogyny. Psychoanalytic Review 90 (2). Piven, J. S. (in press-b). Death and delusion: A Freudian analysis of mortal terror. Westport, CT: Information Age Publishing. Rheingold, J. C. (1964). The fear of being a woman. New York: Grune & Stratton. Rheingold, J. C. (1967). The mother, anxiety, and death. Boston: Little, Brown. Ricoeur, P. (1970). Freud and philosophy (D. Savage, Trans.). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Rieff, P. (1959). Freud: The mind of the moralist. New York: Viking. Rochlin, G. (1967). How younger children view death and themselves. In E. Grollman (Ed.), Explaining death to children (pp. 51-85). New York: Beacon. Rosenthal, H. R. (1963/1969). The fear of death as an indispensable factor in psychotherapy. In H. M. Ruitenbeek (Ed.), Death: Interpretations (pp. 166182). New York: Dell. Ruitenbeek, H. M. (1969). Death: Interpretations. New York: Delta. Schilder, P. (1942). On rotting. Psychoanalytic Review 29 (1): 46-49. Slochower, H. (1964/1969). Eros and the trauma of death. In H. M. Ruitenbeek (Ed.), Death: Interpretations (pp. 183-194). New York: Delta. Stern, M. (1968). Fear of death and neurosis. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 16 (1): 3-31. Stern, M. (1972). Trauma, death anxiety, and the fear of death. Psyche 26:901-928.

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Theweleit, K. (1977-1978/1987). Male fantasies (Vols. 1 and 2) (E. Carter and C. Turner, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Thompson, M. G. (1994). The truth about Freud's technique. New York: New York University Press. Tomer, A. (1994). Death anxiety in adult life—theoretical perspectives. In R. A. Neimeyer (Ed.), The death anxiety handbook (pp. 3-30). Washington, DC: Taylor & Francis. Volkan, V. D. (1988). The need to have enemies & allies. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson. Wahl, C. W. (1958/1959). The fear of death. In H. Feifel (Ed.), The meaning of death (pp. 16-29). New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965. Wallwork, E. (1973/1990). The psychoanalytic diagnosis: Infantile illusion. In R. A. Johnson et al. (Eds.), Critical issues in modern religion (pp. 118-145). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Wallwork, E. (1991). Psychoanalysis & ethics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Walsh, N. (1996). Life in death. In C. Strozier & M. Flynn (Eds.), Trauma and self (pp. 245-254). Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield. Weatherhill, R. (1998). The sovereignty of death. London: Rebus. Wulff, D. M. (1991). Psychology of religion: Classic and contemporary views. New York: Wiley. Yalom, I. D. (1980). Existential psychotherapy. New York: Basic Books. Zilboorg, G. (1943). The fear of death. Psychoanalytic Quarterly 12: 465-474.

C H A P T E R 12

Unveiling Mexican Cultural Essences: Death and Spirituality Luz Maria Solloa Garcia

Pour commencer a luy oster son plus grand advantage contre nous, prenons voye toute contraire a la commune. Ostons luy Vestrangete, pratiquons le, accoustumons le, n'ayons rien si souvent en la teste que la mort.... II est incertain ou la mort nous attende, attendons la par tout. Ea premeditation de la mort, est premeditation de la liberte. Qui a apris a mourir, il a desapris a servir. [By depriving it of its greatest advantage over us, let us adopt a course just contrary to the usual one. Let us deprive it of its strangeness, let us live with it, let us accustom ourselves to it; let us think of nothing so often as of death.... It is uncertain where death awaits us; let us await it everywhere. Premeditation of death is premeditation of liberty. He who has learned to die has unlearned servitude.] —Montaigne That to Think as a Philosopher Is to Learn to Die DEATH What other subject could be more universal and touching than death? Death has been the inspiring genius of all religion, philosophy, and even psychoanalysis. Death and its denial—immortality—have been the motor for science and cultural development, but paradoxically, our modern civilization is terrified by death amid an entourage of anguish, neurosis, and nihilism.

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Max Weber (1967) notes that the fear of death is a peculiarly modern anguish because we are submerged in an insensible progress and, not being satisfied with life in itself, death consequently seems nonsensical. Weber reminds us, however, that the ancient, the wild, the barbarian worlds always ascribed some kind of meaning to death. These are the paradoxes of modern mythology. Our Western culture teaches us to hold tightly to permanent issues, and this is why we are terrified with living, because living means learning to release, learning to die. The Western mind has fused the notions of time and space with those of historic progress, where the "civilized observer" is the one who, here and now, judges "the time of progress." Yet we know that for the child as well as for the unconscious, the experience of time is not absolute; unconscious events remain in a perennial present, forever at the margins of linear Western time. It is the experience of linear time's corollary—the timelessness of dream, of ritual, and of mystery—that takes us to meet with that Other, with Death. The so feared, so avoided, and so seldom mentioned Death is, in Mexico, a cultural archetype which endures in rituals and in mysticism. Much has been said about the Mexican festivities on All Souls' Day—that participants make fun of death, that they play with it to hide their fear—or, as Octavio Paz (1949, p. 48) writes, "The Mexican's indifference towards death is nurtured by his indifference towards life." Although we cannot deny the defensive aspects of this ritual, that is only a superficial interpretation. All Souls' Day is a cultural prescription whose ultimate meanings and purposes are anchored in spiritual necessity. According to Bartra (1987), the myth of Mexican indifference to death emerges from two sources: From a religious fatalism that poisons life, and from the powerful class system's disregard for workers' lives. Nevertheless, a third element may be added to this cultural web that deals with death: the nostalgia for a forgotten spirituality, for the consciousness of one's essential interdependence. As Gargiulo (1997) notes: Human life, Winnicott reminds us, entails more than the resolution of neurotic conflict; it is the capacity to find life interesting and worthwhile by experiencing ourselves as connected with the world, not insolated in our own thinking, creative in our interactions, not simply reactive to our environment, (pp. 6-7) The experience of feeling connected—to both life and to death—leads to increased psychological resilience and better coping. This is the (often unconscious) way to an authentic human condition that the industrialized West has sought to bury. Starting with the Conquest, Mexicans have lived with death throughout a history suffused by tragedy. Although many had expected the

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Revolution to reverse this cycle, tragedies continue, although now without the political taint of colonialism. However, that greatest of all Others—Death—continues to manifest itself through earthquakes, floods, and hurricanes. Paradoxically, these tragedies have also demonstrated Death's renovating and transforming power, and have helped to awaken the power of Mexico's spiritual and mythological infancy. One of the most important and meaningful rites in Mexican culture is the All Souls' Day festivity, which is celebrated in early November. This tradition is a constant yearly reminder that returns us to our roots, to our pre-Hispanic culture, to that archetypal Mother who contains, organizes, and recreates the chaotic experiences of the human being. When we seek to understand the deeper meanings of the All Souls' Day festivities—beyond the need to reaffirm cultural values and participate in a shared national identity—we confront a space that opens between life and death, between the outer and the inner worlds, between the objective and the subjective. Transmitted unconsciously, this is an emotionally vital space that prepares participants to encounter the Mother. According to Ulanov (2001): This transitional space houses for us illusion as it illuminates reality and reality as it engenders illusion. ... Winnicott calls subjective-objects those things we perceive and depend on to exist that reflect back to us our own aliveness, that mirror our needs and wishes, that conform to our view of reality, (p. 17) "The Death," "The Skinny," and "The Carcass" function as transitional objects that allow participants access to their ancestral spirituality, including the power needed to face and derive significance from tragedy and pain. But let us go back to the origins of this tradition. Nahuatl religious traditions describe an eternal relationship between man and nature, time, and the mysteries of life and death. In the ancient Mexican mythological traditions, death was conceived as the dispersion and transformation of three essential powers: the Teyolia (vital power), the Tonally (ego conscience), and the Ihiyotl (passions). Human beings had their origin in the Omeyocan, where they were created by the supreme gods, and then sent to Earth for their birth. After death, individuals traveled to a variety of locations in the spirit worlds based on the circumstances of their deaths. People who drowned, died of leprosy, or were sacrificed to the rain god Tlaloc, for example, would go to Tlalocan, a place near the moon. Dead children traveled to the Tonacacuautitlan (Sustenance Tree), located in the Prime Couple's heaven. Here the children's souls flitted through orchards in the form of humming birds, sucking nourishment from flowers. The Chichihualcuahuitl (Nursing Tree) was for babies who had died before attaining reason; the Tree nursed them with a flow of

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milk. The heaven of the sun was reserved for warriors w h o were sacrificed or w h o died on the battlefield, for w o m e n w h o died in childbirth, and for merchants w h o died during expeditions (Colegio de Mexico, Centro de Estudios Historicos, 2000). Men w h o died a natural death would go to Mictldn, "the dead persons' place." The Mictlan h a d nine levels, and the naturally departed resided in the lowest level with the underworld gods. Back on Earth, the deceased's body was usually cremated. The bones were then placed in a sack to be buried in the dead person's house, together with offerings to the underworld gods and supplies for the posthumous journey, such as a sacrificed dog that allowed the departed to negotiate an u n d e r g r o u n d river. After arriving in Mictlan, the dead continued their usual earthly occupations, and so workers were buried with their tools. It took the dead four years to reach the underworld, during which time their relatives buried additional offerings, beginning eighty days after the death, and then at each anniversary. Essential elements of these traditional beliefs and practices survive in Mexico today, with modifications due to the blending of Christian and pre-Hispanic elements. This continuity is apparent in the celebration of All Souls' Day. Janitzio, in the state of Michoacan, is notable in this regard, performing an elaborate spectacle with candles, torches, songs, prayers, and dances. This ritual produces an unforgettable feeling; one feels transported to that intermediate space between life and death, between m y t h and legend, between the real and the unreal. Traditionally, the commemoration starts with a thorough housecleaning beginning the week before the thirty-first of October. The returning souls may thus be welcomed into a clean and fresh atmosphere, and may rest after their long journey (Gutierrez, 2001). Nine elements are then ritually offered for the dead: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Water, representing the source of life Salt, as a purifying element Lighted candles, as a symbol of eternal love Incense or copal, as a gift for the gods Cempasuchitl flowers or sunflowers, which help the souls travel the road A mat for rest An Izcuincle dog, to help the souls to cross the river Tamales and mole (cornbread and spicy sauce), as a symbol of fraternity Agollete (a special round bread), and a stick of sugar cane

Additional treats which the dead person enjoyed in life are also set forth. These might include wine, beer, pulque (cactus drink), or cigarettes. On the first and second day of November the church bells chime

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to announce the souls' arrival, the time for offerings, and the time of the souls' departure. The cemeteries are cleaned and replenished with candles, flowers, and incense. They are now home to both living and dead people, creating a mystic atmosphere of communion between life and death. During the last decades of the twentieth century, this tradition has become distorted, especially in big cities where Halloween is celebrated instead of the traditional ceremony of the dead. However, in rural communities, magic and tradition have been preserved with profound spirituality and religious sensitivity, a condition now resumed in Mexico City mainly as a consequence of the 1985 earthquake. As Mexico recovers such traditions of unity and identity, their practice inspires a communion with the past; a past that exists not in museums, but as a living connection in our hearts. In this way, the rituals of All Souls' Day have regained their cultural power, functioning as that vital intermediate space which gives continuity and meaning to past and present, to subjective and objective, and to life through death. THE EARTHQUAKE OF 1985 On September 19,1985, the strongest earthquake in Mexican history struck at the heart of the country: Mexico City. Almost two minutes of shakes measuring 8.1 on the Richter scale devastated the city center, collapsing hundreds of buildings. At first, the government reacted with astonishment and negligence, and the Foreign Affairs Ministry announced that there would be no requests for outside help—a harsh signal of systemic political ossification. People not only needed help, they begged for it. Although the exact number of dead has never been determined, their number has been estimated at fifty thousand (Krauze, 1999). "Father government" was absent, passive, unavailable to confront the tragedy, showing once again its inability to understand the peoples' needs. Maintaining an idealized image of omnipotence was its only concern. This lack of sensitivity hidden behind a mask of false strength was the prelude to that government's own destruction. Yet the courageous attitude of youth contrasted sharply with institutional sclerosis (Krauze, 1999). From the first moments, the streets were crowded with high school students who spontaneously organized rescuing and supporting brigades for the injured people. Thousands of young people from every social class took risks amid the ruins to rescue people. Working together, the peoples' fragmented identities were fused and connected by the power, the force, the contention that we find in the Other, our fellow man, our brother, and in Death, that transitional object that connects us with our roots, with the Mother,

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and with the Earth. United by the strength of empathy and compassion, stereotypes vanished as essence was revealed. After the first hours of shock, the government did accept international offers of help. Even eight days after the disaster, living people were still being pulled from the ruins, including several newborn babies trapped under the remains of the Juarez Hospital. Those babies, now adolescents, continue to symbolize hope; the hope of fraternity, and of identity renewed in relation to others. Literally and symbolically, Mexico rescued her dead. Since that day, the traditional All Souls' Day festival has enjoyed a revival. The tragedy helped people to recover faith and hope in themselves, and by this means, traditions were revived. The dead have also been revived, for they, too, now enjoy a sacred space in the ritual of Mexican culture. It is as if Tlatelolco, "The Three Cultures Plaza" (Pre-Hispanic, Colonial, and Modern) had to be shattered in order to begin the inner reconstruction of the Mexican people, who struggled to derive new meanings from suffering and death. Strength and liberation was provided by the integration of present with past, of life with death, and by the experience of interconnection with others (Gargiulo, 1997). As the pre-Hispanic culture of the Mother has been revalued, deep-rooted mysticism and spirituality have been preserved. The search for a closer and real father began by reinstating the authoritarian and idealized father, a legacy of the Colonial period. The reflexive moment of the "Mexican adolescent identity" started to spring, unveiling and integrating in the present the essences of Mexico's rich cultural past. The earthquake of 1985 imprinted every Mexican: It left death, misery, and destruction. Yet this pain and suffering was also an opportunity to find new meanings through our values and our ancestral spirituality. The unveiling of Mexico's essence shattered the stereotypes that constrain our spirit. SEARCHING FOR NEW MEANINGS Death came back destroying, but also renovating; it came back to teach us, to strike us, to remind us who we are, so we could retake our spirituality, our mysticism, and complete the transformation. Now we begin to construct our future as human beings, with our history, our plurality, our conflicts, our strengths, and with everything that affects our complex subjectivity. We are seeking a rising, or rather a "re-rising," of consciousness, with roots in the profound mysticism that our pre-Hispanic past gives to death. Rituals of the dead keep that vital intermediate space conscious and unconscious, real and imaginary, and join us to the Mother, to the Earth, and to our deepest roots.

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We can n o w see that the so-called "Mexican indifference to death" is a m o d e r n cliche; such apparent disdain for death is part of a collective rite that gives meaning to life (Bartra, 1987). It continues to serve its original purpose: To practice and enhance the cultural forms that are contained in that intermediate space between the real and the imaginary—an ineffable space that affirms the legitimacy of its existence t h r o u g h the ritual, the game, the creative activity. But above all, Mexico's cultural attitudes to death are manifest through a unifying spiritual power that can save mankind from egocentric solitude. REFERENCES Bartra, R. (1987). Lajaula de la melancolia: Identidad y metamorfosis del Mexicano. Mexico: Grijalbo. Bowker, J. (1996). Eos significados de la muerte (M. Martinez-Lage, Trans.). Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Colegio de Mexico, Centro de Estudios Historicos. (2000). Historia general de Mexico: version 2000. Mexico: El Colegio de Mexico. Gargiulo, G. J. (1997). Inner mind/outer mind and the quest for the "I." In C. Spezzano & G J. Gargiulo (Eds.), Soul on the couch: Spirituality, religion and morality in contemporary psychoanalysis. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press. Gutierrez Martinez, C. (2001). Mixquic: Un pueblo rico en magia y tradicion. Eas ofrendas a los muertos y sus rituales. Mexico: Ediciones Cigumart. Krauze, E. (1999). Mexico siglo XX. Tomo II. Mexico: Tusquets Editores. Labastida, J. (2000). Cuerpo, territorio, mito. Mexico: D. F. Siglo Veniuno Editores, Secretaria de Cultura, Artes y Ciencias, Goberno de Colima. Morin, E. (1999). El hombre y la muerte. Barcelona: Kairos. Paz, O. (1949). El laberinto de la soledad. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Economica. Ramirez, S. (1977). El Mexicano: Psicologfa de sus motivaciones. Mexico: Grjalbo. Ramos, S. (1934). El perfil del hombre y la cultura en Mexico. Mexico: Coleccion Austral. Shopenhauer, A. (1999). El amor las mujeres y la muerte. Mexico: Ed Dialogo. Ulanov, A. B. (2001). Finding space: Winnicott, God, and psychic reality. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press. Weber, M. (1967). El politico y el cientifico. Madrid: Alianza.

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C H A P T E R 13

Adaptive Insights into Death Anxiety Robert Langs

The danger of death appears to be the most fundamental and universal source of adaptive and defensive structures. Death is a universal and inherently unresolvable adaptive issue, and conscious and unconscious forms of death anxiety are ever-present. As a result, these grave concerns are significant factors in the development of virtually every type of emotional dysfunction. With the prospect of death looming large throughout the world today, the task of gaining a deeper understanding of the profound effects of this threat has become a matter of utmost importance (cf. Liechty, 2002). Toward this end, this chapter will present some recent insights developed by what has been known as the communicative approach to psychotherapy and psychoanalysis and is now called the strong adaptive approach to emphasize one of its most basic features—a primary adaptive orientation (Langs, in press). Because, as noted by Raney (1984), Smith (1991,1998), and others, it is a new paradigm of dynamic psychotherapy and psychoanalysis—terms I use interchangeably—I will first describe the distinctive features of the approach and then present some of its most recent findings and insights in respect to the topics of death and death anxiety (Langs, 1997,1999a, 1999b, 2002). Because the approach is adaptively oriented, these very real issues and concerns have been explored in some detail clinically, with some rather surprising results.

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THE STRONG ADAPTIVE APPROACH The following is a summary of the most well-established clinical findings and theoretical constructs of the strong adaptive approach (for extensive supportive clinical evidence see Langs, 1992,1993,1997, 1998, in press). Of note is the approach's requisite for unconscious validation of all interventions in patients' responsive narrative material. Given that strong adaptive hypotheses are derived from, and validated by, clinical tests of interventions based on its theoretical ideas, the propositions of the strong adaptive approach do have a measure of unconsciously expressed support. Even so, the methodology does, of course, ultimately entail a human assessment of the presence of confirmation or its lack and is thereby open to bias. Nevertheless, because affirmation must be unconscious and encoded in patients' material, a degree of safeguard has been put into place, and it has enabled the approach to be open to revision, growth, and expansion, and to recognize its new insights, as well as its limitations in both theory and practice (Langs, in press). The strong adaptive approach is based on a new way of listening to and formulating patients' material and therapists' interventions (see what follows). This listening process is designed to fathom the conscious and especially the unconscious meanings of communications from both patients and therapists in the therapeutic situation. It is centered on the disguised or encoded narrative unconscious communications from patients that follow their therapists' interventions, which are taken to be the triggers or evocative emotionally charged events for patients' unconscious adaptive responses. Interpretations and management of the ground rules of therapy are based on the decoding of these narrative themes in light of their triggers—a process called trigger decoding (see what follows). As noted, this listening process also makes use of the themes contained in such narratives in order to gauge the validity of offered interventions. In general, validation is marked by the emergence of positively toned themes, while its absence is marked by the emergence of themes that are negatively toned (Langs, 1992,1993, in press). A notable result of these efforts has been the development of a group of deeply insightful and healing interventions that consistently obtain encoded validation and the rejection of those that do not obtain such responses. In addition, consistencies in these clinical observations have led the approach to postulate the existence of an emotion-processing mind (Langs, 1996, in press). This is a mental module (Donald, 1991; Mithen, 1996) or collection of emotion-related cognitive faculties that appears to have evolved to enable humans to cope with emotionally charged

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environmental impingements—so-called traumatic triggering events or triggers. These environmental events are broadly defined to include accidents of nature as well as the harmful or emotionally disturbing acts of other living beings—especially other humans. Encroachments from within an individual, such as thoughts, conscious memories, and signs of physical illness are secondary triggers, although indications of physical problems may have an impact comparable to some external events. Nevertheless, the approach's basic axiom is that, as is true of all living beings prior to humans (Dennett, 1995; Plotkin, 1994), the fundamental task of the human mind and its emotion-related component is to adapt to external or environmental challenges, especially those that pose a threat to survival, however large or small. Among the many findings and ramifications of these clinical efforts is the accumulation of clinical and theoretical evidence that the most fruitful, currently available model of the mind is a revised version of Freud's (1900/1953) first topographic model. This model is based on the assignment of mental contents and processes to one of two basic systems, depending on whether these contents or processes are or operate within or outside of awareness—that is, consciously or unconsciously. The result is a mapping of a two-component mind: For Freud, the systems UCS and PCS-CS, and for the adaptive approach, a conscious and deep unconscious system (for a comparison of the two topographic models, see Langs, in press). The explanatory powers of the revised adaptive topographic model in many respects far exceed those of Freud's second model of the mind, in which classification in terms of functions led to the three-component, structural model of ego, id, and superego (Freud, 1923/1961). Many of the limitations of this model stem from its intrapsychic focus at the expense of conscious, and in particular, unconscious adaptations to external realities. The adaptive model takes such processes into account. It also postulates ego, id, and superego structures and functions for each of the two systems of the emotion-processing mind, but it stresses the striking differences between how these structures operate in the two systems. The propositions that follow, including those related to death anxiety, have been developed largely on the basis of this new, topographic model of the mind. It is notable that the model presented is a mental model, whose operations and dynamics are psychological in nature. Underlying brain structures and electrochemical dynamics also must, of course, exist, but these operate on a different level of nature and will not be considered here. By way of introduction, it should also be noted that there are some unavoidable complexities to the strong adaptive model of the emotionprocessing mind. In addition to its two basic operating systems—the

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conscious and deep unconscious systems mentioned earlier—there are several additional processing systems (Langs, in press). Thus, all emotionally charged events and meanings enter the emotion-processing mind through its sensory receptors, especially those related to sight and sound. The model proposes that these stimuli are received by a Synthesizing Center (SC), which transforms raw sensory data into meaningful units. This process operates extremely rapidly and without awareness interceding, and it also is under strong psychodynamic influence—from the outset, defense and error may play a role at any point in the processing of incoming emotionally charged, triggering events. To continue with these silent in-taking activities, these synthesized inputs are immediately forwarded to a Message Analyzing Center (MAC), which is perhaps the most pivotal and remarkable entity in the emotionprocessing mind. The primary function of the MAC is to protect the conscious mind from system overload and from becoming adaptively dysfunctional. The MAC does so by "determining" which triggering events and which meanings of these events should be permitted to enter awareness for conscious perception and processing, and which events and meanings are to be barred from awareness and assigned for deep unconscious processing. The MAC has the capability to recognize and process a traumatic event in its entirety and in so doing, it also is able to distinguish and deal differently with events that are life endangering as compared to those that do not pose an immediate threat to life and limb. As a rule, dangerous triggers are quickly forwarded to the conscious system and awareness for rapid adaptive response regardless of how disturbing and disruptive they may be, while nonemergency triggers are treated to a far more selective response. This applies to traumatic events as a whole as well as to each of its most compelling universal and personal meanings. Thus, an entire event may either be allowed to register consciously or be blocked from doing so—in which case, we speak of the perceptual denial of an entire incident. A similar form of denial will be produced by the MAC in respect to selected meanings of emotionally charged incidents even as other meanings are allowed direct access to awareness. It's well to appreciate that there is no means by which an individual can be aware consciously when his or her MAC is blocking access to awareness of a given event or meaning—we do not know when and what we deny. The use of this mechanism also precludes conscious recovery of the event or meaning at any future moment—conscious registration is an essential requisite for this kind of retrieval. Nevertheless, perceptually denied experiences and meanings do enter the

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deep unconscious system of the emotion-processing mind and they are reflected in the encoded narrative themes and images communicated by that system (see what follows). Perceptual denial plays a significant role in human responses to death-related triggering events—that is, many meanings of death-related events are perceived and processed unconsciously without awareness interceding. Within the context of an entire traumatic event, then, each notable implication and meaning of the incident, universal and personal, is independently assessed by the MAC in order to "decide" which meanings may enter consciousness and which may not. The MAC makes use of a variety of cognitive and memory-based resources and an essential anxiety gradient—a measure of the amount of potential conscious system disruption that a given meaning is likely to cause. On this basis, it assigns some meanings of a traumatic event—mainly those that are either inescapable or relatively unempowered—to conscious registration and processing. It also assigns other meanings—mainly those that would in all likelihood disrupt conscious system operations—for registration and processing in the deep unconscious system. This latter assignment is generally understood as unconsciously or subliminally perceiving an emotionally charged event or one or more of its meanings. Of importance is the finding that registration and processing in one system of the emotion-processing mind precludes registration in the other system. As a result, some meanings of a triggering event are processed consciously, without deep unconscious processing efforts, while other meanings are dealt with deep unconscious processing efforts but without conscious awareness or conscious working over. As for the MAC's processing of death-related events, some of these events and a selection of their meanings may be sufficiently imposing or reasonably nonthreatening to be allowed to enter awareness. Nevertheless, many especially powerful and disturbing death-related meanings do not do so. Instead, they are forwarded by the MAC to the deep unconscious system for registration and processing, without the least degree of conscious registration. This means that many of the death-related meanings and much of the impact of traumatic triggering events experienced by patients, for example, especially those that are psychological in nature rather than physically harmful, do not register consciously. They therefore go unrecognized not only by the patient, but also by weak adaptive, intrapsychically focused psychotherapists who work mainly with their patients' manifest contents and the implications that can be extracted from these contents. Such work does little if anything to access patients' deep unconscious perceptions and unconscious adaptive processing activities which reach awareness solely in encoded form. They can be defined and understood solely through a process

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called trigger decoding—that is, deciphering narrative themes in light of their evocative triggering events. THE TWO OPERATING SYSTEMS The main features of the conscious system are its commitment to defense (as engineered by the MAC), especially the use of denial and obliteration in response to death-related and other anxiety-provoking triggers, and secondarily, after the event, through the use of the repression of consciously registered disturbing incidents and meanings. Because of its use of denial and the loss of information and knowledge that it causes, the conscious system has, speaking figuratively, a very low emotional I.Q. Conscious adaptations tend to be based on a relatively sparse information base and to be poorly thought out. In addition, clinical study has revealed that conscious system adaptations and choices are under the strong unconscious influence of predator death anxiety (of inflicting violence and killing someone) and deep unconscious guilt for actual harm done to others—that is, conscious behaviors and choices are skewed toward self-harm and self-punishment. Expressions of these needs in the psychotherapy situation are seen not only with patients who remain in treatment with blatantly harmful psychotherapists, but in the conscious ground rule preferences of patients and therapists, which tend to lean toward damaging, so-called frame-modified conditions for treatment (see what follows)—conditions for therapy that hold the participants to treatment quite poorly and tend to be far more damaging than healing. Along different lines, conscious moral values tend to be weak and easily compromised, allowing for many harmful acts against others (and oneself) that are, however, consistently condemned by the deep unconscious system of morality and ethics. Finally, we may note that conscious system values and preferences are highly variable both within and between individuals—the system is lacking a uniform set of standards, frame inclinations, and the like; it is characterized far more by individuality than by universals (Langs, in press). In contrast, the deep unconscious system of the emotion-processing mind operates on the basis of many inherited, universal, or archetypal attributes, including its ground rule preferences and moral values. The working thesis that the system has deep biological underpinnings and archetypal qualities stems from clinical findings that indicate that across both individuals and cultures, there is all but total consistency in the encoded communications and preferences emitted by the system in response to triggering events.1 Thus, both of these subsystems invariably speak for choices and framework conditions that are ideally holding, satisfying, constructively self-serving without causing undue harm

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to others, morally sound, and optimally healing. As reflected in encoded narrative communications, the consistency of deep unconscious responses to triggering events, especially those that are frame related and fraught with moral implications, speaks for the existence of an ideal framework or set of ground rules for the psychotherapy situation—and social relationships as well. This regularity also suggests the existence of an optimal set of moral values which are, in the psychotherapy situation, reflected in the frame preferences of both parties to treatment. Indeed, a secured ground rule is unconsciously perceived as both healing and morally justified, while a modified ground rule is unconsciously perceived as harmful and morally wrong (Langs, in press). While the conscious system scans and processes many types of impingements, the deep unconscious system is focused on frame-related events and communications. In brief, with few if any exceptions, the system endorses an ideal, unconsciously validated set of ground rules for the psychotherapy experience. These rules include a set, standard fee; a set frequency, time and length of sessions; confining the contact between patient and therapist to the time and place of the sessions; total privacy and confidentiality; the relative anonymity of the therapist with no deliberate self-revelations, directives, and such; the absence of physical contact; a number of implied rules of conduct and behavior; and the openness of the patient's communicative expressions. This latter is reflected in the so-called fundamental rule offree association (Freud, 1913/1958), or alternatively, a directive to the patient to communicate narrative material like dreams and stories, and narrative associations to such material—the so-called rule of guided associations that is used by strong adaptive therapists to foster and maximize communicative expressions from the deep unconscious system (Langs, 1999a, in press). Therapies in which the unconsciously validated, ideal conditions prevail are called secured frame therapies, while those in which one or more of these optimal ground rules are compromised are called deviant or modified frame therapies (Langs, 1998). Each form of treatment has its own effects, set of triggers, entails a distinctive mode of emotional healing, and bears a singular relationship to death anxiety. The deep unconscious system is relatively nondefensive, usually unblocked in its perceptions, and incisive in its processing activities. It has no mental tracts that lead directly to awareness. Instead, all of its communicated outputs—its messages to the conscious system and the Output Center (OC) of the emotion-processing mind—are encoded in dreams and other forms of narrative. These messages can be decoded solely in light of their activating triggers—the previously noted process of trigger decoding. Adaptation-oriented listening and the use of trigger decoding are the hallmarks of the strong adaptive approach.

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THREE FORMS OF DEATH ANXIETY The adaptive approach has identified three forms of death anxiety (Langs, 1997, in press). In addition to the much discussed existential form (Becker, 1973; Liechty, 2002), there are two other types: predatory (fear of being killed) and predator (fears of being killed for having killed or harmed others). Each form has served as a selection pressure for the natural shaping of the evolving design of the emotion-processing mind; each has distinctive effects on its current operations; and each affects the psychotherapy experience in its own, particular manner. The oldest form of death anxiety, its predatory version, has forerunners in the ability of all living organisms—unicellular and multicellular—to sense and respond to threats to their existence, be it through fight, flight, or freezing (LeDoux, 1996). Language acquisition in humans, which occurred some 100,000 to 150,000 years ago, created the conditions under which these physical threats to survival extended into psychological threats as well. The basic human response to predatory threat, which may arise from acts of nature or the actions of other living beings, especially humans, is the mobilization of perceptive and other adaptive resources—mental and physical. Nevertheless, when the threat arises from someone on whom one's life depends, as seen with a mother endangering her child, the use of denial and obliteration tends to be invoked because of the dependency factor. Existential death anxiety, which is a distinctly human issue, is another consequence of language acquisition, in that this capability enabled humans to develop distinct identities and an explicit awareness of self, to work over threats to survival mentally, and to anticipate the future. The inevitability of death is captured in what is termed the existential rule that life is followed by death; it is the basic ground rule of human existence (Becker, 1973; Langs, in press). Unconsciously, all forms of rule breaking and boundary violations are believed to render the frame violator immune from the existential rule as well—an unconscious delusion or illusion that accounts for much of the conscious system's preference for modified frames (see what follows). Human beings deal with existential death anxiety in one basic manner—through the use of denial in both mental and physical forms (Becker, 1973; Langs, 1997, in press). While mental forms of denial are well-known, both perceptual denial and denial through action (output forms of denial) are less well appreciated. Perceptual denial is affected by the MAC and it occurs without the awareness of the individual who automatically and unconsciously invokes its use. Behavioral forms of denial include manic acts; extremes of celebration; mindless actions; active ways of deflecting thoughts away from death-

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related concerns; ignoring signs of, and not taking steps to deal with, indications of physical illness; extreme quests for power, control over others, and wealth; violent acts against others—and much more. Perhaps the least understood form of the behavioral denial of death involves the violations of boundaries and the invocation of other types of frame modifications. As noted, this trend is motivated by the unconscious belief that being able to defy a ground rule of any type renders the violator immune to the existential rule of life and death. Predator death anxiety is based on the talion principle—an eye for an eye, a life for a life. This type of death anxiety is activated whenever an individual actually harms another person or living being, acts that either actually are murderous or blatantly destructive, or are unconsciously perceived as equivalent to committing murder. Predator death anxiety also is unconsciously experienced whenever an individual is somehow caused to be physically or mentally impaired, as seen when a mother gives birth to an offspring who suffers from a serious congenital disorder or in accidental causes of harm. Predator death anxiety may create conscious guilt, but it always also evokes deep unconscious guilt because it violates the previously mentioned archetypal standards of the deep unconscious system of morality and ethics. In response to the unconsciously perceived immoral acts of harm to others, this system unconsciously orchestrates a seemingly unrelenting series of self-defeating and self-harmful choices, physical ills, and the like. Self-punishments of this kind, whose deep sources generally go unrecognized, may last a lifetime. DEATH ANXIETY AND THE LISTENING PROCESS Death anxiety greatly affects how therapists listen and intervene, much as, in turn, the listening-formulating process used by a given therapist affects his or her view and understanding of the prevalence of, and nature of the effects caused by, death anxiety. Put another way, sound listening and intervening depends on a therapist's ability to insightfully resolve, or minimize the effects of his or her death-related anxieties and difficulties, much as, in turn, the resolution of a therapist's unresolved death anxieties depends on the sound use of personal selfprocessing—the adaptive form of self-analysis (Langs, 1993)—which entails the proper use of listening and self-interpreting. Given the in-built bent of the conscious system toward denial and defense, the natural approach to psychodynamic listening and formulating can be expected to and does serve these defensive needs. Unconsciously, nonadaptive, intrapsychically oriented ways of attending to patients' material is designed to avoid the powerful meanings and most telling impact of death-related events. This is accomplished in

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several interrelated ways, beginning with a failure to distinguish between patients' narrative and nonnarrative or intellectualized communications (Langs, in press). This oversight draws its importance from the adaptive finding that narratives, such as dreams and stories, are double-message communications. Their manifest contents reflect conscious system adaptive activities, while their latent, encoded contents reflect the adaptive efforts of the deep unconscious system. In contrast, intellectualizations like analyses, interpretations, explanations, descriptions, and such, are single-message communications that by and large reflect conscious system activities alone. In the absence of these distinctions, therapists' listening and intervening tends to be focused on the manifest contents of patients' material and their evident implications. Some of these implications are outside of a patient's awareness and therefore are thought of as unconscious, but adaptive studies have shown that this is only superficially the case— such contents belong to the superficial unconscious subsystem of the conscious system (Langs, 1999b, in press). Bypassed and unappreciated as a result of the approach is the deep unconscious, encoded level of meaning and adaptation, and the failure to address the traumatic, death-related triggers to which they are a nonmanifest response. Therapeutic work with manifest death-related themes is of a very different order from work with trigger-evoked, encoded death-related imagery. The former is highly intellectualized, tends to involve the everyday life of the patient without allusion to the therapist or his or her death-evoking interventions, and generally fails to touch on the many kinds of events other than death itself that activate death-related anxieties. Because of this, the various forms of death anxieties are seldom the key subject and issue in a nonadaptive psychotherapy session. In contrast, the strong adaptive therapist is mindful of death-related themes, committed to searching for the triggering interventions that he or she has made to evoke them, and prepared to interpret by means of trigger decoding, the patient's deep unconscious experience of these triggering events and the death anxieties to which they are connected. The active role played by the therapist in stimulating death-related anxieties and the interpretation of death-related themes in light of their triggers touches on a realm of experience and anxiety that is at once alive, filled with the potential for deep insight, yet utterly terrifying. Therapeutic work with encoded communications, then, always touches on powerful death-related issues of the kind that are so threatening that they are blocked access to awareness and processed solely by the deep unconscious system. Unconsciously, therapists shy away from such therapeutic work because it is so taxing for them emotionally. This is a major reason why, except for the strong adaptive ap-

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proach, virtually all of present day versions of psychodynamic psychotherapy involve work with the manifest and intellectualized contents of patients' material. Death-related meanings are either avoided or over-intellectualized in this way. Only work with narrative communications and the use of trigger decoded interpretations move all concerned with therapy toward death, death anxieties, and their deepest effects and ramifications. Not surprisingly, then, strong adaptive clinical observations lead to insights and hypotheses that are strikingly different from those that prevail in other forms of psychotherapy. Adaptive listening and intervening indicate, for example, that one or more form of death anxiety is a root cause of virtually every emotional maladaptation, dysfunction, and symptom. For both patient and therapist, death-related issues are a continuous presence in the unfolding psychotherapy situation. Death anxieties affect how therapists structure the treatment situation and work with their patients, what patients do and do not communicate in their sessions, how and when therapists intervene, the nature of a patients' resistances and therapists' counter/resistances and countertransferences, and the ongoing trajectory and outcome of a therapy experience. These are a sampling of the death-related insights that stem from the strong adaptive orientation to emotional life and psychotherapy. DEATH ANXIETY AND THE GROUND RULES OF THERAPY While much of it goes unrecognized in the absence of a strong adaptive approach, there is an extensive and highly influential interplay between death-related anxieties and therapists' management of the ground rules of treatment and patients' responses to these efforts. To cite an initial example that also pertains to the previously-mentioned listening process, the common use of forty-five or fifty-minute sessions bears a relationship to the availability of death-related material for interpretation and insight. Optimal forms of strong adaptive psychotherapy, which are designed to enable both patients and therapists to deal effectively with issues related to death anxiety, make use of a ninety-minute session. This is necessary because it has been found that there is an enormous amount of conscious and especially unconscious resistances in both patients and therapists directed against processing trigger-activated death-related concerns. Extended sessions are needed to resolve insightfully the repeated expression of these resistances in patients and to clear the way to their meaningful communication of the unconscious aspects of these issues. This facilitates the therapist's offer of sound, trigger-decoded interpretations and deep insights per-

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taining to a patient's death-related conflicts and the symptoms and resistances for which they account. As for other links between death anxiety and the management of the ground rules of treatment, adaptive-oriented studies have shown that the ideally healing secured frame—the use of the deep unconsciously sought, optimal ground rules—is a major source of existential death anxiety, one of the most severe dreads experienced by humans. This arises because the ideal framework for therapy is, of necessity, restrictive and confining. It is unconsciously experienced as a threatening and entrapping space, much as life on Earth is experienced as entrapping and having but one exit—namely, through death. It is largely because of the existential death anxieties associated with secured frames that departures from the ideal frame of psychotherapy are so common. Except when modified conditions for therapy are unavoidable, as with financially impoverished patients who must be seen in clinic settings, the modified frames offered by therapists and accepted by their patients unconsciously serve as defenses against the existential death anxieties evoked by secured frames. This is a great loss for all concerned, largely because secured frames are the only conditions under which these universal anxieties can be meaningfully expressed, explored, and insightfully resolved. Modified frame conditions, which are strongly favored by the conscious system and yet strongly opposed by the deep unconscious system, are not optimally adaptive solutions to existential death anxieties. Modified ground rules are unconsciously experienced as persecutory and are, in their unconsciously mediated effects, distinctly harmful. When invoked by a therapist, they create predatory death anxieties in the patient and predator death anxiety and deep unconscious guilt in the therapist—much to the detriment of both. Nevertheless, humans evidently prefer to deal with these two modes of death anxiety rather than face and work through the existential form—a testimony to the power of this latter type of anxiety to cause emotional symptoms and maladaptive behaviors. In this context, it's also well to appreciate that erroneous interventions and mismanagements of the ground rules of treatment always serve the denial of death in some fashion and are unconsciously perceived as destructive—they do not obtain encoded, unconscious validation. As a result, given the prevalence of the use of such interventions by psychotherapists the world over, predator death anxiety appears to be their primary occupational hazard. As for additional effects of death anxiety on the therapeutic process and its participants, we may note that therapists are unconsciously influenced by all three of its forms. Existential death anxiety prompts the use of modified frames and intellectualized interventions. It also leads to the denial and avoidance of deep unconscious experience and

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a turning away from the strong adaptive approach—its listening process, unconsciously validating methodology, use of trigger decoding, and informed support for secured frames—all of which touch on issues of death anxiety in powerful ways. Most interventions made by present-day therapists are unconsciously constituted as offering patients a variety of defenses against death anxiety and they sometimes provide temporary relief to patients on that basis. Nevertheless, the underlying death anxieties continue to have their detrimental effects, even as efforts are made by both patients and therapists to deny and obliterate these consequences. In this light, it is well to briefly consider the writings of both Freud and Jung in respect to the subjects of death and death anxiety. Both analysts were, of course, quite aware of death and its importance in human life, but neither of them afforded death and the anxieties it evokes a central role in human creativity or emotional dysfunctions. Jung's psychoanalysis may be seen as a denial of both death and death anxiety grounded in religious and mystical beliefs—a base that accounts for its great popularity among lay people. When Jung did write of death anxiety, he tended to see these anxieties as symbolic and representative of a descent into, or fear of, the unconscious mind. The tangible fears of predation, annihilation, and the existential terror of death and nonbeing are thereby consigned to mere metaphor or ignored. For his part, Freud's psychoanalysis may well have been structured unconsciously as a sexual denial of death anxiety, a form of anxiety to which he refused to give credence (Becker, 1973; Langs, 1997, in press). Indeed, although Freud (1923) reduced death anxiety to castration anxiety or unconscious guilt, and claimed that death could not be represented in "the unconscious," clinical work continually demonstrates that death is a fundamental and horrific psychological problem, that people utilize powerful defenses to block the awareness of their fears of death, and that there is indeed extensive unconscious processing of death-related experiences and death anxiety. Denial of these issues by clinicians who have accepted Freud's thinking on these matters without seriously examining this tremendous psychological problem appear to be evading a central component of human experience. Patients in psychotherapy also evidently prefer to find ways of avoiding and defending against the various forms of death anxiety in lieu of allowing them to find full communicative expression so that they are available for interpretation and working through. In psychotherapies conducted by strong adaptive therapists, these issues do find repeated expression and most of their therapeutic work is centered on interpreting the trigger-activated, encoded themes related to their patients' death anxieties. Quite naturally, such work tends to evoke strong resistances in these patients which, when properly interpreted, alternate

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with brief periods of deep insight—after which fresh resistances quickly set in. This therapeutic work is especially arduous with patients suffering from predator death anxiety and deep unconscious guilt for harming others. The dread of the pain of consciously experiencing the full extent of this guilt is enormous. It takes a great deal of therapeutic work before themes of forgiveness and repentance emerge from their deep unconscious minds—the deep unconscious system of morality and ethics is all too unforgiving and slow to accept repentance. But forgiveness is possible and with it comes symptom relief a n d greatly improved adaptive functioning—a most rewarding therapeutic outcome for all concerned. CONCLUSION It appears that death-related issues are at the root of both emotional maladaptations a n d their adaptive resolution. Working with deathrelated traumas a n d the relevant deep unconscious experiences is difficult and trying for both patients and therapists. While resistances from patients are inevitable, they need not be so for therapists. Still, the most compelling aspects of death and the anxieties it engenders operate in the deep unconscious, a n d it is on this level that the most effective therapeutic work with these issues can take place. Although Freud never probed these problems deeply, he h a d it right w h e n he said, "If you w a n t to preserve peace, arm for war. . . . If you w a n t to endure life, prepare yourself for death" (1915, p . 300). NOTES This paper was originally published in The Psychoanalytic Review, special issue on death, 2003. 1. Archetypes, as I understand them, are universal patterns in and reflections of the mind's efforts to organize nature. Mentally, they have a deep biologicalhereditary basis. In respect to the deep unconscious system of the emotion-processing mind, I believe that the configuration of deep unconscious wisdom or intelligence has archetypal qualities—for example, the consistent focus on ground rule and frame-related issues, advocacy for secured frames, and definition of these frames. In addition, the deep unconscious system of morality and ethics—human unconscious moral precepts and preferences—seem to be configured in archetypal fashion. The same configurations appear in the deep unconscious minds of people from different cultures—they are not primarily culturally influenced except that cultures do provide aspects of the form taken by these preferences (much as they do in people creating various living abodes that nonetheless share certain basic configurations). (In contrast, the conscious systems' wisdom and moral preferences are strongly affected by culture.) Finally, the encoding capabilities of the deep unconscious also have archetypal aspects.

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REFERENCES Becker, E. (1973). The denial of death. New York: The Free Press. Dennett, D. (1995). Darwin's dangerous idea. New York: Simon & Schuster. Donald, M. (1991). Origins of the modern mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Freud, S. (1900/1953). The interpretation of dreams (J. Strachey, Ed. & Trans.). The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, Vols. 4&5 (pp. 1-630). London: Hogarth Press. Freud, S. (1913/1958). On beginning the treatment (Further recommendations on the technique of psycho-analysis I). SE 12 (pp. 121-144). Freud, S. (1915/1957). Thoughts for the times on war and death. SE 14 (pp. 273-300). Freud, S. (1923/1961). The ego and the id. SE 19 (pp. 3-66). Langs, R. (1992). A clinical workbook for psychotherapists. London: Karnac Books. Langs, R. (1993). Empowered psychotherapy. London: Karnac Books. Langs, R. (1996). The evolution of the emotion processing mind, with an introduction to mental darwinism. London: Karnac Books. Langs, R. (1997). Death anxiety and clinical practice. London: Karnac Books. Langs, R. (1998). Ground rules in psychotherapy and counseling. London: Karnac Books. Langs, R. (1999a). Dreams and emotional adaptation. Phoenix, AZ: Zeig, Tucker. Langs, R. (1999b). Psychotherapy and science. London: Sage Publications. Langs, R. (2002). Three forms of death anxiety. In D. Liechty (Ed.), Death and denial: Interdisciplinary perspectives on the legacy of Ernest Becker (pp. 7384). Westport, CT: Greenwood. Langs, R. (in press). Fundamentals of adaptive psychotherapy and counseling. London: Palgrave-Macmillan. LeDoux, J. (1996). The emotional brain. New York: Simon & Schuster. Liechty, D. (Ed.). (2002). Death and denial: Interdisciplinary perspectives on the legacy of Ernest Becker. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Mithen, S. (1996). The prehistory of the mind. London: Thames and Hudson. Plotkin, H. (1994). Darwin machines and the nature of knowledge. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Raney, J. (1984). Narcissistic defensiveness and the communicative approach. In J. Raney (Ed.), Eisteningand interpreting (pp. 465-490). Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson. Smith, D. (1991). Hidden conversations: An introduction to communicative psychoanalysis. London: Routledge. Smith, D. (1998). The communicative approach. In R. Langs (Ed.), Current theories of psychoanalysis (pp. 297-324). Madison, CT: International Universities Press.

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C H A P T E R 14

Laughing at Death NeilJ.Elgee

Death anxiety is the first cause of laughter. As self-conscious creatures w e live deeply rooted in incongruity: the knowledge that w e die. Our sense of h u m o r enables us not only to exist in this predicament but also to play with it to our advantage. The existential joke is on all of us but usually w e use h u m o r to ostracize, even savagely, as w e project death's curse onto others. We can however become self-realized as w e appreciate the denial of death that is built into the fabrications of our cultural belief systems. We become able to view our illusions ironically. H u m o r in the service of faith and grace can be affiliative rather than ostracizing and serve as a guard against fundamentalism. We play with death anxiety in the many expressions of humor. This is a concept that first occurred to me from reading Ernest Becker, whose writings m a d e me increasingly aware of h o w vital a motivator the denial of death is in h u m a n emotions, thought, and behavior. Our sense of humor, our laughter, the comic in all its manifestations, is no exception. Becker says: The laughter: this is really a reflection of a very advanced stage of faith and grace, and it's another thing the youth do not understand. It is deadly earnest to them, this world they face, and they simply cannot laugh without making some kind of triumph over it. Perhaps when and if they succeed in getting back on the road, getting over some of their alienation, they might understand the smile and the laugh. (Bates, 1977, p. 224) To live is to play at the meaning of life. (Becker, 1973, p. 201)

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JOKES Laughter comes suddenly, bursting out, as a momentary rush of pleasure. Peekaboo! Where did Mommy go? Oh! There she is—Smile!— my world is intact after all. Here we see that even with infants, existential uncertainty is already taking its initial peeks at us—and we're smiling. At first we can't tolerate Mommy's absence for more than a few blinks of an eye. A glimpse of human helplessness is all a baby can stand without furious, full-decibelled cries of separation terror. As youngsters grow, they try to immunize themselves against the scary world by venturing without Mom into escalating tests of courage against monsters, both real and imagined. The fundamental incongruity between ideal and real—between dreams of Utopia and hard waking reality, which is our existential condition, gradually dawns on us. We are inescapably vulnerable and doomed creatures for whom, even in ordinary life, tragedy lurks. This is monstrous in itself. There is no guarantee that we will see tomorrow, let alone age seventy. Reassurance from Mother no longer works. The mother of all monsters, the randomness of fickle fate bringing tragedy and death, this inevitability haunts our days and dreams. And what is our refuge? Social culture comes to our rescue, with songs and stories, rituals and belief systems, the sacred canopies—ego-boosting, lifeenhancing, and death-denying. We feel immortal, enveloped in our culture as valued members in a meaningful universe (Pyszczynski, Solomon, & Greenberg, 2003, pp. 18-27). The dread of death is terrifyingly magnified when we consider the possibility that our life and death could be insignificant in a meaningless indifferent universe. Participation in the transcending cultural drama lends meaning and enables us to keep such dark concerns out of mind: unconscious, suppressed by the security blanket of social verities enfolding us in their comforting embrace. Without the transcending envelopment of cultural belief systems for understanding the world and our function in it, we might just cower in bed shrouded in depression, or in mortal terror for fear of a careening car or a malevolent virus. Culture provides us with "cover," with a sacred canopy, to use Peter Berger's (1967) apt image. All viable cultures, whether religious or secular, are "sacred" at their root because they provide meaningful answers to the otherwise threatening questions of existence. But especially in modern times, we have seen that the fabric of culture is not always so tightly woven; it is not impervious. We have come to see that it is, in fact, a "fabrication," a social construction, and in a very real sense "fictional" (Anderson, 1990;

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Becker 1971; Berger, 1967). And when the existential cover that culture provides is pierced, it is very often humor that serves as the first line of defense. Through laughter we cope with that peek through the sacred canopy, and then quickly patch it up again. JOKING—EXISTENTIALLY VITAL A joke penetrates the loosely woven fabric of the fictional cover for a snapshot, a peekaboo beyond its boundaries. From the suspense and expectations of the buildup to the instant of the punch line, we prepare for and peek into an aspect of the abyss of our ultimate fate. But rather than cowering in fright, we are evolved with the capacity to laugh, taking our fear in good humor at that moment of resolution. We turn our fear into fun; we play with it. As a joke teller builds up our expectations, it is as if he or she is blowing up a balloon. We expect to be startled—the bursting balloon is going to jolt us with a bang. This understanding of jokes helps explain why being able to tell a good one is so dependent on timing. We normally keep our existential concerns covered up, and when a hole is punched (punch line) in the woven fabric cover, our psychic guard employs laughter in defense as we quickly close the opening. The laugh, following the buildup of tension, comes with the delectation of relief, just when the predicament and its disguise are discovered. The abyss is revealed, but only just glimpsed, and then immediately resolved. But it can only be a snapshot. An open shutter exposure, forcing us to stare at our morbidity and mortality, would never work. It would be intensely unfunny, literally terrifying. The shutter has to close quickly, so we can return to our normal cover, as the fictional "reality" of our transcending cultural story is reaffirmed. As we will see, in contrast to jokes, expressions of humor in irony and fooling or folly can change radically from the joke mechanism. Irony permits a more continuous, but partial, opening of the shutter. In folly the whole of culture is turned inside out. The evolutionary importance of humor is astonishing. With our level of self-consciousness and no sense of humor, terror and something like a cower-in-the-cave option might have stopped the human experiment in its cradle. Humor, wit, irony, you name it—laughter and the comic depend upon death for their existence. At root, from amusement to satire to the zany, all are predicated upon our existential death anxiety. Or, put another way, if we lacked humor, it is questionable, given the fundamental terrorizing incongruity of mortality awareness in creatures who dream of immortality, whether human beings would have survived at all.

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FREUD AND WOODY ALLEN 'Tell the lighting man to cut the overheads. They emphasize my nose," nervous Woody says, preparing the stage for a comedy performance. "The spotlights make my glasses gleam. Kill 'em. Good. But the wing lights make me look skinny." When the stage is pitch black Woody announces, "Perfect. Now I feel I look my best."1 In this comic strip and in his film Annie Hall (1977), in which he prominently displays Ernest Becker's Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Denial of Death, Woody Allen lets us know that it isn't only sex that has him in psychoanalysis. He is also obsessed with the darkness of his fate in a mortality-cursed body. Woody is the epitome of a deathhaunted soul, doing his darndest at using laughter to gain some sense of control of his life. He typifies the truism that comedians are not the healthy-minded superficial optimists described by William James (1902/ 1958, p. 121) or the cheerful robots characterized by Becker (Keen, 1974, p. 74). For the Woodys of the world, laughter is literally life saving. "Politics is the art of the possible," Woody jots down, "Psychoanalysis, the art of the impossible."2 Psychoanalysis of humor began with Freud's (1908/1963) Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, in which humor is analyzed in terms of the emergence of repressed sexuality and aggression, veiled in socially acceptable terms, making it unobtrusive rather than explicitly violent or illicit. I suggest that an even more fundamental function of humor is to expose and assuage our deep terror of death. Humor protects our cover as we explore and analyze the imagery, affect, and significance of our mortality, and humor enables us to project death's curse onto others. If instead of wishing death on them, we are psychoanalyzed or selfanalyzed and self-realized enough to laugh at ourselves, at our own death denial, humor may help us attain a more advanced stage of living in faith and grace. IRONY The irony of man's condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death . . . but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive. (Becker, 1973, p. 66) The human condition itself is ironic, as Becker says in this epigraph, referring to our need to shrink from fullness of life in the confinements of our cultural belief systems. The magnificently ironic possibility of

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irony is that we can use it to adapt to our ironic condition, to learn to enjoy living, not by gritting our teeth at life's many situations of paradox, ambiguity, and dissonance, but by smiling at our finite selves even while dreaming of infinite possibilities. Irony gets at our existential predicament with less directness than jokes, and therefore is not confined to momentary outbursts. It is instead more a mindset, a way of thinking and experiencing life. It sees the incongruities and knows that we can't stare them down, and so looks at them obliquely, indirectly, out of the skeptical corner of a humor-seeking eye. Rather than an outburst of laughter, we can even laugh privately, silently, whimsically, internally, at ourselves and, ultimately, at death itself. A sense of ironic humor gives access to the fullness of self-consciousness, to a kind of Socratic self-realization. We rely on our comic sensibility to give us a protective cover of amusement as we learn, ironically, to appreciate the conflicts of incongruity, ambivalence, and discordance that are inherent in the human condition: To live fully we have to appreciate fully that we die. This is something to laugh about, and in doing so, we laugh at our own denial of death. The ironist keeps the cultural cover under tension most of the time. The incongruities can burst into a fabric-puncturing witty ironic joke, but irony is much more than this. In addition to glimpses of our deathanxiety, the explosive but fleeting exposures of our mortal vulnerability, the ironic mind gradually learns to be subconsciously aware of our death-denying constructions, and keeps the cultural cover stretched into near-transparency. We manage a creative tension between ideal and real, between dreams of Utopia and the wakeful world of suffering and death. And inasmuch as we maintain an ability to smile ironically at our conflicted human condition, our energy can be engaged to function creatively around the tension. The very indirection of irony provides an element of detachment, but it is detachment crucially combined with self-realization. Thus we are able to take not just momentary glimpses, but open-shuttered views of existential reality, albeit in a sort of night vision looking for laughs! We say one thing but mean another. We say we are mortal and infinity is beyond us, while believing that we are made in the image of the eternal Life Force God. It appears that the best strategy we have is to laugh at our predicament. To handle that cognitive dissonance creatively is a signpost on the way to the wisdom of self-actualization. Irony is a cultivated taste for which we are not all born equal. It can be quite dangerous to mock the underlying denial of mortality inherent in our fundamental cultural belief systems. The ironist may be ostracized, may feel the restraining arm of the censor, and may even experience social death. The price for self-realization is often high.

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Recall that Socrates was put to literal death! But it is worth cultivating the ironic taste, for fullness of life depends on an ability to smile even as we taste the ashes. THE EVOLUTION OF LAUGHTER Perhaps I know best why man alone laughs: he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter. (Nietzsche, 1901/1967, para. 91) We have a tendency to think of laughter as an unqualified positive emotion, ignoring or denying its dark side. Humor has been good, absolutely critical in fact, for human survival, but most laughter is red in tooth and claw; it bites and wounds. While it is indeed good for us to experience laughter and good for those who get us laughing, all too often our laughter is aggressive, biting, and wounding to others. Our sense of humor has a cutting edge, one that has contributed to how we have evolved, competitively. We compete using humor against one another, in-group versus out-group, our universe of meaning against the competition. The humor may be made to seem "only" playful and teasing, but can easily and often go all the way to vicious and deadly. It is ironic that although laughter has been necessary for us to survive, it also threatens that very survival because it pits our success in life against the lives of others of our own kind. In competitive survival, much of our joking is aimed at putting us on top and putting others down, even all the way down, dehumanized out of the human race, trash-talked, as worse than dead waste. It can savagely cut others, demean and hurt, and be deadly serious. Ostracizing Humor Telling jokes, and laughing at them, are ways of adjusting status in one's own favor. (Alexander, 1986, p. 258) The claim developed earlier is that we are enveloped in cultural belief systems that support us as valued members of meaningful universes, and therein lies a competitive rub. We mortals long for the immortality of the gods. We do not want our universes of meaning to be confined to the finite. We are far from content with meaning that is limited to mortal life. Our cultural belief systems are meant to give us lasting significance, connecting us to universals, to everlasting Truth, to the Infinite. There can only be one Truth, with a capital "t," so belief systems that compete with our own must be wrong. Seen in this light, ostracizing humor is directed not only at maintaining our own self-esteem, with feeling good about ourselves; it is

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also directed at making us feel godlike, of lasting worth, better than and above those Others with a different belief system. If you can make fun of Them and their culture, then you are clearly a superior being in a favored universe of meaning. If you can associate them with creatures lower on the great chain of being, then you are higher, certainly higher than they are, at any rate. Put them all the way down, link them to the inanimate, to waste, to bodily excrement, to the dead, and competitively speaking, you have life and they do not. Your god lives and their god is dead. In its imagined acts of cleansing life and exterminating evil, laughter directed at putting others down can still be savage and qualify as ostracizing humor, even if it doesn't lead directly to torture and slaughter. The sociobiologist R. D. Alexander (1986) proposes that there are two related forms of ostracism humor: The explicit type, such as ethnic, racist, and sexist jokes (which clearly disparage an out-group while intensifying feelings of affiliation in the in-group); and the implicit, which also reinforces in-group affiliation, but ostracizes more subtly. He would include in the latter category Leacock's (1938) definition of humor as "the kindly contemplation of the incongruities of life, and the artistic expression thereof" (p. 3). Leacock makes gentle fun of us; those of us, that is, who are already secure members of our greater culture, and thus in no serious danger of being ostracized explicitly. Our ritualized mannerisms and pastimes (adding distraction to distraction, as T. S. Eliot would say) in our teacups and lattes, our golfing and bird watching, make easy pickings for Leacock's veiled satire. He parodies stuffed shirts, Ibsen plays, and Greek tragedies. All good-natured teasing of our pretensions, to be sure, but usually the target of the humor is in-group, and is not cut out, put down, or explicitly scapegoated. One biography said of him, "[Leacock] makes us laugh, but tells us nothing about what we are laughing at, as the great parodist does" (Davies, 1970, pp. 40-41). "The slapstick for him every time—never the rapier" (p. 23). But we can see that his benign contemplation of the incongruities of life, and the artistic expression thereof, is a cover-up. This is what cultural cover does: Cover up the Ibsens and the Greeks. Their stories are too real, too frank about the cruelty of humankind, too dangerous to the "health" of our culturally fictitious healthy-mindedness (cf. Becker, 1973, pp. 13-20). Leacock holds his rapier behind a veil but even says of himself: "I have, I admit, the unfortunate and weak-minded disposition that forces me to smile with hatred in my heart" (1912, p. 204). Alexander finds that the categorizations of other humor theorists fit roughly into his explicit and implicit divisions, describing the latter as humor associated with empathy and the former as wit with hostility. They all intensify the affiliation of those in the in-group for one an-

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other and ostracize the out-group. Thus satire, ridicule, mockery, sarcasm, and the grimly jocular, bitterly cynical, and sardonic all qualify as explicitly ostracizing, hostile wit. We genuinely cut people down with these weapons, and as well, by using scurrilous, grossly or indecently abusive humor—foulmouthed, vulgar, obscene, vituperative, insulting, offensive—all explicitly hostile. The polite teasing of Wodehouse and Leacock, on the other hand, puts down gently, so Alexander would call that ostracizing empathic. Affiliative Humor Perhaps the original source parted into two streams . . . clear and undefiled, the humor of human kindliness . . . and the polluted waters of mockery and sarcasm.... (Leacock, 1938) Alexander, a hard-nosed sociobiologist, admits that his views are typically regarded as cynical. He doubts that there is any humor untainted by ostracism. But he nevertheless encourages us to work toward such a high level of the art, the ideal of affiliative humor with no out-group. We could start by training ourselves to recognize the subtle ostracism of humor that appears to be empathic. Leacock's humor skirts prejudicial ostracizing by choosing indistinctly demarcated targets, in which conceivably we all could be included. Affiliative humor, clear and undefiled, would include us all in an affirmed group and be directed at the scourges common to all humankind. Were we to encounter a superordinate race of aliens, we humans would all share a common xenophobia and paranoia and use ostracizing humor to denigrate them. This humor would be affiliative for us, consolidating our solidarity. Cancer is a similar alien, not from Mars, but lurking in all of us, as are pain and suffering, and diseases of all stripes. And lurking behind all of these is death, the ultimate alien. Humor directed at these scourges, these life-destroyers we all dread, can be affiliative for us. It does not ostracize, except for the caveat that those succeeding in making us laugh at our vulnerability and mortality place themselves a bit above the rest of us. In their creativity they are more godlike and we less so. That aside, helping the cancer victim laugh existentially at her nemesis is a high calling, for it is affiliative, life-affirming, and even therapeutic. Caveats should be mentioned in the therapy connection in that laughter in the sickroom can be at the expense of others, and even of the victim, so it can be ostracizing. It isn't necessarily purely affiliative, so should be prescribed with care and caution (Elgee, 1993a, 2002). At a less-exalted level, scatological humor can also be used both ways. To identify an out-group with excrement is to insult them with

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disgusting filth and dead waste, so is ostracizing in a most undisguised way, as previously mentioned. Joanna Bourke (1999) catalogues countless instances of violent scatological humor among soldiers amidst war. Former Marine William Broyles recollects the carnivalesque behavior of soldiers desecrating a Vietnamese soldier they had recently killed. In joyous laughter and celebration, the soldiers had "propped the corpse against some C-rations, placed sunglasses across his eyes and a cigarette in his mouth, and balanced a Targe and perfectly formed' piece of shit on his head" (p. 3). Yet scatological humor is not necessarily ostracizing. It can be used affiliatively, without enemies and out-groups, since none of us is exempt from offensive bodily emissions. We all produce funny but embarrassing noises, foul gases, and disgusting waste. When joking about the excretory functions of our animal bodies, we can all be affiliated (Elgee, 1993b). We dream of ethereal possibilities but we are stuck with dirty animal bottoms, so we laugh at our painful human condition, what Ernest Becker calls our terrifying paradox: "Born not as a god, but as a man [woman], or as a god-worm, or as a god who shits" (Becker, 1973, p. 58). Alexander's conclusion is that we should encourage "efforts toward social harmony on grander and more nearly universal scales, perhaps through explicit and deliberate promotion of effects of humor that integrate and diminution of effects that ostracize" (Alexander, 1986, p. 265). At this point, we might return to the quotation at the beginning of this chapter. Speaking of his students, and their lack of understanding of the spiritual depths of laughter, Ernest Becker said: "It is deadly earnest to them, this world they face, and they simply cannot laugh without making some kind of triumph over it" (Bates, 1977, p. 224). This sounds very much as if in his experience, teaching at Berkeley in 1968 during the Vietnam War, the humor of young people was strictly ostracizing. Pointing ahead, I will suggest that an affiliative nonostracizing smile is central to the creation of integrative nonfundamentalistic belief systems. Exploration of the natural history, nurturance, maturation, and cultural cultivation of the affiliative form of humor promises to be a rewarding process for encouraging the formation of the spirit of reconciliation. Folly: Through the Looking-Glass Otto Rank's prescription for neurosis: the "need for legitimate foolishness" (1958, p. 49). This is explored further in the following: The way to freedom and curious wonder is to recognize and comprehend the arbitrary, predetermined, and artificial structures that order our lives. The way

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to knowledge of culture and society is to explore one's inner fantasy life. The way to honor intelligence is to know and laugh at its limitations. The way to celebrate creation is to play with its silly mysteries. The intention that comes through in [Lewis Carroll's] Through the Eooking-Glass is, in effect, the meaning of mankind's comic capacity, and it is this: I will play with and make ridiculous fear, loneliness, smallness, ignorance, authority, chaos, nihilism, and death; I will transform, for a time, woe to joy. (Polhemus, 1980, p. 248) As our self-consciousness developed, laughter and a sense of humor evolved as a necessary component for the survival of the human animal. Thus the history of laughter and our apprehension of the comic, even in their archaic forms, warrant examination. Early in my burgeoning interest in the subject, I was perplexed by the genre of folly. We certainly do laugh when people act the fool, we regard an appreciation of the ridiculous as a part of our sense of humor, and if the days of the court jester are gone, the fool continues to be honored in the circus tent, as well as in some religious traditions. But I found the early modern concept of folly to be foreign to contemporary sensibility. What did it mean, 500 years ago, when Erasmus (1509/1942) so praised it in his Moriae Encomium (The Praise of Folly)? My understanding of folly has been greatly enhanced by Peter L. Berger's marvelous book (1997), Redeeming Laughter: The Comic Dimension of Human Experience. This work has been of great help for exploration of the humor literature, and stands out in the genre because Berger writes with his tongue in his cheek and irony in his eye, and we hear lots of comic overtones. He relates a wealth of funny jokes with a panache the best comedians would envy. I found it an absolute delight to read. Who says you kill jokes when you dissect them? Berger (1997) credits Erasmus as perhaps the first to present a "full blown comic worldview. A world turned upside down, grossly distorted, and precisely for that reason more revealing of some underlying truths than the conventional right-side-up view" (p. 21). To be sure, Berger knows something about world views. In fact, he literally wrote the book on the subject! His seminal work, The Social Construction of Reality (Berger & Luckmann, 1966/1967) strongly influenced an entire generation of students. Like his contemporary, Ernest Becker, Berger advocated the inclusion of religious thought as an important and serious component of social science. So when Berger talks about underlying truths we should listen. Erasmus's Folly reveals the pretensions at Truth in the Conventional View of Important Things, which is roughly what I am referring to in this chapter as cultural belief systems, and what Berger refers to as socially constructed reality. The revelers in the world of folly and fooling are making fun of the rules and customs of the social universe in

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which they have lately lived and been obedient. And now they are rebelling from that universe with laughter. The belief systems kept in place by the civic and ecclesiastical authorities are held up to ridicule and utter reversal. The celebrants are not peeking or glancing behind the cultural curtain, their whole society is up on the stage creating a counterworld and the established structures are banished to an outgroup of scapegoats. How can they stand this open-shutter exposure to death? It is a custom, a ritual, with celebration of rebirth and renewal as a life-giving component (Becker, 1975, pp. 6-25). Originally, I suspect it might have begun because laughter and the comic began to penetrate the inchoate ironic mindset of the culture. Thus the sacred canopy, the cover-up of artificiality and fictitiousness, became sufficiently transparent, leading to widespread questioning of its authority. As mob mimesis reached a critical mass, the established cultural belief system was overturned into chaos (Girard, 1972). Empowered in the moment, dethroning the overlords with mockery, getting drunk on wine and intoxicated in the spirit of denial (of death), the mob celebrated the Feast of Fools. But eventually came the day after, the social and political hangover, and with it the realization that this new counterworld was also unreal, itself a fictitious canopy. As forces of the old regime retrenched, regrouped, reformed, and finally returned, the cycle of carnival ritual resumed. Its history of self-limitation, of annual celebration and renewal, continued. BELIEF SYSTEMS AND THE DENIAL OF DEATH Cultural belief systems function to persuade the populace that their society and their lives are of value, and thus that they gain meaning and purpose by allegiance to the Truth of their culture. In the ultimate test of the wisdom of living in this Truth, they believe that at their death, they will "rest" knowing that they have not lived and died in vain, without significance. It has not all been just sound and fury. All is not vanity. This is the legacy of Death, the final arbiter, and the Grim Reaper has us all in his grip; we are his slaves. There is considerable empirical research substantiating the view that death anxiety is the principal motivator underlying our belief systems (Pyszczynski, Solomon, & Greenberg, 2003; Solomon, Greenberg, & Pyszczynski, 1998, 2002). Humor is a major means by which we keep repressed from immediate consciousness a morbid and paralyzing preoccupation with the specter of death. We use humor to free ourselves from slavery to death. The medieval festival of carnival is not subtle about this. It neither glances nor looks sideways at death. It laughs at death straight on, or

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so it masquerades. Deny slavery to the cultural constructs and dance with death! The glances at our finitude that jokes toy with, and the sideways realizations of our mortality in the ironic mindset, are superseded in Folly and Fooling, a totally other and topsy-turvy world of outright death denial. Forget socially constructed reality, forget the cultural covering canopy, and overturn the religious and secular belief systems. Kick over the confining and restraining traces. Take charge. Get free. Let intoxication, rebellion, and unpoliced scapegoating of the recently deposed hierarchy release all primal energy and animal passions. This is the medieval carnival. OSTRACIZING LAUGHTER, AFFILIATIVE LAUGHTER, AND ROMANTIC DENIAL IN FOLLY AND FOOLING Those festivals of long ago, as well as their modern day descendents in Mardi Gras and Carnival, hold up to ridicule the conventional cultural constructs. In the time of Erasmus, this could go on for weeks and months. There was much mirth and music, surely, and he personified Folly as Carnival Queen, a nurturing divinity, and "fountain and nursery of life" (Berger, 1997, p. 20). Erasmus, it seems, was well aware of how vital a sense of humor is to human life. While Folly is clearly making fun of the upended culture and ostracizing its power structure, she shows the affiliative power of the revolt for exponential mob growth and solidarity. But Erasmus did not picture these occasions as full of nothing but new light, life, and laughter. There is plenty of make-believe and outright denial of death in his Folly. She was born in the Isles of the Blessed (Utopia) and "suckled by two jolly nymphs, to wit, Drunkenness . . . and Ignorance" (1509/1942, p. 104). Her companions were Self-love, Flattery, Oblivion, Laziness, Pleasure, Madness, Wantonness, Intemperance, and Dead Sleep (pp. 104-105). Here there is much self-deception and various forms of retreat from the fullness of life and self-realization into social deadness, even oblivion. There is pseudoescape of healthyminded, cheerful robots with their fictions of the culturally condoned Truths, into intoxication with pseudojoy in semideath. Erasmus (1509-1942) could also romanticize extravagantly, as demonstrated in the following portrayal of the deathless death of fools: "But to return to the happiness of Fools, who when they have past over this life with a great deal of Pleasantness, and without so much as the least fear or sense of Death, they go straight forth into the Elysian Field, to recreate their Pious and Careless Souls with such Sports as they us'd here" (p. 154).

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Mikhail Bakhtin (1984), in Rabelais and His World, describes the Festive Laughter of Carnival in the Middle Ages and Renaissance as "of all the people . . . directed at all and everyone, including the carnivaTs participants" (p. 11). This certainly sounds affiliative, but interestingly "it is at the same time mocking, deriding" (p. 12). This mockery and derision is made to sound benign since it is "also directed at those who laugh.... They too are incomplete, they also die and are revived and renewed" (p. 12). They are laughing at death, but also playing with it—they are revived and renewed. They are laughing at play-death, pretending death is not real. Kirby Farrell (1989) examined this phenomenon in a study of Shakespeare dealing with play-death, which he prefaces with an account of his own death denial. Farrell relates that he had read Becker's Denial of Death some nine years before, and chanced upon it again, as if for the first time, while writing this Shakespeare book. Its pertinence to his new project was startling: "Thanks to my own powers of denial, Becker's disturbing vision had disappeared without a trace under the magician's handkerchief of repression. Even as I struggled to explain away the lapse I had a painfully comic sense of my own creaturely compulsion. After all, in my denial I had lately been rediscovering death is a safely disguised form: play-death in Shakespeare" (pp. ix-x). In their idealization of the ambiguous laughter of the common folk, Bakhtin and Rabelais can be understood as describing the contagion of crowd behavior. We see how subtly the targets of the mob, the Catholic Church of the sixteenth century, and the Stalinists of the twentieth century, can be unnamed yet trampled. This is not affiliative humor, "pure and undefiled." There are ostracized scapegoats to be found. Erasmus, Bakhtin, and Rabelais, and perhaps to some extent Peter Berger as well, are caught up in the romance. They fail to emphasize the difference between the ostracizing and affiliative forms of humor, and to fully acknowledge these forces at work trying to control death dread. Berger (1997) says, "The grotesque, obscene, and scatological treatment of the body is an intrinsic part of this overcoming of fear—the most vulnerable, least spiritual aspects of human existence are magically rendered harmless in these parodies" (pp. 83-84). This is an aspect of humor for which an affiliative effect can be virtually universal. Even the parodist is stuck in a mortal body. Quoting Berger (1997) again, "In the late Middle Ages, in a curious synthesis, folly merged with death, as expressed in the carnival-like 'death dance' (Totentanz). . . . Folly, which relativized and subverted all social order, finally foreshadowed death, which obliterates all social order once and for all" (p. 74). Yes, but what is curious about this? That is what all of these strategies are trying to do, they're trying to get

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comfortable with, trying to get control of, trying to get free of slavery to Death. Dancing with Death is Laughing at Death in a supreme incongruity, a funny image, a good joke. And it is affiliative. Nobody is the butt of the joke and no one is made superior to another. We can all feel better. But it is obviously romantic denial of death. LAUGHING AT DEATH AS A RELIGIOUS PROCESS The Divine Comedy comes immediately to mind when we entertain deep thoughts about religion and the comic. This famous poem about the tortures of Hell and Purgatory ends in the Happiness of Heaven. Comedy in 1300 meant happiness, so this accounts for what today seems an incomprehensible title. Polhemus (1980) explains: Dante usurps the word "comedy" for the outstanding rendering in literature of Christian faith—save the Bible—and he purges it of laughter. The goal of Christianity is to transcend the world and the flesh, (p. 10) At the other extreme, Balzac kept the transcendent out of his Human Comedy, the Comedie Humaine, a series of grim literary accounts of life as anything but sublime in his huge edifice about the miseries and mendacities of French society in the mid-1800s. Life laughs at us in our absurdity. Berger (1997) wants to redeem laughter. He does it by elaborating on the Holy Fool idea and the concept of the comic as a signal of transcendence. He describes Kierkegaard as seeing "irony as a precursor of religious insight" (p. 27) with humor as an anteroom, "the last existential stage before faith as a sort of incognito faith" (pp. 27-28). Reinhold Niebuhr "thought that humor led into the 'vestibule of the temple' but that laughter must cease in the 'holy of holies.' This, probably not coincidentally, was also Kierkegaard's view" (pp. 203-204). In this Berger is inclined to think that both were mistaken, and I, with some trepidation at disagreeing with two of my heroes, decidedly agree. There are religions that emphasize and utilize laughter. We need to explore further the question of whether such understandings include laughing at death and an appreciation for the differentiation between ostracizing and affiliative laughter. Berger only briefly discusses the Taoist and Ch'an/Zen traditions. Further inquiry into these religious paths offers tantalizing possibilities for future work. For Polhemus (1980) "The act of laughter and the surge of comic joy in a death-haunted, misery-prone creature could be, and sometimes has been, seen and felt as a natural intrusion of the miraculous into the self—as, that is, a religious experience" (p. 8).

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CREATIVE ILLUSION In a deathbed interview conducted by Sam Keen (1974), Ernest Becker said that the major thrust of his work was in the direction of creating a merger of science and religious perspectives. Earlier, Becker had written: Science thought that it had gotten rid forever of the problems of the soul by making the inner world the subject of scientific analysis. But few wanted to admit that this work still left the soul perfectly intact as a word to explain the inner energy of organisms, the mystery of the creation and sustenance of living matter. It really doesn't matter if we discover that man's inner precepts about himself and his world, his very self-consciousness in language, art, laughter, and tears, are all socially built into him. We still haven't explained the inner forces of evolution that have led to the development of an animal capable of self-consciousness, which is what we still must mean by "soul"—the mystery of the meaning of organismic awareness, of the inner dynamism and pulsations of nature The hysterical reaction of 19th century believers against Darwin only shows the thinness and unimaginativeness of their faith. They were not open to plain and ordinary awe and wonder; they took life too much for granted, and when Darwin stripped them of "special wondrousness" they felt as good as dead. (Becker, 1973, p. 191) Otto Rank (1936/1945) pointed out that heightened self-consciousness for m a n y of us moderns is the price w e pay for the eclipse of the sacred dimension (p. 288). This hyper self-consciousness makes us skeptical of the received wisdom of cultural world views and belief systems, all of which Becker called cultural fictions. Without a believable religious or secular cultural canopy, w e have illusion-deficiency, according to Rank and Becker, and are at risk of functional impairment in neurosis. Granted, there are fully self-realized people w h o can handle heightened self-consciousness; but most of us have trouble getting to that level. We comprise the worried well, at the opposite pole from Becker's healthy-minded, cheerful robots (Keen, 1974, p . 74). We worriers are vulnerable to being crippled by neurosis. The robots bask with equanimity u n d e r the protective cover of the prevailing cultural belief system, while the hyper self-conscious skeptics stew in their existential angst. Becker, a profound and believing religious thinker, recognized that to avoid severe neurosis w e need illusion. He posed the most important questions: "On w h a t level of illusion does one live? . . . What is the 'best' illusion under which to live? Or, what is the most legitimate foolishness?" (1973, p . 202) To ask such questions uncovers the existential incongruity in knowing that w e are living in an illusion, while

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at the same time trying to live as if we believe unquestioningly in it. How can one live an illusion, knowing it is illusory? This is the perfect incongruity, an affiliative possibility for laughing—at ourselves. Our mortal body is the problem and our funny bone comes to the rescue. We laugh at ourselves, not at another—only at ourselves, with our own in-group, at our illusions, and without an out-group. We don't laugh at other belief systems. This can be a model of affiliative laughter, free of ostracizing the Other.3 Becker answered his question as to the level of illusion at which we should live by saying it should be at the highest level. When we smile at our own belief system as illusory, we set the stage to construct a higher illusion. For our belief systems to keep reaching higher they are always works in progress, always evolving, always becoming. Becker is reputed to have had a marvelous sense of humor; he, no doubt, would have relished the idea of affiliative laughter enabling life at the highest level. If Becker is correct that most of us are hard wired for needing a belief system and creative illusions, then all of us, the healthy-minded and the angst-ridden skeptics alike, could benefit from an upgrade in our religious laughter software, both as a creative defense against death anxiety and as a brake on the magnetic pull of fundamentalism. The always-under-construction illusion system could be a powerful use of humor for a religious perspective striving to avoid ostracism and build affiliative understandings. Considering a possible higher illusion, we subject it to criticism for its ostracizing tendencies and for the opportunities it gives us to laugh at ourselves. We put our neurotic angst to work, engaging paradox, irony, and whimsy, and use our imagination, smiling at our inflated idealistic ambitions, as we try to create of ourselves and of our religions, ever-maturing works of art, potentially even approaching sublime offerings to the life force. Perhaps this would conform to Peter Berger's redeeming laughter. It certainly contrasts with Dante's Divine Comedy, in that it builds on laughter experienced in this world, in the here and now. And inasmuch as it is nonostracizing and potentially affiliative, it is poles apart from the misery and tragedy of Balzac's Comedie Humaine, an absurd requiem on the human condition from which there may be no redemption by God or laughter. Earlier, we noted that the possibilities for the development of a flowering of affiliative humor should be explored. Might this be a talent that could be cultivated by religions, by cultures? Are some belief systems already teaching it, some humorists practicing it, social scientists studying it?

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CONCLUDING TESTIMONIALS The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne, first published in 1760, illustrates the proposition that we laugh at death. Existential in its very form, the work is packed with irony, whimsy, and jokes. As Peter Conrad wrote, it is "forever commemorating death" (Sterne, 1991, p. xiii). This comic novel treats the passage of time in existential terms, is very much concerned with morbidity and mortality, and is piled high everywhere with the distractions of hobby horses and cultural fictions in many guises. Sterne was a parson and apparently at times called himself Yorick, after Hamlet's jester. Shakespeare's Yorick is given but a brief appearance in Hamlet, and only in the form of his skull—perhaps the most famous skull in English literature. In the gravedigger scene, Hamlet muses and jokes as he holds the jawless skull: "Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs?" (Hamlet, 5.1.207-209). In Sterne's book, Yorick is Tristram's pastor and, in Volume One, earns himself a whole chapter (XI) in which there are many points of recognition of the relationship between death and humor. According to the notes by editor Melvyn New, his "'Cervantic humour . . . describing silly and trifling Events with the Circumstantial Pomp of great Ones' . . . [uses] burlesque and irony (mock gravity)" in defining his tone (Sterne, 1997, p. 552). Yorick's gibes and jokes beget enemies and revenge and he is persecuted to death. Oh yes, Sterne understood the power and danger of ostracizing humor! He described the dynamics that sociobiologist R. D. Alexander analyzed 200 years later. In summary we have focused on three levels in the use of humor, from jokes to irony to folly, in which the exposure of death denial is increasingly evident, culminating in a proposal for a fourth level, the application of the smile and the laugh to modify death denial expressions in our belief systems. This answers the call of Ernest Becker and others for the critical and creative use of illusion in the growth of more satisfying religious /cosmological institutions in the twenty-first century. An understanding of ostracizing and affiliative humor, the dangers of the former and the strengths of the latter, is presented to facilitate the institutional change envisioned. A New Yorker article dealing with these issues appeared recently: What's So Funny? A Scientific Attempt to Discover Why We Laugh, by staff writer Tad Friend (2002), showcasing a titan of American improvisational theatre, Del Close (1934-1999). "Although Del Close never quite worked out all the details, he was convinced that laughter is related to

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our fear of death . . . [he] said that there is very little difference between the realizations 'a-ha we are going to die' and our laughter, which is 'ha-ha—he would say that 'ha-ha' and 'a-ha' are related industries.' He willed his skull to Chicago's Goodman Theatre, where it sits in an acrylic box, intended for use in a future production of 'Hamlet'" (p. 84). An Internet tribute to Close indicated that the role he always wanted to play was that of Yorick. Friend's (2002) survey doesn't comment further on Close's insight, except in a closing sentence, which asks, "What sometimes makes us giggle at funerals?" Despite coming so close Friend pulls d o w n the veil of conventionality and concludes, "No one really understands w h y w e laugh w h e n we do." Del Close, like W o o d y Allen, s t a n d s in the line of E r a s m u s , Shakespeare, Sterne, Kierkegaard, Carroll, Rank, Becker, Polhemus, Berger, and many others. All have recognized that there are intimate connections between death and laughter. I have attempted here to underline this connection as integral to life itself and to suggest further that there may be ways to use laughter more creatively in our belief systems in the service of escape from the savagery, torture and slaughter we inflict on others. That, as Becker said, would be to escape from evil. In the end, Sterne bowed to death; laughing at it, he "died in jest" (Sterne, 1997, p . 615). His comic death bed scene was a precedent for that of Otto Rank, whose last word was "komisch"—that is, comical, strange, peculiar (Lieberman, 1985, p . 390). Komischl NOTES 1. This is a description (Hirsch, 1981/1990) of a comic strip (Allen, 1978). 2. This is a description (Hirsch, 1981/1990) of a comic strip (Allen, 1978). 3. The proscription against laughing at the belief systems of others does not mean that all such systems are equally worthy. They are not. In discussion with believers using the understanding developed here, awareness of the inadequacy and tentativeness of one's own beliefs could serve as an open stance for dialog. Such a conversation would, of course, have to be good-humored! REFERENCES Alexander, R. D. (1986). Ostracism and indirect reciprocity: The reproductive significance of humor. Ethology and Sociobiology 7: 253-270. Allen, W. (1977). Annie Hall (W. Allen, Producer & Director). Allen, W. (1978). Non-being & somethingness: Selections from the comic strip inside Woody Allen. New York: Random House.

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Index

Abandonment, 3,49, 59, 63,209,217, 236,254 Abuse, 5, 72,108,125,182,187 Afghanistan, 195 Africa, 103 Afterlife, 3, 39,40, 50,53, 111, 257 Aggression, 7, 79, 91, 98, 99,103,104, 113,152,177,186,188,191,193, 196,209,211,212,213,248,249, 250,251,253,257,261,262,294 Aleph. See Aum Shinrikyo Allegory of Sin and Redemption, 122 All Souls' Day, 268, 269, 270,271 Allen, Woody, 294, 308, 309 Al Qaeda, 188,195 America, 13,102,103,108,116,117, 186,190,191,194,195,196,198, 199,237,242,262,263 Anality, 38,184. Anger, 3,19,21, 22,25,26,52, 59, 80, 165,174,194,211,212,214,217, 248,254 Annie Hall. See Allen, Woody Annihilation, 3, 4, 8, 9,10, 22, 26, 27, 28,29, 79,83,112,152,177,187,

228,245,246,247,248,249,252, 253,259,287 anxiety, 245 dread of, 3 fear of, 28,29,35,249,251 Anomie, 164 Anti-Semitism, 184,220,244 Anxiety, 3,5, 9,10,19, 28, 32, 41, 55, 61, 89,151,152,153,156,163, 164,171,175,177,218,246,247, 248,251,252,254,255,258,259, 261,262,263,264,265,266,277, 279,280,281,282,283,284,285, 286,287,288,289,291,294,295, 301,306,309 Apocalypse, 98,103,104,109,110, 111, 113,115,116,134,200,265 Apocalyptic Destruction, 87,88 Apocalyptic Thinking, 87,100 Applewhite, Marshall. See Heaven's Gate Art, 4,56,90,121,122,123,124,130, 135,139,141,143,144,145,149, 155,212,294,298,305,306 Aryan Nations, 235,237

312

INDEX

Asahara, Shoko. See Aum Shinrikyo Atta, Muhammad, 181,183,184,189 Attachment, 26,38,41,42,43, 58, 61, 63, 72, 79,95,173,204,205,260, 263 Aum Shinrikyo, 87,88, 89,108,109, 110,115,116 Avidya. See Buddhism Bahai Movement, 101 Balint, Michael, 141,151,158 Becker, Ernest, 4,9,27, 32, 34, 61, 67, 163,164,165,166,167,168,169, 170,172,173,174,175,249,253, 262,263,282,287,289,291,293, 294,297,299,300,301,303,305, 306,307,308,309,310,311 Belief, 2,4, 5, 28, 29, 38,40,51,53, 54, 61,94,101,102,104,109, 111, 115,140,144,146,151,173,179, 187,224,234,236,246,255,257, 260,261,283,291,292,294,295, 296,297,299,300,301,302,305, 306,307,308 Berger, Peter, 263,292,293,300,302, 303,304,306,308,309 Bible, the, 206, 226, 229, 232, 235, 237,238,239,241,242,304 Bin Laden, Osama, 182,189,191,192, 197 Birth, 7, 26, 31,41,42, 43, 44, 46, 47, 48, 53, 62, 63, 64, 74, 87, 90, 94, 96,97,98,99,100,106,112,119, 132,137,139,140,144,147,148, 149,152,153,157,175,208,210, 231,235,263,269,283,309 The Birth and Death of Meaning, 165 Black Death, 120,121,122,123,124, 125,126,127,128,129,130,131, 132,133,134 Bocklin, Arnold, 128,131,134,144, 159 Book of Revelation, 121 Borderline Disorder, 100 Brahma Kumaris, 87,89,103,104 Branch Davidians, 88,104,105,106, 107,113

Brown, Norman O., 10, 28, 34, 61, 63, 67,262,263,265 Bruegel, Pieter the Elder, 122,127 Buddha, 38, 39,41,43,45,46,48,54, 55,59, 64, 65, 67, 68, 69, 204 Buddhism, 6, 7, 9,10, 37, 38, 39,40, 41,45,47,48,53,54,55,56,57, 58,59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 67, 68,69,101,214,215,224,243,263 Burger, Gottfried August, 125,126, 128,130,131,133 Bush, George W., 178,191,194,197 Campbell, Joseph, 8,34,48,49,50, 52, 62, 64, 65, 67,207,217 Cargo Cults, 102 Carrion, 46 Castration, 2,46,65, 77, 83,151,152, 153,158,247,259,287 Childhood, 2,3, 5, 66, 68, 71, 72, 73, 74, 77, 78,107,165,187, 229,247, 251,253,257,260,263 Children, 5, 9,19,23,55,56,57, 66, 71, 72, 74, 75, 78, 79, 96,100,101, 105,106,112,121,139,148,150, 152,182,187,188,192,203,207, 209, 219,228,229,235,236, 238, 241,248,254,264,265,269,313 China, 38,212,219 Christianity, 6, 7, 9, 60, 62, 68,101, 119,146,227,229,233, 240,243, 304,311 Christians, 172,175 Civil War, 232 Civilization and Its Discontents, 251, 252,253,261,262 Clinton, Bill, 194 Cohn, Norman, 88,115,120,134 Conflict, 216 Conscience, 179,184,185 Consciousness, 5,15,16,48, 77, 79, 98,108,146,149,150,170,247, 252,255,259,268,272,279,293, 295,300,301,305 Contamination, 37,48,185 Conversion, 47, 87,91, 92, 94, 95, 97, 100

INDEX

Coping, 79,93,99,163,268 Corpses, 1, 3,44,45,46,49,55, 74, 75, 77, 78, 79, 81, 82, 84,120,122, 128,129,130,131,188,231,299 Creativity, 137,138,139,141,145, 147,154,155,157 Cults, 1,4,59, 231 Culture, 2, 3,4, 6, 8,40,48,57, 62, 65, 67,90,104,116,120,121,126, 133.134.138.140.141.146.148, 149,154,155,167,168,169,171, 181,182,186,187,197,203,208, 212,213,216,223,231,235,250, 256,263,265,268,269,272,288, 292,293,297,300,301,302 Dance of the Dead, 122,123,124, 126,128,129,131,132,133 Death, 1, 2, 3,4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9,10,11, 13,14,16,17, 20,21,22,23,24, 25,26,27,28, 29, 30,32,33,34, 35,36, 37,40,41,42,43,44,46, 47,48,49,50,51, 52, 53, 54,55, 56,57,59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 65, 66, 67, 74, 81, 82, 83, 84, 87, 90, 91, 94,96,97,98,99,101,102,108, 112,113,120,122,123,124,125, 126,127,128,129,130,131,132, 133.134.137.138.142.145.149, 150,151,152,153,157,158,160, 163,168,170,175,177,178,181, 183,184,188,203,205,206,208, 209,210,212,213,214,216,217, 218,220,221,223,225,226,228, 229,230,233,238, 239,240,242, 243,244,245,246,247,248,249, 250,252,253,255,259,260,261, 262,263,264,265,266,267,268, 269,270,271,272,273,275,277, 279,280,281,282,283,284,285, 286,287,288,289,291,292,293, 294,295,296,298,300,301,302, 303,304,306,307,309,310,312 anxiety, 5, 6, 8,9,10,245, 246,247, 259,263,264,265,266,275,280, 283,285,286,287,291,293 denial of, 2, 3,4, 9, 25,41,42, 63,

313

67,97,99,151,154,256,267,283, 286,287,291,294,295,301,302, 303,304,307 fear of, 2, 8, 27, 28, 57, 58, 59, 84, 139,149,150,151,152,153,154, 155,184,190,218,245,246,247, 251,259,263,265,266,268,308 psychoanalytic denial of, 2,287 Death and the Maiden, 123,124,125, 126,127,128,129 Death Drive, 13 Death Instinct, 82, 83,157. See also Death Drive Decay, 2,4, 6, 7, 8, 37, 41, 42, 43, 44, 46,48,50,52,55,56,57, 59, 61, 62, 64, 65,125,150,158,223,227, 247,252,259,260 Defense, 61,62,164,185 Defilement, 219,231 Degrelle, Leon, 222,223,226,243 Delusion, 10,49,52,98,175,198,246, 256,258,265,282 Delusions, 2,33,60, 92,178,191,198, 221,235,256,259 Denial, 6,10, 34,42,47, 59, 62, 68, 97, 129,131,141,144,145,164,175, 184,196,212,214,216,217,242, 251,262,263,278,279,280,282, 283,289,309 The Denial of Death, 165, 294, 303 Desire, 206,214 Despair, 8,42,44,57,59, 94,112,113, 180,194,210,214,252 Destructiveness, 168,178,186,196 Deutsch, Niklaus Manuel, 123 Di Mambro, Joseph, 111, 112,113. See also Solar Temple Disease, 7,41,42,44, 52, 54,55,56, 57,102,121,191,223. See also Plague Disgust, 6, 7,37, 38,40,41,44,46,49, 50,52,53,57, 65, 66, 67,233,247, 248,252 Disintegration, 3,8,89,101,156,227 Dogen, 38,43, 62, 63. See also Buddhism; Zen Dogma, 31

3M

INDEX

Dolls, 66, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 85 Doppelganger, 142,191 Dread, 3,42, 56,160, 217, 220, 225, 231, 234,241, 245, 246, 288,292, 298,303 Dreams, 54,55,59, 71, 84, 87, 88, 89, 90,91,92,99,100,103,104,113, 114,116,125,139,140,141,143, 157,180,218,243,263,281,284, 289,292,295 Duino Elegies, 73, 74, 85 Dying, 1,22,25,26, 63,123,124,130, 183,185,217,224 The Economic Problem of Masochism, 82 Ecstasy, 134 Ego, 25, 26,29, 33, 35,40, 59, 68, 78, 79, 89,90,91,92,115,138,142, 146,147,153,154,164,172,175, 181,184,185, 215,217,248,249, 250,252,253,255,259,261,263, 269,277,289,292 Ego-Ideal, 91,138 Emotion-Processing Mind, 10,276, 277,278,279,280,281, 282, 288 Empathy, 180 Enlightenment, 41,45,47, 57, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 95,108,109,154, 215,216 Erasmus, 300, 302, 303, 308,309 Erikson, Erik, 64, 68, 71, 72, 85 Eros, 83, 84,145, 206, 253, 265 Escape from Evil, 165 Eschaton, 97, 99,102 E.T (The Extra-Terrestrial), 207,208 Eternity, 6,8, 64 Europe, 50,103,119,120,121,122, 124,125,126,127,131,132,133, 134,135,190,229,230,262, 311 European Culture, 119,120 Europeanness, 120 Evil, 2, 3,11, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48,50,51,52, 53, 55, 61, 62, 63, 64, 69, 99,100,113,114,134,173, 175,178,179,184,185,187,191, 192,193, 206, 207,219, 220,221,

222, 228, 229,231, 237,238,239, 240,243,244,248,249,263,297, 308,309,312 Excrement, 38,46, 297, 298 Existential Death Anxiety, 286 Exorcism, 54 Faith, 1, 55, 57, 65, 97, 98,107,114, 116,174,179,185,198,256,257, 260, 272, 291,294, 304, 305, 309 Fanaticism, 178,179,181,183,186, 187,188,191,192,193 Fantasy, 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 8,16, 25, 26, 27, 29, 30, 31, 33, 37,54, 55, 58,59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 66, 67, 72, 74, 80, 88,92,93,99,100,101,104,125, 127,134,138,142,152,178,207, 209.214.216.245.246.251.253, 255.256.257.258.259.260.261, 300 Fatalism, 19,268 Father, 9,19, 22, 23, 24, 28, 34, 80, 91, 97,100,106, 111, 150,153,180, 196,225,229,233,234,235,237, 238,249,254,255,257,272 Father Divine Movement, 108 Faure, Bernard, 7,10, 38, 39, 46, 47, 48, 54, 56, 58,59, 64, 68 Fear, 61,180,181,183,185,188,190, 207,216 Fear of Death. See Death, Mortality, Terror The feminine, 3, 6,10, 41, 46,47,48, 62, 64, 66, 69,104,134,143, 248 Frau Blaha's Maid, 74,75,77,78,82,85 Freud, Anna, 147,150,159 Freud, Sigmund, 2, 9,10, 30, 33, 34, 35, 61, 68, 71, 76, 77, 78, 79, 82, 83, 84, 85, 89,91,106,113,115, 139,140,141,142,143,144,145, 146,147,148,149,150,151,152, 153,154,155,157,159,160,165, 166,167,168,177,178,199,200, 208,214,217,219,243,245,246, 247.248.250.251.252.253.254, 256.257.258.259.260.261.262, 263,264,265,266,277,281,287, 288,289,294, 309

INDEX

Fromm, Erich, 35, 85,113,115,137, 141,159,179,180,188,199,249, 262,263,264 Fundamentalism, 115,178,181,186, 219 Germany, 89,108,122,181,191,220, 221,222,223, 224, 227,228,229, 230,231, 234, 235,240 Ghost Dance, 102 Ghosts, 54,56,224 Gilgamesh, 149,206 God, 2, 8, 9,19, 28, 61, 62, 81, 91, 92, 98,101,102,105,120,125,126, 137,171,172,173,180,183,188, 192,206,209,211,212,220,221, 222,226,227,228,230,232,234, 236,237,238,239,240,241,242, 243,260,261,262,273,295,306 Goddess, 3,48,204,207,214 Great Reversal, 48,49,65 Grief, 21,44,53,157,180,185,194, 210,211,212,213 Grien, Hans Baldung, 124 Group, 165,166,167 Groups, 165 Guilt, 2, 38, 60,66,68,132,153,166, 169,180,182, 217, 228,230,247, 248,249,250,251,253,259,261, 262,280,283, 286, 287,288 Gulf War, 195,197 Hatred, 41, 46, 48, 73, 78, 79, 83,165, 182,184,187,189,190,223,255, 261,297 Heaven, 25, 39, 87, 98, 99,143,188, 206,224,238,242,269,270. See also Hell; Afterlife; Fantasy Heaven's Gate, 87, 88, 89,101,110, 113 Hebert, Emile, 129,130,134 Heidegger, Martin, 137,148,155, 159,161 Hell, 1,304 Helplessness, 2, 3,4, 7, 28, 79, 81, 147,150,169,187,189,191,247, 251,252, 253,254,257, 259,292 Heroism, 27,166,168,309

315

Hinduism, 43,54,95,103,108 History, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9,10, 34, 38, 47, 50, 53, 58, 64, 65, 68, 71, 72, 90, 91, 94, 97, 99,105,107,114, 115,140,157,167,198,200,224, 225,226,231,233,236,239,240, 244,245,248,250,251,257, 258, 262, 265, 268, 271,272,299, 300, 301,309,311,312 Hitler, Adolf, 109,184,220,221,223, 224,227, 228,229,230,231,234, 235,237,240,241,242,244,311, 313 Hollywood, 178 The Holocaust, 197,219,220,221, 228,231,240,241,243 Holy War, 190 Homosexuality, 34, 60,236,262 Horror, 4,42, 54, 65,105,107,124, 235 Human Nature, 206 Humiliation, 91,108,182,188,189, 191 Humor, 131,291,293, 294, 295, 296, 297, 298,299,300,301, 302, 303, 304,306,307,308,309 Id, 89,140,146,147,217, 277,289 Identification, 179,187,188,189,193 Identity, 2,16, 24, 25, 67, 75, 78, 79, 81, 92, 93,94,97,100,114,119, 120,133,143,145,187,189,190, 191, 203,213, 215, 264, 269, 271, 272,311 Ideology, 4, 38, 60, 88,113,171,173, 174,179,180,181,185,187,188, 189,191,232,247,252,311 Idols, 170,171,172,173 Illusion, 4, 8,10,15, 26, 38, 39,41,48, 58,59, 63, 64, 68, 95,144,157, 166,173,215,216,217,229,243, 255,259,263,264,266,269,282, 305,306,307 Immortality, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8,10,13, 22, 28,29, 35,50,51,52, 53, 62, 63, 98,110,149,155,166,168,173, 206,211,249,262,263,267,293, 296

3

i6

INDEX

Impotence, 170 Impurity, 44,45,46,47,181,225 India, 38,39,50,53,103,114,204 Individuation, 5, 31, 61, 66,152,166, 207,257 Inhibitions, symptoms, and anxiety, 147,150,261 Internal objects, 25, 30 The Interpretation of Dreams, 150,247 Irony, 256,293, 294,295,300, 304, 306,307 Islam, 60,101,181,188,220 Israel, 96,114,115,189,194,231,233, 234,240,311 Israelites, 171

Kohut, Heinz, 141,186,200,214,215, 218 The Koran, 185,188,226 Koresh, David, 105,106,107 Ku Klux Klan, 232

La Barre, Weston, 61,68,102,116,264 Lacan, Jacques, 13,35 Laughter, 51,291,293,294,295,296, 297,298,299,300,301,302,303, 304,305,306,307,308,309 Leaders, 165,167,173,174 Liberation, 50,51,52,53, 63, 67, 96, 110,146,262,272 Lifton, Robert Jay, 4, 5, 9,10, 58, 68, 214,218,262,263,265 Literature, 4,46,50,51, 63, 76, 90, 91, Jains, 49,50,65 93,130,145,165,167,212,264, James, William, 5, 94,107,116,125, 300,304,307,312,313 225,294,309,311 Japan, 38,53,54, 56,58, 65, 66, 68, 69, Loneliness, 23, 74,217,300 Loss, 10,23,24,26, 28, 38,45,46, 79, 89,108,109,206,212,213,215, 137,151,152,158,174,195,208, 216,223,224,225,226,231,234, 209,215,232,247,250,251,252, 312 259,265,280,286 Jesus, 91,98,100,102,220,222,232, 233,237,238 Love, 2,17,23, 30, 38, 39, 56, 60, 72, Jews, 96,116,180,192,220,221,227, 74, 79, 83, 88,90, 91,92,93,103, 228,229,230,231, 232,234,235, 104,112,123,124,141,142,148, 236,237,240,242,243 154,180,181,184,185,203,207, Jokes, 291,293,295,304 208,209,213,217,223,226,248, Jones, Jim, 106,107,108,113,116, 249,250,251,252,253,254,257, 143,158,160 259,261,262,270, 302 Jonestown, 107,108,113,115. See also Luther, Martin, 38, 63, 68, 227, 240, The Peoples Temple 241. See also Anality Jouret, Luc, 111, 113. See also The Marchant, Guyot, 123 Solar Temple Martyrdom, 25,100 Judaism, 60,101,225 Masochism, 30,32,35, 83, 84, 85, 91, Judgment Day, 97, 99,104 250 Jung, C.G., 8,62,140,141,209,218,287 Melancholia, 34,56,158,209 Menstruation, 44,45 Kami. See Shinto Message Analyzing Center, 278 Karma, 38,52,53, 60 Messiah, 105,106 Kernberg, Otto, 189,193,200 Killing, 9,10,25,26,84,153,178,183, Metaphysics, 63 Mexico, 268,269,270,271,272,273, 188,219,221,223,225,226,227, 312 229,230,231,240,241,242,248, Middle East, 13,14,96 280,309 Millenarian groups, 87 Klein, Melanie, 71, 85,153,213,217, Millenarianism, 88 261,263,264

INDEX

Mishima, Yukio, 226,231, 244, 312 Misogyny, 7,46,47,57,58, 69,265 Mono no aware, 215 Moreau, Gustav, 127,134 Mormon Church, 101 Mortality, 2, 4,41,42, 43, 44, 47,48, 56,60, 65,129,132,149,154,164, 175,198,205,214,215,265,293, 294,295,298,302,307 Mother, 2,3,7,9,10,19,22,23,24,26, 27,28,47,48,49,56,57,66,72,73, 74,79,80,84,92,97,106,140,144, 148.153.182.207.213.214.215, 229,255,263,265,282,283,292 Mourning and Melancholia, 33,145 Munch, Edvard, 127 Murder, 61 Muslims, 181,189,192 Myth, 49,50,59, 61, 67,137,139,152, 167,187,203,207,209,217,225, 231,247,268,269,270,311,313 Mythology, 64 Narcissism, 27,32, 69, 79, 83,84,96, 138,163,164,178,181,184,188, 190,199,215,252,257,262,263, 265 Narcissistic Injury, 186,194 Nationalism, 87,258,263 Nature, 81,137,138,141,205,206, 209.211.212.213.214.215.216, 217 Neglect, 169 Neurosis, 5,10, 34,140,145,151,155, 161,164,167,218,245,246,253, 256,258,259,261,263,265,267, 299,305 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 67, 68, 69,144, 159,296,309,311 Nihilism, 267,300 Nirvana, 42,43,44,47, 60, 63. See also Buddhism; Death Drive; Hinduism Nonbeing, 2, 62, 63,84,158,247,287 Normal, 167,169 Object Relations, 2,10,15,28,29,31, 32, 90,152, 264, 265

317

Oblivion, 60,125,208,302 Obsession, 6,17,38,221 Oedipus, 28, 77,152,153,225 Old South, 231 Omphalos, 8 Osho Meditation, 101 Ostow, Mortimer, 61, 69, 88,100,116 Palestinians, 187,188,189,192,194 Paradise, 39,55,57, 60, 64, 84, 87, 88, 206 Patterson, Orlando, 219,232,233, 244 Pentagon, 174 People Forever International, 97,98 Peoples Temple, 87,88,107,108,113 Permanence, 42,53, 64 Persecutory Objects, 25,33 Perversion, 312 Pharaohs, 3 Piety, 20,22, 60 Plague, 6,56,120,121,122,123,124, 127,130,131,220,225,228,229 Play, 26,42, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 78, 79, 80,81, 82,84,125,147,186,196, 257,261,268,278,291,293,300, 303,308 Politics, 2,29,103,104,115,133,186, 190,193,309 Power, 62,163,166,167,169,170, 171,172,173,174 The Praise of Polly, 300 Prayer, 9, 61, 211,212, 213,236 Predation, 61,287 Predator death anxiety, 282,283 Predatory death anxiety, 282 Princess Kaguya, 203,204,205,206, 207,208,209,210,211,212,213, 214,215,216,217 Projection, 2,5,59,109,133,184,219, 225,233,240,258 Psychoanalysis, 2, 9,14,31, 33,35, 36,38,40, 63, 71, 89,91, 97,104, 115,141,142,143,144,145,149, 154,156,165,175,250,258,260, 263,264,265,267,273,275,287, 289,294,312,313 Psychohistory, 10,133

3

i8

INDEX

Psychology, 2, 6, 9,10, 27, 33, 38,58, 69, 71, 72,114,115,141,143,144, 152.166.190.246.260.263.264, 265,310,311,312,313 Psychopathology, 3,8,9,10 Punishment, 206 Pure Land, 39,43,44, 53. See also Buddhism Purification, 6,55,60,65,223,224, 231,249 Purity, 10,46,47,48,68,103,179, 183,184,185,199,221,225,231. See also Contamination; Impurity Pyramids, 3 Qur'an. See Koran Rage, 2, 3,10, 38,46,57, 60, 66, 67, 79,80,83,84,166,186,187,193, 211,217,252 Rajneesh, 101,115,116 Rank, Otto, 139,140,141,145,147, 148,149,152,153,159,160,161, 299,305,308,310 Reality, 2,4, 5,6,11,16,22, 24, 25, 26, 40,44,54,58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 73, 78, 81, 88, 89,90,91, 97, 98,100, 104,112,114,120,143,144,146, 150,164,165,166,172,178,183, 184,185,191,196,208,246,250, 251,252,253,254,255,256,258, 259,269,273,292,293,295,300, 302,309. See also Death Rebirth, 3, 6,43,44,49,53, 57, 64, 88, 89,91,93,94,95,96,97,99,100, 101,103,104,113,210,301 Redemption, 95,97,222,223,226, 232,240,306 Regression, 5, 78, 79, 83,93,156,157, 258 Religion, 2,4,5, 8, 37,47, 50, 52, 54, 57,59,60,61,62,65,67,68,69,88, 90,91,94,97,100,101,107,113,114, 115,116,144,160,173,175,187, 190,200,215,224,225,235,241, 243,244,245,246,250,252,255, 256.258.259.260.262.264.265, 266,267,273,304,309,311,312

Religious experience, 62 Religious fantasies, 4, 90, 91, 99, 219, 246,253. See also Afterlife; Delusion; Fantasy; Immortality Repetition, 210 Resignation, 19,56,57, 65,191,214, 215 Resurrection, 99,102,110,130 Revenge, 26, 30, 31,38,98,99,112, 129,182,191,194,212,307 Revulsion, 49, 52, 56, 57, 58. See also Disgust Ricoeur, Paul, 3,11,27,35,265 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84,85,313 Ritual, 15, 25,29,30,51,55, 61, 64, 95,101,103,112,157,219,220, 225,231,268,270,272,273,301 Romanticism, 132,141,142,144 Russia, 108,132,243 Sabi, 215 Sacred, 3,4,5, 9,16, 21,29, 38, 55, 58, 60, 63,68,102,179,181,188,212, 221,235,249,257,259,263,272, 292,293,301,305,309 Sacrifice, 21,24,51, 61,91,100,171, 172,173,180,183,220,221,222, 225, 227,231,232,233, 234,240, 243,245,246,250 Salvation, 1,3,21, 39,40,47,54,55, 57, 63, 65, 66, 87, 88, 89,93,94, 95,100,102,115,146,184,185, 188,225,245,256,257,258 Satan, 38,237,248 Scapegoating, 174 Scheeler, Max, 138,149,161 Schizophrenia, 35,100 Schnitzler, Arthur, 142,143,144,145 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 140,149,155, 159 Seduction, 210 Semiotics, 5 Separation, 5,52,66,72,103,139, 151,152,194,203,205,206,207, 208,209,210,211,215,217,254, 259,292

INDEX

September 11,174,177,178,190,192, 193,194,195,196,197,198,199 Sexuality, 1,3,46,47, 53,54,57,58, 60, 61, 64, 66, 67, 68, 69, 72, 73, 75, 82,101,103,105,106,108, 110,124,125,146,147,148,150, 155,163,165,168,182,187,220, 232,235,238,239,246,248,250, 252,254,255,262,287,294 Shaheed, 188 Shamanism, 54 Shame, 7,41, 66, 67,180,184,186, 189,238,248,261 Shinto, 54, 224,225. See also Japan Sin, 2,47,48, 53,146,204,206,220, 226,233. See also Evil; Impurity; Sexuality Social justice, 172 Solar Temple, 87, 88,101, 111, 113, 115 Soul, 3,13, 51, 65, 74, 79, 84, 95,96, 103,126,186,203,207,294,305 Spiritual, 60,165 Splitting, 48,214 Stalin, Joseph, 226 Stern, Max, 149,152,153,155,161, 200,214,218,265,266 Strong adaptive approach to psychotherapy, 275,276,281,284,285, 287 Submission, 21, 91,165,166,180, 224,249,251 Suicide, 14,15,16,17, 22, 24, 25,26, 27, 28, 29,30, 33, 34,35, 36, 39, 87,95,102,107,108, 111, 112, 113,116,131,179,180,181,183, 184,185,187,188,196,200,231 Suicide Bombers, 200 Super-Ego, 89,91,146 Super-Nature, 205,206,208,209,210, 212,214,217 Superstition, 54 Symbolism, 2, 3,11, 64,205,265 Synthesizing Center, 278 Taboo, 10,54,115,141,235,243 Taliban, 181,195 Technology, 32, 82

319

Terror, 2, 3,4,5, 6, 7, 8,10,46,55, 57, 59,60, 61, 62, 63, 65, 73, 78,81, 109,110,129,150,151,152,168, 169,170,175,178,184,189,190, 192,194,195,196,197,198,199, 219,232,245,251,252,257,265, 287,292,293,294,310 Terrorism, 14,69,103,163,173,174, 178,179,182,187,192,193,194, 197,198,241,265 Terrorists, 32,33,173,174,177,178, 179,181,183,184,187,188,189, 190,193,195,198 Terror Management, 9,175 Theology, 8,40,50,53,55,57, 60, 61, 98,224,235,262,312 Theweleit, Klaus, 182,183,200 Third Reich, 222,226,228,230,232 Thoughts for the Times on War and Death, 144,149,150,177,178 Through the Looking-Glass, 299,300 Tombs, 3,4,126 Towers, 174 Tragedy, 170 Transcendence, 4,6,10,42,43,46,59, 81,92,157,170,175,207,262, 304 Transference, 5,157,163,165,166, 167,168,169,170,171,172,173, 174,175,219,253,258,260,262, 312 Transience, 4,52, 55,56,214, 215, 217 Transis, 124,129,130 Transitional Objects, 27, 72,171,269 Transmigration, 52, 60. See also Karma Trauma, 2,3,5, 8,9, 52,56, 57, 58, 66, 93,95,96,119,120,121,122,124, 131,132,133,139,147,148,152, 157,185,189,190,191,194,250, 255,265 The Trauma of Birth, 139,148 Traumatic Triggering Events, 277,279 Trigger Decoding, 276,280,281,284,287 Triumphant Death, 121 The uncanny, 71, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 82,83, 85,142,143,253,264

3

20

INDEX

Unconscious, 3, 6, 8,15, 20, 28, 30, 71, 75, 77,89,90,91,92,95,132, 139,140,141,142,144,145,146, 149,150,154,158,165,170,172, 189,190,192,209,233,240,245, 249,259,260,263,268,272,275, 276,277,278,279,280,281,282, 283,284,285,286,287,288,292, 309 Unconscious fantasies, 15 United States, 101,102,105,108,110, 114,186,189,190,194,219,222, 224,231,234,237,242 Upanishads, 50,51,53, 65,69 Vado Mori, 128 Vanitas, 128,129 Violence, 7,9,13, 32,52, 57, 60, 75, 83, 87,88, 89, 91, 95,97,105,112, 113,153,164,168,174,187,189, 193,194,217,219,220,225,226, 239,242,248,249,250,253,261, 262,280 Volkan, Vamik, 191,200 Wabi, 215 War, 10,14,19, 21, 28, 34, 39, 68, 69, 95,96,101,104,171,174,188,190, 219,222,223,225, 228,234,236, 242,243,244,264,288,289, 299 Weakness, 21, 61,96,153,156,185, 231,251

Weber, Max, 268,273 Wiertz, Antoine, 128,129,134 Winnicott, D.W., 8,11, 30, 34, 36, 61, 69, 72,85,141,155,171,268,269, 273 Womb, 3, 7, 8, 46,49,137,138,148, 207 Women, 1,10, 37,45,46,47,48, 54, 56,57,58, 61, 62, 67, 69, 74, 85, 102,103,104,105,106,124,151, 181,182,189,213,214,219,228, 232,233,234,235,236,237,238, 241, 265,270. See also Love; Mother; Misogyny World Trade Center, 174,177,181, 190,194,197,242 World War 1,128,227, 231 World War II, 133, 222, 223, 228,234 World view, 164 Worship, 2,39,54, 61,170,171,172, 173,224 Wovoka, 102 Yalom, Irvin, 5,11,150,161,214,218, 259,262,266 Zen, 38, 39, 40, 43, 60, 61, 62, 63, 68, 69,225,304 Zilboorg, Gregory, 28, 36, 214,218, 266 Zionist Occupation Government (ZOG), 236

About the Editor and Contributors Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi received his doctorate in clinical psychology from Michigan State University in 1970. Since then he has held clinical, research, and teaching positions in the United States, Europe, and Israel. He is the author, coauthor, editor, or coeditor of seventeen books and monographs on the psychology of religion, social identity, and personality development. In addition, he has a special interest in questions of ethics and ideology in psychological research and practice. In 1993 he was the recipient of the William James Award for his contributions to the psychology of religion. Rudolph Binion teaches comparative history at Brandeis University. His numerous writings have dealt with political, cultural, and demographic subjects in psychohistorical perspective. His books include Defeated Leaders: The Political Fates ofCaillaux, Jouvenel, and Tardieu (1960); Frau Lou: Nietzsche's Wayward Disciple (1968); Hitler Among the Germans (1976); Soundings: Psychohistorical and Psycholiterary (1981); After Christianity: Christian Survivals in Post Christian Culture (1986); Love Beyond Death: The Anatomy of a Myth in the Arts (1993); and Sounding the Classics: From Sophocles to Thomas Mann (1997). He is currently preparing a comparative study of group process in human history. Neil J. Elgee is a clinical professor of medicine (emeritus), University of Washington, and founder and president of the Ernest Becker Foundation.

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Luz Maria Solloa Garcia is a training and supervising analyst at the Institute for Research in Clinical and Social Psychology (IIPCS), Mexico City. She received her master's in Developmental Psychology and Learning Disabilities, and her doctorate in Psychoanalytic Research. She is a board member of the International Federation for Psychoanalytic Education (IFPE), chair of the Hispano-American Affairs Committee, postgraduate professor of Psychology at Anahuac and National University (UNAM), and board member of the Institute of Research on Clinical and Social Psychology. A psychoanalyst in private practice in Mexico City, Dr. Garcia is the author of Psychological Problems of the Child and coauthor of several other works. She has written articles on psychoanalysis, gender, brotherhood, qualitative research, and epigenic epistemology Yuko Katsuta studied French Literature at Waseda University and Medicine at Juntendo Medical School, Japan. She is a psychiatrist currently in clinical practice in New York City. A member of the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis, and affiliated with the William Alanson White Institute, Dr. Katsuta specializes in therapy with Japanese immigrants. She is presently translating Jerry S. Piven's The Madness and Perversion ofYukio Mishima into Japanese. Robert Langs has authored some of the classic texts in psychoanalysis, is the founder of the International Society for Communicative Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, and is currently Visiting Professor of Psychiatry, Mt. Sinai Medical School, New York. Daniel Liechty is a member of the graduate faculty of Illinois State University in the School of Social Work. He holds graduate degrees in theology, counseling, peace studies, and social work. A widely published writer and former hospice social worker, he is the author of Theology in Postliberal Perspective (1990) and Transference and Transcendence (1995). Siamak Movahedi is a psychoanalyst and training analyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute. Jerry S. Piven teaches at New School University and New York University, where his courses focus on the psychology of death, evil, and religion. He has earned graduate degrees in psychology, religion, philosophy, and literature, and trained for several years at the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis Institute. He is the author of Death and Delusion: A Freudian Analysis of Mortal Terror (in press), The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima (in press), and numerous articles on psychoanalysis, religion, and history.

A B O U T THE E D I T O R A N D CONTRIBUTORS

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Eva-Maria Simms is an associate professor of psychology at Duquesne University. Her background is existential-phenomenological psychology, and her writings encompass the psychological study of literature, as well as the development of children. She has written about Rilke in German and English. George Victor is a retired psychologist now devoted to historical research. His books include Invisible Men: Faces of Alienation (1973), The Riddle of Autism (1983), and Hitler: The Pathology of Evil (1998). He is currently at work on The Myth of Pearl Harbor. Hans-Jurgen Wirth is a psychoanalyst and analytic family therapist in private practice. He is a member of the German Psychoanalytical Association (DPV) and the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA). He is a private lecturer in the field of "Psychoanalysis with a Special Emphasis of Prevention, Psychotherapy and Psychoanalytic Social Psychology" in the Department of Human and Health Sciences at the University of Bremen. He is editor of the German book series Bibliothek der Psychoanalyse, publisher and editor-in-chief of the journal Psychosozial, and author of numerous articles and various books on the applications of psychoanalysis. Among his recently published books are Hitlers Enkel oder Kinder der Demokratie? Die 68-Generation, die RAF und die Fischer-Debatte (2001), and Narzissmus und Macht. Zur Psychoanalyse seelischer Storungen in der Politik (2002).