Autor: Becker, Ernest

Buch: The Denial of Death

Titel: The Denial of Death

Stichwort: Kind, Analität: Dualismus: Körper - Symbol;

Kurzinhalt: character is a face that one sets to the world, but it hides an inner defeat; two dimensions of human existence-the body and the self-can never be reconciled seamlessly

Textausschnitt: 29/a In this way we realize directly and poignantly that what we call the child's character is a modus vivendi achieved after the most unequal struggle any animal has to go through; a struggle that the child can never really understand because he doesn't know what is happening to him, why he is responding as he does, or what is really at stake in the battle. The victory in this kind of battle is truly Pyrrhic: character is a face that one sets to the world, but it hides an inner defeat. The child emerges with a name, a family, a playworld in a neighborhood, all clearly cut out for him. But his insides are full of nightmarish memories of impossible battles, terrifying anxieties of blood, pain, aloneness, darkness; mixed with limitless desires, sensations of unspeakable beauty, majesty, awe, mystery; and fantasies and hallucinations of mixtures between the two, the impossible attempt to compromise between bodies and symbols. We shall see in a few pages how sexuality enters in with its very definite focus, to further confuse and complicate the child's world. To grow up at all is to conceal the mass of internal scar tissue that throbs in our dreams. (29; Fs)

So we see that the two dimensions of human existence-the body and the self-can never be reconciled seamlessly, which explains the second half of Pascal's reflection: "not to be mad would amount to another form of madness." Here Pascal proves that great students of human nature could see behind the masks of men long before scientific psychoanalysis. They lacked clinical documentation but they saw that the coolest repression, the most convincing equanimity, or the warmest self-satisfaction were accomplished lies both toward the world and to oneself. With the clinical documentation of psychoanalytic thought, we got a fairly comprehensive picture of human character styles-what we can now call "styles of madness" after Pascal. We might say that psychoanalysis revealed to us the complex penalties of denying the truth of man's condition, what we might call the costs of pretending not to be mad. If we had to offer the briefest explanation of all the evil that men have wreaked upon themselves and upon their world since the beginnings of time right up until tomorrow, it would be not in terms of man's animal heredity, his instincts and his evolution: it would be simply in the toll that his pretense of sanity takes, as he tries to deny his true condition. But more of this vital idea later. (29f; Fs) (notabene)

Autor: Becker, Ernest

Buch: The Denial of Death

Titel: The Denial of Death

Stichwort: Freu: "anality", Analität; Dualismus: Körper - Selbst; analer Charakter: Verdrändung der conditio humana

Kurzinhalt: If the adult anxiously cuts it short ... This ... denial is what we mean by the "anal character."; the anus represents: decay and death

Textausschnitt: 30/b I am tempted to quote lavishly from the analytic riches of Brown's book, but there is no point in repeating what he has already written. Let us just observe that the basic key to the problem of anality is that it reflects the dualism of man's condition-his self and his body. Anality and its problems arise in childhood because it is then that the child already makes the alarming discovery that his body is strange and fallible and has a definite ascendancy over him by its demands and needs. Try as he may to take the greatest flights of fancy, he must always come back to it. Strangest and most degrading of all is the discovery that the body has, located in the lower rear and out of sight, a hole from which stinking smells emerge and even more, a stinking substance-most disagreeable to everyone else and eventually even to the child himself. (30f; Fs)

30b I am tempted to quote lavishly from the analytic riches of Brown's book, but there is no point in repeating what he has already written. Let us just observe that the basic key to the problem of anality is that it reflects the dualism of man's condition-his self and his body. Anality and its problems arise in childhood because it is then that the child already makes the alarming discovery that his body is strange and fallible and has a definite ascendancy over him by its demands and needs. Try as he may to take the greatest flights of fancy, he must always come back to it. Strangest and most degrading of all is the discovery that the body has, located in the lower rear and out of sight, a hole from which stinking smells emerge and even more, a stinking substance-most disagreeable to everyone else and eventually even to the child himself. (30f; Fs) (notabene)

31a At first the child is amused by his anus and feces, and gaily inserts his finger into the orifice, smelling it, smearing feces on the walls, playing games of touching objects with his anus, and the like. This is a universal form of play that does the serious work of all play: it reflects the discovery and exercise of natural bodily functions; it masters an area of strangeness; it establishes power and control over the deterministic laws of the natural world; and it does all this with symbols and fancy.*(Anm. d. Autors, jedoch nicht als Fußnote) With anal play the child is already becoming a philosopher of the human condition. ... [] The anus and its incomprehensible, repulsive product represents not only physical determinism and bouridness, but the fate as well of all that is physical: decay and death. ... [] * As anal play is an essential exercise in human mastery, it is better not interfered with. If the adult anxiously cuts it short, then he charges the animal function with an extra dose of anxiety. It becomes more threatening and has to be extra-denied and extra-avoided as an alien part of oneself. This extragrim denial is what we mean by the "anal character." An "anal" upbringing, then, would be an affirmation, via intense repression, of the horror of the degrading animal body as the human burden sans pareil.

Autor: Becker, Ernest

Buch: The Denial of Death

Titel: The Denial of Death

Stichwort: Freud, Ödipuskomplex (Oedipus complex); Problem der Abhängigkeit o. Selbstandes; orale Phase, Narzissmus

Kurzinhalt: ... because all these things reflect man's horror of his own basic animal condition.; the essence of the Oedipal complex is the project of becoming God-in Spinoza's formula-causa sui

Textausschnitt: 34b Freud often tended to understand human motives in what can be called a "primitive" way. Sometimes so much so that when disciples like Rank and Ferenzci pulled away from him they accused him of simple-mindedness. The accusation is, of course, ludicrous, but there is something to it-probably what they were driving at: the doggedness with which Freud stuck to his stark sexual formulas. No matter how much he changed later in life, he always kept alive the letter of psychoanalytic dogma and fought against a watering-down of the motives he thought he uncovered. We will understand better why in a later chapter. (34; Fs)

Take the Oedipus complex. In his early work Freud had said that this complex was the central dynamic in the psychic life. In his view, the boy child had innate drives of sexuality and he even wanted to possess his mother. At the same time, he knew that his father was his competitor, and he held in check a murderous aggressiveness toward him. The reason he held it in check was that he knew the father was physically stronger than he and that the result of an open fight would be the father's victory and the castration of the son. Hence the horror of blood, of mutilation, of the female genitals that seemed to have been mutilated; they testified that castration was a fact. (34; Fs)
Freud modified his views all through his life, but he never got a full distance away from them. No wonder: ...

... Freud never abandoned his views because they were correct in their elemental suggestiveness about the human condition-but not quite in the sense that he thought, or rather, not in the framework which he offered. Today we realize that all the talk about blood and excrement, sex and guilt, is true not because of urges to patricide and incest and fears of actual physical castration, but because all these things reflect man's horror of his own basic animal condition, a condition that he cannot-especially as a child-understand and a condition that-as an adult-he cannot accept. The guilt that he feels over bodily processes and urges is "pure" guilt: guilt as inhibition, as determinism, as smallness and boundness. It grows out of the constraint of the basic animal condition, the incomprehensible mystery of the body and the world. (35; Fs) (notabene)
Psychoanalysts have been preoccupied since the turn of the century with the experiences of childhood; but, strangely enough, it is only since "just yesterday" that we are able to put together a fairly complete and plausible commonsensical picture of why childhood is such a-crucial period for man. We owe this picture to many people, including especially the neglected Rank, but it is Norman O. Brown who has summed it up more pointedly and definitively than anyone else, I think. As he argued in his own reorientation of Freud, the Oedipus complex is not the narrowly sexual problem of lust and competitiveness that Freud made out in his early work. Rather, the Oedipus complex is the Oedipal project, a project that sums up the basic problem of the child's life: whether he will be a passive object of fate, an appendage of others, a plaything of the world or whether he will be an active center within himselfwhether he will control his own destiny with his own powers or not. As Brown put it: (35f; Fs)

The Oedipal project is not, as Freud's earlier formulations suggest, a natural love of the mother, but as his later writings recognize, a product of the conflict of ambivalence and an attempt to overcome that conflict by narcissistic inflation. The essence of the Oedipal complex is the project of becoming God-in Spinoza's formula, causa sui. [...] By the same token, it plainly exhibits infantile narcissism perverted by the flight from death. [...]
If the child's major task is a flight from helplessness and obliteration, then sexual matters are secondary and derivative, as Brown says: (36; Fs)

Thus again it appears that the sexual organizations, pregenital and genital, do not correspond to the natural distribution of Eros in the human body: they represent a hypercathexis, a supercharge, of particular bodily functions and zones, a hypercathexis induced by the fantasies of human narcissism in flight from death.

... the "oral" stage. This is the stage before the child is fully differentiated from his mother in his own consciousness, before he is fully cognizant of his own body and its functions-or, as we say technically, before his body has become an object in his phenomenological field. The mother, at this time, represents literally the child's life-world. During this period her efforts are directed to the gratification of the child's wishes, to automatic relief of his tensions and pains. The child, then, at this time, is simply "full of himself," an unflinchable manipulator and champion of his world. He lives suffused in his own omnipotence and magically controls everything he needs to feed that omnipotence. He has only to cry to get food and warmth, to point to demand the moon and get a delightful rattle in its place. No wonder we understand this period as characterized by "primary narcissism": the child triumphantly controls his world by controlling the mother. His body is his narcissistic project, and he uses it to try to "swallow the world." The "anal stage" is another way of talking about the period when the child begins to turn his attention to his own body as an object in his phenomenal field. He discovers it and seeks to control it. His narcissistic project then becomes the mastery and the possession of the world through self-control. (36f; Fs)
37a At each stage in the unfolding discovery of his world and the problems that it poses, the child is intent on shaping that world to his own aggrandizement. He has to keep the feeling that he has absolute power and control, and in order to do that he has to cultivate independence of some kind, the conviction that he is shaping his own life. That is why Brown, like Rank, could say that the Oedipal project is "inevitably self-generated in the child and is directed against the parents, irrespective of how the parents behave." To put it paradoxically, "children toilet train themselves."12 The profound meaning of this is that there is no "perfect" way to bring up a child, since he "brings himself up" by trying to shape himself into an absolute controller of his own destiny. As this aim is impossible, each character is, deeply and in some way, fantastically unreal, fundamentally imperfect. As Ferenczi so well summed it up: "Character is from the point of view of the psychoanalyst a sort of abnormality, a kind of mechanization of a particular way of reaction, rather similar to an obsessional symptom."13 (37; Fs)

Autor: Becker, Ernest

Buch: The Denial of Death

Titel: The Denial of Death

Stichwort: Kastration, Kastrationskomplex; Phantasie des Kindes (Abhängigkeit von d. Mutter)

Kurzinhalt: the "horror at the mutilated creature" is contrived, but it is the child who contrives it; the horror is the child's "own invention; it is a tissue of fantasy

Textausschnitt: ... In the newer understanding of the castration complex it is not the father's threats that the child reacts to. As Brown so well says, the castration complex comes into being solely in confrontation with the mother. This phenomenon is very crucial, and we must linger a bit on how it happens. (37f; Fs) (notabene)
It all centers on the fact that the mother monopolizes the child's world, at first, she is his world. The child cannot survive without her, yet in order to get control of his own powers he has to get free of her. The mother thus represents two things to the child, and it helps us understand why the psychoanalysts have said that ambivalence characterizes the whole early growth period. On the one hand the mother is a pure source of pleasure and satisfaction, a secure power to lean on. She must appear as the goddess of beauty and goodness, victory and power; this is her "light" side, we might say, and it is blindly attractive. But on the other hand the child has to strain against this very dependency, or he loses the feeling that he has aegis over his own powers. That is another way of saying that the mother, by representing secure biological dependence, is also a fundamental threat. (38; Fs)

The child comes to perceive her as a threat, which is already the beginning of the castration complex in
confrontation with her. ...

The fact is that the "horror at the mutilated creature" is contrived, but it is the child who contrives it. Psychoanalysts reported faithfully what their neurotic patients told them, even if they had to pry just the right words into their expressions. What troubles neurotics-as it troubles most people-is their own powerlessness; they must find something to set themselves against. If the mother represents biological dependence, then the dependence can be fought against by focussing it on the fact of sexual differentiation. If the child is to be truly causa sui, then he must aggressively defy the parents in some way, move beyond them and the threats and temptations they embody. The genitals are a small thing in the child's perceptual world; hardly enough to be traumatic just because they lack protuberance. As Brown so well put it, the horror is the child's "own invention; it is a tissue of fantasy inseparable from his own fantastic project of becoming father of himself (and, as fantasy, only remotely connected with actual sight of the female genitalia)," Or, put another way, ...

Autor: Becker, Ernest

Buch: Escape from Evil

Titel: Escape from Evil

Stichwort: Sünde als Projekt causa sui; säkulare Welt -> Aufhebung der Sünde; Sühne durch Anhäufung von Dingen

Kurzinhalt: sin: separation from the powers and protection of the gods, a setting up of oneself as a causa sui; completely secular -> we no longer have any problem with sin

Textausschnitt: 88a No wonder the confusion of the ancient world was so great and tension and anxiety were so high: men had already amassed great burdens of guilt by amassing possessions, and there was no easy way to atone for this. Men were no longer safely tucked into the group, but they still had their human burdens. As Brown puts it, men were still in flight from themselves, from their own mortality. The burden of time, the tension between the visible and the invisible worlds, and the guilt of possessions must have been high on sensitive souls. This is how we understand the growth of the notion of "sin" historically. Theologically, sin means literally separation from the powers and protection of the gods, a setting up of oneself as a causa sui. Sin is the experience of uncertainty in one's relation to the divine ground of his being; he no longer is sure of possessing the right connection, the right means of expiation. He feels alone, exposed, weighed down by the burden of guilt accumulated in this world by the acts of his body and his material desires. His experience of the physicalness of life obsesses him. Modern missionaries found that the notion of sin was difficult to translate to primitives, who had no word for it; we understand now that they had little experience of isolation or separateness from the group or the ancestral pool of souls. The experience of sin still today, for simple believers, is merely one of "uncleanliness" and straightforward prohibition of specific acts. It is not the experience of one's whole life as a problem. (Fs) (notabene)

88b No wonder that early converts to Christianity could renounce everything in a decisive way that today seems strangely self-sacrificial to us. We are not in the same bind. We have completely eclipsed the tension of the invisible-visible dichotomy by simply denying the invisible world. We have put time on a wholly unilinear basis, and so money and cumulative interest have become our unequivocal god. Christianity proved to be an idealistic interlude that failed; and so we have reaffirmed the ancient pursuit of wealth with a vengeance and straightforward dedication of which archaic man was incapable. We have become completely secular. Accordingly, we no longer have any problem with sin, since there is nothing to be separated from: everything is here, in one's possessions, in his body. There is no experience of sin where the body is not felt to be a problem, where one imagines that he does indeed have full control over his own destiny on the physical level alone. Separation from the divine powers is not felt because these powers are denied by the primary power of the visible things. In other words, we have succeeded better than even the primitives in avoiding sin, by simply denying the existence of the invisible dimension to which it is related. In contrast with guilt, we don't even have to repress it, since it does not arise in our experience of the world. (Fs) (notabene)

89a Brown points out that the secularization of the economy means that we can no longer be redeemed by work, since the creation of a surplus is no longer addressed as a gift to the gods. Which means that the new god Money that we pursue so dedicatedly is not a god that gives expiation! It is perverse. We wonder how we could allow ourselves to do this to ourselves, but right away we know the answer: we didn't take command of history at some given point where civilization started. Not even the noble and thoughtful Athenians could manage that. Rather, history took command of us in our original drivenness toward heroism; and our urge to heroism has always taken the nearest means at hand. Brown says that the result of this secularization process is that we have an economy "driven by the pure sense of guilt, unmitigated by any sense of redemption." What has happened to guilt? It is "repressed by denial into the unconscious" - which can only mean that we are "more uncontrollably driven" by it. Another way of putting this is to say that man has changed from the giving animal, the one who passes things on, to the wholly taking and keeping one. By continually taking and piling and computing interest and leaving to one's heirs, man contrives the illusion that he is in complete control of his destiny. After all, accumulated things are a visible testimonial to power, to the fact that one is not limited or dependent. Man imagines that the causa sui project is firmly in his hands, that he is the heroic maker and doer who takes what he creates, what is rightfully his. And so we see how modern man, in his one-dimensional economics, is driven by the lie of his life, by his denial of limitation, of the true state of natural affairs. (Fs)

89b If we sum it all up historically, we seem to be able to say that man became a greater victim of his drivenness when heroism pushed expiation out of the picture; man was now giving expression to only one side of his nature. He still needs expiation for the peace of his life because he is stuck with his natural and universal experience of guilt. Brown says that the "man who takes is strong enough to shoulder his own guilt," that the process of expiation of modern man "has been reified and passes into piles of stone and gold." Granted that money represents the new causa sui project, that the infantile omnipotence is no longer in one's body but in things. But to repress guilt is not to "shoulder" it; it is not that guilt has vanished by being transmuted into things or expiated by things; rather, as Freud taught us, that which is denied must come out by some other means. History is the tragic record of heroism and expiation out of control and of man's efforts to earn expiation in new, frantically driven and contrived ways. The burden of guilt created by cumulative possessions, linear time, and secularization is assuredly greater than that experienced by primitive man; it has to come out some way. (Fs) (notabene)

Autor: Becker, Ernest

Buch: The Denial of Death

Titel: The Denial of Death

Stichwort: Ambivalenz: Sexualität; Mythos; transzendentes Geheimnis - Sexus

Kurzinhalt: We try to get metaphysical answers out of the body that the body-as a material thing-cannot possibly give. We try to answer the transcendent mystery of creation by experiences in one, partial, physical product of that creation.

Textausschnitt: 44a The body, then, is one's animal fate that has to be struggled against in some ways. At the same time, it offers experiences and sensations, concrete pleasure that the inner symbolic world lacks. No wonder man is impaled on the horns of sexual problems, why Freud saw that sex was so prominent in human life-especially in the neurotic conflicts of his patients. Sex is an inevitable component of man's confusion over the meaning of his life, a meaning split hopelessly into two realms-symbols (freedom) and body (fate). No wonder, too, that most of us never abandon entirely the early attempts of the child to use the body and its appendages as a fortress or a machine to magically coerce the world. We try to get metaphysical answers out of the body that the body-as a material thing-cannot possibly give. We try to answer the transcendent mystery of creation by experiences in one, partial, physical product of that creation. This is why the mystique of sex is so widely practiced-say, in traditional France-and at the same time is so disillusioning. It is comfortingly infantile in its indulgence and its pleasure, yet so self-defeating of real awareness and growth, if the person is using it to try to answer metaphysical questions. It then becomes a lie about reality, a screen against full consciousness. If the
adult reduces the problem of life to the area of sexuality, he repeats the fetishization of the child who focusses the problem of the mother upon her genitals. Sex then becomes a screen for terror, a fetishization of full consciousness about the real problem of life. (44f; Fs) (notabene)

45a But this discussion doesn't exhaust the reasons that sex is so prominent a part of the confusions of life. Sex is also a positive way of working on one's personal freedom project. After all, it is one of the few areas of real privacy that a person has in an existence that is almost wholly social, entirely shaped by the parents and society. In this sense, sex as a project represents a retreat from the standardizations and monopolizations of the social world. No wonder people dedicate themselves so all-consumingly to it, often from childhood on in the form of secret masturbations that represent a protest and a triumph of the personal self. As we will see in Part II of this book, Rank goes so far as to say that this use of sex explains all sexual conflicts in the individual-"from masturbation to the most varied perversions." The person attempts to use his sex in an entirely individual way in order to control it and relieve it of its determinism. It is as though one tried to transcend the body by depriving it entirely of its given character, to make sport and new invention in place of what nature "intended." The "perversions" of children certainly show this very clearly: they are the true artists of the body, using it as clay to assert their symbolic mastery. Freud saw this and recorded it as "polymorphous perversity"-which is one way of talking about it. But he seems not to have realized that this kind of play is already a very serious attempt to transcend determinism, not merely an animal search for a variety of body-zone pleasures. (45; Fs)

45b By the time the child grows up, the inverted search for a personal existence through perversity gets set in an individual mold, and it becomes more secret. It has to be secret because the community won't stand for the attempt by people to wholly individualize themselves. If there is going to be a victory over human incompleteness and limitation, it has to be a social project and not an individual one. Society wants to be the one to decide how people are to transcend death; it will tolerate the causa-sui project only if it fits into the standard social project. Otherwise there is the alarm of "Anarchy!" This is one of the reasons for bigotry and censorship of all kinds over personal morality: people fear that the standard morality will be undermined-another way of saying that they fear they will no longer be able to control life and death. A person is said to be "socialized" precisely when he accepts to "sublimate" the body-sexual character of his Oedipal project. Now these euphemisms mean usually that he accepts to work on becoming the father of himself by abandoning his own project and by giving it over to "The Fathers." The castration complex has done its work, and one submits to "social reality"; he can now deflate his own desires and claims and can play it safe in the world of the powerful elders. He can even give his body over to the tribe, the state, the embracing magical umbrella of the elders and their symbols; that way it will no longer be a dangerous negation for him. But there is no real difference between a childish impossibility and an adult one; the only thing that the person achieves is a practiced self-deceit-what we call the "mature" character." (45f; Fs)

Autor: Becker, Ernest

Buch: The Denial of Death

Titel: The Denial of Death

Stichwort: Perversion; Ödipus-Komplex, Fortpflanzung; Streben nach Unsterblichkeit

Kurzinhalt: Oedipus complex; in other words, perversion is a protest against species sameness;

Textausschnitt: 231a In other words, perversion is a protest against species sameness, against submergence of the individuality into the body. It is even a focus of personal freedom vis-a-vis the family, one's own secret way of affirming himself against all standardization. Rhome/rolandank even makes the breathtaking speculation that the Oedipus complex in the classic Freudian understanding may be an attempt by the child to resist the family organization, the dutiful role of son or daughter, the absorption into the collective, by affirming his own ego. Even in its biological expression, then, the Oedipus complex might be an attempt to transcend the role of obedient child, to find freedom and individuality through sex through a break-up of the family organization. In order to understand it we must once again emphasize the basic motive of man, without which nothing vital can be understood -self-perpetuation. Man is divided into two distinct kinds of experience-physical and mental, or bodily and symbolic. The problem of self-perpetuation thus presents itself in two distinct forms. One, the body, is standardized and given; the other, the self, is personalized and achieved. How is man going to succeed himself, how is he going to leave behind a replica of himself or a part of himself to live on? Is he going to leave behind a replica of his body or of his spirit? If he procreates bodily he satisfies the problem of succession, but in a more or less standardized species form. Although he perpetuates himself in his offspring, who may resemble him and may carry some of his "blood" and the mystical quality of his family ancestors, he may not feel that he is truly perpetuating his own inner self, his distinctive personality, his spirit, as it were. He wants to achieve something more than a mere animal succession. The distinctive human problem from time immemorial has been the need to spiritualize human life, to lift it onto a special immortal plane, beyond the cycles of life and death that characterize all other organisms. This is one of the reasons that sexuality has from the beginning been under taboos; it had to be lifted from the plane of physical fertilization to a spiritual one. (231; Fs) (notabene)
231b By approaching the problem of succession or self-perpetuation in its fully dualistic nature, Rank was able to understand the deeper meanings of Greek homosexuality:

Autor: Becker, Ernest

Buch: The Denial of Death

Titel: The Denial of Death

Stichwort: Otto Rank: Griechentum - Homosexualität, causa-sui project

Kurzinhalt: Rank was able to understand the deeper meanings of Greek homosexuality:

Textausschnitt: 231b By approaching the problem of succession or self-perpetuation in its fully dualistic nature, Rank was able to understand the deeper meanings of Greek homosexuality:

Seen in this light, boy-love, which, as Plato tells us, aimed perpetually at the improvement and perfection of the beloved youth, appears definitely as [...] a spiritual perfecting in the other person, who becomes transferred into the worthy successor of oneself here on earth; and that, not on the basis of the biological procreation of one's body, but in the sense of the spiritual immortality-symbolism in the pupil, the younger.

In other words, the Greek sought to impress his inner self, his spirit or soul, upon the beloved youth. This spiritual friendship was designed to produce a son in whom one's soul would survive:
In boy-love, man fertilized both spiritually and otherwise the living image of his own soul, which seemed materialized in an ego as idealized and as much like his own body as was possible.

232a This brilliant speculation enables us to understand some of the ideal motives for homosexuality, not only of the Greeks, but of especially individualized and creative persons like Michelangelo. For such a one, apparently, homosexuality has nothing to do with the sex organs of the beloved but rather represents a struggle to create one's own rebirth in the "closest possible likeness," which, as Rank says, is obviously to be found in one's own sex. In terms of our discussion we can see that this attempt represents the complete causa-sui project: to create all by oneself a spiritual, intellectual, and physically similar replica of oneself: the perfectly individualized self-perpetuation or immortality symbol.

232b If the castration complex represents the admission by the child that his animal body is a bankrupt causa-sui project, what better way to defy the body than by abandoning its sexual role entirely? In this sense perversions would equal a total freedom from the castration complex; they are a hyperprotest against species sameness. But Rank was so intent on accenting the positive, the ideal side of perversion that he almost obscured the overall picture. We are no longer ancient Greeks, and very few of us are Michelangelos; in a word, we are not dominated by ideal motives nor do we possess the highest powers of genius. Routine perversions are protests out of weakness rather than strength; they represent the bankruptcy of talent rather than the quintessence of it. If the neurotic is the "artiste manque," all the more is the usual homosexual the "Greek manque," the Michelangelo without secure power and talent. The pervert is the clumsy artist trying desperately for a counter-illusion that preserves his individuality-but from within a limited talent and powers: hence the fear of the sexual role, of being gobbled up by the woman, carried away by one's own body, and so on. As F. H. Allen-an earlier follower of Rank-pointed out, the homosexual is often one who chooses a body like his own because of his terror of the difference of the woman, his lack of strength to support such a difference.48 In fact, we might say that the pervert represents a striving for individuality precisely because he does not feel individual at all and has little power to sustain an identity. Perversions represent an impoverished and ludicrous claim for a sharply defined personality by those least equipped by their early developmental training to exercise such a claim. If, as Rank says, perversions are a striving for freedom, we must add that they usually represent such a striving by those least equipped to be able to stand freedom. They flee the species slavery not out of strength but out of weakness, an inability to support the purely animal side of their nature. As we saw above, the childhood experience is crucial in developing a secure sense of one's body, firm identification with the father, strong ego control over oneself, and dependable interpersonal skills. Only if one achieves these can he "do the species role" in a self-forgetful way, a way that does not threaten to submerge him with annihilation anxiety. (Fs)