The Curse: Human self-deception

How can we, the “man on the street”, Tom & Jane, gain an insight into the meaning of this dread of death? A dread so strong that we kill to prevent that death and that we are so dedicated to repressing that dread that many things we do is done in that behalf.

I suspect most of us have experienced the feeling we call ‘claustrophobia’. I have experienced that feeling and I am confident that I would do almost anything to stop that experience. I suspect that it was the dread of death that caused the inmates of the Nazi concentration camps to tolerate such terror as daily existence must have been for those imprisoned in those camps.

I suspect that dread of death is the reason that ‘water-boarding’ is such a popular form of torture. Torture is, I suspect, an effort to induce that same dread that we experience in a claustrophobic episode. I think that we might properly use the metaphor ‘dread of death is claustrophobia’ or perhaps ‘dread of death is water-boarding’.

The curse is anything that lies about the creatureliness of wo/man. Any effort to make a lofty spiritual character out of sapiens represents an ‘occultism’, i.e. an ‘occult’ is anything that attempts to make supernatural the creatureliness of humans, which is the constant preoccupation of human society.

Jung and Adler recognized from the beginning that Freud was wrong in his dogmatic insistence regarding wo/man’s innate instincts of sexuality and aggression; however, they also recognized that Freud had correctly diagnosed and emphasized wo/man’s creatureliness.

Freud “reflected the true intuitions of genius, even though the particular intellectual counter-part of that emotion—the sexual theory—proved to be wrong. Man’s body was a “curse of fate”, and culture was built upon repression—not because man was a seeker only of sexuality, of pleasure, of life and expansiveness, as Freud thought, but because man was also primarily an avoider of death.”

Not sexuality, as Freud theorized, but the consciousness of death is the primary repression. Freud recognized the curse early and dedicated his life toward exposing it. However, he missed the correct scientific fact that was the source of the curse; this being the repression upon which society is constructed.

Becker theorizes that Freud’s mistake is reveled in one key idea, which emerged in his later writings. “Death instinct” was introduced by Freud in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”. This theory was an attempt to patch up his libido theory, which he was very reluctant to reject. The death instinct was “a built in urge toward death as well as toward life”. He theorized that the death instinct was an instinctive urge to die, which was redirected outward into the desire to kill. Wo/man defeats this instinct by killing others.

Psychology has rejected Freud’s death instinct theory for a simpler one. Killing represents a symbolic solution that results from a fusion of animal anxiety with the death fear of the human animal. Rank says “the death fear of the ego is lessoned by the killing, the sacrifice, of the other; through the death of the other, one buys oneself free from the penalty of dying, of being killed.”

Churchill said something to the effect that “there is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at and missed”.

Quotes from “The Denial of Death”; Pulitzer Prize winner for nonfiction by Ernest Becker.

Should I believe Freud or Becker?
Should I believe the writings of many other writers?
Should I reach my own conclusion?

I notice that censors are much more restrictive about hiding sexual acts and organs from us than the sight of people being killed.

Certainly awareness of both things, sex and death, and repressed and carefully controlled by society.

When I think of childhood, however, I know that every child has the way they move, what parts of their bodies they touch and how and when, how they interact with other children adn adults, actively controlled and monitored.

Sure, when death comes up it is whisked out of view, but the complicated adn vast array of taboos around sex and sexuality were a daily part of life.

I actually don't know why we have to have competition. This one is the most repressed.

I do see culture working very hard to keep us in small boxes where the range of behavior is restricted adn controlled.

To me this seems primarily aimed at emotional expression and sexuality.

I think it is a creature expressing its full life energy, its passion that is the most threatening.

And many governments, openly repressive ones, like to remind their people that they will die and that this death can come sooner rather than later.

granty

You should get a "Friends of the Library" card from a local college and borrow books from that library and decide for your self!

granty

You should get a "Friends of the Library" card from a local college and borrow books from that library and decide for your self!

Well, of course I have. I remain unconvinced by Becker's ideas of what is most repressed.

Back when I watched TV I saw lots death and dying. I saw whole movies devoted to watching the main charcter die slowly of cancer. There was even one on an athiest.

I never saw a penis, poop, vagina, someone peeing...you know all that stuff that Freud wrote about.

Of course nowadays adults can legally see sex everywhere, but major media, newspapers, magazines, the networks etc., have strict rules about sexual imagery and description of sexual acts. Death however can be gone into in sometimes rather grusome detail.

In the movies, one penis and you've got an R rating. Curse words can get you an R rating. But hundreds could die in a PG 13.

As an adult wandering through society I find it much more likely for not close friends and aquaintances to talk about death as they have experienced it (the loss of a relative, for example) then they would talk about sex (as they experienced it, say last night's premature ejaculation).

We should also remember that Freud helped open the door to the discussion of sex in the west. It moved out of intellectual circles and via analysts out into the middle class. He helped unrepress Sex. I never liked his death instinct theory much, but it did put the subject on the table. Some of his followers, probably Reich first and foremost went even further in centering their work on sex and blocked sexual energy and this also has had effects on society.

Still it is not clear to me that death taboos are stronger.

I actually think the strongest taboos are around the expression of emotion. A look at the ever expanding pharmacologization of emotions out there is one sign of this.

Repressing how we actually feel about what is happening around us and what has happened to us in the past is the fundamental repression as far as can see and experience. There are trends against this repression and there are trends or backlashes to reinforce this repression.

But most people (having received encouragement to repress and punishments for expressing) are but outlines of themselves. Holding in their, denying, not noticing (and drugging, eating away, overloading, drinking away) their honest emotional reactions to life ( and death and sex, but many other things as well.)