I have made frequent reference to Ernest Becker’s (The Denial of Death, 1973) observation that “man is the god that shits” because it so graphically describes the human condition that unavoidably leads to existential anxiety and dread. I’ve just given it a reread and recommend it to anyone who might wish to understand this condition and its psychological consequences from a “scientific” psychoanalytic perspective. It amazingly parallels (my take on) Zhuangzi’s analysis and proposed response.
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Becker tells us that this human condition results in two unavoidable neuroses—repression and transference. Repression is essentially the denial of death, and though we do well to face it squarely and as “heroically” as we can, there will always be some degree of repression involved. Becker is careful to avoid the mistake of “psychoanalytical religionists” who suggest a possible end to all repression. Instead, he suggests a project of continual approximation of that ideal.
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The great paradox of the human experience is seen in the inevitability of death, on the one hand, and the organismic impulse of the “life force” (qi?!) on the other. We wish to live, but must die. Our task is to create (not discover) a creative response to both without negating either. To do so is to live in authenticity.
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Transference is our natural response to this paradox. (To be “normal” is to be neurotic.) Transference is the psychological act by which we attempt to resolve our need for the ultimate and sure grounding that we cannot find in ourselves. Religion has typically fulfilled this role, though there are innumerable other ways in which it manifests. A life-project (“making a difference”), trusting a guru or a psychoanalyst, stamp-collecting, foot-fetishism, and philosophizing are all types of transference. Some form of transference is both required and unavoidable. The trick then is to choose the object of one’s transference in full awareness of the necessarily illusory nature of the act. This too is to live in authenticity.
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Becker makes much of Soren Kierkegaard’s psychological insights and response, putting him on a par with Freud and his greatest disciples. Kierkegaard recognized both this need for a seemingly religious transference and the inauthenticity of religious belief taken as objectively “true”. Thus his “leap of faith” and life lived in ambiguity and doubt. But Kierkegaard’s response still had the Judeo-Christian God as its object—and could not, therefore, be open and empty—the most authentic and consistent reflection of the human condition. Becker, unfortunately, seems to have been unaware of the possibility of a transference that has no object, but rather expresses itself as a release into the utterly unknowable, and is therefore empty. (He dismisses Buddhism out of hand, and correctly criticizes Jung for his religious forays into Eastern mysticism.) This was Zhuangzi’s response to the human condition—a trusting release into openness—as valid today as it was two and a half millennia ago. This is an open transference where some transference will happen in any case, and one that allows for greater existential authenticity than foot- or God-fetishism.