The Psychoanalyst K ierkegaard
Ernest Becker
The Denial of Death
CHAPTER FIVE
The Psychoanalyst Kierkegaard
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Kierkegaard’s Characterology
Kierkegaard’s whole understanding of man’s character is that it is a structure built up to avoid perception of the “terror, perdition and annihilation that dwell next door to every man.” He understood psychology the way a contemporary psychoanalyst does: that its task is to discover the strategies that a person uses to avoid anxiety. What style does he use to function automatically and uncritically in the world, and how does this style cripple his true growth and freedom of action and choice? Or, in words that are almost Kierkegaard’s: how is a person being enslaved by his characterological lie about himself ?
Kierkegaard described these styles with a brilliance that today seems uncanny and with a vocabulary that sums up much of the psychoanalytic theory of character defenses. Whereas today we talk about the “mechanisms of defense” such as repression and denial, Kierkegaard talked about the same things with different terms: he referred to the fact that most men live in a “half-obscurity” about their own condition, they are in a state of “shut-upness” wherein they block off their own perceptions of reality. He understood the compulsive character, the rigidity of the person who has had to build extra-thick defenses against anxiety, a heavy character armor, and he described him in the following terms:
"A partisan of the most rigid orthodoxy … knows it all, he bows before the holy, truth is for him an ensemble of ceremonies, he talks about presenting himself before the throne of God, of how many times one must bow, he knows everything the same way as does the pupil who is able to demonstrate a mathematical proposition with the letters ABC, but not when they are changed to DEF. He is therefore in dread whenever he hears something not arranged in the same order."
There is no doubt that by “shut-upness” Kierkegaard means what we today refer to by repression; it is the closed personality, the one who has fenced himself around in childhood, not tested his own powers in action, not been free to discover himself and his world in a relaxed way. If the child is not burdened by too much parental blocking of his action, too much infection with the parents’ anxieties, he can develop his defenses in a less monopolizing way, can remain somewhat fluid and open in character. He is prepared to test reality more in terms of his own action and experimentation and less on the basis of delegated authority and prejudgment or preperception.
Kierkegaard understood this difference by making a distinction between “lofty” shut-upness and “mistaken” shut-upness. He went on to give a Rousseau-like enjoinder for raising children with the right kind of character orientation:
"It is of infinite importance that a child be brought up with a conception of the lofty shut-upness [reserve], and be saved from the mistaken kind. In an external respect it is easy to perceive when the moment has arrived that one ought to let the child walk alone; … the art is to be constantly present and yet not be present, to let the child be allowed to develop itself, while nevertheless one has constantly a survey clearly before one. The art is to leave the child to itself in the very highest measure and on the greatest possible scale, and to express this apparent abandonment in such a way that, unobserved, one at the same time knows everything… . And the father who educates or does everything for the child entrusted to him, but has not prevented him from becoming shut-up, has incurred a great
accountability."
Just as Rousseau and Dewey, Kierkegaard is warning the parent to let the child do his own exploration of the world and develop his own sure experimental powers. He knows that the child has to be protected against dangers and that watchfulness by the parent is of vital importance, but he doesn’t want the parent to obtrude his own anxieties into the picture, to cut off the child’s action before it is absolutely necessary. Today we know that such an upbringing alone gives the child a self-confidence in the face of experience that he would not have if he were overly blocked: it gives him an “inner sustainment.”
And it is precisely this inner sustainment confidence in the face of experience that he would not have if he were overly blocked: it gives him an “inner sustainment.” And it is precisely this inner sustainment that allows the child to develop a “lofty” shut-upness, or reserve: that is, an ego-controlled and self-confident appraisal of the world by a personality that can open up more easily to experience. “Mistaken” shut-upness, on the other hand, is the result of too much blockage, too much anxiety, too much effort to face up to experience by an organism that has been overburdened and weakened in its own controls: it means, therefore, more automatic repression by an essentially closed personality.
And so, for Kierkegaard, the “good” is the opening toward new possibility and choice, the ability to face into anxiety; the closed is the evil, that which turns one away from newness and broader perceptions and experiences; the closed shuts out revelation, obtrudes a veil between the person and his own situation in the world. Ideally these should be transparent, but for the closed person they are opaque. It is easy to see that shut-upness is precisely what we have called “the lie of character,” and Kierkegaard calls it the same thing:
"It is easy to see that shut-upness eo ipso signifies a lie, or, if you prefer, untruth. But untruth is precisely unfreedom … the elasticity of freedom is consumed in the service of close reserve… . Close reserve was the effect of the negating retrenchment of the ego in the individuality."
This is a perfectly contemporary psychoanalytic description of the costs of repression on the total personality. I am omitting Kierkegaard’s more detailed and penetrating analysis of how the person becomes fragmented within himself by the repression, how the real perception of reality dwells under the surface, close at hand, ready to break through the repression, how the repression leaves the personality seemingly intact, seemingly functioning as a whole, in continuity — but how that continuity is broken, how the personality is really at the mercy of the discontinuity expressed by the repression. To a modern, clinically-trained mind such an analysis must be truly marvelous.
Kierkegaard understood that the lie of character is built up because the child needs to adjust to the world, to the parents, and to his own existential dilemmas. It is built up before the child has a chance to learn about himself in an open or free way, and thus character defenses are automatic and unconscious. The problem is that the child becomes dependent on them and comes to be encased in his own character armor, unable to see freely beyond his own prison or into himself, into the defenses he is using, the things that are determining his unfreedom.
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Normal Neurosis
Most people, of course, avoid the psychotic dead ends out of the existential dilemma. They are fortunate enough to be able to stay on the middle ground of “philistinism.” Breakdown occurs either because of too much possibility or too little; philistinism, as we observed earlier, knows its real enemy and tries to play it safe with freedom. Here is how Kierkegaard sums up the three alternatives available to men; the first two correspond to the psychotic syndromes of schizophrenia and depression:
"For with the audacity of despair that man soared aloft who ran wild in possibility; but crushed down by despair that man strains himself against existence to whom everything has become necessary. But philistinism spiritlessly celebrates its triumph … imagines itself to be the master, does not take note that precisely thereby it has taken itself captive to be the slave of spiritlessness and to be the most pitiful of all things."
In other words, philistinism is what we would call “normal neurosis.” Most men figure out how to live safely within the probabilities of a given set of social rules. The Philistine trusts that by keeping himself at a low level of personal intensity he can avoid being pulled off balance by experience; philistinism works, as Kierkegaard said, by “tranquilizing itself with the trivial.” His analysis was written almost a century before Freud spoke of the possibility of “social neuroses,” the “pathology of whole cultural communities.”
Kierkegaard’s threefold typology does not exhaust the character of man. He knows that all men are not so “immediate” or shallow, so automatically built into their culture, so securely embedded in things and in others, so trustingly a reflex of their world. Also, comparatively few people end up on the psychotic extremes of the continuum of human defeat; some win a degree of self-realization without surrender to complete spiritlessness or slavery. And here Kierkegaard’s analysis becomes the most telling: he is attempting to ferret people out of the lie of their lives whose lives do not look like a lie, who seem to succeed in being true,
complete and authentic persons.
There is the type of man who has great contempt for “immediacy,” who tries to cultivate his interiority, base his pride on something deeper and inner, create a distance between himself and the average man. Kierkegaard calls this type of man the “introvert.” He is a little more concerned with what it means to be a person, with individuality and uniqueness. He enjoys solitude and withdraws periodically to reflect, perhaps to nurse ideas about his secret self, what it might be.
This, after all is said and done, is the only real problem of life, the only worthwhile preoccupation of man: What is one’s true talent, his secret gift, his authentic vocation? In what way is one truly unique, and how can he express this uniqueness, give it form, dedicate it to something beyond himself ? How can the person take his private inner being, the great mystery that he feels at the heart of himself, his emotions, his yearnings and use them to live more distinctively, to enrich both himself and mankind with the peculiar quality of his talent?
In adolescence, most of us throb with this dilemma, expressing it either with words and thoughts or with simple numb pain and longing. But usually life suck us up into standardized activities. The social hero-system into which we are born marks out paths for our heroism,
paths to which we conform, to which we shape ourselves so that we can please others, become what they expect us to be. And instead of working our inner secret we gradually cover it over and forget it, while we become purely external men, playing successfully the standardized hero-game into which we happen to fall by accident, by family connection, by reflex patriotism, or by the simple need to eat and the urge to procreate.
I am not saying that Kierkegaard’s “introvert” keeps this inner quest fully alive or conscious, only that it represents somewhat more of a dimly aware problem than it does with the swallowed- up immediate man. Kierkegaard’s introvert feels that he is something different from the world, has something in himself that the world cannot reflect, cannot in its immediacy and shallowness appreciate; and so he holds himself somewhat apart from that world. But not too much, not completely. It would be so nice to be the self he wants to be, to realize his vocation, his authentic talent, but it is dangerous, it might upset his world completely. He is after all, basically weak, in a position of compromise: not an immediate man, but not a real man either, even though he gives the appearance of it. Kierkegaard
describes him:
"… outwardly he is completely “a real man.” He is a university man, husband and father, an uncommonly competent civil functionary even, a respectable father, very gentle to his wife and carefulness itself with respect to his children. And a Christian? Well, yes, he is that too after a sort; however, he preferably avoids talking on the subject… . He very seldom goes to church, because it seems to him that most parsons really don’t know what they are talking about. He makes an exception in the case of one particular priest of whom he concedes that he knows what he is talking about, but he doesn’t want to hear him for another reason, because he has a fear that this might lead him too far."
“Too far” because he does not really want to push the problem of his uniqueness to any total confrontation:
"That which as a husband makes him so gentle and as a father so careful is, apart from his good-nature and his sense of duty, the admission he has made to himself in his most inward reserve concerning his weakness."
And so he lives in a kind of “incognito,” content to toy — in his periodic solitudes — with the idea of who he might really be; content to insist on a “little difference,” to pride himself on a vaguely-felt superiority.
But this is not an easy position to maintain with equanimity. It is rare, says Kierkegaard, to continue on in it. Once you pose the problem of what it means to be a person, even dumbly, weakly, or with a veneer of pride about your imagined difference from others, you may be in trouble. Introversion is impotence, but an impotence already self-conscious to a degree, and it can become troublesome. It may lead to a chafing at one’s dependency on his family and his job, an ulcerous gnawing as a reaction to one’s embeddedness, a feeling of slavery in one’s safety. For a strong person it may become intolerable, and he may try to break out of it, sometimes by suicide, sometimes by drowning himself desperately in the world and in the rush of experience.
And this brings us to our final type of man: the one who asserts himself out of defiance of his own weakness, who tries to be a god unto himself, the master of his fate, a self-created man. He will not be merely the pawn of others, of society; he will not be a passive sufferer and secret dreamer, nursing his own inner flame in oblivion. He will plunge into life, into the distractions of great undertakings, he will become a restless spirit … which wants to forget … Or he will seek forgetfulness in sensuality, perhaps in debauchery… At its extreme, defiant self-creation can become demonic, a passion which Kierkegaard calls “demoniac rage,” an attack on all of life for what it has dared to do to one, a revolt against existence itself.
In our time we would have no trouble recognizing these forms of defiant self-creation. We can see their effects so clearly on both personal and social levels. We are witness to the new cult of sensuality that seems to be repeating the sexual naturalism of the ancient Roman world. It is a living for the day alone, with a defiance of tomorrow; an immersion in the body and its immediate experiences and sensations, in the intensity of touch, swelling flesh, taste and smell. Its aim is to deny one’s lack of control over events, his powerlessness, his vagueness as a person in a mechanical world spinning into decay and death.
I am not saying that this is bad, this rediscovery and reassertion of one’s basic vitality as an animal. The modern world, after all, has wanted to deny the person even his own body, even his emanation from his animal center; it has wanted to make him completely a depersonalized abstraction. But man kept his apelike body and found he could use it as a base for fleshy and hairy self-assertion — and damn the bureaucrats. The only thing that might be undignified about it is its desperate reflexivity, a defiance that is not reflective and so not completely self-possessed.
Socially, too, we have seen a defiant Promethianism that is basically innocuous: the confident power than can catapult man to the moon and free him somewhat of his complete dependence and confinement on earth — at least in his imagination. The ugly side of this Promethianism is that it, too, is thoughtless, an empty-headed immersion in the delights of technics with no thought to goals or meaning; so man performs on the moon by hitting golf balls that do not swerve in the lack of atmosphere. The technical triumph of a versatile ape, as the makers of the film 2001 so chillingly conveyed to us. On more ominous levels, as we shall develop later on, modern man’s defiance of accident, evil, and death takes the form of skyrocketing production of consumer and military goods. Carried to its
demonic extreme this defiance gave us Hitler and Vietnam: a rage against our impotence, a defiance of our animal condition, our pathetic creature limitations. If we don’t have the omnipotence of gods, we at least can destroy like gods."
