it stars saddam said:

deCypher said:

Hypothesizing that every human is consumed by an unconscious death anxiety seems just like Freud postulating that every male is consumed by the Oedipal complex: both are unprovable assertions and seem more like an attempt to twist the facts to prove the author's pet theory rather than examine true human motivations.

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I highly recommend reading Life Against Death by Norman O. Brown before you write off Freud entirely.  I consider it one of the most important texts on psychoanalysis that I have encountered.  The Oedipus complex is indeed a reality, though its nature is often misunderstood.  Many falsely assume that it simply means that every child wants to kill his father and fuck his mother.  It's not quite that simple.  Brown explains that the Oedipus complex is essentially a desire to become one's own father, or "self-existent," free from the trappings of the ego and the external world.  In infancy, the child exists in a sort of solipsistic state of polymorphously perverse sexuality in which all of his needs are met by his mother and he is not burdened with inhibitions or social demands.  One could say that for the first 2 years of the child's life, he exists as "pure id," to use Freud's terminology.  However, once he begins to develop self-awareness, the child is confronted with the reality principle, an event which is naturally traumatic.  In flight from the reality principle, the child envisions a return to his mother's womb, a state in which he was unburdened by the harsh reality of autonomy and social expectations.  The father is viewed merely as an obstacle.

"The essence of society is repression of the individual, and the essence of the individual is repression of himself."

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it stars saddam said:

Psychology is a pseudoscience

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deCypher said:

Subjective experience can not be verified via the scientific method (or, at least, your results are not generalizable to the human population as a whole).

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Icelander said:

Stimulated by a question by RGVs I have to broach this subject one more time.

The Denial of Death (ISBN 0-684-83240-2) is a psychology/philosophy work written by Ernest Becker and published in 1973. It was awarded the Pulitzer prize for general non-fiction in 1974, two months after the author's death. The book builds largely on the works of Søren Kierkegaard, Sigmund Freud, and one of Freud's colleagues, Otto Rank.

The basic premise of The Denial of Death is that human civilization is ultimately an elaborate, symbolic defense mechanism against the knowledge of our mortality, which in turn acts as the emotional and intellectual response to our basic survival mechanism. Becker argues that a basic duality in human life exists between the physical world of objects and a symbolic world of human meaning. Thus, since man has a dualistic nature consisting of a physical self and a symbolic self, man is able to transcend the dilemma of mortality through heroism, a concept involving his symbolic half. By embarking on what Becker refers to as an "immortality project" (or causa sui), in which he creates or becomes part of something which he feels will outlast him, man feels he has "become" heroic and, henceforth, part of something eternal; something that will never die, compared to his physical body that will die one day. This, in turn, gives man the feeling that his life has meaning; a purpose; significance in the grand scheme of things.

From this premise, mental illness is most insightfully extrapolated as a bogging down in one's hero system(s). When someone is experiencing depression, their causa sui (or heroism project) is failing, and they are being consistently reminded of their mortality and insignificance as a result. Schizophrenia is a step further than depression in which one's causa sui is falling apart, making it impossible to engender sufficient defense mechanisms against their mortality; henceforth, the schizophrenic has to create their own reality or "world" in which they are better heroes. Becker argues that the conflict between immortality projects which contradict each other (particularly in religion) is the wellspring for the destruction and misery in our world caused by wars, bigotry, genocide, racism, nationalism, and so forth, since an immortality project which contradicts others indirectly suggests that the others are wrong.

Another theme running throughout the book is that humanity's traditional "hero-systems" i.e. religion, are no longer convincing in the age of reason; science is attempting to solve the problem of man, something that Becker feels it can never do. The book states that we need new convincing "illusions" that enable us to feel heroic in the grand scheme of things, i.e. immortal. Becker, however, does not provide any definitive answer, mainly because he believes that there is no perfect solution. Instead, he hopes that gradual realization of man's innate motivations, namely death, can help to bring about a better world.

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Icelander said:

As a child I never thought about death. Playing was all that mattered and seemed eternal. Then it slowly dawned on me that playing wasn't eternal. Bummer. That certainly was worrisome.

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It seems eternal because we haven't yet developed the adult's dumb habit of obsessing about the past and future.  When you are really in the moment it might as well be eternal; no fear, no death anxiety.  Soooo hard to stay there, only because the mind starts to think again.  Fucking mind.  Ruining my fun.

PhanTomCat said:

However, I must be thick, as I personally don't feel any closer to understanding or relating to the concepts in a tangible way....
Perhaps I am just proficient at repressing such things.... 

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PhanTomCat said:

Nothing that anyone "creates" as a project will last forever....

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