the stubbornness of his will he goeth down.
-SOPHOCLES, Antigone
Introduction
Neurosis is not usually defined as a fear of life, but that is what it is. The neurotic person is afraid to open his heart to love, afraid to reach out or strike out, afraid to be fully himself. We can explain these fears psychologically. Opening one's heart to love makes one vulnerable to being hurt; reaching out, to being rejected; striking out, to being destroyed. But there is another dimension to this problem. More life or feeling than one is accustomed to is frightening to the person because it threatens to overwhelm his ego, flood his boundaries, and undermine his identity. Being more alive and having more feeling is scary. I worked with a young man whose body was very unalive. It was tight and contracted, his eyes were dull, his skin color sallow, his breathing shallow. By breathing deeply and doing some of the therapeutic exercises, his body became more alive. His eyes brightened, his color improved, he felt tingling sensations in parts of his body, and his legs began to vibrate. But then, he said to me, “Man, this is too much life. I can't stand it.”
I believe that to some degree we are all in the same situation as this young man. We want to be more alive and feel more, but we are afraid of it. Our fear of life is seen in the way we keep busy so as not to feel, keep running so as not to face ourselves, or get high on liquor or drugs so as not to sense our being. Because we are afraid of life, we seek to control or master it. We believe that it is bad or dangerous to be carried away by our emotions. We admire the person who is cool, who acts without feeling. Our hero is James Bond, Secret Agent 007. The emphasis in our culture is upon doing and achieving. The modern individual is committed to being successful, not to being a person. He belongs rightly to the “action generation,” whose motto is do more but feel less. This attitude characterizes much of modern sexuality: more action but less passion.
Regardless of how well we perform, we are failures as people. I believe that most of us sense the failure in ourselves. We are dimly aware of the pain, anguish, and despair that lie just below the surface. But we are determined to overcome our weaknesses, override our fears, and surmount our anxieties. This is why books on self-improvement or How to Do It are so popular. Unfortunately, these efforts are bound to fail. Being a person is not something one can do. It is not a performance. It may require that we stop our frantic business, that we take time out to breathe and to feel. In the process we may feel our pain, but if we have the courage to accept it, we will also have pleasure. If we can face our inner emptiness, we will find fulfillment. If we can go through our despair, we will discover joy. In this therapeutic undertaking we may need help.
Is it the fate of modern man to be neurotic, to be afraid of life? My answer is yes, if we define modern man as a member of a culture whose dominant values are power and progress. Since these values characterize Western culture in the twentieth century, it follows that every person who grows up in this culture is neurotic.
The neurotic individual is in conflict with himself. Part of his being is trying to overcome another part. His ego is trying to master his body; his rational mind, to control his feelings; his will, to overcome his fears and anxieties. Though this conflict is in large part unconscious, its effect is to deplete the person's energy and to destroy his peace of mind. Neurosis is internal conflict. The neurotic character takes many forms, but all of them involve a struggle in the individual between what he is and what he believes he should be. Every neurotic individual is caught in this struggle.
How does such a state of internal conflict arise? Why is it the fate of modern man to suffer from these conflicts? In the individual case the neurosis arises within the context of a family situation. But the family situation reflects the cultural one, since the family is subject to all the forces in the society of which it is a part. To understand the existential condition of modern man and to know his fate, we must investigate the sources of conflict in his culture.
We are familiar with some conflicts in our culture. For example, we talk peace, but we prepare for war. We advocate conservation, but we ruthlessly exploit the earth's natural resources for economic gain. We are committed to the goals of power and progress, yet we want pleasure, peace of mind, and stability. We don't realize that power and pleasure are opposing values and that the former often precludes the latter. Power inevitably leads to a struggle for its possession, which often pits father against son and brother against brother. It is a divisive force in a community. Progress denotes a constant activity to change the old into the new under the belief that the new is always superior to the old. While this may be true in some technical areas, it is a dangerous belief. By extension, it implies that the son is superior to the father or that tradition is merely the dead weight of the past. There are cultures in which other values dominate, where respect for the past and for tradition is more important than the desire for change. In these cultures conflict is minimized and neurosis is rare.
Parents as representatives of the culture have the responsibility to inspire their children with the values of the culture. They make demands upon a child in terms of attitudes and behavior that are designed to fit the child into the social and cultural matrix. On one hand the child resists these demands because they amount to a domestication of his animal nature. He must be “broken in” to make him part of the system. On the other hand the child wishes to comply with these demands to keep the love and approval of his parents. The outcome depends upon the nature of the demands and the way they are enforced. With love and understanding it is possible to teach a child the customs and practices of a culture without breaking his spirit. Unfortunately, in most cases the process of adapting the child to the culture does break his spirit, which makes him neurotic and afraid of life.
The central issue in the process of cultural adaptation is the control of sexuality. There is no culture that does not impose some restraint upon sexual behavior. This restraint seems necessary to prevent discord from developing within a community. Human beings are jealous creatures and prone to violence. Even in the most primitive societies the bond of marriage is sacred. But conflicts that arise from such restrictions are external to the personality. In Western culture the practice has been to make the person feel guilty about sexual feelings and sexual practices like masturbation that in no way threaten the peace of the community. When guilt or shame are attached to feelings, the conflict is internalized and creates a neurotic character.
Incest is taboo in all human societies, but the sexual feelings of a child for the parent of the opposite sex are reprehensible only in modern societies. Such feelings are believed to pose a danger to the exclusive right of a parent to the sexual affections of the partner. The child is seen as a rival by the parent of the same sex. Although no incest occurs, the child is made to feel guilty for this most natural feeling and desire.
When Freud investigated the causes of the emotional problems of his patients through analysis, he found that in all cases they involved infantile or childhood sexuality, in particular, sexual feelings for the parent of the opposite sex. He also found that associated with these incestuous feelings were death wishes toward the parent of the same sex. Noting the parallel with the legend of Oedipus, he described the child's situation as oedipal. He believed that if a boy did not suppress his sexual feelings for his mother, he would suffer the fate of Oedipus; namely, he would kill his father and marry his mother. To prevent that fate the child is threatened with castration if he does not repress both his sexual desire and his hostile feelings.
Analysis also revealed that not only were these feelings suppressed but the oedipal situation itself was repressed; that is, the adult had no memory of the triangle in which he was involved between three and six years of age. My own clinical experience confirms this observation. Few patients can recall any sexual desire for the parent. Freud believed, further, that this repression was necessary if the person was to establish a normal sexual life in adulthood. He thought that the repression made it possible to transfer the early sexual desire from the parent to a peer; otherwise, the person would remain fixated on the parent. Thus, for Freud, repression was the way the oedipal situation was resolved, allowing the child to advance through a latency period to normal adulthood. If the repression was incomplete, the person became a neurotic.
According to Freud, the neurotic character represents an inability to adapt to the cultural situation. He recognized that