Outline - History and Evolution of Freudian Theory Explaining how the psychoanalysis perspective fits as the founding movement in the history and systems of psychology helps the doctoral learner prep

On the Ubiquity of Personal and Social Delusions Jerry S. Piven In this article Freudian theory is invoked to illustrate the connections among repression, the fear of death, and delusional phantasies. Civiliza­ tion is a structure invented to protect individuals from death, but the sacrifices imposed by that social structure are psychologically injurious and terrifying because society threatens individuals with punishment and death for having illicit desires. Annihilation anxiety may be abated by social structures, but the psychological sacrifice and threat amplify anni­ hilation anxiety. I further argue that immersion in personal or social phantasies quells the conscious fear of death. Individuals vary in terms of reactions to death anxiety and how the complex matrix of fear and terror is nourished or abated in the developmental process. A Freudian reading of the developmental process implicates the inherently traumatic Jerry S. Piven teaches in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, New School Univer­sity, New York, NY 10011.

In this article I use the word phantasy in the psychoanalytic sense to connote the unconscious dynamics of the belief rather than the conscious qualities of imagining or daydream connoted by the word fantasy. Also note, some people do have the ego strength to deal with death, but most others derive their aplomb from the social and religious phantasies that absorb the fear of death. Conscious equanimity does not mean that unconscious anxieties do not exist. Rigid adherence to phantasy systems and illusions is one way of knowing that the anxiety still lurks below consciousness.

Journal of the American Academy of Religion March 2003, Vol. 71, No. 1, pp. 135-156 © 2003 The American Academy of Religion 136 Journal of the American Academy of Religion nature of nurture and the necessity of self-deceptive illusions. These phantasies do subdue conscious fear, but conscious feelings of security do not dispel unconscious tremors. Underneath these phantasies, dread and terror impel rigid adherence to whatever phantasy system provides subjective feelings of safety and salvation. THROUGHOUT HIS TEXTS Freud makes it clear that both societies and individuals are anxious enough to delude themselves about the fun­ damental nature of life and death. 1 Freud consistently blurs the distinc­ tion between neurosis and normalcy by intermingling neurosis with religion and repression with history. According to Freud (1953b: 81) everyone seems to adhere to some phantasy system. Whether personal or social, everyone engages in transferences as a defensive attempt to re­ sist the present, and perhaps very few endure fears of death and annihila­ tion without crippling themselves emotionally in attempts to escape. 2 Freud's theories of civilization, repression, and religion provide a com­ plex illustration of the pervasive frequency of neurosis and the need to flee from reality in fear and dread. The obvious defect even before this analysis begins is the reductive way Freud imagines religion. For the sake of this argument, religion is here restricted to those beliefs, faiths, or worlds that denote literal belief in deities with external reality and sentience. It is still a matter of consider­ able scholarly inquiry regarding what engenders such religious phantasies, and I use Freud as a springboard for playing out the complex dynamics of delusion formation and self-deception in everyday life. Though Freud's analysis of religion pertains only to certain modes of religion, and he is by no means the alpha or omega on the psychology of religion, his dy­ namic subversion of subjectivity and his explorations of the ubiquity of 1 Freud is inconsistent with regard to his thoughts on death. On the one hand, he maintains that death anxiety can be reduced to castration (1953e> 1953h) or guilt (1953p) and that death cannot be represented in an unconscious that knows only impulses (1953p). On the other hand, Freud also states repeatedly that religion derives from the fear of death and decay and that we continually remold reality and create phantasies that repress and soothe our fears of death, putrescence, and nonbeing (1953f, 1953i, 1953q). I have dealt with the complexities of these arguments elsewhere (Piven 2000, 2001a, 2001b, 2002b) and for now will rely on Freud's psychoanalyses of religion and self-deception. 2 Transference is the repetition of previous modes of perception, experience, and conflict onto the present, especially the relation to one's parents. Hence, replacing certain present perceptions with more childlike ways of seeing reality allows people to forget the present and reexperience the childlike satisfaction of magical thinking. They also attempt to work out unresolved conflicts and derive gratification from the object of transference in response to unsatisfied childhood needs. By hallucinating elements of reality in a more childlike and unrealistic way, transference is both a defense against the present and a cognitively, perceptually crippling process. Transference also enables the wish fantasy of merger with an idealized protective parental surrogate, whether a god, a leader, or a satisfying and protecting phantasy. Piven: Death, Neurosis, and Normalcy 137 delusion make a return to his texts a worthwhile and provocative en­ deavor. By returning to the "psychology of self-deception," we may dis­ cover the hallucinatory quality of myriad "realities." 3 THE PHANTASY OF EVIL AND SACRIFICE In the essay "Civilized Sexual Morality and Modern Nervousness" (1953c) Freud writes that repression is always accompanied by an increase of anxiety concerning life and death. 4 This anxiety interferes not only with happiness and the capacity for enjoyment but the willingness of individuals to act together and for one another by risking their lives or begetting off­ spring, excluding them from participating in the future. Freud thus con- 3 Heinz Hartmann calls psychoanalysis the psychology of self-deception because it continually finds how the fundamental character of the conscious psyche is infiltrated by unconscious ideas, perceptual distortions, and the repression of unwanted ideas. Just how one is to determine what is reality and what is fantasy is a slippery question indeed. Can there be criteria for determining fan­tasy when we are all to some degree self-deceptive? The psychoanalytic determination of fantasy does not reside in the analyst's omniscience. Although Freud adheres to an avowed scientific ap­proach that basis justification for belief on sufficient evidence, psychoanalysis is also a hermeneu-tics of suspicion that implicates the analyst's own inherent irrationality. Freud knew he could be irrational (his logical positivism and conviction notwithstanding)—his self-analysis reveals his own fantasies and the unreliability of his own sense of reality. It is precisely because the analyst is also subject to his or her own irrationalities that analysts must be analyzed so that they may at least attempt to be aware of their own inclinations to project, be defensive, and succumb to intense countertransferences. This being said, analysts are divided on their epistemological convictions. Some analysts believe that science yields the most reliable results and that ultimately their own grounding in reality (af­ter having been well trained and themselves analyzed) enables them to judge what is real and what is fantasy in the patient. Other analysts defer from such scientific premises and concern themselves with irrationality in the analytic process regardless of what reality might supposedly be. In this sense, fantasy is not what the "grounded" analyst believes must be a deviation from objective reality as determined by him- or herself. Fantasy describes the intense investment in an idea or belief, at­ tachment and immersion in an idea such that the belief is not susceptible to alteration or discon- firming instances, the sense that the subject is bringing to the situation his or her own issues. The reality of the situation described is not at issue as much as the focus and emotions of the subject. Regardless of whether God actually exists, for example, the belief is endowed with significance in the believer, whose faith describes his or her own issues rather than something in the universe re­searched empirically. God's actual existence is never the issue (God may exist for all we know, but the believer is immersed in his or her emotional life and imagination and is not concerned with "objective" evidence). For the purposes of this article, we should note that Freud himself still seems to have maintained a belief in objectivity even as his own theory rendered such conviction rather slippery. One cannot ever eliminate oneself from the fantasy process, so by implication Freudian theory must be suffused with some fantasy—perhaps the occasional fantasy of objectivity. Freud never seems to have addressed the question of how one can definitively determine what is or is not fantasy when we are all fantasizing and self-deceiving, even if to varying degrees. 4 This observation relies on Freud's early formula for neurosis, in which anxiety is the result of repression; he later modified this view to state that anxiety motivates repression in the first place. However, despite this theoretical change, the observation that repression and its social agents of threat and shame do produce anxiety, fear, and frustration is indubitably correct. 138 Journal of the American Academy of Religion eludes his essay by raising the question whether "our 'civilized' sexual morality is worth the sacrifice it imposes upon us" (1953c: 203-204). How is it possible that a society that was founded to protect individu­ als from death increases death anxiety? In the "civilized" societies of which Freud writes, social systems are functional defenses, in that nature no longer threatens to impinge on individual lives. Bears seldom carry off infants, snakes rarely slither into our homes, and the dark mystery of nature is kept at bay by our city walls. 5 Food and medicine are readily available, and citizens rarely starve or suffer from incurable agues. Indi­ viduals can follow their bliss, pursue their projects, and retire in peace because their rights are protected. 6 Nevertheless, the psychological sacri­ fice Freud discusses throughout his work increases the malaise of civili­ zation and inculcates the fear of death. It may seem strange that Freud believes that the fear of death derives from repression rather than either exposure to death or conscious aware­ ness of the finality of life. Freud (1953f, 1953i, 1953q) actually cites death and decay as terrors of such significance that mythologies and religions were invented to deny and disavow death. In The Interpretation of Dreams Freud writes: "Children know nothing of the horrors of corruption, of freezing in the ice-cold grave, of the terrors of eternal nothingness—ideas which grown-up people find it so hard to tolerate, as is proved by all the myths of a future life" (1953i: 254). However, when Freud explicitly re­ duces death anxiety to guilt or castration ( 1953e, 1953h) he is arguing that before the psyche can even comprehend death, we are subject to numer­ ous annihilating experiences in childhood that actually become the tem­ plates for imagining death. Hence, when Freud writes that civilization engenders the fear of death, he is expressing a chronology of how death anxiety unfolds through helplessness, malignant parenting, and socially annihilating and repressively injurious experience. The existential fears of death, putrescence, and nonbeing come later, with the development of con­ sciousness, after the emerging psyche has experienced such terrifying vul­ nerabilities of helplessness, loss, injury, illness, and so forth. Thus, society is the injurious force that threatens life, engenders conscious fear, and re­ quires phantastical solutions. Society protects people and grants both lei­ sure and freedom, but society can also be vicious, repressive, oppressive, and inherently damaging to the emotional lives of its constituents. 5 My hyperbole here stresses the fear of nature in addition to its genuine dangers. 6 While these descriptions may be accurate in ideal cases, it is also ironic that some of the great­ est instances of violence, genocide, and death from starvation and disease have occurred in our civilized cultures. Piven: Death, Neurosis, and Normalcy 139 One concludes from Freud that human beings feel anxiety when life itself is repressed. According to this view annihilation anxiety is the di­ rect response to repression of the will to live. Repression is a diminution of life that can only feel like a threat to one's existence. Not only are indi­ viduals frustrated. The same fears of retaliation, punishment, and anni­ hilation that threaten the child in infancy are perpetuated by society. And in this case, the threat of death is often real. The castration complex and manifold sources of annihilation anxiety nourished in childhood become law, morality, ideology, and cosmology. Socially induced repression is a crucial source of death anxiety, even as civilization protects humanity from nature and from one another. Further, repressed hostility engenders guilt and the fear of retaliation. The more civilized the society, the more tren­ chant the guilt and fear of being killed for illicit wishes. 7 Human beings nevertheless feel terrified without society, but society is also injurious in a final way. Culture consequently enforces a morality derived from this fear with the intention of vilifying and exterminating that which threatens it. Hence, individual drives are vilified, and anything representing those wishes or their temptation will also be demonized and destroyed. 8 Not just guilt but also disgust for life are inculcated by the sacrificial morality of civilization. Such is the nature of civilization—de­ testable elements of the self are killed off while simultaneously disavowed and projected onto others who become the direst sources of evil. Evil is psychologically what arouses fear, disgust, shame, and discom­ fort. Thus, the "life instincts"—sexuality, healthy narcissistic expansion of the self, autonomy, independent thought, creativity, and so on—are considered evil by those forced to repress and despise them, and this is in fact a perennial theme in western history. 9 Though described as evil, such abhorrent material is often called "other," as though it were not the self 7 This is Freud's conclusion at the end of Civilization and Its Discontents (1953b). Guilt here ex­ plicitly means the fear of not being loved and of being killed by one's loved ones. This is the view taken up by Klein (1975a, 1975b)—the fear of punishment and death derives from retaliatory wishes, which must thereby be repressed. According to Freud and Klein, then, emotions such as love are self-deceptive and conceal the fear of being killed for one's hatred. 81 am writing here of both the social violence enacted on those who defy the prevalent morality and the psychological damage inflicted on those who have not yet sacrificed their desires for the communal morality. If we are fortunate, however, we may have the emotional capacity to subli­mate some of our impulses before they are repressed, channeling them into fulfilling socially ac­ceptable pursuits. In this way we may be able to evade the painful prohibition and demonization of our fantasies. Sublimation is not possible after repression, it should be noted, and if these impulses escape after repression they become neurotic compromises imbued with conflict and guilt. They are far less fulfilling than sublimations. 91 expand on this in greater detail in my article "Death, Repression, Narcissism, Misogyny" (2001a), which will appear in The Psychoanalytic Review. I refer again to these issues to play out the impact of such psychodynamics on social systems and self-deception. 140 Journal of the American Academy of Religion that were feeling or acting in such an objectionable fashion. Call it ate} 0 Satan, or the feminine, history is replete with the mendacious ploys whereby desires, ideas, feelings, urges, and prohibited impulses have been externalized. Evil is everything people have wished to repress—or expi­ ate, frighten off, castrate, slaughter, and so forth. As Freud argues, then, repression not only engenders an increasing anxiety over life and death but catalyzes a morality intended to kill the self. This is the "death drive" killing the self to preserve the self against the threat of its own living. However, the ego also externalizes this aggres­ sion for self-preservation. Self-preservation involves a flight response from one's illicit wishes, which ends up killing the self, and it is also capable of directing this aggression outward at enemies to preserve the self from its own annihilation. The distinction of "otherness" might even be a way to strengthen the defensive power of the ego by acting as though the threat came from outside, thus fortifying the preparedness of the ego. 11 Society enforces what its constituents need to constrain in themselves: their own repressed and frustrated, morally disgusting desires. Although civilization constrains aggression and coerces internaliza­ tion of violence as guilt, this does not mean that society becomes peace­ ful. While repression of aggression and reaction formations transform hostility into the love commandment, aggression is nevertheless displaced and enacted in compulsive fashion. First of all, children identify with the aggression of their parents, and adults themselves identify with the ag­ gression of their surrogate parents, that is, society. 12 Hence, a society be­ comes oppressive to its own constituents, as each citizen rigidly enforces the aggressive constraints of society. Second, aggression is not merely contained; it, in fact, becomes dis­ placed onto scapegoats who are targeted for their evil or pernicious quali­ ties. One of Freud's great insights is that communities experience far too much hostility merely to restrain or transform into love. Groups displace hostility from among themselves onto others, siphoning their anger onto victims who become containers for communal hostility: "It is always pos­ sible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their ag- 10 Ate is the Greek word meaning both possession by a god or divine force and blindness that leads one to ruin. 11 See Freud's Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety (1953h). 12 Freud is indicating here that such aggression is taken over by the child in the establishment of his or her own superego. In this sense, the aggression is turned against the self. However, identifi­ cation with aggression also means identifying with the authority and using that authority to pun­ ish others, which is one self-preservative consequence of excessive self-punitive behavior (see the hallucinations of Dr. Schreber, who became the avatar of God so as not to be his victim). Piven: Death, Neurosis, and Normalcy 141 gression" (Freud 1953b: 114). Such violence allows individuals to destroy their own externalized insidious qualities while reinforcing feelings of love and invulnerability within the group. Now that individuals have a target for their hostilities and can destroy them as a community, their anger is siphoned off, and the group feels empowered and loyal through the act of communal violence (Becker 1973, 1975; Bion; Durkheim 1965, 1989; Fromm 1955; Jaques). Finally, the feeling of community and invulnerability is so amplified by the act of displacement and violence that it becomes ritualized in pu­ rification ceremonies, holy aggression, and institutionalized oppression or warfare. If no enemy is readily available, arbitrary differences within the community will be identified to segregate that evil group from the mainstream. Communities will search for some network of differences, some pattern of deviance, that will enable them to displace their hostility; otherwise the entire community will have no outlet for its aggression. If there is no real enemy, arbitrary characteristics will be inflated and dis­ torted into blazons of evil. And if there is a paucity of obvious differences, vile traits will be hallucinated (Piven 2002a; Volkan). Love will persist among the community so long as an enemy can be found. This means that individuals are terrified of violence from other members of the community, for on some level they recognize the genu­ ine hostility lurking beneath the facade of the love commandment. They are also afraid of being destroyed by the enemy group, which means that the ideologies and doxologies justifying their violence become sacred.

Their beliefs sustain their feelings of both righteousness and immortal­ ity. Invulnerability entails the eternal truth of their cosmology and its ability to sustain them against their enemies. This means that the sacred also protects them from one another, for their enemies most often derive from displacement of aggression. Ulti­ mately, the fear of reprisal from enemies, friends, and the authority of society itself is an amplification of the fear of the superego, of punishment and annihilation by the father. The conscious fears of death from murder and warfare overlay the unconscious fear of annihilation that compels repression of hostility and submission to the authority of the state. Thus, even sublimated cruelty and institutionalized oppression cannot be sepa­ rated from the restraining of aggression and the internalization of guilt. To put it another way, it is the injurious effect of authoritarian sup­ pression that generates much of communal frustration and hostility, vir­ tually guaranteeing that some outlet will be needed and that a scapegoat will be punished with a tremendous catharsis of repressed wrath. The problem is that this catharsis, like every neurotic compromise, does not liberate the aggression once and for all but, rather, repeats the struggle 142 Journal of the American Academy of Religion with guilt and hostility. 13 Even while the most violent societies crush their enemies, they nevertheless suffer from their own interminable struggles and self-punishments. So long as the superego admonishes the ego, as long as society itself demands renunciations and coerces sacrifice, the threat of death will perpetuate the repression of hostility, the inculcation of guilt, and the displacement of aggression. 14 Thus, even while violence is inflicted on victims, individuals still sustain their own masochism. Ironically, individuals sacrifice themselves and kill their own bodies to preserve both society and their subjective sense of safety. Freud thus conceives of the psychogenesis of individuals, societies, and epochs as simi­ lar and interrelated developmental processes. History and culture are seen to emerge from the wishes, needs, conflicts, and compromises of individu­ als born into and perpetuating the dynamics of their families. Freud (1953d: 186) conceives of individuals striving to relieve the tensions of their needs and suffering the struggles, trauma, and compromises of development.

But individuals and families exist within a given group and society. These developmental vicissitudes become group phantasies, prohibitions, and conflicts, repeating and amplifying individual anxieties, defenses, and socially patterned reactions and defects. Only now parental edict is rein­ forced by innumerable spectators, police, and adjudicators. The threat of punishment and alienation is far more deadly, the loss of love is more devastating, and, therefore, the wish to appease others and avoid castiga- tion is more compulsory. FEAR, HELPLESSNESS, AND MORALITY Freud claims that psychoanalysis enables us to throw some light on "the origins of our great cultural institutions—on religion, morality, jus­ tice and philosophy" (1953d: 185) because the psychological functions of these phenomena are derived from motives other than their manifest rationale: "The whole course of the history of civilization is no more than an account of the various methods adopted by mankind for 'binding' their unsatisfied wishes, which, according to changing conditions (modified, moreover, by technological advances) have been met by reality sometimes with favour and sometimes with frustration" (1953d: 186). While Freud 13 In Freud's view the defenses continue to operate even after a threat in the external world disappears. 14 Of course, the enemy could be a component of the self or an enemy invading the self such as the devil, a spirit, or homosexuality, in which case the enemy within will be punished and destroyed. If the authorities sanction self-punishment, asceticism will be the outlet (inlet) for aggression rather than violence toward others. The point I am making here is that societies sanction aggression to­ward others even while they make their constituents feel guilty. Piven: Death, Neurosis, and Normalcy 143 interprets history in terms of binding sexuality, he specifically attributes this motivation to the need for omnipotence (1953d: 186) and notes that the human reaction to the inner and external worlds is to constrain and control them. Now this has two connotations: that people do so in order to satisfy their desire for pleasure and satisfaction and also that they are defending themselves from feelings of helplessness through conquest.

One is merely the complement of the other, for anxiety and weakness are sources of displeasure and impede the search for gratification. How­ ever, the terror of helplessness is not merely a lack of pleasure but, rather, a motive for restoring protection. As Freud writes early in his career, "The initial helplessness of human beings is the primal source of all moral mo­ tives" (1953η: 318). 15 Freud observes how conviction, obedience, and morality all derive from the need to master helplessness, create a non- persecutory environment, and evade the punishment and loss of love that might arrive if one does not conform to parental invective. Morality de­ rives from helplessness and fear of annihilation. Morality itself is not inherently destructive or crippling. Honesty and respect for the property of others are not cruel or repressive. Nevertheless, Freud seems to view the enforcement of morality as a macrocosm of the terrors and injuries of childhood, fashioning a pathological society that compulsively incul­ cates fear, threat, and the internalization of aggression. The pathological instances might yet be considered anomalous. But Freud is generalizing without exception. In his view morality, society, and history all derive from helplessness, fear of death, and the omnipotent phantasy of control and invulnerability. 16 Indeed, people cocoon them­ selves within these pathologies and phantasies to evade death and suffer­ ing. Individuals cripple themselves to save themselves, as Freud states so elegantly in Civilization and Its Discontents (1953b). Adaptation is fraught with complications that frequently result in both disruptive symptoms of repressed libido and crippling inhibitions of growth and functioning. What this ultimately means is that the human organism adapts itself to reality not merely by learning amicably what it can and cannot do but also by impairing its means to experience reality under the threat of injury and loss of security. The reality encountered after the re­ pressions, inhibitions, reactions, punishments, and displacements is a severely mutilated perspective, for thought itself is shrouded with guilt and aversion, submission and denial, inhibition, distorted wishes mani- 15 Just how Freud came to this conclusion in 1895 is a matter of curiosity. Perhaps this is one of his fantasies. 16 See also Lifton and Yalom, who see history as shifting modes of transcendence, death denial, and symbolic immortality. 144 Journal of the American Academy of Religion festing themselves in displaced reproaches and idealized images, phobias and magical rituals, and somatic disguises of memories and desires. What this article has been implicating are the means Freud describes for the psyche to avoid injury to the self, from external dangers; from terrifying experiences, ideas, and memories; from angry parents who may disapprove and abandon it; and from its own desires, which it learns are wrong and must be suppressed and forgotten. The psyche, on the one hand, reacts to these threats by excluding them from consciousness so as to preserve itself and, on the other, is itself retarded by its own measures to avoid anxiety. The ego attempts to separate from itself anything that is a source of displeasure. Freud describes the processes of defense and pathology ap­ positely in Civilization and Its Discontents. Whether from without or within, the drive for a "pure pleasure ego" is responsible for the dis­ avowal of knowledge, feeling, and perception. Consequently, this entails detachment from the external world (Freud 1953b: 66-68). Defense is in­ herently self-debilitating. Life is too painful, Freud writes, and "we cannot dispense with palliative measures" (1953b: 75). There are a number of diversions from pain—substitutive satisfactions—but none of these truly provides a sense of meaning and significance to life or finally quells the anxiety, suffering, and despair. Thus, Freud writes that "only religion can answer the purpose of life" (1953b: 76). He describes the three great sources of pain: "We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own body, which is doomed to decay and dissolution and which cannot even do without pain and anxiety as warning signals; from the external world, which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of de­ struction; and finally from our relations to other men. The suffering which comes from this last source is perhaps more painful to us than any other" ( 1953b: 77). Freud refers to the fear and disgust of bodily decay in numerous writings (1953a, 1953f, 1953i, 1953o, 1953q), and he also correlates the rela-tion of the merciless destructiveness of the external world to human wounded narcissism (1953f) and terror of helplessness (1953b, 1953n).

These have thus far been central sources of death anxiety and defensive re­ sponses that distort reality perception and generate ideology and cosmology. If Freud includes relations among human beings as perhaps the most agonizing strife, one might pause to reflect. Freud is seldom known for his sensitivity in the subject of love, 17 but here Freud is describing the 17 That is, his analysis of love tends to be somewhat sterile, describing love in terms of libido, nar­ cissism, objects, sublimation or displacement of sexuality, and so on. There have been excellent treat­ments of Freud's view of love, including RiefPs and Bellah et al.'s contentions that Freud's view of love is narrow conceptually; Wallwork's (1991) elegant discussion of egotism, object love, and the love commandment; Lear's exploration of love and its place in human nature, development, and analytic therapy; and Thompson's analysis of Dora, love, and transference, just to cite a few. Piven: Death, Neurosis, and Normalcy 145 complex processes and failures of human development in an aphorism.

Not just sexuality per se but the human need for comfort, protection, and security drive the pleasure principle. The infant may instinctively seek pleasure but depends on satiation as a sign of safety. Pain gener­ ates fear for life. The need for love from others develops from this in­ fantile need for protection and security. Hence, relations with other human beings are at the heart of strivings for invulnerability, and loss of love in adulthood may still be experienced as annihilation and death.

As Freud writes, "We are never so defenceless against suffering as when we are in love, never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object or its love" (1953b: 82). Love between human adults is a vestigial biological defense against helplessness and death. And it is this vulnerability that renders people so susceptible to transference illusions in relationships, to being deceived and manipulated by leaders, and to religious phantasies that restore infantile dependence, approval, and protection. 18 As Fenichel says, human beings have a "longing for being hypnotized" (Becker 1973: 132). Reality is more complicated and more disappointing than childhood dependence; otherwise people would not need to project their phanta­ sies on others or delude themselves into religious beliefs. Emergence from the primal idealized phantasy of childhood into the vicious world of adult aggression and deceit is inherently painful, and, again, human beings too often experience the annihilation of alienation, rejection, betrayal, and the failure of others to meet their expectations throughout life. Ironically, the negative qualities of loved ones are often similar reactions to their own disappointments, injuries, and phantasies. And perhaps that is the crux of Freud's argument in this text: reality cannot but fail to conform to infantile wishes, and the malaise created by the demands and sacrifices of civilization poises individuals between love, aggression, and guilt. If Eros itself is repressed, aggression and guilt only intensify to a point at which civilization may not be able to endure. Freud concludes Civilization and Its Discontents with the uncanny speculation that Death may emerge victorious over Eros. The question, then, is whether this death will continue to consume individuals with guilt, will be externalized as aggression, or will present as a deeply pathological ver­ sion of both. Considering the worldwide violence in the years following 18 See Freud's Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1953g). See also Becker 1973 (in his chapter "The Spell Cast by Persons—The Nexus of Unfreedom"), 1975; Bion; Chasseguet-Smirgel; Fromm 1955, 1964; Jaques . All these works focus on different ways human beings re­ treat from reality and seek safety and love in the group, through devotion to leaders and social fictions. 146 Journal of the American Academy of Religion Freud's text, it is difficult to imagine the advance of a civilization that does not set these pathologies in motion in the act of civilizing. 19 The questions will no doubt be asked, Is it not possible to suppress some portion of desire when circumstances demand it without too much suffering and pathological consequence? and Why can't a child be taught by his or her parents what is expected of him or her without scarring or warping his or her psychic structure? There is undoubtedly development in the conflict-free ego sphere (see Hartmann), the possibility of genuine love, ego strength, and sublimation. But perhaps normalcy is permeated to varying degrees by these fears and injuries elucidated here. Perhaps normalcy as an ideal of health just does not exist. Freud himself asserts that the neurosis is not qualitatively different from normalcy, just differ­ ent as regards the prominence of a trait or constellation of characteristics dominating the psychical life of each individual. Freud writes: "If you take up a theoretical point of view and disregard this matter of quantity, you may quite well say that we are all ill—that is, neurotic—since the precon­ ditions for the formation of symptoms can also be observed in normal people" (1953j: 358). And again, he notes: "We have seen that it is not scientifically feasible to draw a line of demarcation between what is psy­ chically normal and abnormal; so that that distinction, in spite of its prac­ tical importance, possesses only a conventional value" (1953m: 195). In addition, the very fact that children are fragile, helpless creatures instantly prone to intense pain, anxiety, fear, and remorse means that the methods adults employ to teach children and bestow values on them are not going to be a matter of simple rational discussion, at least for a few years. Children do not react well to deprivation, separation, or prohibition. Not only will they inevitably experience intense frustration and anxiety, but they additionally suffer from the imposition of adult limitations on their needs and wishes. Indeed, reality itself will be inclement without adult coercion.

As mentioned earlier, the child will ultimately be confronted with the fact that one's own wishes cannot be satisfied or one's fears dispelled immedi- 19 It should be noted that since Freud, sexual prohibition and the kind of neuroses Freud writes of seem to have decreased markedly in America and Europe. Analysts often say that they deal less with sexual inhibition and guilt than with self-esteem issues, for example. However, to the extent that self-esteem is bound up with guilt and the developmental search for love and support, sexual­ity in the broadest sense has achieved some liberation but hardly an ideal sense of health. Self-esteem and guilt are intimately involved with sexuality and with the direction and nature of desire, body imagery, one's ability to express intimacy, and the repetition of infantile patterns onto adult rela­tionships. Although classical hysterias and anxiety neuroses seem to have diminished, our own age has its own malaise derived in large part from the kinds of aggressive and unreliable parenting that produce so many problems in self-esteem. Freud's expectation of a world collapsing under sexual repression guilt, described at the end of Civilization and Its Discontents, may be unfulfilled at the inception of the new millennium, but the world is still a madhouse (see Brown: 15). Piven: Death, Neurosis, and Normalcy 147 ately. It should also be recognized that if one were to protect the child from painful stimuli so meticulously that the child never suffered deprivation, fear, anguish, or agony, the child would never attain any tolerance for pain or the ability to think or act for him- or herself. Thus, the inevitable result is struggle. Growth proceeds by overcom­ ing anxiety, want, fear, and frustration. Optimally, the child will learn to depend on his or her own powers and gain the confidence of conquering difficult tasks without having the unfortunate experience of encounter­ ing tasks too arduous or traumatic for his or her level of development— experiences that might convince the child of the futility of struggle, the hostility of the surrounding world, or his or her own helplessness. Never­ theless, children are forced to dispense with certain wishes and actions; confront the terrible fear of parental anger, admonishment, or abandon­ ment; and stifle their wishes from both fear and need for approval. Thus, to state the point succinctly, children will inevitably be forced into defend­ ing themselves against painful stimuli, enduring frustration, postponing gratification, and suffocating much of their vitality. These are hardly be­ nign influences the child can simply forget or shrug off. That is why Freud says that "the child is psychologically father to the adult" (1953m: 187). Early disturbances create the individual, and these injuries are unavoidable: The early efflorescence of infantile sexual life is doomed to extinction because its wishes are incompatible with reality and with the inadequate stage of development which the child has reached. That efflorescence comes to an end in the most distressing circumstances and to the accom­ paniment of the most painful feelings. Loss of love and failure leave be­ hind them a permanent injury to self-regard in the form of a narcissistic scar, which in my opinion . . . contributes more than anything to the "sense of inferiority" which is so common in neurotics. The child's sexual researches, on which limits are imposed by his psychical development, leads to no satisfactory conclusion; hence such later complaints as "I can't accomplish anything; I can't succeed in anything." (Freud 1953a: 20-21) The simple point here is that if these experiences do not necessarily involve trauma, they do necessitate limitation of wishful expression and defenses against anxiety. When a child develops an aversion to copro - philia, this is not mere instruction, and neither is excluding desires for the mother/father and resentment against the interloping father/mother from consciousness. These remoldings of awareness operate under threat and fear and themselves indicate this tension. So although development need not manifest any overt symptomology of pathological disturbances, the so- called normal character traits such as aversion to or avoidance of certain ideas, experiences, sensations, or desires indicates at least an impairment and dis­ tortion of experience as well as perception. And this is why normalcy must 148 Journal of the American Academy of Religion not be confused with health. Normalcy is still a matter of perceptual dis­ tortion and psychical debility. And the psyche would have it no other way. Normalcy amounts to defenses and repressions enforced so flawlessly that the psyche feels no anxiety from within and feels gratified to have obtained the approval of society and its superego. This says nothing about the price the individual has paid for the meticulousness of the repressions, nothing about the strength of the individual to tolerate adversity, affliction, painful ideas, or calamities. Ordinary happiness says nothing about one's ability to ex­ perience consciousness and thought without aversion, fear, reactions of hatred, anxiety, and moral invective, nothing about one's limitations, inhibitions, or capacities. If the distinctions between normal and pathological behavior have been blurred thus far, it has been to imply just how much human beings are determined by psychological compulsions that undermine any sense of rationality and control, though individuals seem to bear some reality testing and may not always exhibit symptoms. This article has also inti­ mated the forces that drive and compel the psyche, though human be­ ings maintain the illusion of self-control, the certainty of their beliefs, truths, and morals. RELIGION AND PSYCHOPATHOLOGY Nothing blurs the distinction between normal and pathological so much as religion. One of the most important phantasy systems that pro­ tects human beings from death is religious belief. But because so many people adhere to religious beliefs of some kind, and because such beliefs and practices are considered natural, healthy, moral, normal expressions of culture, people sometimes forget how disassociated from reality such religious phenomena are. Because individuals are also driven to religious beliefs as a social solution to repressed desire, and because people feel comforted by such beliefs, they would be inclined to deny their disasso­ ciation from reality, indeed would abjure any threat to their faith in the absolute reality of such beliefs: One can try to re-create the world, to build up in its stead another world in which its most unbearable features are eliminated and replaced by others that are in conformity with one's wishes. But whoever, in desper­ ate defiance, sets out upon this path to happiness will as a rule attain nothing. Reality is too strong for him. He becomes a madman, who for the most part finds no one to help him in carrying through his delusion. It is asserted, however, that each one of us behaves in some one respect like a paranoiac, corrects some aspect of the world which is unbearable Piven: Death, Neurosis, and Normalcy 149 to him by the construction of a wish and introduces this delusion into reality. A special importance attaches to the case in which this attempt to procure a certainty of happiness and a protection against suffering through a delusional remoulding of reality is made by a considerable number of people in common. The religions of mankind must be classed among the mass-delusions of this kind. No one, needless to say, who shares a delusion ever recognizes it as such. (Freud 1953b: 81) But it is exactly these resistances, projections, and displacements of wish phantasies that liken religious beliefs and practices to neurotic symptoms, however ordinary they seem. Individual neurotic ceremonies or phanta­ sies reveal their disassociation from reality; social participation in phan­ tasy and practice unites the community and prevents infantile desire from revealing itself by what would be otherwise alienating. Freud writes: "De­ vout believers are safe-guarded in a high degree against the risk of certain neurotic illnesses; their acceptance of the universal neurosis spares them the task of constructing a personal one" (1953f: 44). Religious morality is imposed and often causes tangible individual problems, though desire may manifest itself through the social phantasy. The analogy of calling religion a universal obsessional neurosis (Freud 1953f, 1953k, 1953m) is relevant because projected phantasy and Oedipal struggles may be interpreted in what religious adherents take to be reality. Thus, not only are religious ethics imposed, they are practiced because believers fear punishment and alienation. The faithful are often forbidden to question such beliefs and enact them not from "other-regard" or principles but because salvation and damnation are at stake. Immortality resides in remaining infantile and unconditionally sub­ missive (Freud 1953b: 84-85). Hence the irony of salvation and death denial: The security and relief from terror attained by religious faith also reinforce the infantilism, dependence, and fear of punishment and death the believer wished to escape. The practice of being a good and perfect child to retain Daddy's love is writ large and projected onto the universe.

On a macrocosmic level the believer feels happy when he or she has re­ nounced his or her wishes and feels that he or she has gotten the father's love and approval. But the fear still remains, and the believer must con­ tinue supplication. Sadly, it would be more terrifying to individuate and stand alone than to live in fear of damnation. As Freud writes, "The deri­ vation of religious needs from the infant's helplessness and the longing for the father aroused by it seems to me incontrovertible, especially since the feeling is not simply prolonged from childhood days, but is perma­ nently sustained by fear of the superior power of Fate" (1953b: 72). Repression also destroys not merely the believers but those who are different as well, for the repressed demands release and is waiting for any 150 Journal of the American Academy of Religion opportunity to express itself by unleashing its fury on others. Excessive repression causes excessive frustration and obsessiveness. Believers are thus inclined to demand renunciations from each other, and their own repression demands that others conform or suffer the consequences. In sum, religious morality serves the purpose of satisfying the human need for eternal answers, for protection and security, and for an afterlife, but it cripples its individuals physically and mentally, as well as having delete­ rious effects on those who are not of the fold. As Freud notes, the repres­ sion of aggression and reaction formations away from hostility engender communal love, but this becomes possible only with the opportunity for displacing aggression onto someone else. The sacred truth and salvation of those answers sustaining life beget "the narcissism of minor differ­ ences," whereby the smallest dichotomies become justifications for dero­ gation and aggression: "When once the Apostle Paul had posited universal love between men as the foundation of his Christian community, extreme intolerance on the part of Christendom towards those who remained outside it became the inevitable consequence" (Freud 1953b: 114-115). Human history is highly informed by religious tradition. One would hardly call neurotic symptoms a morality that corresponds to goodness or health. So while religious morality is critiqued in terms of its effects on believers and disbelievers, what we take for granted as morally good and healthy when we examine the pathology governing religious belief might also be called into question. Aside from their irreality, the fictitious na­ ture of the externalized beliefs, the phantasy system itself might be con­ sidered a product of infantile fixation that impedes growth, autonomy, and individuation. Religion creates as many neuroses as it prevents: Religion restricts this play of choice and adaptation, since it imposes equally on everyone its own path to the acquisition of happiness and protection from suffering. Its technique consists in depressing the value of life and distorting the picture of the real world in a delusional man­ ner—which presupposes an intimidation of intelligence. At this price, by forcibly fixing them in a state of psychical infantilism, and by drawing them into a mass-delusion, religion succeeds in sparing many people an individual neurosis. But hardly anything more. (Freud 1953b: 84-85) Indeed, it is virtually impossible to separate neurosis from religious phenomena, even while the existence of social phantasy precludes the diagnosis of individual neurosis with individual phantasies. The fact that each individual experiences his or her own conflicts that engender patho­ logical symptoms unique to his or her total composition divorces neuro­ sis from a social phantasy provided from without. But it might also be said Piven: Death, Neurosis, and Normalcy 151 that because religion is the projection of infantile phantasies of protect­ ing and punishing parents, and includes many of the magical anxiety avoidances so prevalent among those who are prone to the indulgence of infantile regression and flight into illness, that religion may be considered a transference neurosis. Thus, there is no surprise when Freud not only compares religion and neurosis but declares them inseparable: "If our work leads us to a conclusion which reduces religion to a neurosis of humanity and explains its enormous power in the same way as a neurotic compulsion in our individual patients, we may be sure of drawing the resentment of our ruling powers down upon us I have never doubted that religious phenomena are only to be understood on the pattern of the individual neurotic symptoms familiar to us" (1953k: 55-58). Unfortu­ nately, enough of human history and civilization depends on such beliefs to protect people that humanity may never outgrow its infancy or mad­ ness: "The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life" (Freud 1953b: 74). Indeed, this whole analysis would seem to indi­ cate that the net result of the sacrifices required of civilization and moral­ ity is a small modicum of comfort, security, and certainty at the expense of reality, health, and a peaceful world. A final word is necessary, however, in case one is misled into thinking that religion is the only target of this critique. 20 Symptomology is not confined to "religion" in the social sphere or "neurosis" in the individual one. Phantasy systems abound that symptomize the need for security, protection, gratification, pleasure, and salvation. Thus, whether discuss­ ing nationalism, consumption, shopping, philosophy, or psychoanalysis, human beings are driven by enough displaced wishes to affect their sense of reality. 21 20 yfe cannot maintain that all religion and theology conform to Freud's model. See Wallwork 1990. In all fairness, Freud's case falls short of understanding the great profundity of many reli­ gions, and it might take some time for psychoanalysis to catch up with the wisdom of certain the­ ologies. As a fine example of how Tibetan Buddhism contains many of the same core insights as psychoanalysis on suffering, attachment, and illusion, see Leifer. Indeed, according to Leifer, Ti­ betan Buddhism also recognizes the primacy of the fear of death in illusion formation, which psy­ choanalysis, for the most part, has not yet done. 21 For instance, Guntrip and Loewald call the American pursuit of money the "normal neuro­ sis," whereas Lasch considers America "the culture of narcissism." Fromm (1955) calls national­ ism a "libidinal fixation to mother." See Lifton's explication of "symbolic immortality" for some insight into many ordinary (though in many cases neurotic) forms of the evasion of death through illusion and emotional investment. 152 Journal of the American Academy of Religion CONCLUSIONS The implication of this exposition is that socially constructed illusions that ward off the fear of death are the norm. Death inspires and sanctifies illusions. Normalcy is a flight from death and annihilation, and perhaps all avoidances and illusions are acts of self-preservation. What is neurosis but a flight from reality, awareness, and confrontation with struggle to­ ward infancy, unconsciousness, and cessation of pain? As Yalom writes, "Neurotic syndromes share one important feature: though they incon­ venience and restrict a patient, they all succeed in protecting him or her from overt and terrifying death anxiety" (49). Freud explicitly rejects the idea that "every fear is ultimately the fear of death" (1953e: 57). But this means that the concept of death is complex and founded on manifold annihilating experiences. Death can mean separation, helplessness, being overwhelmed by one's emotions, violent injury, loss of love, loss of loved ones, decay of the body, and nonexistence.

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