The Denial of Death

  • Subtitle:
  • Author: Ernest Becker
  • Date: 2023-02-14
  • Tag: #psychology #philosophy
  • Link:

Foreword

We repress our bodies to purchase a soul that time cannot destroy; we sacrifice pleasure to buy immortality; we encapsulate ourselves to avoid death. And life escapes us while we huddle within the defended fortress of character.

Our desire for the best is the cause of the worst.

Becker, like Socrates, advises us to practice dying. Cultivating awareness of our death leads to disillusionment, loss of character armor, and a conscious choice to abide in the face of terror.

CH1 Human Nature and the Heroic

英雄主义是主要角色。

as William James—who covered just about everything—remarked at the turn of the century: “mankind’s common instinct for reality… has always held the world to be essentially a theatre for heroism.”

理解英雄主义的倾向:理解自恋(narcissism)。

#运气

As Aristotle somewhere put it: luck is when the guy next to you gets hit with the arrow.

弗洛伊德认为人类的内在认为自己是不朽的。

Freud’s explanation for this was that the unconscious does not know death or time: in man’s physiochemical, inner organic recesses he feels immortal.

自恋与自我价值的认同 [[《自卑与超越》]]

「他的自我价值感是象征性的,他珍视的自恋依赖于符号,依赖于他自己价值的抽象概念,一个由声音、文字和图像组成的在空气中,在脑海中,在纸上概念。这意味着,人类对组织活动的自然向往,融合和扩展的乐趣,可以在符号的领域中无限地得到满足,从而成为不朽。单个有机体不需要动一根手指就可以扩展到世界和时间的维度;即使它气喘而亡,也能将永恒融入自己。」

His sense of self-worth is constituted symbolically, his cherished narcissism feeds on symbols, on an abstract idea of his own worth, an idea composed of sounds, words, and images, in the air, in the mind, on paper. And this means that man’s natural yearning for organismic activity, the pleasures of incorporation and expansion, can be fed limitlessly in the domain of symbols and so into immortality. The single organism can expand into dimensions of worlds and times without moving a physical limb; it can take eternity into itself even as it gaspingly dies.

Cosmic significance。自恋与自我认同的需求相结合,我们产生了一种「天上地下唯我独尊」的独特心理。小孩子羞于掩饰,总是要最好的,当第一。

When you combine natural narcissism with the basic need for self-esteem, you create a creature who has to feel himself an object of primary value: first in the universe, representing in himself all of life.

现代人对金钱的追求掩饰了我们希望成为独一无二英雄的本能。我们的攀比行为即是证明我们比对方要强,具有最高价值。

We disguise our struggle by piling up figures in a bank book to reflect privately our sense of heroic worth.

社会赋予了每个人应有的角色和位置,继而压抑了人们对「英雄主义」的幻想,不承认自己的英雄情结。这也令社会更加稳定和谐。但这是我们的本能,无需为此感到羞愧。

英雄主义的「高」和「低」,被文化所赋予。

But each cultural system is a dramatization of earthly heroics; each system cuts out roles for performances of various degrees of heroism: from the “high” heroism of a Churchill, a Mao, or a Buddha, to the “low” heroism of the coal miner, the peasant, the simple priest; the plain, everyday, earthy heroism wrought by gnarled working hands guiding a family through hunger and disease.

英雄主义为了:首要价值、宇宙特殊性、创造价值、不可动摇的意义。

earn a feeling of primary value, of cosmic specialness, of ultimate usefulness to creation, of unshakable meaning.

人类所做的一切都是宗教的、英雄的,也可能是虚构的、易错的。

“civilized” society is a hopeful belief and protest that science, money and goods make man count for more than any other animal. In this sense everything that man does is religious and heroic, and yet in danger of being fictitious and fallible.

人生的主要问题:做什么可以获得英雄感?

As we shall see from our subsequent discussion, to become conscious of what one is doing to earn his feeling of heroism is the main self-analytic problem of life.

the main problem of human life: How empirically true is the cultural hero system that sustains and drives men?

资本主义和集权政府下的英雄主义——消费主义与希特勒。

The great perplexity of our time, the churning of our age, is that the youth have sensed—for better or for worse—a great social-historical truth: that just as there are useless self-sacrifices in unjust wars, so too is there an ignoble heroics of whole societies: it can be the viciously destructive heroics of Hitler’s Germany or the plain debasing and silly heroics of the acquisition and display of consumer goods, the piling up of money and privileges that now characterizes whole ways of life, capitalist and Soviet.

Society itself is a codified hero system, which means that society everywhere is a living myth of the significance of human life, a defiant creation of meaning.

充分了解自己,我们便掌控了生活。

For twenty-five hundred years we have hoped and believed that if mankind could reveal itself to itself, could widely come to know its own cherished motives, then somehow it would tilt the balance of things in its own favor.

PART I THE DEPTH PSYCHOLOGY OF HEROISM

我喝酒不仅仅是因为酒中的快乐,也不是为了嘲笑信仰,只是为了暂时忘记自己,独自一人沉醉其中。

I drink not from mere joy in wine nor to scoff at faith—no, only to forget myself for a moment, that only do I want of intoxication, that alone. —OMAR KHAYYAM

CH2 The Terror of Death

对死亡的恐惧驱动了我们的行为。

of all things that move man, one of the principal ones is his terror of death.

直面死亡的勇气。人们将勇气上升为一种崇拜。

We admire most the courage to face death; we give such valor our highest and most constant adoration; it moves us deeply in our hearts because we have doubts about how brave we ourselves would be.

加缪:「真正严肃的哲学问题只有一个:自杀。」

古时走入死亡并且复活的人被视为英雄。

When philosophy took over from religion it also took over religion’s central problem, and death became the real “muse of philosophy” from its beginnings in Greece right through Heidegger and modern existentialism.

三到五岁的孩子才会形成关于「死亡」的概念。

The psychiatrist Rhein-gold says categorically that annihilation anxiety is not part of the child’s natural experience but is engendered in him by bad experiences with a depriving mother.

童年经历、对冲动的抑制、社会对自由和自我意识的反抗。

the fear of death as greatly heightened by the child’s experiences with his parents, by their hostile denial of his life impulses, and, more generally, by the antagonism of society to human freedom and self-expansiveness.

对死亡的恐惧是社会创造的东西,同时也用来对抗人,使他屈服。

fear of death is something that society creates and at the same time uses against the person to keep him in submission

叔本华憎恨他的母亲,称死亡为「哲学之缪斯」。此为童年经历造成的对死亡的恐惧所产生的影响。

表象之下,对死亡的恐惧普遍存在。它是自我保护本能的一种表现,我们却潜意识忽略它。

Zilboorg says that most people think death fear is absent because it rarely shows its true face; but he argues that underneath all appearances fear of death is universally present

Zilboorg points out that this fear is actually an expression of the instinct of self-preservation, which functions as a constant drive to maintain life and to master the dangers that threaten life

孩子对于世界的困惑:对因果关系的不理解,与对自己能力的不实际的想象。孩子和自己内在世界的混沌状态共处。

what is unique about the child’s perception of the world? For one thing, the extreme confusion of cause-and-effect relationships; for another, extreme unreality about the limits of his own powers.

When the child experiences inevitable and real frustrations from his parents, he directs hate and destructive feelings toward them; and he has no way of knowing that malevolent feelings cannot be fulfilled by the same magic as were his other wishes. Psychoanalysts believe that this confusion is a main cause of guilt and helplessness in the child.

the child doesn’t have the sure ability to organize his perceptions and his relationship to the world; he can’t control his own activity; and he doesn’t have sure command over the acts of others.

「talion principle」。孩子的恐惧和无助源于:

terror of the world, the horror of one’s own wishes, the fear of vengeance by the parents, the disappearance of things, one’s lack of control over anything, really.

repression takes care of the complex symbol of death for most people.

被压抑的对死亡恐惧的拒斥。

underneath the most bland exterior lurks the universal anxiety, the “worm at the core.”

冲击(shock)可以打破压抑(repression)

repression 是如何工作的:以彼之力还施彼身。

it is not simply a negative force opposing life energies; it lives on life energies and uses them creatively.

自恋在孩子的温暖童年中滋长。

Again we have evidence that the complex symbol of fear of death would be very variable in its intensity; it would be, as Wahl concluded, “profoundly dependent upon the nature and the vicissitudes of the developmental process.”

我们将看到,人类为自己创造了一个可管理的世界:他不加批判地、不加思考地投入行动。他接受文化编码,面对他应该看的地方;他不像巨人那样把世界一整块咬下来,而是像海狸那样把世界咬成一个个小块。他使用了各种各样的技巧,我们称之为「性格防御」:他学会了不暴露自己,不鹤立鸡群;他学会了将自己嵌入其他力量,包括具体的人、事物和文化指令;结果是,他开始生活在他周围世界的想象中。当他的脚深陷泥沼,他的生活被描绘成一个现成的迷宫时,他不必害怕。他所要做的就是以一种强迫性的方式,在孩子学习的「世界的方式」中,以一种冷酷的平静——詹姆斯所说的「活在当下,忽视和遗忘的奇怪力量」——继续前进。

What we will see is that man cuts out for himself a manageable world: he throws himself into action uncritically, unthinkingly. He accepts the cultural programming that turns his nose where he is supposed to look; he doesn’t bite the world off in one piece as a giant would, but in small manageable pieces, as a beaver does. He uses all kinds of techniques, which we call the “character defenses”: he learns not to expose himself, not to stand out; he learns to embed himself in other-power, both of concrete persons and of things and cultural commands; the result is that he comes to exist in the imagined infallibility of the world around him. He doesn’t have to have fears when his feet are solidly mired and his life mapped out in a ready-made maze. All he has to do is to plunge ahead in a compulsive style of drivenness in the “ways of the world” that the child learns and in which he lives later as a kind of grim equanimity—the “strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting”—as James put it.

CH3 The Recasting of Some Basic Psychoanalytic Ideas

关于人「本质」的困惑。

there was no essence, that the essence of man is really his paradoxical nature, the fact that he is half animal and half symbolic.

We might call this existential paradox the condition of individuality within finitude.

人类的巨大扩张、灵巧、微妙、自我意识让人类有一种上帝的感觉。

Man has a symbolic identity that brings him sharply out of nature. He is a symbolic self, a creature with a name, a life history. He is a creator with a mind that soars out to speculate about atoms and infinity, who can place himself imaginatively at a point in space and contemplate bemusedly his own planet. This immense expansion, this dexterity, this ethereality, this self-consciousness gives to man literally the status of a small god in nature, as the Renaissance thinkers knew.

人类的矛盾之处:自我认知的无限性与自我肉体的有限性。

Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever.

孩童性格的塑造。性格是展现给外界的样子,但却隐藏了内心的失败。成长就是隐藏伤痕的过程。

In this way we realize directly and poignantly that what we call the child’s character is a modus vivendi achieved after the most unequal struggle any animal has to go through; a struggle that the child can never really understand because he doesn’t know what is happening to him, why he is responding as he does, or what is really at stake in the battle.

character is a face that one sets to the world, but it hides an inner defeat.

To grow up at all is to conceal the mass of internal scar tissue that throbs in our dreams.

帕斯卡:「not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.」不疯狂即是另一种疯狂。

Anality ——肛交心理——forms of the universal protest against accident and death

the basic key to the problem of anality is that it reflects the dualism of man’s condition—his self and his body.

孩童对肛门的好奇与探索。

it reflects the discovery and exercise of natural bodily functions; it masters an area of strangeness; it establishes power and control over the deterministic laws of the natural world; and it does all this with symbols and fancy.

肛门粪便与其隐喻——腐烂和死亡。

The anus and its incomprehensible, repulsive product represents not only physical determinism and boundness, but the fate as well of all that is physical: decay and death.

人们通过肛门行为锯齿死亡与意外。将掌控自己身体主权的行为,作为一种对自然神秘行为的控制。

存在主义的悖论——「不一致性(incongruity)」一如生活本身。

we can understand what the existential paradox means: that what bothers people is really incongruity, life as it is.

俄狄浦斯情结

the boy child had innate drives of sexuality and he even wanted to possess his mother. At the same time, he knew that his father was his competitor, and he held in check a murderous aggressiveness toward him. The reason he held it in check was that he knew the father was physically stronger than he and that the result of an open fight would be the father’s victory and the castration of the son. Hence the horror of blood, of mutilation, of the female genitals that seemed to have been mutilated; they testified that castration was a fact.

弗洛伊德认为,我们每个人内心深处的罪恶感都与在史前时期的弑父和乱伦的原始罪行有关;罪恶感根深蒂固,它与我们的身体、性和排泄物以及父母等概念深深纠缠。

He thought that the guilt we each feel deep down is connected with a primal crime of patricide and incest committed in the dim recesses of prehistory; so deep is guilt ingrained, so much is it confused with the body, with sex and excrement, and with the parents.

俄狄浦斯情结并非简单的恋母,而是成为上帝。一种因逃避死亡而形成的扭曲的自恋。

the Oedipus complex is the Oedipal project, a project that sums up the basic problem of the child’s life: whether he will be a passive object of fate, an appendage of others, a plaything of the world or whether he will be an active center within himself—whether he will control his own destiny with his own powers or not.

plainly exhibits infantile narcissism perverted by the flight from death

其主要问题是逃离无助和消失,性的问题紧随其后。俄狄浦尔计划是从被动、从毁灭、从偶然中逃离:孩子想要通过成为自己的父亲、自己生命的创造者和维持者来征服死亡。

The Oedipal project is the flight from passivity, from obliteration, from contingency: the child wants to conquer death by becoming the father of himself, the creator and sustainer of his own life.

儿童的成长过程尤为有趣,出生后的口欲期展开对身体和周围世界的探索,三岁开始对死亡形成概念,认识到自己并非世界的全部和中心。

His body is his narcissistic project, and he uses it to try to “swallow the world.” The “anal stage” is another way of talking about the period when the child begins to turn his attention to his own body as an object in his phenomenal field.

因此,并没有所谓完美的人格,孩子通过做自己形成自己的性格。性格是异常形成的,由特定的反应方式形成的。

The profound meaning of this is that there is no “perfect” way to bring up a child, since he “brings himself up” by trying to shape himself into an absolute controller of his own destiny. As this aim is impossible, each character is, deeply and in some way, fantastically unreal, fundamentally imperfect. As Ferenczi so well summed it up: “Character is from the point of view of the psychoanalyst a sort of abnormality, a kind of mechanization of a particular way of reaction, rather similar to an obsessional symptom.”

The Castration Complex

阉割情结——男孩害怕失去生殖器,女孩幻想曾经拥有男性生殖器,然后被阉割。于父亲的威胁无关,而是和母亲的对抗中产生。母亲既是生理上的安全依仗,又是精神上的威胁。孩子必须客服这种依赖去确认自己力量的保护感。

In the newer understanding of the castration complex it is not the father’s threats that the child reacts to. As Brown so well says, the castration complex comes into being solely in confrontation with the mother.

That is another way of saying that the mother, by representing secure biological dependence, is also a fundamental threat.

孩子形成因果概念,就会不停挑战父母,超越他们以及他们所代表的诱惑和威胁。恐怖是孩子自己发明的概念,孩子将母亲视为崇拜与爱慕的对象,是缩小其权威的行为。

What troubles neurotics—as it troubles most people—is their own powerlessness; they must find something to set themselves against. If the mother represents biological dependence, then the dependence can be fought against by focussing it on the fact of sexual differentiation. If the child is to be truly causa sui, then he must aggressively defy the parents in some way, move beyond them and the threats and temptations they embody. The genitals are a small thing in the child’s perceptual world; hardly enough to be traumatic just because they lack protuberance.

Penis-Envy

阴茎嫉妒——弗洛伊德提出,由于观察到男女小便方式不同,女孩认识到男性与女性器官不同,并产生阴茎羡慕和阴茎忌妒。按照经典精神分析理论,母亲没有给女孩阴茎,使女孩对母亲充满敌意并且希望父亲插入以获得阴茎,这就是阴茎嫉妒的概论。

性别差异的可怕之处。

The horror of sexual differentiation is a horror of “biological fact,” as Brown so well says.18 It is a fall out of illusion into sobering reality. It is a horror of assuming an immense new burden, the burden of the meaning of life and the body, of the fatality of one’s incompleteness, his helplessness, his finitude.

性这个物理的答案对于解决我们是谁、为什么出现在这个星球上来说,毫无用处,甚至是一种威胁。

性交伴随着罪恶感,罪恶感之所以存在,是因为身体给人内心的自由、他的「真实自我」蒙上了阴影,通过性行为,这个「真实的自我」被迫成为一个标准化的、机械的、生物学的角色。是对真实自我的一种欺骗。

The inner self represents the freedom of thought, imagination, and the infinite reach of symbolism. The body represents determinism and boundness. The child gradually learns that his freedom as a unique being is dragged back by the body and its appendages which dicate “what” he is. For this reason sexuality is as much a problem for the adult as for the child: the physical solution to the problem of who we are and why we have emerged on this planet is no help—in fact, it is a terrible threat. It doesn’t tell the person what he is deep down inside, what kind of distinctive gift he is to work upon the world. This is why it is so difficult to have sex without guilt: guilt is there because the body casts a shadow on the person’s inner freedom, his “real self” that—through the act of sex—is being forced into a standardized, mechanical, biological role. Even worse, the inner self is not even being called into consideration at all; the body takes over completely for the total person, and this kind of guilt makes the inner self shrink and threaten to disappear.

专注于「physical self」是一种逃避存在悖论、以及性的罪恶感的方式。女人在性交中通过确认「爱」去确认和保证自己独特的内在「self」不会被动物性的因素所否定。男人则相反,纯粹动物性角度出发,去逃避这种罪恶感以及对自我存在的怀疑。

Trauma of the primal scene

causa-sui:自因。拉丁文 causa sui 的意译。十七世纪荷兰唯物主义哲学家斯宾诺莎哲学中的基本概念。斯宾诺莎反对笛卡尔宇宙有物质、精神两个独立存在、平行发展的本原的观点,主张宇宙间只有实体存在着,这个实体就是无所不包的整个自然界。

孩子对父母性交的观察造成的创伤。困惑超越了生理上的认知。这种场景的创伤不仅仅是弗洛伊德认为的无法参与其中,而是包含了许多复杂的因素,比如身体的恐怖、文化上超越自我的背叛。

The thing that the parents represent most of all is the discouragement of the body as a causa-sui project; they represent the castration complex, disillusionment with the body, and the fear of it. Even more, they themselves are the living embodiment of the cultural world view that the child has to internalize in order for him to get out of his impasse with his body.

性所代表的——符号(自由),以及身体(命运)。

Sex is an inevitable component of man’s confusion over the meaning of his life, a meaning split hopelessly into two realms—symbols (freedom) and body (fate).

用性去回避真正的自我意识和成长,是一种逃避真正自我的谎言。

It then becomes a lie about reality, a screen against full consciousness.

性作为对抗社会标准化与垄断的私密方式。比如,青少年时期的秘密手淫,以一种个人化的方式使用他的性,控制它解除它的决定性。

In this sense, sex as a project represents a retreat from the standardizations and monopolizations of the social world.

A person is said to be “socialized” precisely when he accepts to “sublimate” the body-sexual character of his Oedipal project.

阉割情结令人服从社会,成为社会人,将身体交付他人或社会,以换取「成熟」这一特质。

The castration complex has done its work, and one submits to “social reality”; he can now deflate his own desires and claims and can play it safe in the world of the powerful elders. He can even give his body over to the tribe, the state, the embracing magical umbrella of the elders and their symbols; that way it will no longer be a dangerous negation for him. But there is no real difference between a childish impossibility and an adult one; the only thing that the person achieves is a practiced self-deceit—what we call the “mature” character.

CH4 Human Character as a Vital Lie

人们伪装自己的想法去驱赶真正的现实。

为什么与生俱来崇尚英雄情结的人却缺少勇气?

人之所以天生懦弱,是因为他觉得自己没有权威;他没有权威的原因就在于人类动物的本质:我们所有的意义都是从外部,从我们与他人的交往中建立起来的。部分原因在于我们生而俱来的罪恶感、对他人的依赖和崇拜——最明显和浅表的原因。

I thought the reason man was so naturally cowardly was that he felt he had no authority; and the reason he had no authority was in the very nature of the way the human animal is shaped: all our meanings are built into us from the outside, from our dealings with others.

Jonah Syndrom:对成长的逃避,对实现自己最大能力的恐惧。我们害怕被粉碎、失去控制、走向灭亡,继而减弱了我们的生命强度。

Maslow used an apt term for this evasion of growth, this fear of realizing one’s own fullest powers. He called it the “Jonah Syndrome.”

“partly a justified fear of being torn apart, of losing control, of being shattered and disintegrated, even of being killed by the experience.” And the result of this syndrome is what we would expect a weak organism to do: to cut back the full intensity of life

孩童缺少承受创造的恐怖的力量。Repression 的好处就是能够让人们在这个无法理解、充斥着美好、恐怖的复杂世界上坚定地生活下去。

We change these heavily emotional perceptions precisely because we need to move about in the world with some kind of equanimity, some kind of strength and directness; we can’t keep gaping with our heart in our mouth, greedily sucking up with our eyes everything great and powerful that strikes us.

自然所赋予人的无限性。这既是一种恩赐,也是一种负担。

She created an animal who has no defense against full perception of the external world, an animal completely open to experience. Not only in front of his nose, in his umwelt, but in many other umwelten. He can relate not only to animals in his own species, but in some ways to all other species. He can contemplate not only what is edible for him, but everything that grows. He not only lives in this moment, but expands his inner self to yesterday, his curiosity to centuries ago, his fears to five billion years from now when the sun will cool, his hopes to an eternity from now. He lives not only on a tiny territory, nor even on an entire planet, but in a galaxy, in a universe, and in dimensions beyond visible universes.

我们是有肛门的上帝。

As Maslow has well said, “It is precisely the godlike in ourselves that we are ambivalent about, fascinated by and fearful of, motivated to and defensive against. This is one aspect of the basic human predicament, that we are simultaneously worms and gods.”

Maslow对弗洛伊德的评价:对外界的恐惧即一种对我们创造现实的能力和可能的恐惧。

Freud’s greatest discovery, the one which lies at the root of psychodynamics, is that the great cause of much psychological illness is the fear of knowledge of oneself—of one’s emotions, impulses, memories, capacities, potentialities, of one’s destiny. We have discovered that fear of knowledge of oneself is very often isomorphic with, and parallel with, fear of the outside world.

焦虑来自对于无助以及被遗弃的恐惧。示弱是一种生存方式,这种虚弱用来逃避死亡,也表示用自己的力量立于天地间。

The child’s character, his style of life, is his way of using the power of others, the support of the things and the ideas of his culture, to banish from his awareness the actual fact of his natural impotence.

能力与欲望的不匹配。

There is no secure answer to the awesome mystery of the human face that scrutinizes itself in the mirror; no answer, at any rate, that can come from the person himself, from his own center. One’s own face may be godlike in its miraculousness, but one lacks the godlike power to know what it means, the godlike strength to have been responsible for its emergence.

我们脆弱却不承认脆弱。

We don’t want to admit that we are fundamentally dishonest about reality, that we do not really control our own lives. We don’t want to admit that we do not stand alone, that we always rely on something that transcends us, some system of ideas and powers in which we are embedded and which support us.

我们生活中需要的谎言注定是宿命的也是可笑的。

We still did not meet our doom on our own manly terms, in contest with objective reality. It is fateful and ironic how the lie we need in order to live dooms us to a life that is never really ours.

真实的生活是一场灾难,看清死亡与重生我们也就看清了现实。然而,这并不容易,因为我们终将走向死亡。

we could understand what was at stake in the death and rebirth: that man’s character was a neurotic structure that went right to the heart of his humanness. As Frederick Perls put it, “To suffer one’s death and to be reborn is not easy.” And it is not easy precisely because so much of one has to die.

四层神经结构: 一二、everyday layers,大部分时间发挥作用; 三、感到空虚和迷失,我们为了人格防御而避开; 四、死亡感知与拒斥死亡,最深处的真实而基本的动物性恐惧。

认清这四层,我们才可以直面内心,不去躲避与对抗恐惧。

重生即拒天堂于门外。负罪而活对一些人是解脱。

享受一个人的「全部人性」有何意义?全部的人性意味着全部的恐惧与焦虑。

Lewis Bunuel 路易斯·布鲁埃尔电影中的疯狗,代表了一种对循规蹈矩的压抑生活的反抗。无论我们如何抵抗,我们就在错误的悬崖边。我们用压抑去抵抗内心的恐惧,伪装真正的现实。

no matter what men pretend, they are only one accidental bite away from utter fallibility.

马斯洛的「自我实现」与「存在认知」——对世界真想感知的开放心态。但无需全然走到头。

Maslow talks very convincingly about “self-actualization” and the ecstasy of “peak experiences” wherein a person comes to see the world in all its awe and splendor and senses his own free inner expansion and the miracle of his being. Maslow calls this state “being cognition,” the openness of perception to the truth of the world, a truth concealed by the neurotic distortions and illusions that protect one against overwhelming experiences.

Rank 针对罗素的「人生而平等却处处在枷锁中」的批判。

“every human being is… equally unfree, that is, we… create out of freedom, a prison…”

Harold Searles 所说到的患者的悲剧——人的有限性、对死亡和过于庞大的生活的恐惧。人格分裂者无法将自己的肉身安放在合适的位置,对待这些恐惧与不安。我们处于对绝望的防御而形成我们的性格,有些人很不幸,没能将这种恐惧拒之门外。

At Chestnut Lodge, the twice-weekly, hour-long case presentations usually have to do with schizophrenic patients…. When the author went there, nearly 12 years ago, the therapists—including the author—presenting these cases often tended to paint a totally, or almost totally, black picture of the patient’s childhood family relationships; the feeling-atmosphere of the presentation was one of blame of the parents more than anything else. As the years have gone on, the author has found that the presentations have come to convey less and less of such blame, and to convey more and more of the tragedy of the patients’ lives—tragedy which is so much of a piece with the tragedy of life for all of us that the presentation is often a profoundly grief-laden experience for both the presenter and the listeners. One feels that the staff-presentation now gives a truer picture of a patient’s life, but a picture which is much more deeply shaking than was the blame-colored picture previously often seen.

The schizophrenic’s misfortune is that he has been burdened with extra anxieties, extra guilt, extra helplessness, an even more unpredictable and unsupportive environment. He is not surely seated in his body, has no secure base from which to negotiate a defiance of and a denial of the real nature of the world.

The schizophrenic is supremely creative in an almost extra-human sense because he is furthest from the animal: he lacks the secure instinctive programming of lower organisms; and he lacks the secure cultural programming of average men. No wonder he appears to average men as “crazy”: he is not in anything’s world.

我们想要从死亡与消失中的恐惧中解脱,但生活是其导火索,因此我们无法全然活着,只能束手束脚。

The irony of man’s condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive.

Stripped of subtle complications (i.e., of all the character defenses—repression, denial, misperception of reality), who could regard the sun except with fear?

CH5 The Psychoanalyst Kierkegaard

Kierkegaard 克尔凯郭尔

the best existential analysis of the human condition leads directly into the problems of God and faith

Kierkegaard 的理论基石是人类自我意识的觉醒——即被逐出伊甸园。同时也带给了人恐惧和焦虑。

The foundation stone for Kierkegaard’s view of man is the myth of the Fall, the ejection of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden.

The fall into self-consciousness, the emergence from comfortable ignorance in nature, had one great penalty for man: it gave him dread, or anxiety.

上帝告诉亚当偷食禁果会导致死亡,人类自己的决定导致了人类的命运。自我意识的觉醒导致了对死亡的恐惧和焦虑。

In other words, the final terror of self-consciousness is the knowledge of one’s own death, which is the peculiar sentence on man alone in the animal kingdom. This is the meaning of the Garden of Eden myth and the rediscovery of modern psychology: that death is man’s peculiar and greatest anxiety.

K 将人们性格的形成原因归为躲避恐惧与毁灭。即人么你如何欺骗自己的方式导致了他们是怎么样的人。

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.”

「lofty」shut-upness 与 「mistaken」shut-upness(the lie of character)。孩子的童年经历导致了他们选择以何种方式形成自己的防御或者说性格。

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.

作为家长的启示:接受不确定性,不要做独断专行的家长。给孩子宽容、探索的机会。[[Range]]

the inauthentic or immediate man:被社会文化所限制,成为了文化的奴隶,用劳动力回报去掌控自己的生活。如张爱玲所说,「新兴的京戏里有一种孩子气的力量,合了我们内在的需要。中国人的原始性没有被根除,想必我们的文化过于随随便便之故。就在这一点上,我们不难找到中国人的永久的青春的秘密。」想必张所谓的「永久的青春」并非褒义。中国的文化根深蒂固,过于厚重,难以改变。因此,在中国做一个「immediate man」十分容易。我们需要一些「孩子气」更多的东西,不仅仅是在张的时代。

平庸主义者的信条:

Why does man accept to live a trivial life? Because of the danger of a full horizon of experience, of course. This is the deeper motivation of philistinism, that it celebrates the triumph over possibility, over freedom. Philistinism knows its real enemy: freedom is dangerous. If you follow it too willingly it threatens to pull you into the air; if you give it up too wholly, you become a prisoner of necessity. The safest thing is to toe the mark of what is socially possible.

人内在象征的自我、具有某种自由,但有限的身体限制了这种自由。

Kierkegaard is painting for us a broad and incredibly rich portrait of types of human failure, ways in which man succumbs to and is beaten by life and the world; beaten because he fails to face up to the existential truth of his situation—the truth that he is an inner symbolic self, which signifies a certain freedom, and that he is bound by a finite body, which limits that freedom.

极端情况:自我过多和过少。过多——人格分裂(schizophrenia);过少——抑郁(depression)。

自我(self)与身体(body)需要结合,在某个平衡点上我们发展自己的性格。重要的是我们需要承认并意识到自己的局限性。

the development of the person is a development in depth from a fixed center in the personality, a center that unites both aspects of the existential dualism—the self and the body. But this kind of development needs precisely an acknowledgment of reality, the reality of one’s limits.

The depressed person is so afraid of being himself, so fearful of exerting his own individuality, of insisting on what might be his own meanings, his own conditions for living, that he seems literally stupid. He cannot seem to understand the situation he is in, cannot see beyond his own fears, cannot grasp why he has bogged down.

绝望——所有事都理所应当;所有事都无足轻重。

“The loss of possibility signifies: either that everything has become necessary to man or that everything has become trivial.”——K

庸俗主义的拥趸即为「normal neurosis」正常的精神病患者。

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.”

K 试图将人们带出这种对生命的谎言。

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.

对「immediate man」轻蔑、不屑的人——introvert。询问这些我们从青春期开始挣扎的问题:

  • 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?

过度的「introvert」可能会导致伤害。随之而来的是最后一类人——投身生活的自我创造的人:

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,

这种普罗米修斯式的人的极端例子:希特勒和越南。无法像上帝般全知全能,却可以像上帝般大肆毁灭。

真正的「人」应该是——超越自己的人。为此他需要:为了生存需要哪些,意识到有限的、无助的人性;直面焦虑;正视死亡;打破我们人性的谎言。

instead of the deadends of human impotence, self-centeredness, and self-destruction, he now shows us what true possibility would be like for man.

The “healthy” person, the true individual, the self-realized soul, the “real” man, is the one who has transcended himself.

In order to transcend himself he must break down that which he needs in order to live.

In the prison of one’s character one can pretend and feel that he is somebody, that the world is manageable, that there is a reason for one’s life, a ready justification for one’s action.

从无到有到无的恐惧。

This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression—and with all this yet to die.

The flood of anxiety is not the end for man. It is, rather, a “school” that provides man with the ultimate education, the final maturity. It is a better teacher than reality, says Kierkegaard,40 because reality can be lied about, twisted, and tamed by the tricks of cultural perception and repression. But anxiety cannot be lied about. Once you face up to it, it reveals the truth of your situation; and only by seeing that truth can you open a new possibility for yourself.

William James的总结:

This is the salvation through self-despair, the dying to be truly born, of Lutheran theology, the passage into nothing of which Jacob Behmen [Boehme] writes. To get to it, a critical point must usually be passed, a corner turned within one. Something must give way, a native hardness must break down and liquefy….

The man with the clear head is the man who frees himself from those fantastic “ideas” [the characterological lie about reality] and looks life in the face, realizes that everything in it is problematic, and feels himself lost.

对人而言,一切皆有可能

one is a creature who can do nothing, but one exists over against a living God for whom “everything is possible.”

很好的总结

Man breaks through the bounds of merely cultural heroism; he destroys the character lie that had him perform as a hero in the everyday social scheme of things; and by doing so he opens himself up to infinity, to the possibility of cosmic heroism, to the very service of God. His life thereby acquires ultimate value in place of merely social and cultural, historical value. He links his secret inner self, his authentic talent, his deepest feelings of uniqueness, his inner yearning for absolute significance, to the very ground of creation. Out of the ruins of the broken cultural self there remains the mystery of the private, invisible, inner self which yearned for ultimate significance, for cosmic heroism. This invisible mystery at the heart of every creature now attains cosmic significance by affirming its connection with the invisible mystery at the heart of creation. This is the meaning of faith.

In Kierkegaard, psychology and religion, philosophy and science, poetry and truth merge indistinguishably together in the yearning of the creature.

CH6 The Problem of Freud’s Character, Noch Einmal

Man’s body was “a curse of fate,” and culture was built upon repression—not because man was a seeker only of sexuality, of pleasure, of life and expansiveness, as Freud thought, but because man was also primarily an avoider of death. Consciousness of death is the primary repression, not sexuality.

弗洛伊德后期写作的核心——「death instinct」。他也是个小心眼的人。

The death instinct represents the organism’s desire to die, but the organism can save itself from its own impulsion toward death by redirecting it outward. The desire to die, then, is replaced by the desire to kill, and man defeats his own death instinct by killing others.

人们从他人的苦难中获得解脱,或许是恐怖片受欢迎的部分原因。

Rank: “the death fear of the ego is lessened by the killing, the sacrifice, of the other; through the death of the other, one buys oneself free from the penalty of dying, of being killed.”

弗洛伊德的经历以及对死亡的态度。对自己死亡的迷信。对死亡屈服的模糊犹豫。

To yield is to disperse one’s shored-up center, let down one’s guard, one’s character armor, admit one’s lack of self-sufficiency. And this shored-up center, this guard, this armor, this supposed self-sufficiency are the very things that the entire project of coming-of-age from childhood to manhood is all about.

弗洛伊德的晕眩与他的人生问题的关系——The fantasy of father-murder,“wrecked-by-success”。

在孩子与父亲的对抗中,输了会结局惨烈,赢了则会难以承受这种愧疚。

Guilt is a function of fear

all victories over a rival, including his own father, reawaken the guilt of victory and trigger the reaction of being unable to bear it.

causa-sui 是一种代价,即我们必须同时承担情感上的无助以及对这种情绪认同的反抗。

the causa-sui project is a lie that must take its toll; now we can understand that this toll is an emotional one that must always carry both the temptation to admit helpless dependence and the fight against that admission. One lives with a certain amount of tight-lipped determination.

自我是:自我的主权,行动和选择的自由,塑造自己的命运。

The ego is the thing; it alone gives self-governance, the ability to have a certain freedom of action and choice, to shape one’s own destiny as much as possible.

As Roazen points out, in Freud’s own words he saw his hero as:“… a man whose sexual need and activity were exceptionally reduced, as if a higher aspiration had raised him above the common animal need of mankind.”

自因哉概念层面的矛盾性——非人造的意义。

Here is the ambivalence of causa sui on a conceptual level: how can one trust any meanings that are not man-made?

对抗无意义——一边轻视一边祈祷。

As you fear that life in this dimension may not count, may not have any real meaning, you relieve your anxiety by being especially scornful of the very thing that you wish for most, while underneath your writing desk you have your fingers crossed.

蔑视宗教的虚幻舒适。

This is what makes man strong and true—that he defies the illusory comforts of religion.

What, actually, does it mean to be a tragic figure firmly in the grip of one’s daimon? It means to possess great talent, to relentlessly pursue the expression of that talent through the unswerving affirmation of the causa-sui project that alone gives it birth and form.

PART II THE FAILURES OF HEROISM

CH7 The Spell Cast by Persons—The Nexus of Unfreedom

人们灵魂中的奴隶性。

men worship and fear power and so give their loyalty to those who dispense it.

患者对医生的移情(transference)。催眠师的威严形象。人们对于强者的顺从心理。

Ferenczi

“In our innermost soul we are still children, and we remain so throughout life.”

弗洛伊德认为人们在群体中的时候,更依赖、更顺从。

they simply became dependent children again, blindly following the inner voice of their parents, which now came to them under the hypnotic spell of the leader. They abandoned their egos to his, identified with his power, tried to function with him as an ideal.

leader 带给群体虚幻,如同带给孩子无边能力幻想的父亲。

The real world is simply too terrible to admit; it tells man that he is a small, trembling animal who will decay and die. Illusion changes all this, makes man seem important, vital to the universe, immortal in some way.

In the group each man seems an omnipotent hero who can give full vent to his appetites under the approving eye of the father.

弗洛姆 - [[《逃避自由》]]

Fromm has insisted, too, on the importance of what he calls “incestuous symbiosis”: the fear of emerging out of the family and into the world on one’s own responsibility and powers; the desire to keep oneself tucked into a larger source of power. It is these things that make for the mystique of “group,” “nation,” “blood,” “mother- or fatherland,” and the like.

Redl 的研究

the “spell cast by persons”—as we have called it—is a very complex one, which includes many more things than meet the eye. In fact, it may include everything but a spell.

群体的领导的作用——合理化冲突、缓解冲突、爱、敌对目标。

Redl showed that groups use leaders for several types of exculpation or relief of conflict, for love, or for even just the opposite—targets of aggressions and hate that pulls the group together in a common bond. (As one recent popular film advertisement put it: “They follow him bravely into hell only for the pleasure of killing him and revenging themselves.”)

领导无自我。

the leader is as much a creature of the group as they of him and that he loses his “individual distinctiveness” by being a leader, as they do by being followers. He has no more freedom to be himself than any other member of the group, precisely because he has to be a reflex of their assumptions in order to qualify for leadership in the first place.

群众的受害者心理,导致对领导指令的盲从,成为一种逃避责任的懦弱的英雄主义。

As we have learned from the anthropological literature, the victim who is sacrificed becomes a holy offering to the gods, to nature, or to fate. The community gets more life by means of the victim’s death, and so the victim has the privilege of serving the world in the highest possible way by means of his own sacrificial death.

He is not just a naturally and lustily destructive animal who lays waste around him because he feels omnipotent and impregnable. Rather, he is a trembling animal who pulls the world down around his shoulders as he clutches for protection and support and tries to affirm in a cowardly way his feeble powers.

领导者与从众是相互依存的关系。领导会创造从众,群体会创造领导,二者彼此需要。

弗洛伊德视野既宽也窄。

For Freud, “eros” covered not only specific sexual drives but also the child’s longing for omnipotence, for the oceanic feeling that comes with a merger with the parental powers.

阿德勒的观点:

transference is fundamentally a problem of courage.

移情和勇气相关。移情是懦弱,是需要掌控,是自我疏离的一种表现。

that transference is not a matter of unusual cowardice but rather of the basic problems of an organismic life, problems of power and control: the strength to oppose reality and keep it ordered for our own organismic expansion and fulfillment.

负面移情—帮助我们修复我们的世界,树立目标和一种感觉,即使是破坏性的。我们身体的疼痛也可以是移情的目标。

The pains we feel, the illnesses that are real or imaginary give us something to relate to, keep us from slipping out of the world, from bogging down in the desperation of complete loneliness and emptiness.

作者结论:

transference is a form of fetishism, a form of narrow control that anchors our own problems.

容格:

“… unless we prefer to be made fools of by our illusions, we shall, by carefully analysing every fascination, extract from it a portion of our own personality, like a quintessence, and slowly come to recognize that we meet ourselves time and again in a thousand disguises on the path of life.”

移情是驯服恐惧。

the essence of transference: as a taming of terror.

As William James said, with his unfailing directness, fear is “fear of the universe.” It is the fear of childhood, the fear of emerging into the universe, of realizing one’s own independent individuality, one’s own living and experiencing.

The transference object becomes the focus of the problem of one’s freedom because one is compulsively dependent on it; it sums up all other natural dependencies and emotions.

个人自我能力越弱,恐惧越强、移情越多。个人的无力与对死亡的恐惧所导致的结果——对父亲形象的强者崇拜。

This is a logical fate for the utterly helpless person: the more you fear death and the emptier you are, the more you people your world with omnipotent father-figures, extra-magical helpers.

the more terrifying the object, the stronger the transference; the more that the powerful object embodies in itself the natural power of the world, the more terrifying it can be, in reality, without any imagination on our part.

The Twin Ontological Motives

移情缘字对生活和死亡的恐惧,却也映射了对英雄主义和自我超越的向往。

transference is a reflex of cowardice in the face of both life and death, but it is also a reflex of the urge to heroism and self-unfolding.

我们一直在寻找「好」的感觉。

Man is the only organism in nature fated to puzzle out what it actually means to feel “right.”

人一方面想要和宇宙和自然融合(出于自我感觉的渺小以及对孤独的恐惧),另一方面也想要成为独一无二的独特存在。

what the psychoanalysts call “identification” is a natural urge to join in the overwhelming powers that transcend one.

个体化意味着和自然脱离

Individuation means that the human creature has to oppose itself to the rest of nature.

The whole basis of the urge to goodness is to be something that has value, that endures.

人为何遵守道德:

He uses morality to try to get a place of special belongingness and perpetuation in the universe, in two ways. First, he overcomes badness (smallness, unimportance, finitude) by conforming to the rules made by the representatives of natural power (the transference-objects); in this way his safe belongingness is assured. This too is natural: we tell the child when he is good so that he doesn’t have to be afraid. Second, he attempts to overcome badness by developing a really valuable heroic gift, becoming extra-special.

独裁者、施虐者为对象提供了客服无用的感觉。包括我们的自我审视与自我批评也是与心中的英雄对话,继而具备心中英雄的威严。

Dictators, revivalists, and sadists know that people like to be lashed with accusations of their own basic unworthiness because it reflects how they truly feel about themselves. The sadist doesn’t create a masochist; he finds him ready-made.

移情带来的安全英雄主义。

The fundamental use of transference, of what we could better call “transference heroics,” is the practice of a safe heroism.

保持独特也保证安全和受控。

How a person solves his natural yearnings for self-expansion and significance determines the quality of his life. Transference heroics gives man precisely what he needs: a certain degree of sharply defined individuality, a definite point of reference for his practice of goodness, and all within a certain secure level of safety and control.

移情英雄主义并不受控,无法意识。

seeing in the other person the self-transcending life process that gives to one’s self the larger nourishment it needs.

人无法独自而活。

As Rank so wisely saw, projection is a necessary unburdening of the individual; man cannot live closed upon himself and for himself. He must project the meaning of his life outward, the reason for it, even the blame for it.

CH8 Otto Rank and the Closure of Psychoanalysis on Kierkegaard

文化

Culture opposes nature and transcends it. Culture is in its most intimate intent a heroic denial of creatureliness.

天堂提供了所有人都可成为英雄的虚幻。

Or we might better say that Christianity took creature consciousness—the thing man most wanted to deny—and made it the very condition for his cosmic heroism.

Rank 的「romatic solution」:用爱转移英雄主义。精神上和道德上的需求转移到了一个个体上面。

he fixed his urge to cosmic heroism onto another person in the form of a love object.

救赎通过宣福而实现,不再是上帝的抽象的特权。那么我们对其他人的祝福是否也一定程度上反映出了我们对英雄主义的追求?

Salvation itself is no longer referred to an abstraction like God but can be sought “in the beatification of the other.” We could call this “transference beatification.”

Rank 将现代爱情关系视为一种宗教问题。我们所爱对象往往具有「神化」特征,歌曲中天使的微笑,如星星般的美眸。将对方神化、完美话,我们通过与对方结合而得到提升。我们的爱人即为神。

The point is that if the love object is divine perfection, then one’s own self is elevated by joining one’s destiny to it.

弗洛伊德将现代爱情归为俄狄浦斯情结。

性是灵与肉的融合。

in sex the body and the consciousness of it are no longer separated; the body is no longer something we look at as alien to ourselves.

性不是生活之谜的答案,无法解决我们的人生困境。

Sex is a “disappointing answer to life’s riddle,” and if we pretend that it is an adequate one, we are lying both to ourselves and to our children.

We might say that the child is still too weak to be able to bear the conflict of trying to be a personality and a species animal at the same time. The adult is, too, but he has been able to develop the necessary mechanisms of defense, repression and denial, that allow him to live with the problem of serving two masters.

将宇宙英雄主义与个人的爱混淆在一起,我们二者皆失。失去对方,失去自我。

When you confuse personal love and cosmic heroism you are bound to fail in both spheres. The impossibility of the heroism undermines the love, even if it is real. As Rank so aptly says, this double failure is what produces the sense of utter despair that we see in modern man. It is impossible to get blood from a stone, to get spirituality from a physical being, and so one feels “inferior” that his life has somehow not succeeded, that he has not realized his true gifts, and so on.

我们在寻求完美的另一半完全满足我们的意愿,但这是不可能的。将对方视为自己的全部,则对方的缺点会成为我们自我认知的威胁。

When we look for the “perfect” human object we are looking for someone who allows us to express our will completely, without any frustration or false notes. We want an object that reflects a truly ideal image of ourselves. But no human object can do this; humans have wills and counterwills of their own, in a thousand ways they can move against us, their very appetites offend us.

对方的弱化,导致英雄主义的倾倒,与家庭矛盾的关系。

The shadow of imperfection falls over our lives, and with it—death and the defeat of cosmic heroism. “She lessens” = “I die.” This is the reason for so much bitterness, shortness of temper and recrimination in our daily family lives.

抑郁的诱因——降低自我,委曲求全。

We may have no other God and we may prefer to deflate ourselves in order to keep the relationship, even though we glimpse the impossibility of it and the slavishness to which it reduces us.

我们向爱人祈求英雄主义,通过爱让我们感觉更好,却忽略了对方也是和我们一样脆弱和有限的个体。

现代爱情的结果——过于重视肉体。既然我无法满足我的最根本的需求,我至少可以和美好的肉体寻欢作乐,这是一种对于爱过少的所求,和过多索求一样,都是一种自我欺骗。

我们如何超越自己?我们选择离我们最近的 beyond 父母、老师、老板、领导。

man cannot fashion an absolute from within his condition, that cosmic heroism must transcend human relationships.

有创造力的人能力的来源。

The key to the creative type is that he is separated out of the common pool of shared meanings. There is something in his life experience that makes him take in the world as a problem; as a result he has to make personal sense out of it.

The work of art is, then, the ideal answer of the creative type to the problem of existence as he takes it in—not only the existence of the external world, but especially his own: who he is as a painfully separate person with nothing shared to lean on.

如果你如此突出于自然,你自己就必须创造自己的英雄式的理由,这太难了。这就是我们对一些似乎不合逻辑的东西的理解:你越是发展成为一个独特的自由和批判的人,你的内疚感就越强。 艺术家用自己的作品为自己的英雄主义寻找理由。作品即自己,即不完美,直到得到外部认可。

If you stick out of nature so much that you yourself have to create your own heroic justification, it is too much. This is how we understand something that seems illogical: that the more you develop as a distinctive free and critical human being, the more guilt you have.

The artist and the madman are trapped by their own fabrications; they wallow in their own anality, in their protest that they really are something special in creation.

艺术家无法与自己的作品和接受它的社会和平相处。

there is no way for the artist to be at peace with his work or with the society that accepts it.

宽恕来自全然超越。适用于最强、最英雄式的人。

the only way out of human conflict is full renunciation, to give one’s life as a gift to the highest powers. Absolution has to come from the absolute beyond.

拒绝最高权力的被动性

One should reach for the highest beyond of religion: man should cultivate the passivity of renunciation to the highest powers no matter how diffcult it is.

划重点!对生命英雄式的认可,超越性、超越另一半、超越宗教,而是在于对自然的全然臣服。

Only in this way, says Rank, only by surrendering to the bigness of nature on the highest, least-fetishized level, can man conquer death. In other words, the true heroic validation of one’s life lies beyond sex, beyond the other, beyond the private religion—all these are makeshifts that pull man down or that hem him in, leaving him torn with ambiguity.

CH9 The Present Outcome of Psychoanalysis

But the misfortune of man is that he can experience this guilt in two ways: as bafflement from without and from within—by being stopped in relation to his own potential development.

天才在左疯子在右。

neurosis represents creative power gone astray and confused. The person doesn’t really know what the problem is, but he hits on an ingenious way to keep moving past it.

神经官能的缩小。为了逃避死亡却走向死亡。

the person seeks to avoid death, but he does it by killing off so much of himself and so large a spectrum of his action-world that he is actually isolating and diminishing himself and becomes as though dead.

两种神经症类型:narrowing-down 和 creative

twin ontological motives: on the one hand, one merges with the world around him and becomes too much a part of it and so loses his own claim to life. On the other hand, one cuts oneself off from the world in order to make one’s own complete claim and so loses the ability to live and act in the world on its terms.

自恋神经症

If you are not involved in what others take for granted as the nourishment of their lives, then your own life becomes a total problem.

But the misfortune of man is that he can experience this guilt in two ways: as bafflement from without and from within—by being stopped in relation to his own potential development.

天才在左疯子在右。

neurosis represents creative power gone astray and confused. The person doesn’t really know what the problem is, but he hits on an ingenious way to keep moving past it.

神经官能的缩小。为了逃避死亡却走向死亡。

the person seeks to avoid death, but he does it by killing off so much of himself and so large a spectrum of his action-world that he is actually isolating and diminishing himself and becomes as though dead.

两种神经症类型:narrowing-down 和 creative

twin ontological motives: on the one hand, one merges with the world around him and becomes too much a part of it and so loses his own claim to life. On the other hand, one cuts oneself off from the world in order to make one’s own complete claim and so loses the ability to live and act in the world on its term

神经症者将自己的创造力系于己身,无法消化,不断内耗,而艺术家将这种力量从自己身上转移到了一个客观物体——他的创作上。神经症患者将「神经质」作为他的作品,实现克服「badness」追求完美的目的。一个在想象中将自己打造为英雄,一个在实际中通过创造成为英雄。

We might say that both the artist and the neurotic bite off more than they can chew, but the artist spews it back out again and chews it over in an objectified way, as an external, active, work project.

将追求完美具像化、客体化,转为我们可以控制,在一定程度上可以实现的事物。

the only way to work on perfection is in the form of an objective work that is fully under your control and is perfectible in some real ways.

我们需要不断地解决问题去缓解我们的存在焦虑。

He takes in the world, makes a total problem out of it, and then gives out a fashioned, human answer to that problem. This, as Goethe saw in Faust, is the highest that man can achieve.

根据天赋能力,我们可以区分神经症患者、艺术家、青少年、正常人。

cultural routine: the proletariat demands the obsession of work in order to keep from going crazy. 工作是人们对于现实真相的逃避,因此人们在混乱不堪的工作中也自得其乐。

The daily madness of these jobs is a repeated vaccination against the madness of the asylum. Look at the joy and eagerness with which workers return from vacation to their compulsive routines. They plunge into their work with equanimity and lightheartedness because it drowns out something more ominous. Men have to be protected from reality.

Rank 关于幻想与现实之间问题的总结。

With the truth, one cannot live. To be able to live one needs illusions, not only outer illusions such as art, religion, philosophy, science and love afford, but inner illusions which first condition the outer [i.e., a secure sense of one’s active powers, and of being able to count on the powers of others]. The more a man can take reality as truth, appearance as essence, the sounder, the better adjusted, the happier will he be… this constantly effective process of self-deceiving, pretending and blundering, is no psychopathological mechanism….

基于历史的神经症。它是一种历史问题而非临床问题。

the individual can more easily cross the line into clinical neurosis precisely where he is thrown back on himself and his own resources in order to justify his life.

神经症如今频繁出现,与英雄主义完美符号化身的消失相关。人们越来越难以找到完美的英雄。现代人的精神困境,被孤立于集体意识形态之外。

Neurosis is today a widespread problem because of the disappearance of convincing dramas of heroic apotheosis of man.

Modern man became psychological because he became isolated from protective collective ideologies.

心理学并不解答所有问题,只归因到个人层面。在这方面,宗教扮演了类似的解决人心理问题的功能。

Psychology narrows the cause for personal unhappiness down to the person himself, and then he is stuck with himself.

罪与精神问题十分相似,个人的完全孤立,个体与自然的不和谐,他的超个人主义,他试图从自己内心创造自己的世界所造成的困境。因此,人们从手边找到移情对象,并以此实现对自己的超越。

sin and neurosis are two ways of talking about the same thing—the complete isolation of the individual, his disharmony with the rest of nature, his hyperindividualism, his attempt to create his own world from within himself.

In sin and neurosis man fetishizes himself on something narrow at hand and pretends that the whole meaning and miraculousness of creation is limited to that, that he can get his beatification from that.

罪者不承认自己的人性、不幸、不值得的原因——无法在集体幻想中得到慰藉。

the sinner (neurotic) is hyper-conscious of the very thing he tries to deny: his creatureliness, his miserableness and unworthiness.

现代人的心理困境:试图用心理学渣都啊答案,却加剧了他的割裂与超意识。兰克称心理学为一种「主要为消极和瓦解的意识形态(preponderantly negative and disintegrating ideology.)」。

a sinner with no word for it or, worse, who looks for the word for it in a dictionary of psychology and thus only aggravates the problem of his separateness and hyper-consciousness.

神经症的三方面问题:

  • 作为性格形成的结果;
  • 现实与幻觉的问题;
  • 作为历史环境的结果。 三者合一即为对在特定历史时期,特定文化背景下与自我矛盾的共处。

three aspects of the problem of neurosis: as a result of character-formation, as a problem of reality versus illusion, and as a result of historical circumstances. All three of course merge into one. Man lives his contradictions for better or worse in some kind of cultural project in a given historical period.

Rank的惊人结论:神经症时罪而非病,其解药是一种令个体相信并融入其中的积极的集体意识形态。

if neurosis is sin, and not disease, then the only thing which can “cure” it is a world-view, some kind of affirmative collective ideology in which the person can perform the living drama of his acceptance as a creature.

歌德所谓的投入与反思,即代表一种知行合一,只思考令我们疯狂,只投入行动则令我们成为野兽。

As Goethe put it, we must plunge into experience and then reflect on the meaning of it. All reflection and no plunging drives us mad; all plunging and no reflection, and we are brutes.

神经症对于现代人来说是一种悲剧,自始至终被遗弃。难以找到需要的存在的想象,因此职能自己创造一种想象病栖身其中。

现代人无法脱离逻辑,我们知道真实和现实。「像孩子般天真」是成年人的calling。

宗教通过将即国内温和恐惧投射到宇宙天地间,转移了这种焦虑,为独立的自我正当化和人格发展提供了力量。

精神健康需要理想的幻觉,令我们发展自我,做出正确的决定。

移情问题是一个价值问题、理想问题。弗洛伊德试图科学地处理这个问题,但当涉及到定义「真正的」知觉时,他躲避了这个问题。Van der Leeuw 看到了移情投射(transference introjection)更多的问题,并得出结论,可能存在更多形式的移情。

作者认为,宗教解决了死亡的问题,并提供了希望和在自由中取得英雄式胜利的可能性。精神健康的理想是一种诚实的、现货的幻觉,在生命、死亡和现实方面完全诚实。

我们需要回答这个问题:个人是否能够从自己身上肯定和接受自己?

CH10 A General View of Mental Illness

阿德勒的自卑理论。

mental illness is a way of talking about people who have lost courage, which is the same as saying that it reflects the failure of heroism.

精神疾病代表拒绝人性。

mental illness represents styles of bogging-down in the denial of creatureliness.

抑郁

抑郁,缺少勇气。对生活的恐惧导致对死亡的恐惧。 在某种程度上,人必须付出生命,接受死亡,把自己交给世界的风险和危险,允许自己被吞噬和耗尽。否则,一个人在试图避免生与死的过程中,最终就像死了一样。

令一个抑郁原因——通过取悦他人实现自己的价值和不朽。远古时期,家庭荣誉和行为准则即为此。

the urge to immortalization and self-perpetuation by pleasing the other, by conforming to the code of behavior that he represents. …… This is a part of the psychology of ancient ancestor worshippers as well as of moderns who continue to live according to family codes of honor and conduct.

抑郁者是guilty hero。罪恶感是令其生存的必要存在。

If your god is discredited, you yourself die; the evil must be in yourself and not in your god, so that you may live. With guilt you lose some of your life but avoid the greater evil of death.

对女性而言,对死亡的恐惧和抑郁来得更为剧烈。

death doesn’t keep knocking on her door only to be ignored (as men ignore their aging), but kicks it in to show himself full in the face.

并非父母是我们的阉割者,而是自然。社会活动的失败,文化,加深了我们的无力感。

英雄主义将对死亡的恐惧转化为自我延续的一种追求,因此使人们愉快接受死亡,甚至追求死亡。

Heroism transmutes the fear of death into the security of self-perpetuation, so much so that people can cheerfully face up to death and even court it under some ideologies.

人需要以自己力所能及的方式成为「英雄」。

The debt to life has to be paid somehow; one has to be a hero in the best and only way that he can

精神分裂

schizophrenic 是灵与肉过于不同导致的不整合。

The hypersensitive individual reacts to his body as something strange to himself, something utterly untrustworthy, something not under his secure control.

精神分裂者认知、反思,并且将自己的肉体视为一种威胁。

Schizophrenia takes the risk of evolution to its furthest point in man: the risk of creating an animal who perceives himself, reflects on himself, and comes to understand that his animal body is a menace to himself.

「自恋型神经症」:在幻想中自我膨胀,完全的自大狂式的自我膨胀,作为最后的防御,在缺少现实力量的情况下,试图获得完全的象征的力量。

Freud very aptly called the syndrome “narcissistic neurosis”: the ballooning of the self in fantasy, the complete megalomanic self-inflation as a last defense, as an attempt at utter symbolic power in the absence of lived physical power.

精神分裂者缺少对社会意义的自动反应,无法控制自我的反应,对经历的直接控制。天才同样缺少对社会意义的自动反应,却有着强大自我的足够资源,用创造性的形式表示它。

The schizophrenic is not programmed neurally into automatic response to social meanings, but he cannot marshal an ego response, a directive control of his experiences. …… The genius too is not programmed in automatic cultural meanings; but he has the resources of a strong ego, or at least a sufficient one, to give his own personal meanings a creative form.

弗洛伊德认为对恋物癖的人来说,所迷恋的物体是女性或者母亲生殖器的一种象征,是对阉割的恐惧。通过恋物,他们成为了男人。

雌雄同体,不是关于性的问题而是关于人的问题。它代表了一种对于完整性的挣扎与向往。它是对重新获得与自然界其他部分的统一性的渴望,也是对在自己身上获得完整性的渴望。这是一种治愈存在断裂——即自我与身体、自我与他人、自我与世界的二元论——的愿望。再加上自我对身体之外的自我延续的渴望,我们就可以理解性身份的片面性是如何成为一种限制和危险。

The hermaphroditic image represents a striving for wholeness, a striving that is not sexual but ontological.

早期经历对恋物癖患者的影响。自卑。 获得自尊的三种途径:

  • 来自他人的力量
  • 对自己身体的安全掌控
  • causa-sui 我们超越动物脆弱性的象征

these people were weak in their body confidence—to put it in nonclinical terms.

Rank 认为将性的不朽转为个人的不朽是我们掌控病超越自然的唯一方式。变态是对物种单一性的反抗,是对个体淹没在身体中的反抗。变态是缘起于懦弱而非强大的反抗。

The only way in which mankind could actually control nature and rise above her was to convert sexual immortality into individual immortality.

perversion is a protest against species sameness, against submergence of the individuality into the body.

希腊同性恋。一个尽可能理想化并且像他一样的身体实现精神上的追求,创造自己的重生。

In boy-love, man fertilized both spiritually and otherwise the living image of his own soul, which seemed materialized in an ego as idealized and as much like his own body as was possible.

童年经历的诸多能力的影响:对身体的安全感,对父亲的强烈认同,对自我的控制和可靠的人际交往的能力。

the childhood experience is crucial in developing a secure sense of one’s body, firm identification with the father, strong ego control over oneself, and dependable interpersonal skills.

克服性作为单一化的威胁:通过绝望和智慧,而非自信和控制。

  • 最佳——爱的存在;
  • 性交

恋物与性相关。

the fetish had to do with a problem posed by the sexual act.

恋物癖代表了将动物性转化为超然物的一种方式,从而使人格从标准化的、平淡的、与世隔绝的肉体中解放出来。它是改变现实的一种方式。

The fetish object represents the magical means for transforming animality into something transcendent and thereby assuring a liberation of the personality from the standardized, bland, and earthbound flesh.

The body is no longer flesh, no longer an impersonal demand by the species; it has a halo, emanates light and freedom, becomes a really personal, individual thing.

恋物是人们克服对自己身体的恐惧和焦虑的方法。它作为自我催眠的装置,可以超越现实,控制自己的身体。恋物癖必须与身体有亲密的关系,但它也必须是一种个人的和秘密的魅力,使人们能够控制自己的命运。恋物癖还必须以一种精确的方式被戏剧化,以提供满足感、克服焦虑感。

恋物癖是普遍存在的,并作为一种文化魔法的形式,允许人们想象和象征性地塑造事物,从而证明他们过着有趣的生活。

在中国古代,裹小脚的做法模糊了恋物癖的创造力和文化创造力之间的界限。这种残缺被看作是对文化的致敬,但也被看作是创造力的一种失败。

Nowhere is there a better example of the blurring of the line between fetishist creativity and cultural creativity than in the ancient Chinese practice of binding the feet of females. This practice mutilated the feet, which were then an object of veneration by the men even though deformed. Freud himself remarked on this practice in relation to fetishism and observed that the “Chinese man seems to want to thank the woman for having submitted to castration.”

恋物癖者对特定物品的痴迷使他们与现实分离,并创造了一个个人世界,但这也削弱了他们与他人的关系,导致他们在物品面前产生无助感。为了克服这种无助感,欲望本身必须被迷恋,性吸引力也需要被准化定义。通过这样做,伴侣被剥夺了威严和权力,从而使恋物癖者克服他们面对伴侣时所感受到的普遍无助感。

施虐受虐的自然性

虐待狂同样也是生物的自然活动,是对经验、掌握、快乐的驱使,是需要从世界上获取它所需要的东西,以提高自己,使自己成长;更重要的是,一个人必须忘记自己,解决他自己痛苦的内心矛盾。

Sadism likewise is the natural activity of the creature, the drive toward experience, mastery, pleasure, the need to take from the world what it needs in order to increase itself and thrive; what is more, a human creature who has to forget himself, resolve his own painful inner contradictions.

虐待狂和受虐狂并不是人类行为中不自然或罕见的反常现象,而是人类普遍状况的反映。它们是两极对立的自然互补的表现,虐待狂代表对经验、掌握和快乐的驱动力,而受虐狂代表人作为被动接受者的自然谦卑、感激、内疚和超越的状态。

The hyphenated word sado-masochism expresses a natural complementarity of polar opposites: no weakness without intensive focus of power and no use of power without falling back on a secure merger with a larger source of power.

例如,强奸被看作是无力感的表现,也是宣示自己统治地位的需要。同样,受虐狂也被看作是以有控制的方式体验痛苦,并将其转化为快乐的来源的一种方式。作者认为,这些变态行为是有限的,是人们英雄主义局限性的表现。因此,施虐受虐最终是无足轻重的,因其只在限制了个人的完整性和力量时才扮演了英雄的角色。

精神疾病是勇气和超越死亡的失败的结果。精神病患者不能对自己的生活负责,对生命和死亡过度恐惧,并成为他人的负担。精神病也是谈论那些用自己的恐惧和失败的英雄主义给别人带来负担的人的一种方式。

作者接着讨论了变态行为,以及它们如何与人类对自身困境的恐惧和在这种状况下的无力联系起来。精神疾病的问题已经与偶像崇拜的问题密不可分,因此作者呼吁建立一种服从于最高权力、真正的无限和绝对的英雄主义。

the problem of mental illness is one of not knowing what kind of heroics one is practising or not being able—once one does know—to broaden one’s heroics from their crippling narrowness.

how truly inseparable are the domains of psychiatry and religion, as they both deal with human nature and the ultimate meaning of life.

PART III: RETROSPECT AND CONCLUSION: THE DILEMMAS OF HEROISM

CH11 Psychology and Religion: What Is the Heroic Individual?

康德:「如果说人类真正需要什么科学的话,那就是我教的这门科学,即如何在创造中正确占据分配给人类的位置,以及如何从其中学习成为一个人所必须具备的条件。」

If there is any science man really needs it is the one I teach, of how to occupy properly that place in creation that is assigned to man, and how to learn from it what one must be in order to be a man.

康德认为人类要研究的最重要的科学是教人如何理解和履行我们在宇宙中的作用以及做人的意义。他强调了解我们在这个世界上的目的和责任的重要性,并利用这些知识成为最好的自己。

我们年少时总是被不痛的人生观,以及如何过好自己的生活而困惑,因此我们选择不同的偶像与英雄——即拥有权威的人,父母、教师、名人。随着年纪的增大,我们发现这些想法愈发可悲,不同的权威会给出不同的甚至相反的理解。重要的是实现某种放松和保持对不同经验的开放态度,使自己不成为他人的负担。

Norman Brown的书《Life Against Death》——人类的敌人是基本的压抑,是对悸动的肉体生命和死亡的幽灵的否定。他所预言的是为了完全没有压抑的生命,这将带来一个新的人的诞生。

mankind can only transcend the terrible toll that the fear of death takes if it lives the body fully and does not allow any unlived life to poison existence, to sap pleasure, and to leave a residue of regret. If mankind would do this, says Brown, then the fear of death will not longer drive it to folly, waste, and destruction; men will have their apotheosis in eternity by living fully in the now of experience.

负罪感和焦虑是人性化、自我发展的必要动力。

我们的生命并非只由我们的身体组成,还有自我(ego)——一个内在的象征性的经验世界。这种经验将我们的世界割裂,一分为二,负担因此而生。但伴随负担而来的,还有哦我们不断拓展的生命,这种负担可以说是为了在经验和自我意识的最远处发展生命力而必须付出的代价。

Life in the body is not “all we have”if we have an ego. And the ego represents, as far as we can judge, a natural urge by the life force itself toward an expansion of experience, toward more life.

Phillip Rieff 的观点——压抑不是创造假世界,而是「真相」——即他无法经历所有。为了生存我们必须经历限制,而文化和超我提供了这种限制。文化是为了我们能够生活而对生活的妥协。

repression is not falsification of the world, it is “truth”—the only truth that man can know, because he cannot experience everything.

that in order to have a truly human existence there must be limits; and what we call culture or the superego sets such limits. Culture is a compromise with life that makes human life possible

生活存在限制,也存在种种可能性。人们需要移情,正如在不停变化的自然中需要找到自己道德的支撑。

men need transference because they like to see their morality embodied, need some kind of points of support in the endless flux of nature

将生命延长的乌托邦并无法解决对死亡的恐惧,因为对死亡的恐惧并非对生命的唯一动机。除此之外,英雄般的超越,为整个人类、为未出生的后代战胜邪恶,将一个人的存在奉献给更高的意义同样重要。享乐主义不是英雄主义,人们寻找心理咨询是希望知道自己为什么在享乐主义下并不快乐。

The fallacy in all this sterile utopianism is that fear of death is not the only motive of life; heroic transcendence, victory over evil for mankind as a whole, for unborn generations, consecration of one’s existence to higher meanings—these motives are just as vital and they are what give the human animal his nobility even in the face of his animal fears.

生活本身就是无法客服的问题。心理治疗可以减轻人们的罪恶感,但其效用有限,并不能解决所有的烦恼。

心理学和宗教的结合。

人类的新生活形式可以从当前的人类状况中出现。我们没有办法超越人类状况的极限,甚至出现新事物的想法也只是一个神话或一个可以努力实现的理想。比如像保罗·蒂利希(Paul Tillich)这样的神学家相信一种新人的出现,但他们对这种人的幻想较少,并将其视为某种程度上可以实现的理想。

The myth of the inner life — Suzanne Langer

人必须有“做自己的勇气”,要自立,要正视现实世界的永恒矛盾。克服那些否定生活的东西

man has to have the “courage to be” himself, to stand on his own feet, to face up to the eternal contradictions of the real world.

你不能在心甘情愿放弃自由的同时谈论自由的理想。

you can’t talk about an ideal of freedom in the same breath that you willingly give it up.

苏珊·兰格(Suzanne Langer)创造的「内心生活的神话」的概念,指的是来自自然之心的新能量的出现,将新的能量引入世界。关于现实的信念,特别是关于人性的信念,影响着人们的真实行动,这有助于解释为什么像埃里希·弗罗姆这样的精神分析预言家强调人类的努力、愿景和希望来塑造现实。然而,如果一个人要有一个新的生命的神话,那必须是对最高和最困难的努力的召唤,而不是简单的快乐。这就。Tillich 关于新存在的观点的不同之处,因为它需要勇气面对无意义的焦虑,并将最大限度的非存在吸收到自己的存在中。东方神秘主义不适合西方人,因为它是对勇气的逃避,是阻止对自我最大无意义的吸收。

我们需要大胆的、创造性的神话来帮助人们看到他们的现实状况,尽管最高的理想可能看起来并不真实。

We need the boldest creative myths, not only to urge men on but also and perhaps especially to help men see the reality of their condition. We have to be as hard-headed as possible about reality and possibility.

治疗性革命提出了两个主要问题:

  • 被解放者会多成熟、多批判、多清醒;
  • 以及即使这些人获得解放,世界是否会变得不那么悲惨。

世界上的广大民众,如俄罗斯和中国的民众,不会受到这种治疗性革命理想的影响,世界上的经验事实也不会因为个人分析或温柔的爱而消逝。我们必须承认世界的现实——我们注定生活在充满悲剧和恶魔的世界。

Besides, can any ideal of therapeutic revolution touch the vast masses of this globe, the modern mechanical men in Russia, the near-billion sheeplike followers in China, the brutalized and ignorant populations of almost every continent?

Men are doomed to live in an overwhelmingly tragic and demonic world.

通过移情来胁迫一个不那么邪恶的世界。但弗洛伊德清楚地意识到,邪恶存在于人的内心,也在外部自然之中。

to coerce, by transference, a less evil world.

无论人类在这个星球上做什么,都必须在创造的恐怖的真实生活中进行,在一切的背后,是怪诞的,是恐慌的隆隆声。否则它就是错误的。无论实现了什么,都必须从生物的主观能量中实现,而不致于麻木,充分运用激情、视觉、痛苦、恐惧和悲伤。

whatever man does on this planet has to be done in the lived truth of the terror of creation, of the grotesque, of the rumble of panic underneath everything. Otherwise it is false. Whatever is achieved must be achieved from within the subjective energies of creatures, without deadening, with the full exercise of passion, of vision, of pain, of fear, and of sorrow.

兰克选择「非理性」作为生命基础的意义。对宇宙的英雄主义是神秘的、神圣的,无法被科学和世俗主义整齐划一地安排和合理化。

陈旧的宗教方式解决超越存在的自然矛盾的方法:将自己的问题投射到神上,由一个无所不包、无所不能的超越来治愈。

the only way to get beyond the natural contradictions of existence was in the time-worn religious way: to project one’s problems onto a god-figure, to be healed by an all-embracing and all-justifying beyond.

超越人类局限性的方法并非是科学可以控制的,也并非我们可以掌握。认真对待生命,在生物的主观能动性范围内实现人类在地球上的任何行为,而不至于使人类的敏感性走向终点。

We can conclude that a project as grand as the scientific-mythical construction of victory over human limitation is not something that can be programmed by science. Even more, it comes from the vital energies of masses of men sweating within the nightmare of creation—and it is not even in man’s hands to program.