Читать книгу Fear of Life - Dr. Alexander Lowen M.D. - Страница 8

Introduction

Neurosis is not usually defined as a fear of life, but that is what it is. The neurotic person is afraid to open his heart to love, afraid to reach out or strike out, afraid to be fully himself. We can explain these fears psychologically. Opening one's heart to love makes one vulnerable to being hurt; reaching out, to being rejected; striking out, to being destroyed. But there is another dimension to this problem. More life or feeling than one is accustomed to is frightening to the person because it threatens to overwhelm his ego, flood his boundaries, and undermine his identity. Being more alive and having more feeling is scary. I worked with a young man whose body was very unalive. It was tight and contracted, his eyes were dull, his skin color sallow, his breathing shallow. By breathing deeply and doing some of the therapeutic exercises, his body became more alive. His eyes brightened, his color improved, he felt tingling sensations in parts of his body, and his legs began to vibrate. But then, he said to me, “Man, this is too much life. I can't stand it.”

I believe that to some degree we are all in the same situation as this young man. We want to be more alive and feel more, but we are afraid of it. Our fear of life is seen in the way we keep busy so as not to feel, keep running so as not to face ourselves, or get high on liquor or drugs so as not to sense our being. Because we are afraid of life, we seek to control or master it. We believe that it is bad or dangerous to be carried away by our emotions. We admire the person who is cool, who acts without feeling. Our hero is James Bond, Secret Agent 007. The emphasis in our culture is upon doing and achieving. The modern individual is committed to being successful, not to being a person. He belongs rightly to the “action generation,” whose motto is do more but feel less. This attitude characterizes much of modern sexuality: more action but less passion.

Regardless of how well we perform, we are failures as people. I believe that most of us sense the failure in ourselves. We are dimly aware of the pain, anguish, and despair that lie just below the surface. But we are determined to overcome our weaknesses, override our fears, and surmount our anxieties. This is why books on self-improvement or How to Do It are so popular. Unfortunately, these efforts are bound to fail. Being a person is not something one can do. It is not a performance. It may require that we stop our frantic business, that we take time out to breathe and to feel. In the process we may feel our pain, but if we have the courage to accept it, we will also have pleasure. If we can face our inner emptiness, we will find fulfillment. If we can go through our despair, we will discover joy. In this therapeutic undertaking we may need help.

Is it the fate of modern man to be neurotic, to be afraid of life? My answer is yes, if we define modern man as a member of a culture whose dominant values are power and progress. Since these values characterize Western culture in the twentieth century, it follows that every person who grows up in this culture is neurotic.

The neurotic individual is in conflict with himself. Part of his being is trying to overcome another part. His ego is trying to master his body; his rational mind, to control his feelings; his will, to overcome his fears and anxieties. Though this conflict is in large part unconscious, its effect is to deplete the person's energy and to destroy his peace of mind. Neurosis is internal conflict. The neurotic character takes many forms, but all of them involve a struggle in the individual between what he is and what he believes he should be. Every neurotic individual is caught in this struggle.

How does such a state of internal conflict arise? Why is it the fate of modern man to suffer from these conflicts? In the individual case the neurosis arises within the context of a family situation. But the family situation reflects the cultural one, since the family is subject to all the forces in the society of which it is a part. To understand the existential condition of modern man and to know his fate, we must investigate the sources of conflict in his culture.

We are familiar with some conflicts in our culture. For example, we talk peace, but we prepare for war. We advocate conservation, but we ruthlessly exploit the earth's natural resources for economic gain. We are committed to the goals of power and progress, yet we want pleasure, peace of mind, and stability. We don't realize that power and pleasure are opposing values and that the former often precludes the latter. Power inevitably leads to a struggle for its possession, which often pits father against son and brother against brother. It is a divisive force in a community. Progress denotes a constant activity to change the old into the new under the belief that the new is always superior to the old. While this may be true in some technical areas, it is a dangerous belief. By extension, it implies that the son is superior to the father or that tradition is merely the dead weight of the past. There are cultures in which other values dominate, where respect for the past and for tradition is more important than the desire for change. In these cultures conflict is minimized and neurosis is rare.

Parents as representatives of the culture have the responsibility to inspire their children with the values of the culture. They make demands upon a child in terms of attitudes and behavior that are designed to fit the child into the social and cultural matrix. On one hand the child resists these demands because they amount to a domestication of his animal nature. He must be “broken in” to make him part of the system. On the other hand the child wishes to comply with these demands to keep the love and approval of his parents. The outcome depends upon the nature of the demands and the way they are enforced. With love and understanding it is possible to teach a child the customs and practices of a culture without breaking his spirit. Unfortunately, in most cases the process of adapting the child to the culture does break his spirit, which makes him neurotic and afraid of life.

The central issue in the process of cultural adaptation is the control of sexuality. There is no culture that does not impose some restraint upon sexual behavior. This restraint seems necessary to prevent discord from developing within a community. Human beings are jealous creatures and prone to violence. Even in the most primitive societies the bond of marriage is sacred. But conflicts that arise from such restrictions are external to the personality. In Western culture the practice has been to make the person feel guilty about sexual feelings and sexual practices like masturbation that in no way threaten the peace of the community. When guilt or shame are attached to feelings, the conflict is internalized and creates a neurotic character.

Incest is taboo in all human societies, but the sexual feelings of a child for the parent of the opposite sex are reprehensible only in modern societies. Such feelings are believed to pose a danger to the exclusive right of a parent to the sexual affections of the partner. The child is seen as a rival by the parent of the same sex. Although no incest occurs, the child is made to feel guilty for this most natural feeling and desire.

When Freud investigated the causes of the emotional problems of his patients through analysis, he found that in all cases they involved infantile or childhood sexuality, in particular, sexual feelings for the parent of the opposite sex. He also found that associated with these incestuous feelings were death wishes toward the parent of the same sex. Noting the parallel with the legend of Oedipus, he described the child's situation as oedipal. He believed that if a boy did not suppress his sexual feelings for his mother, he would suffer the fate of Oedipus; namely, he would kill his father and marry his mother. To prevent that fate the child is threatened with castration if he does not repress both his sexual desire and his hostile feelings.

Analysis also revealed that not only were these feelings suppressed but the oedipal situation itself was repressed; that is, the adult had no memory of the triangle in which he was involved between three and six years of age. My own clinical experience confirms this observation. Few patients can recall any sexual desire for the parent. Freud believed, further, that this repression was necessary if the person was to establish a normal sexual life in adulthood. He thought that the repression made it possible to transfer the early sexual desire from the parent to a peer; otherwise, the person would remain fixated on the parent. Thus, for Freud, repression was the way the oedipal situation was resolved, allowing the child to advance through a latency period to normal adulthood. If the repression was incomplete, the person became a neurotic.

According to Freud, the neurotic character represents an inability to adapt to the cultural situation. He recognized that civilization denies the individual full instinctual gratification, but he believed that this denial was necessary for cultural progress. In effect he accepted the idea that it was the fate of modern man to be unhappy. That fate was not a concern of psychoanalysis, which was limited to helping a person function adequately within the cultural system. The neurosis was seen as a symptom (phobia, obsession, compulsion, melancholia, etc.), which interfered with that functioning.

Wilhelm Reich had a different view. Although he had studied with Freud and was a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, he realized that the absence of a disabling symptom was no criterion of emotional health. In working with neurotic patients he found that the symptom developed out of a neurotic character structure and could be fully eliminated only if the person's character structure was changed. For Reich it was not a question of functioning adequately in the culture but of an individual's ability to give himself fully to sex and to work. That ability allowed the person to experience full satisfaction in his life. To the degree that this ability was lacking, the person was neurotic.

In his therapeutic work Reich focused upon sexuality as the key to the understanding of character. Every neurotic person had some disturbance in his orgastic response. He could not give in fully to the involuntary pleasurable convulsions of the orgasm. He was afraid of the overwhelming feeling of total orgasm. The neurotic was orgastically impotent to some degree. If, as a result of therapy, the person gained this ability, he became emotionally healthy. Whatever neurotic disturbances he suffered from disappeared. Further, his freedom from neurosis continued as long as he retained his orgastic potency.

Reich saw the connection between orgastic impotence and the oedipal problem. He claimed that neurosis had its roots in the patriarchal authoritarian family in which sexuality was suppressed. He would not accept that man was inexorably bound to an unhappy fate. He believed that a social system that denied to people the full satisfaction of their instinctual needs was sick and had to be changed. In his early years as a psychoanalyst Reich was also a social activist. However, in his later years he came to the conclusion that neurotic people cannot change a neurotic society.

I have been greatly influenced by Reich's thinking. He was my teacher from 1940 to 1953. He was my analyst from 1942 to 1945. I became a psychotherapist because I believed that his approach to human problems both theoretically (character analysis) and technically (vegetotherapy) represented an important advance in the treatment of the neurotic character. Character analysis was Reich's great contribution to psychoanalytic theory. For Reich the neurotic character was the terrain in which the neurotic symptom developed. He believed therefore, that the analysis should focus upon the character rather than the symptom to effect a major improvement. Vegetotherapy marked the breakthrough of the therapeutic process into the somatic realm. Reich saw that the neurosis was manifested in a disturbed vegetative functioning as well as in psychic conflicts. Breathing, motility, and the involuntary pleasurable movements of orgasm were markedly restricted in the neurotic individual by chronic muscular tensions. He described these tensions as a process of armoring, which reflected the character on the somatic level. He stated that the bodily attitude of a person is functionally identical with his psychic attitude. Reich's work is the basis for my development of bioenergetic analysis, which extends Reich's ideas in several important ways.

One, bioenergetic analysis provides a systematic understanding of character structure on both the psychic and somatic levels. That understanding enables one to read the person's character and emotional problems from the expression of his body. It makes it possible, also, to imagine the history of the person, since his life experiences are structured in his body.¹ The information gained from this reading of the language of the body is integrated into the analytic process.

Two, through its concept of grounding, bioenergetic analysis offers a deeper understanding of the energy processes in the body as they affect personality. Grounding refers to the energetic connection between a person's feet and the earth or ground. It reflects the amount of energy or feeling the person allows into the lower part of his body. It denotes the relationship of the person to the ground he stands on. Is he well grounded or is he up in the air? Are his feet well planted? What is his standing? One's feelings of security and independence are intimately related to the function of his legs and feet. These feelings strongly influence his sexuality.

Three, bioenergetic analysis employs many active bodily techniques and exercises to help a person strengthen his standing, increase his energy, enlarge and deepen his self-perception, and further his self-expression. In bioenergetic analysis the body work is coordinated with the analytic process, making this therapeutic modality a combined body-mind approach to emotional problems.

For more than thirty years I have been a practicing therapist, working to help patients gain some measure of joy and happiness in their lives. That endeavor has necessitated a continuing effort to understand the neurotic character of modern man from both the cultural and the individual positions. My focus has been and is upon the individual as he struggles to find some meaning and satisfaction in his life; in other words, as he struggles against his fate. However, the background of that struggle is the cultural situation. Without a knowledge of the cultural process we cannot comprehend the depth of the problem.

The cultural process that gave rise to modern society and modern man was the development of the ego. This development is associated with the acquisition of knowledge and the gaining of power over nature. Man is part of nature like any other animal, fully subject to her laws; but he is also above nature, acting upon and controlling her. He does the same with his own nature; part of his personality, the ego, turns against the animal part, the body. The antithesis between ego and body produces a dynamic tension that furthers the growth of culture, but it also contains a destructive potential. This can be seen best through analogy with a bow and arrow. The more one draws the bow, the further the arrow will fly. But if one overdraws the bow, it will break. When the ego and the body pull apart to the point where there is no contact between them, the result is a psychotic break. I believe we have reached this danger point in our culture. Psychotic breakdowns are quite common, but even more widespread is the fear of breakdown, on both the personal and the social levels.

Given his culture and the character it produces, what is the fate of modern man? If the story of Oedipus can serve as a prophecy, it is a prophecy of achieving the success and power one seeks only to find one's world coming apart or breaking down. If success is measured by material possessions, as it is in the industrialized countries, and power by the ability to do and go (machines and energy), most people in the Western world have both success and power. The collapse of their world is the impoverishment of their inner or emotional lives. Having committed themselves to success and power, they have little else to live for. And like Oedipus they have become wanderers on the earth, uprooted beings who can find no peace anywhere. Each individual feels alienated, to some degree, from his fellowman, and each carries within him a deep sense of guilt that he does not understand. This is the existential condition of modern man.

The challenge to modern man is to reconcile the antithetical aspects in his personality. On the body level he is an animal, on the ego level a would-be god. The fate of the animal is death, which the ego in its godlike aspirations is trying to avoid. But in trying to avoid this fate man creates an even worse one, namely, to live in fear of life.

Human life is full of contradictions. It is the mark of wisdom to recognize and accept these contradictions. It may seem like a contradiction to say that accepting one's fate leads to a change in that fate, but it is true. When one stops struggling against fate, one loses his neurosis (internal conflict) and gains peace of mind. The result is a different attitude (no fear of life), expressed in a different character and associated with a different fate. Such a person will know the fulfillment of life. This is how the story of Oedipus ends, the figure whose name identifies the key problem in the personality of modern man.