From The Denial of Death:
The unspoken implication is that if he stood on his own feet alone, the ground would cave in under him. The question goes right to the heart of the human condition,… I once wrote that 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. This is what gives us a "self" and a superego. Our whole world of right and wrong, good and bad, our name, precisely who we are, is grafted into us; and we never feel we have authority to offer things on our own. How could we?--I argued—-since we feel ourselves in many ways guilty and beholden to others, a lesser creation of theirs, indebted to them for our very birth.
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… mental illness is a way of talking about people who have lost courage, which is the same thing as saying that it reflects the failure of heroism…. When does the person have the most trouble with his self esteem? Precisely when his heroic transcendence of his fate is most in doubt, when he doubts his own immortality, the abiding value of his life; when he is not convinced that his having lived really makes any cosmic difference. From this point of view we might well say that mental illness represents styles of bogging-down in the denial of creatureliness.
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Adler had already revealed how perfectly depression or melancholia is a problem of courage; how it develops in people who are afraid of life, who have given up any semblance of independent development…. The more you shrink back from the difficulties and the darings of life, the more you naturally come to feel inept, the lower is your self-evaluation…. The moral of this example of failure of courage is that in some way one must pay with life and consent daily to die, to give oneself up to the risks and dangers of the world, allow oneself to be engulfed and used up. Otherwise one ends up "as though dead" in trying to avoid life and death.
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Who knows what form the forward momentum of life will take in the time ahead or what use it will make of our anguished searching. The most that any one of us can seem to do is to fashion something--an object or ourselves--and drop it into the confusion, make an offering of it, so to speak, to the life force.
Books by Ernest Becker at Powell's Books
