Page 46 - Microsoft Word - SPIRIT AND THE MIND.doc

The Value of Mortal Fear 29
Becker points out how a psychology unaware of this dimension of reality promotes the “characterological lie”—the false sense of safety and security in ego—and thus leads to entrapment, isolation and suffering. It is here, he warns, that modern psychology is making its most serious, perhaps fatal mistake:
Psychology narrows the cause for personal unhappiness down to the person himself, and then he is stuck with himself. But we know that the universal and general cause for personal badness, guilt, and inferiority is the natural world and the person’s relationship to it as symbolic animal who must find a secure place in it. All the analysis in the world doesn’t allow the person to find out who he is and why he is here on earth, why he has to die, and how he can make his life a triumph. It is when psychology pretends to do this, when it offers itself as a full explanation of human unhappiness, that it becomes a fraud that makes the situation of modern man an impasse from which he cannot escape. . . .
If you fail to understand this you risk making the neurotic even worse off by closing him off from the larger world-view that he needs. As Rank put it:
. . . It was finally the understanding psychoanalyst who sent the self-conscious neurotic back to the very self-knowledge from which he wanted to escape. On the whole, psychoanalysis failed therapeutically because it aggravated man’s psychologizing rather than healed him of his introspection. (Rank)4
Ken Wilbur is a leading exponent of the rapidly developing trans- personal school of psychology, which focuses on man’s higher transcendental nature beyond sense of personal self or duality. He sheds light on the nature of mortal fear, the way different schools of psychology, including the existentialists, deal with it, and the means by which it is transcended. He writes:
The existentialists pointed out that wherever there is a separate self, there is angst, suffering, the terror of being, and the terror of death. “The essential, basic arch-anxiety,” wrote Boss (1973), “is innate to all isolated, individual forms of human existence.” In the basic anxiety, human existence is afraid of as well as anxious about its “being-in-the-world.” That is not neurotic terror, but a given