Fear of Life. Dr. Alexander Lowen M.D.
was relatively inflexible, his legs were stiff. Despite these handicaps he had good coordination and was competent in many sports. His rigidity represented a need to hold up against collapse, helplessness, and dependency. In his marriage he took the role of the strong one and unconsciously invited his wife to lean on him. At the same time he resented her dependency. He had to be in control of all situations as he was in control of himself, yet he knew that this attitude was self-defeating. Sam needed to learn how to let go and come out with his feelings.
Sam approached this problem of letting go as he approached any other task. He figured it out, then tried to do what was called for. It didn't work. That's not the way to let go. The more he tried to figure it out in his head, the tighter his body became. Even the work on his body to reduce its tension suffered from the same dilemma. He did the bioenergetic exercises as if he was trying to master a skill. The result was that he had very little feeling, though some vibrations did develop in his legs. Sam was characterologically geared for achievement, but letting go is not something one can achieve. Before any genuine feeling would emerge, Sam had to let go of his need to achieve or to be strong.
I have chosen this case to show the difficulty of the therapeutic task. The patient acts unconsciously to defeat the therapeutic undertaking. We call it resistance, but it is, in effect, nothing other than his character structure.
Here is another short example. A woman suffered from severe anxiety, which she sought to allay by finding a man who would protect and take care of her. To gain this end she was sexually seductive, and, since she was an attractive woman, she became involved with many men. All her relationships ended with her feeling betrayed and used. Her anxiety continued to mount. I might add that a previous therapeutic relationship ended with the therapist becoming sexually involved with her.
Mary's father died when she was seven. He had been her support. In all her subsequent relationships she was looking for another father. Since a therapist tries to provide some support for his disturbed patients, it is easy to see a male therapist as a father surrogate. Once Mary made the transference, she became emotionally involved with her therapist. She felt she needed him and was afraid he would die, leave, or not be there for her. Her major effort was directed to assuring his interest in her. Thus, she would be seductive one time, then testing the therapist another time. Needless to say, her maneuvers only increased her anxiety. Her very effort to gain security undermined her security.
Problems of this nature cannot be resolved until their connection with the oedipal situation is traced out and worked through. Sam's need to achieve and to be strong stemmed from his sense of inferiority vis-a-vis his father in that situation and his determination to prove be was a man. But the need to prove one's manhood reinforces the inner feeling of inadequacy and traps the person. Mary was trying to find a father who would accept her sexual feelings. She wanted to be a child and a woman at the same time, which made a real relationship with a man almost impossible.
Struggling against fate only enmeshes one more deeply in its coils. Like an animal caught in a net, the more one struggles, the more tightly bound one becomes. Does this mean we are doomed? We are doomed only when we struggle against ourselves. The main thrust of therapy is to help a person stop struggling against himself. That struggle is self-destructive, and it will exhaust a person's energy and accomplish nothing. Many people want to change. Change is possible, but it must start with self-acceptance. Change is a part of the natural order. Life is not static; it is constantly growing or declining. One doesn't have to do anything to grow. Growth happens naturally and spontaneously when energy is available. But when we use our energies in a struggle against our character (fate), we leave no energy for growth or the natural healing process. I have always found that as soon as a patient accepts himself, there is a significant change in his feelings, his behavior, and his personality.
Natural healing is inherent in the structure and function of the living organism. A cut finger will heal, a broken bone will mend, and an infection will clear up spontaneously. A body is not like a bubble, which once it bursts cannot be put together again. Within limits, the body's fate is to restore its integrity and to maintain its process against traumas and injuries from the environment. This should be equally true of the emotional traumas and injuries we receive as children. Why doesn't neurosis heal spontaneously like any other illness or disease? The answer is that the neurotic interferes with this healing process. He keeps picking the scab off the wound. By his defense or resistance, he keeps the injury alive. That is what it means to be neurotic and why we can define neurosis as a struggle against fate.
This idea of fate was never far from Freud's consciousness. He remarked about some people, “The impression they give is of being pursued by some malignant fate or of being possessed by some extraneous power, but psychoanalysis has always taken the view that their fate is for the most part arranged by themselves and determined by early infantile experiences.”2 Freud illustrated this with the case of the benefactor whose proteges invariably abandon him and “who thus seems doomed to taste all the bitterness of ingratitude,” of the man whose friends regularly betray him, and of the lover whose affairs always end the same way. He even mentions the case of a woman whose three husbands had each to be nursed by her on their deathbeds.
Freud believed that such observations indicated the existence of a “compulsion to repeat-something that seems more primitive, more elementary, more instinctual than the pleasure principle.”3 Freud called that something the “death instinct,” which he saw as a “compulsion inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things.”4 There is much in common between instinct and fate. Both can be described as blind forces inherent in the nature of things. Both have the quality of predictability. Both are structured in the organism either genetically or characterologically. There is, however, an important difference between them. Instinct describes an act or a force that furthers the life process. It is an active principle. We speak, for example, of an instinct for survival. Fate, on the other hand, is a passive principle. It describes the way things are.
We have seen that people do not always learn from experience, but repeat self-destructive behavior patterns. In my opinion such behavior reflects the operation of fate, because it is a manifestation of character rather than the expression of an instinctual force. The distinction can be made clear by using the analogy of a record player and comparing life to the music it sends forth. The active force is electricity, which runs the motor, which turns the record, allowing the needle to follow the grooves. When the record come to an end, the music ceases-the equivalent of death. The latter is not a compulsion but a state of being.
In this analogy the compulsion to repeat can be seen as a “broken record.” The needle goes round and round in the same groove, repeating the same notes because it is unable to advance. Thus, the repetition compulsion can be seen as the result of a break in the personality, which fixates the individual at a certain pattern of behavior he cannot change. But human beings are not mechanical devices. The repetition compulsion can also be seen as an attempt by the personality to return to the situation where it got stuck, in the hope of someday getting unstuck. However, as long as the break exists, the needle will go round and round in the same groove, the pattern endlessly repeated. That is its fate until the break is healed.
We shall see in a later chapter that when the break in the personality is severe, it gives rise to a death wish in the person. If the wish is conscious it constitutes a suicidal desire or intention. In many cases, however, it is unconscious and severely restricts the individual's ability to live his life fully. Such a wish, though structured in the personality, is not a death instinct, for in most cases it arises from a highly traumatic oedipal situation. To one degree or another that situation breaks the unity of the personality in modern man. His life becomes like a broken record, endlessly replaying the conflicts of his oedipal situation. I would venture the guess that the woman who nursed three husbands on their deathbeds had been in a similar position with her father when she was a child.
In describing the Oedipus complex, Freud revealed the dilemma of modern man, namely, that his success is achieved at the cost of his personal fulfillment and that his power over nature is gained at the expense of his orgiastic potency. But where Freud accepted the inevitability of this dilemma and attempted to justify it biologically in terms of the death instinct, I see the dilemma as the product of this culture and subject, therefore, to change