Fear of Life. Dr. Alexander Lowen M.D.
behavior again and again. For example, there is the person who always finds himself in the position of helping others. He responds eagerly when someone appeals to him for aid. Afterward he feels used and resentful because he doesn't believe that the person he helped appreciated his effort. He turns against the person he befriended and resolves to be less available and more critical of the need for his help next time. Yet when he senses someone in difficulty, he offers his services often even before they are requested, thinking that this time the result will be different. But it happens again as before. He doesn't learn because his helping has a compulsory quality. He is driven to help by forces beyond his control.
Take the case of the woman who in her relationships with men assumes a mothering role. The effect of this position is to infantilize the man and so to deprive her of sexual fulfillment. She may end the relationship feeling used and cheated and blaming the man's immaturity and weakness for its failure. Next time, she says, she will choose someone who can stand on his own two feet and not need to be mothered. But the next time turns out like the others. A strange fate seems to impel her into the very situation she is trying to avoid. She is driven to mother her men by unknown forces in her personality.
Such behavior can be regarded as neurotic because of the unconscious conflict that underlies it. In the case of the man, part of his personality wants to help, another part doesn't. If he helps he feels resentful, if he doesn't he feels guilty. This is a typical neurotic trap from which there is no way out except by retracing the steps that led into it. There is a similar unconscious conflict behind the behavior of the woman. That conflict is between her desire for a healthy and satisfying sexual relationship with a man and her fear of such a relationship. Mothering a man is her way of attempting to overcome her sexual anxiety, for it allows her to deny her fear of surrendering to a man. By acting as a mother, she feels needed and superior.
Here is still another example. A certain woman had great difficulty establishing a relationship with a man. When she met someone she was attracted to, she became hypercritical. She saw all his weaknesses and faults and rejected him. Since no one is perfect, her reactions made forming any relationship impossible. Although she says that she wants a relationship very much, she seems incapable of changing this pattern of behavior even after it is pointed out to her. It is not difficult to see that her hypercritical attitude is a defense against the feared danger of being rejected herself. She protects herself by rejecting the man first. But knowing this doesn't help much either. Her neurotic response is beyond her control.
To help her we must know what forces in her personality dictated this behavior. It only happened when she met someone to whom she was attracted. With others the problem did not arise, she could be friendly and relaxed. Since the difficulty developed only when she had some feeling for the person, we can assume that it was related to the feeling of desire or longing. She could not stand this feeling, it was too painful, and so she withdrew from the situation. Here, too, we must find out what happened to this person as a child to create this problem. Through analysis we will discover that she experienced a rejection by a parent, the pain of which was so overwhelming that she locked it up to survive. She closed her heart so as not to feel her heartache, and now she dares not open it. To love is to open the heart, and she is afraid to do so because of the pain in it. In her case the neurotic conflict is between the desire for love and the fear of it.
What makes such conflict neurotic is the person's repression of its negative element. Thus, the helping man denies his resentment at being asked for help, the mothering woman denies her fear of sex, and the hypercritical person denies her inability to love. Unable to face his pain and the anger to which it gives rise, the neurotic individual strives to overcome his fears, anxieties, hostilities, and anger. One part of himself seeks to rise above another, which splits the unity of his being and destroys his integrity. The neurotic person struggles to win over himself. In this, of course, he must fail. Failure seems to mean submission to an acceptable fate, but actually it amounts to self-acceptance, which makes change possible. To the degree that most people in Western culture are struggling to be different, they are neurotic. And since this is a fight one can't win, all who engage in this struggle will fail. Strangely, through the acceptance of failure, we become free from our neurosis.
A typical example is the man who repeatedly loses money in bad investments by following the advice of others. He is a sucker for the promise of quick and easy money. Although he had been burned enough to know that the promise is illusory, he cannot resist its lure. He functions under the drive of a compulsion that is more powerful than his rational judgment. It may be a compulsion to lose, for there are people who seem fated to be losers. But such a fate can be changed if the nature of the compulsion and its origin are carefully explored through analysis.
The classic example is the woman who, after divorcing her first husband because he was an alcoholic and determining that her second marriage will be different, discovers that her new husband is also a heavy drinker. Although she didn't know this before the marriage, she had been blind to many indications of this tendency. Through analysis it can be shown that she is attracted to men who drink but repelled when the drinking gets out of control. Like the man in the preceding example, she is not aware of her deep feelings and motivations. This lack is typical of a neurotic character.
The term neurotic character refers to a pattern of behavior based upon internal conflict and represents a fear of life, of sex, and of being. It reflects the person's early life experience because it was formed as a result of those experiences. The most crucial experience for the development of the neurotic character is the oedipal one. This key experience occurs between the ages of three and six, when the oedipal situation develops, namely, the sexual interest of the child in the parent of the opposite sex and the resulting rivalry with the parent of the same sex. Both parents play an active role in this triangular situation in which the child feels trapped. The child develops a neurotic character as the only possible solution to a situation that in his mind is fraught with danger to life and sanity. Whether the danger is as real as the child believes, one cannot say. No child in this situation can afford to test the validity of his belief. He must compromise by bridling his passion and suppressing his sexuality. I shall illustrate this process with the following cases.
Margaret consulted me because she was depressed and felt that her life was empty. She was an attractive woman in her middle thirties and a nurse by profession. She had never married, though she had had many relationships with men. None had worked out satisfactorily for her. Years earlier her depression had been so severe that she was suicidal. Her suicidal tendencies had diminished through psychoanalytic treatment, but her depressive tendencies continued. However, she had never ceased to work. She was a hard worker and was highly regarded in her profession.
The outstanding expression of Margaret's body was its lifelessness. If she didn't talk or move, she might be taken for a wax figure. Her eyes were dull, her voice flat. However, from time to time while looking at me her eyes would light up and her face would become alive. It never lasted more than a few minutes, but it was an astounding transformation. When it happened, I was aware that she regarded me with feeling. Usually she appeared preoccupied and was aware of me only to communicate her thoughts. As we worked together I realized that her lifelessness went quite deep. When she opened her eyes wide, they had an almost hollow look. Her breathing was very shallow, her movements never animated.
The therapeutic task was to help Margaret discover why the light faded from her eyes. Why was she unable to maintain the glow of life? What was she unconsciously afraid of? Margaret's lack of life was the result of self-negation and a self-destructive attitude. In most neurotic persons this attitude is unconscious. Margaret was aware, however, that she was self-destructive. She said, “I am always trying to kill my body by not eating properly, not sleeping enough, by being worried about my image, and by being frantic about my work. I am never ‘there’ for myself, I am never able to enjoy myself, I don't take care of myself.”
When I asked Margaret how and why that attitude developed, she replied, “I was literally destroyed by my mother, so frequently that I identified with her.” Margaret had told me earlier that her mother used to beat her regularly. She described her mother as a hypochondriac who lay on a couch all day reading and complaining. However, the mother was really ill. She was a diabetic, but Margaret said that she was also self-destructive in that she took no responsibility for her own