Fear of Life

The Wisdom of Failure

Alexander Lowen

• Verlag: The Alexander Lowen Foundation
• Jahr: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781938485039
• Thema: Psychology
• Thema: Psychoanalysis

Fear of Life is an in-depth study of the human condition within modern culture Alexander Lowen challenges conventional thinking and contends that neurotic behavior stems from a fear of life, and represents the individual's unconscious effort to overcome that fear. But one cannot do so. One can only suppress or deny it, at the cost of spontaneity and being at ease. Lowen explains that being a person requires that one stop their frantic doing, and take time out to breathe and to feel. If one has the courage to accept and feel the pain and hurt, despair and sadness, and inner emptiness or anxiety in one's life, one can heal trauma and gain pleasure, fulfillment, and joy....the object of Bioenergetic Analysis.

1

The Neurotic Character

The Oedipal Problem

It is said that people learn from experience, and in general this is true. Experience is the best and, perhaps, the only real teacher. But when something falls within the area of a person's neurosis, the rule does not seem to apply. The person doesn't learn from experience but repeats the same self-destructive 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 life. She died of heart trouble in her fifties. “But,” Margaret said, “my father was equally self-destructive, working twenty hours a day and never taking time for pleasure. He was Christ, the martyr. He died of a heart attack in his forties.”

She added, “My father was a burden to me. I felt I had to save him. He was in my mind all the time. He made me very sad and unhappy. I could never reach him. I remember looking at him when he was suffering from heart trouble, and he had such a pathetic look. It was actually worse than pathetic. It was the look of suffering. He was a sufferer. I need to help people.”

We cannot understand Margaret or her problem without a picture of the family situation in which she grew up. In that picture the most important elements are the personalities of the parents. They affect the child more by who they are than what they do. Children are very sensitive and pick up their parents’ moods, feelings, and unconscious attitudes by osmosis, as it were. This was especially true for Margaret since she was an only child. Her parents’ influence was unmitigated by the presence of other children. Consider the following.

“My mother said my father was a rough lover. I realize that I choose men who are somewhat like him in their suffering and in their rough intensity of sexual need. I don't see the suffering in these men until I get socked with it later. Then I find that I am taking care of them, helping them, and there is nothing in it for me. This is one way I am self-destructive. But I don't know if I could like anybody who is not suffering. My heart wouldn't open to that person. The last man I was involved with attempted suicide. I had a long line of men I had to help. It seems that if I can't do the neurotic thing, there is nothing else.”

What exactly was Margaret's relationship to her father? She says that her mother told her that she was very close to her father until the age of four or five. She has no memory of that closeness nor any knowledge of why it ended. All she remembers is that her father was beyond reach. She felt close to him in her heart but there was no contact between them. “It was like in a dream. I am still in that dream. I relate to men on this basis. I build enormous fantasies of what life would be like with them, only to discover after a few meetings that they couldn't possibly fulfill my dreams.”

From the above it is clear that in her contacts with men Margaret is looking for the kind of relationship that she had with her father before the age of five. It was a search for a lost paradise. She was trying to find her Shangri-la. She asked me, “Why am I always getting cuddled by men at bars? I must give off something.” Her manner and her expression indicated that she, too, was a sufferer. Just as she is drawn to those who suffer, so they are drawn to her. Each hopes the other can relieve his suffering, but each only brings suffering to the other. Neither has any joy to offer.

From the above it is obvious that Margaret suffered a severe loss at about the age of five, when the loving relationship she had with her father ended. The depressive tendency is conditioned by such a loss.¹ Undoubtedly, there had been an earlier loss of love in her relationship with her mother, but the early loss had been mitigated by the warmth of her contact with her father. When that ended, Margaret was lost. She survived by a great effort of will, manifested today in the set of a grim and determined jaw. But memories of the time when she glowed in the warmth of her father's love are still reflected in the momentary brightening of her eyes and face.

What happened to cause the destruction of the loving relationship she had with her father? Why did it have such a devastating effect upon her personality? Margaret had no memories of that time. They were completely repressed. However, she has had many years of psychoanalysis and is familiar with the oedipal problem. During our discussion of this subject, she remarked, “I don't remember any sexual feelings for my father, but during my analysis I had a dream of sleeping with him. Having been in analysis for some time, I felt that I could have this dream without thinking I was crazy. However, in the dream I felt I couldn't let go. I couldn't really enjoy it.”

Margaret still doesn't enjoy sex. She still can't let go and have an orgasm. She uses sex for contact and closeness. She cannot give in to her sexual feelings because she is afraid they would overwhelm her and drive her crazy. I shall explore this aspect of the fear of sex in a later chapter. My intention here is to show the relation between the neurotic character and the oedipal problem.

What really went on in her family? What was the relation between the parents? Margaret said, “I used to have the fantasy as a child that my parents were very close to each other and that I was the outsider. I felt isolated. Then, as I grew older, I saw that my mother was alone and my father, too. I realized that she talked about him as if he was a stranger.” She did recollect a scene in which her father tried to throw her mother out of the window, but she doesn't know why. We can guess. Like so many other marriages, her parents’ relationship had started on the high note of romance but ended on the bitter one of frustration. This is the terrain in which the oedipal problem develops. The frustrated parent generally turns to the child of the opposite sex for sympathy and affection.

The feelings between Margaret and her father were very deep. Despite the barrier between them, he was close to her heart and she to his. Margaret said that she was told that when she won some awards at school and church he cried. Why was any expression of these feelings restrained? There is only one answer. They had become sexual on both sides. The danger of incest seemed real. The father had to withdraw from any contact with the girl, and she had to be made to suppress her sexuality since it threatened him.

The child's sexual desire for the parent is an expression of her natural aliveness. The child is innocent until the parents project their sexual guilt upon her. Margaret was the bad one because her sexuality was alive and free. It had to be beaten out of her, which her mother did literally with a horsewhip with which her father used to train horses. She was forced to deny her body and invest her energy in schoolwork. The father didn't protect her because he felt too guilty to interfere. She was effectively broken as one breaks the wild, free spirit of a horse so it can be ridden by a man. Since Eve, the female has been regarded as the temptress. This bias reflects the double standard of morality characteristic of patriarchal culture. In the past, Western society has found it necessary to suppress the woman's sexuality more than that of the man.

We can understand now why Margaret developed her neurotic character. She was not allowed to relate to her father on a sexual level, and that taboo became ingrained into her personality and extended to all men. She can be the child who wants to be cuddled or she can be the understanding and sympathetic helper who will try to ease a man's suffering. Since neither of these approaches fulfills her need for a sexual relationship (which is more than just having sex), she becomes depressed. I don't believe that she can overcome her depressive tendency until she regains her sexuality. Having lost her sexuality, she lost her life. To be sexual is to be alive, and to be alive is to be sexual. In subsequent chapters I will show what is involved in working through this problem.

Margaret's case is not unique. It may differ from the average in the severity of the beatings she received, in the degree of repressed sexuality in the family, and in the special form her neurotic character assumed. Yet it is typical of what goes on in modern families, namely, the incestuous feelings between parents and children, the rivalries, jealousies, and threats to the child. It is also typical of the way the oedipal problem shapes the neurotic character of the individual. Here is a different case, which shows many similarities with Margaret's, although it involves a man.

Robert was a highly successful architect who consulted me because he was depressed. His depression was caused by the breakup of his marriage. When I asked why the marriage failed, he said that his wife complained that there was no communication between them, that he withdrew from contact, and that he was sexually passive. He admitted the truth of her complaints. He recognized that he had great difficulty expressing feelings. He had undergone psychoanalytic treatment earlier for a number of years. The treatment had helped him somewhat, but his emotional responsiveness was still very weak.

Robert was a handsome man in his late forties. He had a well-built and well-proportioned body and regular facial features. When I looked at him, he smiled too quickly. I sensed that eye contact embarrassed him. On closer examination I saw that his eyes were watchful and without feeling. The most notable aspect of his body, however was its tightness and rigidity. Without his clothes he looked like a Greek statue. Dressed, he could be taken for a moving mannequin. He was so controlled that his body did not look alive.

What happened in Robert's childhood to account for his emotional deadness? Like Margaret, he was an only child. His mother, however, doted on him when he was young. Although his parents were not rich, he was dressed in very expensive clothes, which were always kept clean. He said that pictures showed him to be an adorable little boy. His biggest wrongdoing was to get dirty. He was immediately washed and his clothes changed. He was never beaten. Punishment for any transgression took the form of shame and the withdrawal of love.

Robert related that as a boy he had the fantasy that he was not the child of his parents. He said that they really wanted a girl. He imagined that someday his true parents would discover him. This feeling of not belonging arises whenever there is a lack of emotional contact between parents and a child. In Robert's case his parents also felt that he didn't belong to them. They said he was different from them. Robert explained his feeling by the fact that his mother and father were so close that he felt on the outside. “I felt that I would pound on the door and say, ‘Let me in.’ At other times I felt I would run away and find my true family.” It may be recalled that Margaret had a similar feeling of being an outsider and not belonging to her family. She discovered later that the apparent closeness of her parents was more of a facade than a reality. What was the situation in Robert's family?

Robert described his mother as an amazon driving wild horses with whips. Though she was not pretty, wore glasses, and was socially uncomfortable, she had made a splendid marriage. His father, he said, was handsome, charming, and very much sought after. He was a winner, a man bound to succeed. Robert recognized that his mother was ambitious. He said, “She tried to project an image of refinement. Her parents had been farmers. She wanted to show that she was the best wife for my father, that their union was the perfect marriage.”

She also tried to project the image of being the perfect mother. To fulfill that image Robert had to be the perfect child, which he tried to...