Three Psycho-Mythologies of Death: Becker, Hillman, and Lifton Author(s): Lucy Bregman Source: Journal of the American Academy

of Religion, Vol. 52, No. 3 (Sep., 1984), pp. 461-479 Published by: Oxford University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1464203 Accessed: 26/07/2009 15:51
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Journal of the American Academy of Religion, LII/3

THREE PSYCHO-MYTHOLOGIES OF DEATH: BECKER, HILLMAN, AND LIFTON

LUCY BREGMAN
I

Recent literatureon the psychologyof the dying processis hampered by inadequate psychologicaltheory on the continuous role of death in human existence. For the most part, American psychoanalyticthought, influencedby oversimplifiedpsychoanalytictheory, has relied on the view that "in our unconscious,death is never possible in regard to ourselves" (Kiibler-Ross: 2). This in turn has helped legitimate our society's widedenial of death. Even after a huge numberof popularbookson care spread best-knownexample,and a model for most of the others)this gap between theoryand practicalconcernremains.A psychologyof dying shouldreston a foundationsystematicallyincluding death within the overall portraitof the psyche. It should not mirrorcontemporarysociety'svision of death as an external,accidental,and non-psychicforce. In our time, psychology has come to play the role of functional replacementfor religion, at least for many persons.Here, a "functional" definition of religion, such as that of Clifford Geertz (Geertz: 90ff.) is illuminating.Religion defined in this fashion does not necessarilyrequire a high degree of explicit transcendence,or an explicitly "supernatural" outlook. When psychology organizes the worldview of contemporary persons, it provides a framework within which sexuality, family life, work, inner experience and the quest for identity all are mapped out with confidence. It has performed its religious function. Yet even those who admire the capacity of psychology to do this task notice that death is a territory omitted from the great majority of contemporarymaps. Psychologicalframeworks,however successfulin other areas,avoid treatment of this topic. In 1967, Thomas Luckmanncould write that "death does not appear even as a subordinatetopic in the sacred cosmos of modern industrialsociety"(Luckmann:114).
Lucy Bregman(Ph.D., Universityof Chicago) is AssociateProfessorof Religion at Temple University.She is the author of The Rediscoveryof Inner Experience (1982) and of articleson religiousthemes in contemporary psychology.

for the dying (of which Kubler-Ross's On Death and Dying is the first and

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The being whom Luckmann, Philip Rieff, and others have labelled man,"is at home in the "sacredcosmos of modern indus"psychological trial society." An eternally youthful and energetic being, continuously shaking free of the past, of parents and tradition, he or she is in hot pursuitof self-actualization, growth, and identity. Such a personis essentially deathless.He or she is also at pains to avoid embeddednessin those communal structureswhich traditionally mitigated the impact of individual death, through ritualsor shared concerns which survive after the individual'sdemise. For psychological man, such communal structures requirecommitmentswhich are undesirableand emotionallyimpossible. This isolationof the self, ratherthan the mere decline of certain theological beliefs, has helped the "religionof psychology"promotea picture of a deathless,autonomousself. Yet an alternative vision to this completely deathless personage is emerging even within the context of the psychologicalworld view. For illustration,take the role death plays in a work such as Gail Sheehy's Passages. Using the image of the title, the individualis viewed as travelling forward in time, through a series of transitions(and often of jobs and mates);in the process,he or she graduallybecomes more and more his own person. He breaksout of commitmentswhich no longer fit, and frees himself from the "inner custodian."This results in new vitality. Within such a model, death appears as the chronologicalending of the series of transitions,but also as a spur for individualsto make changes "before time runs out" (Sheehy: 351ff.). Once the changes are made, death fades as a preoccupation.As on ongoing element in the person's identity, death plays as little role here as in the more straightforward versionsof the deathlessperson. The three thinkerswith whom this paper deals write in anguish and outrage against this portraitof the person. Becker, Hillman, and Lifton all recognize American psychology'scomplicity in the cultural cover-up of death, and all attempt to alleviate this problem at the level of theory. In spite of the real differences among their solutions,they agree on the following themes: 1. Psychologyin America, Freudian as well as humanistic,has been bound to a kind of "healthy-mindedness" which is often a mask for a nonpsychologicalmaterialism,and a readinessto flee from life's mysteries. Humanistic psychology in particular comes under attack, with its promisesthat "joy, delight, celebration of life, perfect love and perfect 2. If psychologyis to function as a religion, then it should do so with depth and care. None of the three disputes the religiousrole of psychology for twentieth-centuryAmerica, and all are inclined to enhance it. But an adequate religious vision is what they desire, a vision inclusive and profound enough to compete with or replace traditionalones. This
freedom . . . are easy to come by" (Becker: 271).

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would include both mythic and moral dimensions, and these in turn require some rethinking of psychologicaltheories of symbolism, ethical foundations,and theological language. In these thinkers,psychology as a "science"is no longer a principle theme; one might argue that in developing mythologiesof death they have abandonedwhatever tenuous link with scientificthought depth psychologyoriginallyclaimed for itself. 3. An adequate psychologyof death must face head-on the nature of human embodiment, addressingcarefully issues which popular psychology assumes have long ago been answered. Ethical naturalism asserts that: "We are natural beings. Death is a natural event. Therefore, we should accept death." An entire ethic built upon the metaphor of "health"and organic well-being supportsthis. Yet all three of our theorists are vigorous opponents of this form of ethical naturalism, which merges the human with the organic. 4. All three must struggle with models of individuality bequeathed them by contemporaryculture, previouspsychologies,and Western religious tradition.There is often violent rejectionof many aspects of these models. The liabilitiesof this situation,and of past models, are apparent in many places, for instance in the persistenceof "genderasymmetry," which legitimatesmale experienceas the pan-humannorm. In this paper,I will brieflypresentthe majorideas of Becker,Hillman, and Lifton, and close with a reflection on one striking feature of their thought. I do not hope to capture the full flavorof their writings, or the many nuances of their ideas. These thinkersappear to addressthe basic problem with much more imaginationand courage than other theorists. For those interestedin a religiousdimensionto psychologicaltheory, it is so convenientlyexplicit in their religiousconinviting to find psychologists cerns. One does not have to show, laboriouslyand speculatively, that behind the manifest psychologicalcontent there lurksa religiousone. Yet becausethe religiousness of these theoristsis so very present,we are forced to select among three very diversereligiousvisions,and come therebyinto theologicaland ethicalevaluations. II Ernest Becker wrote The Denial of Death shortly before his death from cancer in 1974. The sense of existentialcrisis and urgency throughout the book makes this biographicaltie-in seem more than a poignant coincidence. The Denial of Death is a reinterpretationof Freudian depth-psychology by way of Rank, existentialism, and Norman O. Brown'sLife Against Death. All of these sources,however, are subordinated to Becker's own polemical, passionatevision. It is impossible, he proclaims, to write an "objective"and disinterested study of death. Therefore, he gives readers a choice at the start: either hear what is

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real-however terrifying-or flee into healthy-mindednessand comforting illusions about oneself and the human condition. The first path is heroic and authentic, and allows for the unmasking of those pseudosolutionswhich disguise our horrorof death. One of Becker'sstrategiesis to rely on the author's persona within the argument. Egocentric, outraged, grandly masculine, but in some ways pathetic: this may not be the "realErnest Becker,"but it is a self-presentation which emerges as a model for those who choose the "morbidly-minded" and courageous It is not the which convince, but (I suspect) path. empirical arguments the degree to which readerscan identify themselveswith this persona.1 The central thesis of The Denial of Death is deceptively simple: "The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else: it is a mainspringof human activity-activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny of man" (ix). All of childhood and of culture with its "hero-systems" is fundamentallyexpressiveof this denial. Every nook and cranny of human existence is contaminatedby death'sterror.Becker steadfastly refuses to find death "acceptable"by mitigating it in any way. It is the constant dread presence discovered in every situation of vulnerability,humiliation,and violence. The task of authorand readeris to strip away the levels upon levels of lies which attempt to deny this reality. Becker claims to work from Freud's vision of the human condition, supplementedby other sources. Yet a major difference is that, whereas for Freud every human situation is construed in terms of conflicting psychic forces, Becker is a more traditionalCartesiandualist. "Nature's values are bodily values, human values are mental values" (31), he asserts. This leads to strange rereadings of Freud's original insights. Becker sees the mind/body relation as one of continuous warfareended only at death when the body "wins"by destroying the mind. In this respect he differs from those who use the traditional dualism to assertthe invulnerabilityof spirit or mind from the forces of decay. For Becker,the human animal is both mind and body, but the two are easily envisioned as separated.Moreover,each side in the civil warfare is relain what it represents.The person is "outof nature tively straightforward
and hopelessly in it....

him in many ways-the strangestand most repugnantway being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die" (26). The spirit, on the other
1 For example, Eugene Bianchi, in his paper "Death and Transcendencein Ernest Becker"(originallyread at AmericanAcademy of Religion meeting, 1977), seems to have accomplisheda much higher degree of identificationthan the present writer. Bianchi's presentationis valuable, and I am indebted to it and to his critique of Becker from a Jungianviewpoint.

His body is the material casing that is alien to

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hand, is infinite in aspiration,eager to pursue its own "freedom-project" and imagine itself as "self-caused" and self-created. Freud's view of the revised fit is to this Oedipus complex yearning, following the work of Norman O. Brown. But for Becker (unlike Brown), sexuality becomes a torment rather than a pleasure:as an activity in which embodiment is crucial, it reveals the vulnerabilityof the inner self, the latter's dependence on the alien, materialcasing. Becker'sindividualis clearly "psychological man"in his essentialisolation from others.The inward desire to be self-causedis matched by the almost complete lack of positive references to family, friends, lovers, children. The mother is not an object of infantile desire, but a source of blood and smells who by her closeness to "nature"inspires disgust and loathing (38). Although the individual flees into the "cleanly powerful" world of the father (40), of culturalhero-systems,the function of these is principally defensive. They repeat the childhood denial of finitude, nature, and death, at a level society accepts and normalizes,and at the expense of a basic grasp of reality. Nothing can reconcile the individual with his body and the death it bears within it. If we imagine that we can relinquishthe heroic and slip into a more communallyoriented "natural" (feminine?) outlook, this is an impossible dream. Human nature can never be natural, and it is not possible to live contentedly within our psychic means. The only sphere in which the human dilemma can even begin to find adequate expression,if not true resolution,is that of religion. One might have expected Becker to be especially hostile to religion, first because of its advocacy of an afterlife (the most transparentdenial of death) and second because religion has been the implacable enemy of the individual's wish to be the ground of his own existence. Religion legitimated the power of the father over the rights and hopes of the son. But Becker surprisesus. Since all of culture rests on denial of death, religion sets the human drama on the widest possiblestage, the cosmos. Thus it providessuitable grandeurfor man's basic situation.Becker also reinterpretsthe traditionalantithesisbetween religion and human freedom, in a passage which may sound satirical,but which Becker intends very seriously: The personality can truly begin to emergein religionbecause Godas an abstraction doesnotoppose the individual as others do, but instead the individual with all the powers provides necessary for independent Whatgreatersecuritythan to self-justification. leanconfidently on God,on the Fountof creation, the mostterriall the better: fyingpowerof all?If Godis hiddenandintangible, thatallowsmanto expand anddevelop by himself.(202) And expand he does, filling the space vacated by an otiose deity. Religion lifts the individual into alternative spheres of existence, "of

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heavens and possible embodiments that make a mockery of earthly logic.... In religiousterms, to 'see God' is to die, because the creatureis too small and finite to be able to bear the higher meanings of creation" (204). But whether the self can really die in this moment of cosmic awe is not certain. Is annihilationor self-deificationthe result?Nor does Becker ever reconnectthis "heavenly" perspectivewith the ordinaryearthly and of embodiment so as to make the latter bearable. earthy experiences Becker's resort to the explicit language of myth at this point is as intriguing as are the specific contents of his cosmic myth. He wishes to provide a religious vision unabashedlyrather than covertly. A psychology adequate in its apprehensionof death's power requiresa larger theater than "normal"psychologies focused on interpersonalrelations and emotional adjustment.Freud's legacy of demystificationcontinues to be valid, but in the service of properawe for the real mysteriesof existence. Becker is therefore no "reductionist," however his view of symbolismas defensive might suggest this. However, once he has staked out this territory, he is very vulnerableto a wide variety of religiouscritiques. Becker claims to stand within the "Augustinian-Lutheran" tradition of Westernthought (88), yet the specific images of his psycho-mythology seem uncannilyclose to those of a ratherdifferent strandof religioushistory. Those familiar with Hans Jonas'sThe Gnostic Religion can hardly fail to be struck by the close parallel between Becker's language and that of the "gnostics"portrayed there. An intensified and anguished oppositionbetween nonmaterialself and material,disgustingbody characterized the gnostic ethos. Moreover, the solution was an escape into heavenly realms for the self, which claimed direct identity with the highest and most abstractdivinity, a God too remote and pure to have been responsiblefor the creation of matter. Like the "alien God"of the gnostic theologians,Becker'sGod confirmsrather than thwartsthe individual's aspirationsfor an entirely heavenly and nonmaterial identity. The lack of communalemphasisso apparentin Becker'sportrayalof the self was also, it seems, a characteristic of gnostic forms of piety. An unfortunateresult of the label "gnostic" is that one immediately feels obliged to provide an "orthodox" alternative,so to speak. This seems the wrong response.Becker writes for the twentieth, not the second century. Why has he reevoked a style of religiousnesswhich few of his sources-certainly not Freud-would support,and which seems so much lesssubtlethanthese sourcesthemselves?Whatis he tryingto say?I believe he has found in humanisticpsychology, with its healthy-mindedethical naturalism,and its preference for "organic"imagery, a superb target. Moreover,recall the date of The Denial of Death's publication:in the aftermathof the VietnamWar, when revulsionagainsttraditionalmilitary modelsof heroismwas at its height. Becker,in protest,wrote an attackon

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"nature"as an adequate human ideal, and an endorsement of heroism removing the whole heroic myth from the military and political sphere. Yet the result is a self removed entirely from all that "earth" represents,a self grandiosein one sensebut profoundlydepleted in many ways. It is easy to criticize Becker for his complete neglect of cultural and contextual factorsin favor of explanationsat a level of universalhuman nature. But the gnostic God and its myth of the heavenly self may be a profoundand perennialresponseto certain agonizing failuresin present possibilitiesfor meaning,heroism,and trustat the levels of psyche and society. Moreover, the very one-sidedqualityof Becker'svisionmakesit more powerful. I do not think it is fair to blame Becker for his lack of a "solution" to the problem of death, after he has defined it as insoluble.Where he can be criticized is in his over-ontologizingof a specific type of human identity into a universalnorm, which in turn exacerbatesthe basic problem of death. The Denial of Death, however powerful its message for some, seems to endorse a style of human being which contributesto the very outlook it claims to oppose. In contrast, Hillman and Lifton begin by viewing the contemporaryterror of death as a tragic anomaly, and not by any means a revelationof an eternal "humannature." III Emerging from the Jungian tradition,James Hillman's "archetypal" psychologyis a highly imaginativeexplorationof a psychologicalapproach to death. Hillman, like Becker, is explicit in his use of mythic, religious themes, and is even more distant from conventional psychologicaldiscourse. So much so that readers who wish for some ordinary evidence, hypotheses,and reliance on other scientific norms will be entirely frustratedand tempted to dismissHillman. Yet it is intrinsicto Hillman'srevisioningof psychologyto breakthe illusorybond between depth psychology and naturalscience, and reestablish the truerbond to myth. Here is a samhow (as with Becker)style is not ple Hillman passage,which demonstrates "We ask:what is the purposeof this event separablefrom subject-matter: for my soul, for my death? Such questionsextend the dimensionof depth without limit, and again psychologyis pushed by Hades into an imperialism of soul, reflecting the imperialism of his Kingdom and the radical dominionof death"(1979:31-32).The referenceto Hades and the echo of the New Testamentare, as we shallsee, centralto Hillman'spurpose. His Jungianbackgroundoffers Hillman several advantages.First, he is not burdenedwith a defensive view of symbolism,a view which holds all symbol to be mystification, a screen to shield the symbolizer from naked reality. Hillman insists that images, symbols, and myths are the true stuff of psyche, and should not be denigrated as poor substitutesfor a "real life" stripped of imagery. Second, Jungian thought does not feel

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compelled to find in individual childhood the prototypes for all adult dilemmas. This may be a loss in some contexts. But Becker'smetaphysiof Freud's already theory-ladendescripcally oriented reinterpretations tions of childhood conflicts are implausible. It is a relief when Hillman relinquishesthe literalismof childhood origins. However, Hillman rejects and the two mainstaysof Jungian psychology:the reified "unconscious," archetype of the self. The former rested on a false hope that depth psychology needed the appearance of scientific theory and on a falsely mechanicalstyle of explanation.The disappearanceof the self-archetype bringsus to the heart of Hillman'spsycho-mythology. Hillman holds that the proper startingpoint for a psychologyis soul, "a perspectiverather than a substance,a viewpoint toward things rather than a thing itself" (1975:x). Psychology, he believes, has been everything but soulish,taking its norms and methods from biology, sociology, and theology rather than from psyche. Within soul, there are to be discovered depths, death, dreams,the whole "nightside"of life-and Gods. These Gods are the personifications and powers who have always haunted inner life; Jung simply rediscovered and renamed them, as of the collective unconscious." Soul evokes inwardness,and a "archetypes whole approach to these powers within, emphasizing plurality and indeed fragmentation,as well as nonpossessiveness. These are not "my" and guardiansof the soul and its archetypes;they are the true possessors depths. We can see here that soul carrieswhat many would perceive as a feminine undertone, diametrically opposite to that of Becker's heroic inner self. The equivalent in Hillman's psychology to Becker'sfreedom-loving self is the "heroicego," who plays the role of a villain in all of Hillman's writings.Ego psychologyis the dominant form of contemporarypsychology, becausethe ego mirrorsthe literalismand materialismof contempoof the entire realmof soul. The raryculture,its fear and misunderstanding desires oneness-and heroic conquest over all ego strength,light, height, the other powerswithin. Westernmonotheismhas confirmedthese aspirations, as has Western philosophy. Psychology simply perpetuatesthem. Even when "self"or "spirit"is substitutedfor ego, Hillman suspects all and unification,and equates them with the systems based on "oneness" of the heroic The triumph ego. ego representsan alien intruderinto the realmof soul-a Herculesin the houseof Hades,wielding a materialsword againstshades (1979:110).The realm of soul is spontaneously polytheistic; there are many persons and powers acting within it. Hillman makes a returnto "imaginalGreece"to describethem, bringingto psychic life the mythsand Godsof classicalculture.In contrast,the ego is consistentlyassociated with the dominantJudeo-Christian strandof Westernfaith, particumanifestations. larlyin its Protestant How does death come into this view of psyche? The link between

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soul and death is firm, not because of an alleged immortality, but because through the soulish perspective death too is revisioned. "Our emphasis upon physical death correspondsto our emphasis upon the physical body, not the subtle one; on physical life, not psychic life; on the literal and not the metaphorical"(1979:64). Our culture's ignorance and silence in regard to death is not a norm, attributableto a universal human nature, but an abnormality linked by Hillman to the ego's dominion, and the soul-lossthis entails. His position is elaboratedin The Dream and the Underworld, a work based on an extended analogy: Hades is to earth's surface as dream is to waking, as soul is to ego. Hades, the undergroundhome of dead shades, is the missing element beneath every experience. "All soul processes,everything in the psyche, moves toward Hades. As the finis is Hades, so the telos is Hades. Everything would become deeper, moving from the visible connectionsto the invisible ones, dying out of life. When we search for the most revelatory meaning of an experience, we get it most starkly by letting it go to Hades, asking what this has to do with 'my' death" (30). Dying out of life-the realm of the external, literal, material-and into soul: we will be hard-pressedto find a clearer, less metaphoricalway to state Hillman's telos, without remaining above ground ourselves.If we hope for a nonmythic alternative,we are still caught in the realm of the ego. The radical dominion of death, the Resurrectionof Death itself: these are terms which suggest this sinking down to Underworld, the realm of shadow,sleep, decay, and disintegration. Hillman'swritings give the reader an opportunityto purge away all far more thoroughlythan Becker's.If Hades is the healthy-mindedness, finis and telos, then psychotherapyas soul-makingmust refuse all goals of cure, adjustment,happiness.These are all heroic fantasiesof the ego, moralisticimportationsfrom earth's surface. Hillman keeps "pathology" as a central motif of therapy, while he removesboth the medical hope of cure and the humanisticone of growth. From Hades, the shades expect no reincarnation or resurrection. Hillman sees himself as the preserverof the original dark wisdom of the founders of depth psychology, over against those who for several generations have been at work to dilute, soften, or brighten their real contributions.Whether or not the reader can respond to this method depends in part on how much he or she is willing to lay aside literalismand materialism,at least temporarily.(For instance, the literalist in me wants to know if Hillman's patients realize that he has renouncedthe hope for a cure.) Like Becker, Hillman also repudiates the hope of the ethical naturalist-harmony with the earth, natural cycles, and so on, must be is not a given, but itself "oneof the fantasiesof soul repudiated."Nature" and itself an imaginal topography" (1979:72). Note that this position underminesethical naturalism, withoutforcing Hillmaninto an intensified

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oppositionof the gnostic variety. Hillman insists that earth and Underworld are not the same. In his language, Demeter loses Persephone to Hades. Hillman knows that many powerful currentsin Western religious as well as scientificthought oppose his soulishyearning for Hades. In a discussion of "Barriers,"he includes among them "Christianism," the which insists the descent to Underworld must be a victoideology every rious harrowingof Hell. Christianism turns the dark but kindly realm of shades into a place of burning and torment, then claims that Christ can "annulit through his resurrectedvictory over death" (1979:84).Hillman finds the ego at work in this model of Christ, just as surely as in Hercules. At worst, the ego's fear and hatred is projectedonto soul, so that, as Hell, the Underworld'sdeath becomes a "lastenemy." The defensive function of symbolism is selectively reintroduced,when Hillman warns that "every resurrectionfantasy of theology may be a defense against death, every rebirth fantasy in psychology a defense against depth" (1979:90).Visionsof ascended spirit are a poor exchange for the loss of soul. In case one is tempted to accuse Hillman of caricature,the heavy use of the "lastenemy" phrase in some fairly recent Christianwritings about death is quite of a piece with this portrait.2 Christianism restson a fear of soul and its kind of death, which is then transferredinto an exaggerated terror of biological death. It is against such an ideology that Hillman struggles, and within this struggle themes like "the radical dominionof death"receive their peculiarsignificance. Nevertheless, even the sympathetic reader of The Dream and the Underworldmay marvel at how Hillman can make such a goal as "the Resurrectionof Death" sound so appealing. What would in any other context be truly horriblehas lost virtuallyall its sting. Is this anothercase of perverse psychologicalromanticism,similar to R. D. Laing's attempt to transformschizophreniainto a glamorousand revolutionaryexperience? One reasonHillman can so wholeheartedlyadvocate Hades is that virtually all public images of mass death and ordinaryviolence are consigned by him to the sphere of the ego. Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and Jonestown are events of earth's surface, grisly mementos of the ego's unlimited passion for literal killing. They have no connection with soul whatsoever.Thus to sink down to the Underworld,to die out of life and into soul, avoids any contaminationfrom those brutal images of mass death. The violence of Hades is illustratedby the rape of Persephone,
2 Oscar Cullman'swell-knownessay, "Resurrection of the Body or Immortalityof the Soul?"(in K. Stendahl,ed., Resurrectionand Immortality [New York:Macmillan& Co., 1965]),whatever its merits as biblical scholarship,is a stunning example of Christianism, and thoroughlyvulnerableto Hillman'soutragedcritique. Cullmanis almost Beckerianin his repetitionof terms such as "horror" and "terror," language which is not found in the originaltexts he discusses.

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not by ordinarystreet crime. At this point, does myth become mystification? We may see in some of Hillman's usages a screen to hide us from the many experiences of death and violence which neither can nor should be glamorized. This is, I believe, Hillman'sunsolveddilemma. In a sense, Auschwitz and Hiroshimahave become soulishimages as well as literal events. They are by now elements in the total contemporaryexperienceof death, reenacted in dreamsand other inwardplacesof sould.To blame the heroicego for their persistenceis to lighten the burdenplaced on all death-language, to lighten it beyond credibility. This criticism goes hand in hand with another:Hillman's soul permits internal plurality, but his worldview or perspectivemakes no allowance for a pluralityof souls. Family, community and historyare all consignedto earth'ssurface,severedfrom inner life by the power of Hillman'sown imaginallandscape;these realitiesremain outsidethe properrangeof a truly psychologicalperspectiveuntil they are transformedinto Underworld images. Like Becker, who ontologizes a specific, historically conditioned style of selfhood, Hillman's surfaceUnderworldimagery eternalizesan isolationof the inner self which might justas clearly be the productof a certainspecific historicalsituation.Jungian thought has always been vulnerable to this charge; it substitutesan for explanationsin terms of the ordiatemporal"collectiveunconscious" nary historicalexperienceof social life and relatedness.But Hillman'ssoul is an extreme of this tendency; it is more alone, more dependent on the Godswithin,than is the Jungiannorm. Hillman'sdualism of ego and soul, surface and Underworld,ends by tearing apart our experience. Although the explicit goal is fulfilled-he does reintroducedeath into psychic life-in the processhe redividespsychic life from ordinarylife. I supposethat vigoroussupporters of Hillman would find a need for "integration" and "unification" a productof the ego's workings,but I remain unconvinced.A psychologyof death ought to be preparedfor twentieth-centuryimages of death or at least be able to trace their impacton soul.The returnto imaginalGreeceis not in itself the problem; it is the use of this to discount and ignore more recent experiences which seem equally significant.In Lifton, our third psychologist, we find a thinker intent on including such public and unsoulishdeath-imageryas Hillmanignores,into his psychologyof death. IV In The BrokenConnection, RobertJ. Lifton offers his solutionto the same issuediscussedby Beckerand Hillman:can psychologyfind roomfor death, and so acknowledge its presence throughouthuman life? Lifton's neo-Freudian,Eriksonianheritage is remarkablefor its ethical sensitivity, for its inclusionof cultureand historyas factorsin their own right,and for

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a view of humanbeingsconsiderablymore "healthy-minded" than thoseof the two previoustheorists.Yet Lifton'smoraloutrageat contemporary culof death goes at least as deep as theirs.This outrageis not ture'sdistortions on behalf of the heroic self, or the inner depths of soul, but for threatened humanity.The anger is balancedby compassionand humaneness,a genuine awarenessthat we are all of us in this thing together. This may, once again, be a matterof author'spersonaratherthan the writer'strue personality, but it is a personainsistingthat any psychologyshouldbe judged by the adequacy of its moral vision. In this Lifton is more truly "prophetic" than Becker,insofaras the propheticappeal depends on the possibilityof personaland socialtransformation. Liftonrejectsboth Freud's"deathinstinct" and the post-Freudian view that death is unsymbolizable,and so perpetually unacceptable to the unconscious. The idea of an "instinct" is a confusedintrusionof a biological force into a psychologicaltheory, at least as Lifton understandsit. The body will always be an element in human identity and the life-cycle; Lifton is no dualistin Becker'sstyle. But the body is mediated and experienced in terms of psyche and culture, a fact which the language of "instincts" obscures.We find here an alternativeform of Hillman'scritique of naturalism:every vision of embodiment is already psychic, not pure "naturein the raw."As for the mind's supposedincapacity to symbolize death, this is inaccurate.Freud himself was preoccupiedwith death fears, and did not interpretthem as disguisedcastration-anxieties (Lifton:47ff.). Such an interpretation,however, has dominated AmericanFreudianism, falsely legitimizingthe culturaldenial of death. Our own society may find death "unimaginable," and so denigratepast cultures'attemptsto symbolize it by labellingthese defenses againstdeath'sterror.But this normalizes our own fear to no good purpose. Lifton insists that symbolism is not primarily defensive, aiding the denial of raw reality (as Becker holds). He sees "the symbolizingprocess arounddeath and immortalityas the individual'sexperienceof participation in some form of collectivelife-continuity." whichsuggest reflect a compelling anduniverImages immortality sal innerquestfor continuous to whathas symbolic relationship gone beforeand what will continueafter our finite individual lives.... Thestruggle or experience of a senseof immortoward, nor"irrational" butanapprotalityis in itselfneither compensatory of ourbiological andhistorical connectedness. priate symbolization (17) Thus for Lifton the individual'sown death should not be confused with "the end of everything," and patterns of "symbolic immortality"help acknowledge continuities within nature, history, and the cosmos. Psychology has arbitrarilydismissed such visions, preferringa model of an isolated individualfor whom connectednessis an illusion,an escape from

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authenticaloneness. Lifton identifies five modes of symbolic immortality.These are patterns of symbolism,not philosophicproofs for survivalof physical death. The first,"biological," is expressedin the hope to live on in one's children. Other modes symbolize connectednessthrough work, nature-"The state may collapse but the mountains and rivers remain" (22)-theological beliefs and what Lifton calls "transcendence." The latteris an alteredstate of consciousness, a breakthrough for a senseof abundantlife in the midstof is the foundationupon which the other four modes death. Transcendence are built. It liberatesthe individualinto ultimacy,splendorsurpassing what were thoughtto be the boundariesof existence.It is the Liftonianequivalent to that moment when the self, faced with the wonderand mysteryof the cosmos,"seesGod and dies."But becauseLifton is not hostileto embodand iment, he findsin sexualunion one potentialvehicle for transcendence quotes both John Donne and Norman Mailer to insist on this (32). But Lifton sadly recognizesthat transcendencealone is not usuallyenough to guarantee a sense of immortality;it must be communicatedin terms of some intellectuallyand emotionallysustaining framework. Lifton'sappreciativestance toward hopes and images such as these is worth emphasizing. Few psychologistshave shared this positive regard. For example, the simple hope to live on in one's children has most frequentlybeen lookedon with extremesuspicion,as a sign of parentalpossessivenessand a lack of fulfillmentas autonomousindividuals.Psychological writings are filled with endless diatribesagainst this view of children as extensionsof oneself. Yet Lifton insiststhat for all the distortionsof this hope, the underlyingwish for continuityis a valid one, and the "biological mode"hasalwaysbeen the most popularone. Continuitieswhich a Beckerian self would find threatening (such as with nature) or inauthentic are treatedwith respectas symbolizations of authenticcontinuities.This is less true of the theological mode, but even here Lifton does not see denial whereothershave refusedto see anythingelse. Lifton also applies his nondefensiveview of symbolismto childhood experiences. Each individual learns to symbolize death in analogies drawn from other experiences.But death is envisionedas the oppositeof life, and so the "experientialclusters"depend on polarities (53). For example, the child experiences both connectednessand separationand builds for him or herself an image of death as abandonment, life as relatedness.A healthy child can acknowledgeseparationand allow for a certain amount of it, then use his or her individual experience as the foundationfor appropriatingwhatever culturalsymbolismfor death and immortalityis available. Two other experiential clusters engendering death imagery are the and stasis-movement.The former polarities of disintegration-intactness has attracted the major share of psychoanalytic attention. Mutilation,

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dismemberment,wounding:these shape our death-imagery,providing a vision of death as a direct attack on the body's integrity. But for Lifton, a healthy form of embodiment includes "finitude,limitation and boundary" (63), and so even disintegrationexperiences are assimilatedby the child, rather than merely denied. Stasisis the cluster of imagery linking death to sleep and enclosedness,lack of movement. Children who make use of this pattern often assume that death, like sleep, is a reversible condition. Lifton traces the development and elaborationof these three clusters throughoutthe life-cycle. For our purpose, it is intriguing to note that the theoristsdiscussed in this essay themselves rely on these patternsof imagery. For Becker, "disintegration"is clearly primary. Hillman's Hades is an ideal realm for stasis.And Lifton himself focuses on connectedness vs. separation as the major theme in a psychology of death. I suspect also that the disintegrationpattern is more salient for men, and that of separationfor women, although there is not a great deal of evidence to confirm this. At least Lifton has provided a framework for death-symbolization,and tied this to childhood without building the denial of death into his system in absolutecategoriesand oppositions. Is there a "mythic"dimension to Lifton's psychology? The Broken Connection is an immensely complex work, and includes discussions of a very wide range of topics. Yet Lifton's very insistenceon human rootedness in history leaves him with an immense dilemma, and provides the springboardfor his mythology. He refuses to locate twentieth-century fear of death in "human nature,"and so turns to a unique feature of contemporary life. Especially since 1945, humanity has lived on the brink of catastrophicworld-destruction.A nuclear war would ruin all continuities:children, work, even rivers and mountainsmight no longer survive. More accurately, the image of such an annihilation pervades and darkensour capacity to exist in connection with death. World War III is not "history"; it is an imaginal possibilitywhose plausibilityis both rootedin history,and threatensto undermineit.3 "As death imagery comes to take the shape of total annihilationor extinction, religious symbolism becomes more sought after and more inadequate" (339). A well-populated heaven is no consolation for the vision of a poisonedand ruined earth. No adequate "higheraffirmation" in the face of this threat has yet been found. Consequently,all images of connectednessare endangered, rendered dubious. Language and imagination simply fail. Lifton quotes Loren Eiseley: "To perpetuatethis final act of malice seems somehow disproportionate, beyond endurance. It is
3 It is therefore not exactly relevant to Lifton's position that a full-scale nuclear war and that the devastationmight not be so total as the imagery might be partly"survivable" assumes.

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like tamperingwith the secret purposesof the universeitself, and involving not just men but life in the final holocaust-an act of petulant, deliberate blasphemy"(344).4The final holocaust,the ultimate No to vitality, continuity, and meaning: Lifton does not create this mythic image, but he must encounterit in all its starkness, dread, and limiting force. In the face of this barely imaginable possibility, Lifton identifies a villain. Not the heroic ego, but "nuclearism," a false and idolatrousfaith, "the passionateembrace of nuclear weapons as a solution to death anxiety and a way of restoringa lost sense of immortality"(369). Nuclearism is expressedin the hope that the weapons themselves will bring peace, or serve as a magic key to human mastery over political transformation, nature. It "involves a search for grace and glory in which technicalscientific transcendence, apocalyptic destruction, national power, personal salvationand commited individual identity all become psychically bound up with the bomb" (376). Nuclearismis the religion of Hillman's heroic ego, a dangerousand vicious idolatry feeding on the apocalyptic myths of past eras. In Lifton's eyes, such myths invite us to assureourselves that a new heaven and a new earth automaticallyemerge from the ruinsof the old and that God'spurposesmight be served by the final, deliberate blasphemy. They also promise invulnerability for the righteous and the purificationof evil throughmass destruction. We can understandnow why Lifton's advocacy of even the simpler forms of symbolic immortalityis so important.The hope for continuities, for something-children, nature, worksof culture-to survive this generation, is a precariousone. Connectednesswith life, renunciationof nuclearism and the false promiseof a victory over death throughmass killing: these are our moral imperatives. Lifton does not resolve at the level of myth or psychologicaltheory what remains so obviously unresolved in current existence. He does not provide, in other words, an explicit fullblown countermythto oppose that of the apocalypticnuclearist. Yet in many passagesof The Broken Connection, he comes close to doing so. A trust in life, in the cycle of generations,in the capacity of human beings to integrate death-experiences,suggests a counter-myth. To be a survivor,not a heroic conqueror:"renewalinvolves a survivor experience: there is a measure of annihilation along with imagery of vitality beyond the death immersion" (392). Lifton's own work with Hiroshimasurvivorsand Vietnam veterans leads him to use such parabut a highly sophisticated digms. This is a form of "ethicalnaturalism," form, giving priorityto symbolizingcapacitiesbut refusingan immortality severed from natural continuities and capacities. Apocalyptic nuclearism falsely promisesthe salvationof one's soul at the cost of the whole world. Lifton tries to affirm the connectednessof the world and soul, so
4 The quotationfrom Eiseley is from "Man,the Lethal Factor."

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that biological life and inner personhoodare no longer set against each other. The exaggerated split between spirit and body degrades such visions into "mere survival";in both Becker and Hillman we saw evidence for this legacy. Lifton finds in our current situation the opportunity to renounce such divisions and seek the connectedness between human and natural,soul and earth, life and death. V In Christian tradition, the four "last things" were: death, Heaven, Hell, and the Last Judgment. This presentationof the three theoristsof death also stressesthe link between death and various mythic realities. One may even wonder if death as a biological phenomenonhas not been of politics, religion, and symbolentirely swallowedup by considerations ism. But remember Hillman's polemic. Our culture has known only biological death, and all three of these theoristsare forced to argue on behalf of the reality of psychic death, of death as an event and an ongoing relationin the lives of personsratherthan organisms. The associationwith the quartet of traditionaleschatology is not so fanciful as it may seem at first. Two of these three theoristsmake abundant use of vertical imagery. Becker requiredan imagery of ascensionin order to arrive at a point where the self can escape the limited logic of earth, and so confront the true mystery and wonder of the cosmos. Hillman's psycho-mythologyrested on a similar split between Hades and earth's surface. Lifton, much more temporally than spatially oriented, still required an experience of "transcendence" beyond the other modes of symbolic immortality. Moreover, Lifton must go beyond "history" proper, in order to confront the "finalholocaust,"the act of blasphemy, and denounce false historicizingsof apocalyptic myths. These thinkers require a multi-leveled-and in Lifton's case-temporally complex view of human existence. Rudoph Bultmann could dismiss the three-story cosmology of the New Testament as irrelevant and unbelievable and could completely detemporalize and individualize eschatology. But like Hillman's Gods (who never die in the soul) some reliance on these images reemerges as an imaginative option in a psychologicalcontext. What marks off these three thinkers from ordinary psychologistsis not, perhaps,their indebtednessto such language, but their explicit, positive acknowledgementof its mythic and religiousroots. We will certainly not argue that Hillman's Hades is identical with the Christian'straditional Hell, or that such "places"exist eternally, merely awaiting rediscovery. But we suggest that patternsof ultimate imagery connected to deathvisions of "lastthings"-emerge whenever death is taken as seriouslyas these theoristscompel us to do. We can contrasttheir views with the "one-story" approachwe found

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in Sheehy's Passages, a work uncritically duplicating the worldview of "psychologicalman." As we saw, life in Sheehy's book is portrayedas a horizontal progressiontowards greater autonomy. Death comes at the literalized chronologicalend and spurs the individual to make his or her passagesbefore "time runs out." Within such a framework,Sheehy can find Dante's Divine Comedy an instance of midlife crisis (Sheehy: 365-66) without ever delving into its religiousframework,the symbolism of the journey beneath and above, nor its final ecstatic consummation. Sheehy's view is in Hillman's language a purely earth's surface view of life and development. We mustalsocontrastBecker'sand Hillman'suse of this verticalimagery with its even more explicit use in certain transpersonal-humanistic psychologies. Maslow's"peak-experience" began a revitalizationof the The symbolism of heights, heavens, transcendence, and "godlikeness." movement known as transpersonalpsychology elaborated this vision, making explicit the links between this language and certain traditional contemplative-mysticalsystems which employed a model of "levels" ascending upward. In this style of psychology, however, death is often left out altogether,or so quickly left behind and below that it is barely mentioned. For example, in an essay enumeratingthe many meaningsof Maslow could list as one of these: "Transcendence of "Transcendence," death, pain, sickness,evil etc. when one is at a level high enough to be reconciled with the necessity of death, pain etc. From a godlike, or Olympian point of view, all these are necessary,and can be understood as necessary"(271-72). From this, it is a very shortstep to the claim that such realitieshave no ultimate statusat all, are "illusions" endemic to the earthboundpsyche, but fortunatelyescapableillusions. None of our three thinkers would share Maslow'soptimism that an "Olympian" perspectiveis easy to reach, nor that it necessarilyproduces a superior grasp of reality. It takes Becker's self a long and tortured struggle to reach a "high level," and it is not clear that he is ever truly able to accept death and evil as "necessary." Hillman would find in this "Olympian"perspective nothing but the heroic ego's pretensions. Lifton's version of transcendence is best described as the integration of negative experience rather than a sublime detachment from its pain. Moreover,because Lifton never sees transcendenceas in itself a solution, one is forced to reconnect it and oneself to the ambiguous and threatened realm of social and historical experience. The monistic atemporality of the "Olympian" perspective-not in itself a problem for Becker-implies no connectedness to past or future. For Lifton, you cannot confrontnuclearismwith peak-experiencealone. This contrast with Maslow may help us formulate the purpose of cosmic and eschatologicallanguagein a psychologyof death. "multi-story" When we close the pages of The Broken Connection, we sense that no

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human problem has been left out, and that no situation human beings encounteris unrelatedto death. Beckerand Hillmanare to my mind somewhat lesssuccessful,but they too providevisionsof the humancondition,of which one can make the same claim. And in all three instances,a revisioning of death requiresa cosmosthat reachesout to include additional"last things," not to escape from death but properly to apprehend its scope. Heavensor the Underworldmay yield a point of view more accuratethan that of earth'ssurface-and so the cosmologicalsymbolismemployed in so many traditionalcontextsis rediscoveredwithin psychologicaltheory.The "final holocaust"is a perspective against which our current situation in regard to death becomes comprehensible.Dante may have experienced midlife crisis,but The Divine Comedyis far closerto Becker,Hillman,and Lifton in intentionthanto Passagesand its view of existence. At the startof this paper, we referredto psychologyas a "functional" replacement for religion, and also noted that functional definitions of religion usually downplayedthe element of transcendence.The "religion of psychology,"the world-view of psychologicalman, is normally characterized as at odds with multilevelled, mythic, and transcendentrealms of experience,let alone with eschatologicalrealities.But as we have tried to show, depth psychologyseems capable of transcendingthese boundaries, reachingbeyond them with the help of sophisticatedinterpretations and revisionsof traditionalmythic resources.Or is it not depth psychology per se, but seriousawarenessof death, which creates and recreatesa mythic context, multilevelled, fearsome, awe-inducing?The provocative and compelling quality of all three of these theoristslies in their success in connecting death to an enormousrange of human experience, and so revisioning its scope. Such efforts are profound and complex, acknowledging the paradoxesof human existence ratherthan reducingor ignoring them. In turn, all three of these theoristsdeserve to be acknowledged by critics of the psychologicalworldview, and of the Americanvision of deathlessexistence it has so frequently supported. REFERENCES
Becker,Ernest 1974 Geertz,Clifford
1973 Hillman, James 1975 1979

The Denial of Death. New York:Free Press.

The Interpretation of Culture. New York: Basic Books. Revisioning Psychology. New York: Harper & Row. The Dream and the Underworld. New York: Harper & Row.

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Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, On Death and Dying. New York:Macmillan. 1969 Robert Lifton, The BrokenConnection. New York:Simon & Schuster. 1979 Luckmann,Thomas The Invisible Religion. New York:Macmillan. 1967 Maslow,Abraham The FartherReaches of Human Nature. New York:Viking 1971 Press. Sheehy, Gail 1977 Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life. New York: Bantam.

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Philosophy of Mind in Sixth-Century China

Paramartha's "Evolution ofConsciousness"
Diana Y.Paul.Consideredthe leadingtranslator of Buddhistdoctrine to 6thParamartha introduced centuryChina,the missionary-monk philosophical ideas that would subsequentlyexcitethe Chinese imagination to develop the greatschoolsof Suiand T'ang Buddhism.Thisfirststudyof Paramartha in a Westernlanguage focuses on a new translation and analysis of the Chuanshih lun (Evolutionof Consciousness),a text that reveals the full outlineof Paramartha's Yogacara thought.Inaddition,theauthordiscusses Paramartha's and political contextof the timein Indiaand life, the historical south China, and Paramartha's views on language and the process of cognition.$30.00

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