Facing up to the Inescapable

...Kierkegaard, he argues, anticipated virtually all Freud's insights, and more validly so, in his thinking on anxiety and on the need for acceptance of creatureliness...

...The Shade S e l l e r JOSEPHINE JACOBSEN Doubleday, $5.95 An A t t i c of I d e a l s KAREN SWENSON Doubleday, $5.9.5 C L A I R E H A H N For one trapped moment I felt I had walked into a situation I've squirmed to evade...

...He regarded Norman O. Brown and Herbert Marcuse as having made great contributions to human self-understanding but as faithless to their own insights when they asserted that men could live without repression...

...It is also what life is all about...

...But the more intensely subjective the experience, the more precise and delicate must be the artist's control...

...Psychology as self-knowledge is selfdeception," in Rank's words, because it does not give men what they want, immortality...

...Just as she avoids the temptation to make a prose case, so Swenson overcomes the problems of much contemporary poetry...

...Freud opened the way to our basic understanding of mental illness through his discovery that "repression is normal self-protection and creative self-restriction," but Freudianism "contains a powerful truth that is phrased in such a manner as to be untrue...

...He or she seeks escape in either the triviality of routine or in heroic achievement...

...Yet The Denial o/ Death is not only the culmination but the triumph of Becker's attempt to create a meaningful "science of man...

...Ask a contemporary theologian--other than an anti-intellectual fundamentalist-about death and you will be answered with an amused smile, silence, or studied unintelligibility...

...Above all, Becket realized that faith is a gift of grace...

...As poets pursue their insights to the extreme verge of breakdown, many, often successful poets, demand that their emotion create form...

...Freud abhorred religion because he could not take "the step from scientific to religious creatureliness," and made the psychoanalytic movement his own death-denying illusion...

...Freud, Becker asserts, is right in his basic premise that we cannot live .without illusion, but the real question is what is the "life-enhancing illusion," what provides "the fitting kind of beyond, the one in which you find it most natural to practice self-criticism and self-idealization...

...But Karen Swenson and Josephine Jacobsen are nothing so simple as feminists...

...poetry, as Auden said, "makes nothing happen...

...Trained as a cultural anthropologist, he has sought in a series of books--most noteworthily The Structure el Evil and The Birth and Death o/ Meaning---to reintegrate a search for ultimate values into the social sciences...

...A ninety-year-old woman, rouge on "the cracked china of her cheeks" smiles at a world her visitors cannot see before "Flat white shoes/ put her away unbroken...

...Although it is true that Swenson's poems grow from the matrix of experiences dealt with by women's liberation groups, she has none of the strident polemics that make many of us wince against the truths proclaimed...

...In part two of her volume Commonweal: 217...

...The Denial o[ Death is the final building block in Becker's offering and it is a worthy one, a moving, important and necessary work that speaks not only to the social scientists and theologians but to all of us finite creatures...

...Becker's thesis, brilliantly and lucidly argued, is simple...

...For Becket life is not a structure of illusions generated by the repression of sexuality and aggression, but a structure of illusions resulting from the fear of death...

...Yet death is what religion is all about, as ordinary men and women know...

...The human animal must be conscious of death in order to struggle to preserve life, but cannot face the knowledge of death fully...

...Rank was brought---correctly--to the same conclusion that "the only way out of human conflict is full renunciation, to give one's life as a gift to the highest powers" and that, in Rank's words, the "need for a truly religious i d e o l o g y . . . is inherent in human nature and is basic to any kind of social life...

...For Becket, the greatest thinker in the psychoanalytic tradition is Otto Rank, on whose ideas he bases much of his own thinking, and he agrees with Rank that psychoanalysis is a "preponderately negative and disintegrating ideology...

...In one splendid and terrifying sequence of three brief poems Swenson takes us to a nursing home...

...Here were two volumes of poems by women for me to review...

...The Denial of Death attempts nothing less than a synthesis of the work of Freud and his successors and a reconciliation of the insights of psychoanalysis with religion...

...Anality is likewise linked to our horror of decay and death...

...Contrary to Freud, Becket asserts that "consciousness of death is the primary repression, not sexuality...

...His earlier works---especially The Structure o/ Evil--had sought to absorb Freudian-induced pessimism about human nature back into the Enlightenment tradition and to replace the tyranny of instinct with belief in the social origins of anti-social behavior, but in his later years he became somewhat less optimistic...

...Contemporary poetry, British and American, is the heir to the Romantic movement in its insistence that the response of self to the outside world is the only valid province of poetic exploration...

...In a supreme irony, Becker has only gained the notice he has long deserved through a Pulitzer prize awarded posthumously for this book...

...He could write that religion solved the problem of transference "by expanding awe and terror to the cosmos where they belonged" and that "the personality can truly begin to emerge 29 November 1974:216 in religion because God . . . does not oppose the individual as others do...

...Yet he still held out hope that religion could give meaning to life, and advised that mankind should wait "in a condition of openness toward miracle and mystery _9 . . awe-filled creatures trying to live in harmony with the rest of creation...

...Would I be writing about my "sisters" and their agon in the supermarket, their death by water in the washing machine...

...The marriage the reader is called to celebrate is the happy wedding of word, form, and experience...

...Unable to see how the therapeutic revolution could affect the great masses of humanity, he accepted Freud's statement that "Men are doomed to live in an overwhelmingly tragic and demonic world...

...The single great task of human beings is facing the inevitability of their death...

...Becker is less than clear about his own religious position, however, since it was still evolving at the time he was writing this book and when he died...

...Freud's central error was in fetishizing the symbols of our deeper problem, our knowledge that we live in a body which must die...

...Rather it creates a coherence that is not partisan, not debatable...

...But he also accepted the general intellectual convention that "what characterizes modern life is the failure of all traditional immortality ideologies to absorb and quicken man's hunger for self-perpetuation and heroism," and he found in Kierkegaard's failure to live up to the implications of his own ideal of the Knight of Faith a source of discouragement...

...We talked of the terrible agony even the experienced writer undergoes in trying to say what he means as he envisions it...

...Psychoanalysis may be of marginal help to us in understanding the genesis and locus of particular neuroses, but this enlightenment simply leaves us naked before the root of all neuroisis, our creatureliness...

...Becker concludes his last contribution to our knowledge of ourselves by saying that all any of us can do to meet the challenge of death--which he realizes is ultimately the challenge of faith--is "to fashion something--an object or ourselves--and drop it into the confusion, make an offering of it so to speak to the life force...

...But her poems discover again that poetry is not the prisoner of its themes...

...She looks at women in part one--at Dietrich, "her figure, plastic as an airline dinner," at Virginia who has been slowly dismembered on the operating table until she stands "wearing her scars behind the soft sculpture of foam," at Hecuba who hides behind a mask "taut and intransigent as the glaze on my best china...

...His work received only limited recognition from his peers but struck such a receptive note among his students that when he was released by the University of California during its stormiest years, the student government raised the funds to pay his salary themselves...

...It makes a small world but does not try to change the large world...

...It testifies to a journey undertaken but never completely finished...

...In a poignant hospital bed interview with Sam Keen shortly before his own death (Psychology Today, April 1974), Becket told how he had come to believe in God with the birth of his first child...

...Neurosis and schizophrenia are both different ways of avoiding the reality of death...

...Her theme is loneliness: separate womeni s o l a t e d men live together by the social rules which short-circuit communication...

...Sex is often the occasion or locus of personality disorders because it dramatizes our animalness and contingency...

...Becker's failure to fully resolve the problem of religion for himself is indicated by his ambivalent attitude toward hope...

...The Denial o[ Death is thus both a great and an imperfect book...

...He chose instead to move to San Francisco State, but unable to work there, went on to self-imposed exile in Canada where he was teaching when he died at 49...

...This last book documents the extent of the loss that untimely death represents...

...That death is likewise what the science of man is all about is the message of Ernest Becker's magnificent last book...

...They are women and they are also poets...

...Karen Swenson's small volume, her first book of poems, is divided into three parts...

...At the same time he agreed with Erich Fromm that men "had to leave tragedy behind as part of a program to awaken some kind of creative effort" in the world, and replied to Fromm's critics that if Fromm was a "Rabbi at heart" then "If the alternative is fatalistic acceptance of the present human condition then each of us is a rabbi---or had better be...

...It is precisely in the formal control this artist is able to maintain as she deals with painful material that her success lies...

...I last saw Ernest Becker when he was at home resting after his first operation for the cancer that was to soon kill him, during a brief period when we were academic colleagues...

...Yet it was an agony from which he was unable to recoil, since he knew it was his calling...

...He noted with ironic satisfaction my news that a noted sociologist of our acquaintance was now publicly proclaiming the importance of values to the social sciences, a position Becker had throughout his life advocated to his own peril...

...Man's plight is no less severe than woman's...

...BOOKS l i FACING UP TO THE INESCAPABLE VICTOR FERK|$S The Denial o f Death ERNEST BECKER Free Press, $7.95 Death, the anthropologist Geoffrey Corer once remarked, is the new obscenity, the reality which we cannot face just as our Victorian ancestors could not face the fact of sex, the unclean thing which we hide in our closets and make the subject of our dirty jokes and our pornography...