Note to my readers: though old age is plenty traumatic, I’m broadening the focus of this blog to sometimes include aspects of trauma less directly associated with the theory of trauma, more with its experience, including my own.
Suddenly I’m Old and Death Approaches
I’m seventy-nine years old, soon to be 80. Old age has snuck up on me, though it should have been no surprise. I live in what used to be called an old age home, though hardly anyone calls it that. I have my own apartment, am served one meal a day, and have discovered love in late life. As I become frailer or begin to lose my mind (an almost universal progression among the old, unless they just drop dead), I will move or be moved first to assisted living, then to a nursing home unit, or to “memory care.” All under one roof, all for one rather large fee. For now, I live a normal life, am in reasonably good health for my age, take vacations, and continue with my academic work, albeit on a more modest scale. I will likely write no more books.
My environment is one of concentrated morbidity and mortality. It’s called a continuing care retirement community (CCRC). It’s small, almost 200 people, and just about every week someone who I know dies, has a serious fall, a stroke, or shows signs of rapid onset dementia. Parkinson’s is a plague, especially among men. In other words, I live amidst death and dying.
Almost everyone says they are not afraid of death. All are afraid of a protracted period of dying, and the pain, fear, and indignity that go with it.
———–
Among those who have thought seriously about getting old, Erik Erikson is well known for having developed the eight stages of psychosocial growth. Focusing not just on psychosexual development in early childhood, as Freud did, Erikson extended development throughout the life cycle, from infancy to old age. Erikson argues that if one has successfully navigated the previous stages, the death that faces us all can be accepted rather than feared.
A less well-known, but hardly obscure author is Ernest Becker, who wrote Denial of Death, for which he posthumously won the Pulitzer Prize. Becker too began with Freud, transforming the young boy’s fear of castration into a more general fear of death. Fear of death is the basis of civilization, which deals with death terror by means of the vital lie— almost any activity that helps us deny our mortality, and the meaninglessness of life that it imposes on us. Sometimes Becker sounds like Ecclesiastes. All is vanity.
Placed beside Becker, Erikson’s acceptance of death is just one more lie. Or would be if Becker had not elaborated in an interview given in hospital shortly before his death. Here Becker goes beyond the “immortality-ideologies” he refers to in Denial (p 354), referring instead to the true aim of transcendence, which he now all but calls God. In my opinion, a version of the vital lie that seeks transcendence in God can no longer be called a lie. It may not be objectively true (whatever that would mean), but it is not merely an ideological defense against death. It is what most people call belief. What’s the difference? We shall see?
I draw on these two authors not to compare and contrast them for intellectual purposes, though that is my training, but to help make sense of my experience living among the old as I face my own death. Not now, but soon.
Erik Erikson
Erikson argued that Freud’s stages of psychosexual development were but an early stage in the lifelong task of social development, which he understood in terms of eight stages of individual maturation, each marked by a decisive conflict. The last stage, to which his wife Joan added an addendum, is integrity versus despair. /1/ Erikson idealizes what it means to face an imminent death. Ernst Becker comes closer to the mark regarding the sheer terror of death. When people aren’t talking about something it’s often a sign that it’s important. Fellow residents where I live talk about fear of a painful, drawn-out dying. Never about fear of death itself. Perhaps death, or non-being, is unimaginable, as Freud argued, but I don’t think that’s the whole story. /2/ In any case, unimaginable doesn’t mean unspeakable. Unimaginable is a cliché for something so awful that I don’t want to even think about it.
A lot depends on where one starts. Erikson starts with the assumption that human life unfolds through a series of eight stages. One stage must be met before the next can be begun, yet within him or herself everyone contains the crux of every stage. Even if the task of a particular stage is unfulfilled, such as the failure of the adolescent to form a secure individual identity, the failure is rarely complete. The result will complicate, but not prevent the emergence of the next stage, so strong is the internal developmental pressure, the crux Erikson refers to as epigenetic.
The stages are familiar to many. They run from infancy through childhood, adolescence, adulthood, to old age. In his last years, Erikson, with the help of his wife Joan, added a ninth stage, late old age, in which frailty and dependence on others must once again be confronted, a second childhood.
Becker’s revision of Freud
Both Erikson and Becker are deeply influenced by Freud, but Becker focuses on another aspect of Freud. Rather than extending the stages of development throughout the lifespan as Erikson does, Becker focuses on the fear of death, which begins with Freud’s Oedipus conflict, and makes us dependent on father figures throughout life, men (and women) who can save us from the terror of death. This terror makes cowards of us all; for we are willing to do almost anything to escape this terror, from following insane leaders to abandoning ourselves to the group. In other words, Freud’s fear of castration becomes for Becker but a moment in the larger fear of death, which we solve by much the same principle as the little boy: by identifying with powerful figures, which may include the group.
The task of old age
The task in old age, says Erikson, is to review one’s life. The goal is integrity; the risk is despair. Can the old person look back on his or her life and hold that it’s been worthwhile? Perhaps the best way to get a sense of this, I’ve found, is to listen to people tell the story of their lives. Where I live this is often at dinner at tables for four, generally two couples who eat together regularly.
I’m generally not sure what I’m hearing from my fellow residents, as we are called. Cruises and exotic vacations are probably the leading topic. There is less talk about children and grandchildren than one might suppose, and of course there is lots of gossip and self-reporting about health problems. Though about a quarter of residents have Ph.D.s (my old age home is surrounded by colleges and universities), and there are a number of MDs, there is little discussion of work life. Nor is there much shared reflection on the intangible but crucial events in life, like love lost, or children gone astray.
Most of us are what one resident referred to as “situational friends.” We share a residence, as well as similar backgrounds, but lack the foundation of genuine friendship: time and the experience of having navigated at least one earlier life stage together. Five of my outside friends go back forty to fifty years, and most of us were married (at least for the first time) and had children around the same time. In my CCRC we are acutely aware that death, dementia, or extreme fragility will likely bring an end to friendship within a few years. There are exceptions. Friendships of ten years or more are uncommon, but exist and intense friendships may develop over a year or two. Overall, however, familiarity with death limits investment in relationships among the old, and with it people with whom to share the narrative of one’s life. It may go deeper. Many may have never put their life story together in the first place. One does so by practice, and the absence of people who might listen delimits practice.
Erikson on integral life
Erikson says that an integral life must have unfolded as it did. Ego integrity defeats despair only when one recognizes that one lived the only life it was possible for one to live. /3/
Erikson’s is a dramatic way of saying what he has been saying since Childhood and Society (1950), his first major book. Ending one’s life in a state of integrity rather than despair means accepting that there will be no more chances to get it right, and that one came close enough to how one would have lived one’s life in an ideal world. Fear of death stems from having failed to live a full life. Such persons lacked the heroism that engagement in even ordinary everyday life, requires.
For individual life is the coincidence of but one life cycle with but one segment of history; and all human integrity stands or falls with the one style of integrity of which one partakes. (Life Cycle Completed, p 66)
Integrity is the courage to meet the challenge of each stage of life. The tragedy of late life is that if one did not act courageously throughout one’s life, it really is too late.
Generally, Erikson talks about integrity as generativity: the achievement of intimacy, raising children, and participating in the cultural world through friendship and social relations generally. Book groups are a particularly popular activity where I live, but almost exclusively among women. Late life is particularly poignant, since integrity is the summation of the successful transit of all the preceding stages.
Wisdom
If one has lived with integrity, then one may face death with the attitude of Socrates, the attitude of wisdom, “a detached concern with life itself in the face of death.” /4/ With integrity men and women may face death without fear. An old man or woman will see him or herself as part of the cycle of life. The culture and traditions one shared continue, and one can accept that one’s purpose in being (that is, of having lived) has been fulfilled.
Becker: it’s not so easy
When it was published in 1973, Ernest Becker’s Denial of Death was a read by the general public as well as psychologists. Becker won the Pulitzer Prize posthumously for it, and he seemed to have hit upon a simple and universal explanation for human behavior. But Becker’s influence has not lasted as Erikson’s has. One wants to say that this itself is proof of his thesis: the denial of death by each of us organizes the culture. In this case the culture “forgot” Becker as it helps each of us forget that we are going to die.
Becker argues that from the moment we recognize that we are going to die as individuals, we organize, with the cooperation of culture, to deny this fact. For death spoils everything. “Why was I born if it wasn’t forever?” asks a character in a play by Ionesco. /5/
Becker puts it this way.
The fear of death is natural and is present in everyone, that it is the basic fear that influences all others, a fear from which no one is immune, no matter how disguised it may be. William James spoke very early for this school, and with his usual colorful realism he called death “the worm at the core” of man’s pretensions to happiness.” /6/
Like Erikson, Becker is deeply influenced by Freud. Like Erikson, he reinterprets Freud. The Oedipal conflict, which is resolved by identification with the powerful, castrating father figure, is transformed by Becker into an identification with the power to defeat death. A person, institution, or even the group to which one belongs may become this power. What in Freud was castration anxiety becomes death anxiety in Becker.
Remember we said the transference did not prove “eroticism,’ as Freud earlier thought, but actually a certain ‘truthfulness’’ about the terror of man’s condition. (Denial, p 196)
There is no solution. Unlike Erikson, who imagines a succession of developmental stages leading to integration and acceptance of death, Becker holds that not only old age, but all of life, is rendered unsatisfactory by the doom that hangs over us. What can one say to someone who recognizes that he or she is doomed to die an essentially meaningless death.
Full humanness means full fear and trembling, at least some of the waking day. When you get a person to emerge into life, away from his dependencies, his automatic safety in the cloak of someone else’s power, what joy can you promise him with the burden of his aloneness? When you get a person to look at the sun as it bakes down on the daily carnage taking place on earth, the ridiculous accidents, the utter fragility of life, the powerlessness of those he thought most powerful—what comfort can you give him from a psychotherapeutic point of view? (Denial, p 95)
His answer is character as a protective armor, and heroic projects that are bound to fail, but nonetheless may be of some value.
Becker follows Otto Rank, arguing that character is artifice, an apparently stable but contrived self, able to contain one’s impulses and fears, at least to some degree. In fact, the self is vulnerable not only to the caprice of reality but must close itself off to much of its own experience of life in order not to open itself to death. The denial of death is emotionally expensive. The cost is vitality in living.
But if character is a lie, it’s a vital lie. Without its illusion, we would go insane. Character traits are secret psychoses. Without them we would be exposed to overwhelming fear, irresistible impulse, and a world seen as it truly is, “red in tooth and claw.” /7/
The other defense against the fear of death is the transference. Among adults, transference refers to worship of a heroic leader, or subjection of oneself to the values of the masses. Anything so as not to face the vast, meaningless universe alone. Becker, it is apparent, is not just talking about knowledge of the fact that everyone must die. He is taking a view much closer to that of Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus and elsewhere. We long for the world to answer our cry, to show in some way that we belong here. And the world is at best silent, at worst hostile. Camus’ The Plague captures this world, one not made for the human being, and hostile to his happiness..
Most heroism is false, either the worship of heroes (idols), or the killing of others, as though murder, including mass murder, would grant us mastery over death. Consider the Nazi SS, dressed in perfectly polished boots, fitted uniforms, with the death’s head on the right collar, striding among the starving skeletons of Auschwitz. Might that not have seemed a triumph over death for an intoxicated moment?
But of course, there is no triumph over death. And perhaps it is not simply death that is the enemy, but the meaninglessness of life that death reveals. As Becker puts it, “society itself is a codified hero system, which means that society everywhere is a living myth of the significance of human life.”
Attachment theory is a better explanation
Becker writes as if psychoanalysis remains the province of Freudians, even if he enlarges the transference to include those who might protect us from death. But by the time Becker wrote Denial of Death (early 1970s), the centrality of human attachment had been accepted by the majority of practicing analysts. John Bowlby’s attachment theory (1907-1990) was already well established. D. W. Winnicott (1896-1971), whose reputation continues to grow, argued that insecure attachment to mother was psychic death. Ronald Fairbairn (1889-1964), whose career was almost over by the time Becker wrote, stated that desire is but a signpost to the object. It is human relatedness and connection that we want. Harry Guntrip (1901-1975) elaborated.
Seen from this perspective, fear of death is a fear of the loss of all attachment. It is the terror first experienced by the infant when mother is absent for longer than he can hold himself together. Perhaps it even includes loss of attachment to oneself; in death one is absent from one’s own being. If so, then the psychological solution to the terror of death is not found in projective identification with the powerful father as hero-figure, but with the promotion of a culture of attachment, from family to large group. Camus’ The Plague, in which many citizens of Oran come together to fight the plague the best they can is the ideal. As the narrator, Dr. Rieux, a genuine hero, puts it.
Following the dictates of his heart, he has deliberately taken the victims’ side and tried to share with his fellow citizens the only certitudes they had in common—love, exile, and suffering. Thus, he can truly say there was not one of their anxieties in which he did not share, no predicament of theirs that was not his. /8/
Becker’s death bed interview: creatures of attachment to each other and God
Becker died of colon cancer at the age of 49 in 1974. He wrote Denial while he was dying. In a death bed interview in hospital, famous among Beckerati, he reflected on his work.
As far as my work is concerned, I think the major thrust of my work is to go frankly in the direction of the merger of science and religious perspectives. I want to show if . . . man held up a mirror to himself of his condition on earth, what it meant to be a man, this would coincide exactly with religious understanding of human nature./9/
Like Camus, he sees his work as focusing on building community in a world in which man is an exile. I see my work now, says Becker, largely as an extension of the work of Max Horkheimer and the Frankfurt School.
Man is a willful creature as Horkheimer says, abandoned on the planet. There is a beautiful phrase there in which he calls for mankind to form itself into communities of the abandoned. Which to me is a very beautiful idea and one that I wanted to develop. (Keen interview)
Seeing the world in this way gives us an opportunity to see the connection between Becker’s focus on man’s creatureliness, and attachment theory: we are creatures of attachment. The fundamental fact of creatureliness isn’t death but the need for human relations and attachment. Which is what Horkheimer is saying. It is a very difficult idea because man needs to be a hero, and the hero is closer in popular imagination to John Wayne than the social worker.
Which is why it is refreshing to see Becker referring to the idea of the everyday hero.
So that making a beautiful cabinet can be heroic. I mean one can say, “I’m a first-class cabinet maker. I introduced beauty into the world in this form.” Or for the average man, I think being a provider is heroic enough. This whole idea they make fun of in stories and plays where the old folks are saying, “Well, I’ve always provided for you. I’ve always fed you.” Well, that’s his heroics, isn’t it? That in the face of everything, he’s fed his family and pulled them through the hard times. Very fine. The heroism of everyday life of everyday man, just being a provider. (Keen interview)
But the heroism of everyday life is not enough. In the end, Becker turns to God. Not the Judeo-Christian God, but a transcendental referent called God. For if Becker chooses religion, then he chooses God. While he may have an odd God in mind, he also has no objection to conventional ways of thinking about the meaning of life. I assume this includes conventional religion.
I think this is the most exalted type of heroism. Being the hero for the creative powers of the universe. Feeling that one has lived to some purpose that transcends one. And this is the highest meaning of heroism for the individual. Which is why religion gives this individual the validation that nothing else gives him. (Keen interview)
Conclusion
Erikson’s life review, the task of stage 8, isn’t going to be very helpful if one proceeds with Becker’s honesty. If undertaken in good faith, stage 8 is going to lead to Becker’s conclusion: a meaningful life narrative is but one more immortality project. Unless, that is, one can connect it to the truly transcendent, what Becker all but calls God. Erikson’s secular or ethical humanism actually limits the scope of his project. Erikson’s highest stage of development is humane. But the relentlessly human may not be enough. Becker, who only seems to offer less hope, actually offers more.
In his last years, Erikson and particularly his wife Joan, posited a ninth psychosocial stage, late-old age, roughly the years beginning in one’s 80’s. In the ninth stage, the integrity of the self becomes more difficult to isolate and defend against the fragility of its body. The achievements of earlier stages are endangered. From the basic trust of the first stage to autonomy and identity of later stages, none are immune to the frailty and dependence of the body. Developmental time can run backwards as well as forwards. The integration and wisdom of old age are themselves endangered by the frailty of the body-self.
Joan Erikson writes that Erik always presented the ego syntonic pole first, from trust versus mistrust, or autonomy versus shame and guilt. In the ninth stage the order is reversed, indicating that it really is too late even to struggle with integrity vs. despair.
As Erik has reminded us, “Despair expresses the feeling that the time is now short, too short for the attempt to start another life and to try out alternate roads.”. . . One’s focus may become thoroughly circumscribed by concerns of daily functioning so that it is enough just to get through a day intact, however satisfied or dissatisfied one feels about one’s previous life history. /10/
What if the ninth stage is really the eighth stage? The body mind knows what the end of the story is all along, even as it only becomes acutely aware in the last stage. Even a successful life story, the mark of integrity, is an immortality project, a vital lie, unless connected to the work of community and the heroism that culminates in the transcendent.
Becker, it turns out, is a religious thinker. I say religious not only because he uses the term, but also because the term “spiritual” or some such would be inadequate. Religion involves others, as Becker would, connecting transcendence with community.
In my old age home, more than a few people in their 80’s and 90’s still bring enormous energy to a life shared with others. They have generally been among the privileged in almost every aspect of life, and so better cared for medically and better educated than average. Many still bring enormous energy to life with others. There are also a large number who are too worn out in body or soul. We may worship the transcendent, but we live as exiles, and that takes its toll on some more than others.
Endnotes
1. Erik Erikson, Childhood and Society. Norton, 1950. Erik Erikson and Joan Erikson, Life Cycle Completed, extended version with new chapters on the ninth stage of development, by Joan Erikson. Norton, 1985.
2. Sigmund Freud makes this claim most clearly in “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death, Standard Edition, vol. 14 (1915). “It is indeed impossible to imagine our own death . . . whenever we attempt to do so we can perceive that we are in fact still present as spectators.”
3. Erikson, The Life Cycle Completed, p 66.
4. Erikson, Insight and Responsibility. Norton, 1964, p 133.
5. Eugene Ionesco, “Exit the King.” Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 2015, p 35.
6. Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death. Free Press/Simon & Schuster, 1973, p 44. There is a marvelous audio with Becker on his death bed, conducted by Sam Keen. It can be heard at: The Denial of Death: Listen to Ernest Becker’s Final Interview – TalkDeath. There is also a video of the same interview. The book will be cited in the text as Denial.
7. Denial, p 14, Sam Keen’s introduction.
8. Albert Camus, The Plague. Vintage Books, 1972, pp 280-281.
9. “A Conversation with Ernest Becker.” Psychology Today, April, 1974, pp 71-80. The interview was conducted by Sam Keen, and will be cited in the text as “Keen interview.” It is the partial text of the interview cited in endnote 6.
10. Internal Erik Erikson quote from Childhood and Society, p 269.
