Sigmund Freud's Pride According to Ernest Becker
In speaking of Sigmund Freud in The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker (pg. 257) connects pride with the causa-sui project:
"I haven't even mentioned Rank's powerful views on Freud's limitations. In Rank's system of thought the most generous judgment that might probably be made about Freud's limitations was that he shared the human weakness of the neurotic: he lacked the capacity for illusion, for a creative myth about the possibilities of creation. He saw things too "realistically," without their aura of miracle and infinite possibility. The only illusion he allowed himself was that of his own science--and such a source is bound to be a shaky support because it comes from one's own energies and not from a powerful beyond. This is the problem of the artist generally: that he creates his own new meanings and must, in turn, be sustained by them. The dialogue is too inverted to be secure. And hence Freud's lifelong ambivalence about the value of posterity and fame, the security of the whole panorama of evolution. We touched on all these questions in our comparison of Freud and Kierkegaard, and now we are back to it. One can only talk about an ideal human character from a perspective of absolute transcendence. Kierkegaard would say that Freud still had pride, that he lacked the creature consciousness of the truly analyzed man, that he had not fully served his apprenticeship in the school of anxiety. In Kierkegaard's understanding of man, the causa-sui project is the Oedipus complex, and in order to be a man one has to abandon it completely. From this point of view Freud still had not analyzed away his Oedipus complex, no matter how much he and the early psychoanalysts prided themselves that they had. He could not yield emotionally to superordinate power or conceptually to the transcendental dimension. He lived still wholly in the dimension of the visible world and was limited by what was possible in that dimension only; therefore, all his meanings had to come from that dimension."
Ernest Becker (1975). The Denial of Death. New York: Free Press.
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