No wonder that historically art and psychosis have had such an intimate relationship, that the road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and… - Ernest Becker

The argument from biology and evolution is basic and has to be taken seriously; I don’t see how it can be left out of any discussion. Animals in order to survive have had to be protected by fear-responses, in relation not only to other animals but to nature itself. They had to see the real relationship of their limited powers to the dangerous world in which they were immersed. Reality and fear go together naturally. As the human infant is in an even more exposed and helpless situation, it is foolish to assume that the fear response of animals would have disappeared in such a weak and highly sensitive species. It is more reasonable to think that it was instead heightened, as some of the early Darwinians thought: early men who were most afraid were those who were most realistic about their situation in nature, and they passed on to their offspring a realism that had a high survival value. The result was the emergence of man as we know him: a hyperanxious animal who constantly invents reasons for anxiety even where there are none.

Once we realize what the religious solution did, we can see how modern man edged himself into an impossible situation. He still needed to feel heroic, to know that his life mattered in the scheme of things; he still had to be specially “good” for something truly special. Also, he still had to merge himself with some higher, self-absorbing meaning, in trust and in gratitude—what we saw as the universal motive of the Agape-merger. If he no longer had God, how was he to do this? One of the first ways that occurred to him, as Rank saw, was the “romantic solution”: he fixed his urge to cosmic heroism onto another person in the form of a love object. The self-glorification that he needed in his innermost nature he now looked for in the love partner. The love partner becomes the divine ideal within which to fulfill one’s life. All spiritual and moral needs now become focussed in one individual. Spirituality, which once referred to another dimension of things, is now brought down to this earth and given form in another individual human being. Salvation itself is no longer referred to an abstraction like God but can be sought “in the beatification of the other.” We could call this “transference beatification.” Man now lives in a “cosmology of two.” To be sure, all through history there has been some competition between human objects of love and divine ones—we think of Héloïse and Abelard, Alcibiades and Socrates, or even the Song of Solomon. But the main difference is that in traditional society the human partner would not absorb into himself the whole dimension of the divine; in modern society he does. In case we are inclined to forget how deified the romantic love object is, the popular songs continually remind us. They tell us that the lover is the “springtime,” the “angel-glow,” with eyes “like stars,” that the experience of love will be “divine,” “like heaven” itself, and so on and on; popular love songs have surely had this content from ancient times and will likely continue to have it as long as man remains a mammal and a cousin of the primates. These songs reflect the hunger for real experience, a serious emotional yearning on the part of the creature. The point is that if the love object is divine perfection, then one’s own self is elevated by joining one’s destiny to it. One has the highest measure for one’s ideal-striving; all of one’s inner conflicts and contradictions, the many aspects of guilt —all these one can try to purge in a perfect consummation with perfection itself. This becomes a true “moral vindication in the other.” Modern man fulfills his urge to self-expansion in the love object just as it was once fulfilled in God: “God as … representation of our own will does not resist us except when we ourselves want it, and just as little does the lover resist us who, in yielding, subjects himself to our will.” In one word, the love object is God. As a Hindu song puts it: “My lover is like God; if he accepts me my existence is utilized.” No wonder Rank could conclude that the love relationship of modern man is a religious problem.

We saw that there really was no way to overcome the real dilemma of existence, the one of the mortal animal who at the same time is conscious of his mortality. A person spends years coming into his own, developing his talent, his unique gifts, perfecting his discriminations about the world, broadening and sharpening his appetite, learning to bear the disappointments of life, becoming mature, seasoned—finally a unique creature in nature, standing with some dignity and nobility and transcending the animal condition; no longer driven, no longer a complete reflex, not stamped out of any mold. And then the real tragedy, as André Malraux wrote in The Human Condition: that it takes sixty years of incredible suffering and effort to make such an individual, and then he is good only for dying. This painful paradox is not lost on the person himself—least of all himself. He feels agonizingly unique, and yet he knows that this doesn’t make any difference as far as ultimates are concerned. He has to go the way of the grasshopper, even though it takes longer.