The strength of Rank’s work, which enabled him to draw such an unfailing psychological portrait of man in the round, was that he connected psychoanal… - Ernest Becker

It doesn’t matter whether the cultural hero-system is frankly magical, religious, and primitive or secular, scientific, and civilized. It is still a mythical herosystem in which people serve in order to earn a feeling of primary value, of cosmic specialness, of ultimate usefulness to creation, of unshakable meaning. They earn this feeling by carving out a place in nature, by building an edifice that reflects human value: a temple, a cathedral, a totem pole, a sky-scraper, a family that spans three generations. The hope and belief is that the things that man creates in society are of lasting worth and meaning, that they outlive or outshine death and decay, that man and his products count. When Norman O. Brown said that Western society since Newton, no matter how scientific or secular it claims to be, is still as “religious” as any other, this is what he meant: “civilized” society is a hopeful belief and protest that science, money and goods make man count for more than any other animal. In this sense everything that man does is religious and heroic, and yet in danger of being fictitious and fallible.

Freud was right to see the centrality of the image of the phallic mother and to connect it directly with the castration complex. But he was wrong to make the sexual side of the problem the central core of it, to take what is derivative (the sexual) and make it primary (the existential dilemma). The wish for the phallic mother, the horror of the female genitals, may well be a universal experience of mankind, for girls as well as boys. But the reason is that the child wants to see the omnipotent mother, the miraculous source of all his protection, nourishment, and love, as a really godlike creature complete beyond the accident of a split into two sexes. The threat of the castrated mother is thus a threat to his whole existence in that his mother is an animal thing and not a transcendent angel. The fate that he then fears, that turns him away from the mother in horror, is that he too is a “fallen” bodily creature, the very thing that he fights to overcome by his anal training. The horror of the female genitals, then, is the shock of the tiny child who is all at once—before the age of six—suddenly turned into a philosopher, a tragedian who must be a man long before his time and who must draw on reserves of wisdom and strength that he doesn’t have. Again, this is the burden of the “primal scene”: not that it awakens unbearable sexual desires in the child or aggressive hate and jealousy toward the father, but rather that it thoroughly confuses him about the nature of man.

When we are young we are often puzzled by the fact that each person we admire seems to have a different version of what life ought to be, what a good man is, how to live, and so on. If we are especially sensitive it seems more than puzzling, it is disheartening. What most people usually do is to follow one person's ideas and then another's, depending on who looms largest on one's horizon at the time. The one with the deepest voice, the strongest appearance, the most authority and success, is usually the one who gets our momentary allegiance; and we try to pattern our ideals after him. But as life goes on we get a perspective on this, and all these different versions of truth become a little pathetic. Each person thinks that he has the formula for triumphing over life's limitations and knows with authority what it means to be a man, and he usually tries to win a following for his particular patent. Today we know that people try so hard to win converts for their point of view because it is more than merely an outlook on life: it is an immortality formula.