Book Note [[Books Index]] # Book - The Birth and Death of Meaning An Interdisciplinary perspective on the problem of man - 2nd Ed [[Ernest Becker]] **Book notes from "The Birth and Death of Meaning. Ernest Becker.**  --- ## Chapter 1. The Man-apes. The lesson for Thomas Hobbes - Discovery of man-apes, dug up in 1924. Question about origin of modern man.  - Animal takes. Marshall Sahlins pointed out "you get your recognition from others not on what you take - like the baboons, but on what you give." ## Chapter 2: The Origins of the Mind. The Mechanics of the Miraculous - Evolution. Man's brain got stimulated and developed. - Development of the mind, allow man to distant from immediate, nature reactivity:  - Direct reflex - organism responds to the things in the surrounding.  - Conditioned relex- - Association - Relationships between two things in his visual field, and decides to act on it himself.  - Highest level - reactivity-meaning; symbolic behavior - man invented language, using words to symbolizes things and respond to them.  - Natural selection. Evolution process. How human's young longest period of infantilization. - allowed more time to pass on of experiences/learning.   - Mixed generation, different individuals of different sex, stages in the sexual cycles, and living in group continue to stimulate brain development to recognize social cues.  Re-reading this on [[27-04-2024]] ^0e92c9 - Humans come from the mammalian line of evolution. The long infantilization period allows their brain to develop for an extended period. Living in a social group, humans are motivated to survive, which leads them to learn to work together and develop social codes and rules. To remain in the group, humans have to be sensitive to each other's gestures and emotions, which requires them to have a sense of self-awareness and awareness of others. - Furthermore, humans have different interactions at different stages of life due to the absence of a distinct mating period. These complex social interactions stimulate the brain to develop in a complex way. Humans use symbolism to organize their social groups, rather than depending on strength or energy. This includes creating "roles" and "status" that inform each individual's function and place in the social group. Coming of age means understanding one's position in the context of society. - In that aspect, I wonder about today's society problem; psychological problem arises because we do not know what's our role/status/function in today's world. [[Purpose and Meaning in Life]] [[Existential]] [[Depression has multiple causes]] - ![[Book - Love and Will#^de9dd0]] - Unlike baboons, who rely solely on food, humans nourish themselves mostly on self-esteem. This sounds a bit like "man does not live on bread alone but on every word from God." - Lower level organisms have direct reflexes, while higher organisms have conditional reflexes, like Pavlov's dogs. The highest organisms exhibit symbolic behaviour, which means they can choose to react based on the meaning of the symbols they attribute. ^06f0fd - There is a beautiful quote that says, "Nature provided all of life with water, but only humans could create the symbol of H2O, which gave them command over water, and the word 'holy,' which gave water special powers that even nature could not give." (page 7) This quote highlights the power of human beings to attribute meaning to symbols and how it has enabled us to interact with the world in a unique way. ## Chapter 3: The Distinctively Human. The ego, language and the self.* - Animal live in the moment. React instantly to their environment. Unable to know time. React to their reflexes.  - They are all "ID/It". Pictures, sensory, emotions.  - Cerebral cortex of man gave man the ability to decide - mediate.  - The origin of langauge. Possibly as a result of hunters to coordinate effort.  - Role of language is very significant to human.  - At some point, symbolic world - a sound, symbols means something. "I" .. "You" - Allow seperation of self "Not me"  - Self of self - Ego, - the process of central control of behavior. There was no shape in the begining.. until man formed "I". Self-awareness. Self-reflexivity.  - What is MAN? In the context of socialising, in society, a child form his identity, through learning the symbols of the world.  ## Chapter 4: The inner world. Introduction to the birth of tragedy. - The dualism of experience . objects have both an inside and an outside. We are split in two. Self and body.  - Child learns quickly to cultivate his private self because it puts a barrier between him and the demands of the world. A child think adults know his inner world. - First lie. The moment a child realised there is a secret place within. Free from prying eyes.  - Pro and Cons between this inner and outer dualism - loneliness. Shallowness if only connected by the shallow exterior.  - The inner world, SELF, is protean. Sense of self.  - If not develop, people extend outward to use exterior objects to give sense of shape (materialism) - Attach SELF to inaminate objects. and feel wounded when object damage.  - Searching for mirror to reflect to us our sense of self.  ## Chapter 5: Socialization: The creation of the inner world. - A child depend on his carer (mother) not only for nurtrition and survival but also for discovery of himself. The symbols he learns, his perception of the world. In the begining there are ONE.  - Process of socialization seperate child from mother, to function on his own. He has to be able to "handle himself" - To survive, the child must form his ego, and it is only possible through succession of frustrations. Frustrated by having to conform to social expectations now, learning to eat, to poop... He learn to behave in certain way to "earn" the mother's love. It's a bind, he cannot survive on his own.. so he accepts frustration - Ambivalence. - There is anxiety... so he adjust.  - Socialization means forming human beings out of helpless, dependent animal matter.  - Role of Anxiety in child development? [[Anxiety]] ^e29c03 - Kurt Goldstein, the ability to withstand anxiety is heroic.  - Many theories of anxiety. A child must adapt by controlling conduct and situation to not face anxiety.  - Man ability to not react to anxiety key to development.  Related to [[Book - Rollo May - The Meaning of Anxiety]] - Freud, defense mechanism of Ego function to reduce anxiety - "This is not me" ^8c68f9 - Freud discovered the university of human experience. Because of socialization, The child transiting from Self-body to self-other dualism.  - Child gave up the natural for an artificial symbolic world. Gave up the body.  - The child has only his body as the coin for transaction. Everything is about the body. Until he learnt the symbols of adults.  - Not SEXUAL to the child (it is only interpreted as sex from adult perspective) To the child, it's almost genderless. (Inner and outside world... Why am i given this body?) - Fixation of the stages reflect how his family environment undermined this process, by underming his self-worth. He prematurely gave up the body..  - "The child we call autistic or schizophrenic, is the one who has not been able to feel this secure sense of support to his body; and so he does not make a confident transition from the biological to the social world. The "lever" of love and support that provides the basis for humanization has not been well used, and the child simply may not feel that the game is worth the candle." ## Chapter 6: The new meaning of the Oedipus Complex.  The dispossession of the inner world. - Freud was flexible and allow broader interpretation of the Oedipus complex. - What was durable in Freud? [[Anxiety]] - Anxiety - Ego function to reduce anxiety as defense mechanism  - But the price to reduce anxiety is also the restriction of experience, ego skew perceptions and limiting action.  ^d767eb Exactly what Rollo May was writing about in [[Book - Rollo May - The Meaning of Anxiety]] - The whole of psychoanalytic theory can be summed up: "You no longer have to punish me, father, i will punish myself now.". In another word "You can approve of me as you see how well i do as you would wish me to." "I am a social person because I am no longer mine, because i am yours." - There is universiality of this human slavery and blindness that we call Neurosis.  - Freud did not discover conscious but discovered how the implantation of consciouness works.  - Motives of behavior varies, conscious is self-created in the effort to reduce anxiety - something like internalised?  - Process of socialization is fundamentally, blocking the child's natural urge to move freely forward.  - Sometimes do it for the child safety, and mastery - Much of the time is due to parents' fears - and anxiety - As a result, child gave up part of his natural urge to identify with his parents, because he need them. Caught in the ambivalence. This is process of frustrated action blockage, anxiety arises... and defense mechanism happen to defense against self dishonesty.  -- That's neurosis. No need to have trauma - From the perspective of Power relation. Child no power to resist. And adult can take away the power through benign matters "for your own good"  - "Avoidance of external conflicts (with the parents) creates internal conflicts (the neurotic de-centering, fragmentation, and cluttering up of the self with alien images.). - Double bind! by Ronald Laing. No other way out.  - Avoidance of external conflicts - can be applied to family rules, rituals, systemic framework. To compliant with external expectatons, child's bodily energy is suppressed under those "symbols and forms" - e.g the family should be quiet, no expression of emotions." - On the other way. If there is too much of allowing child to expand energy. No Limit or boundaries. The child unable to develop his "ego" or him self as individual. Too dependent on external things to support him. His movement is not within his control. e.g Emotional regulation? **Chapter 7: Self Esteem. The Dominant motive of man.**  - Since the child, through process of socialization, learnt that he can no longer earn parental approval by continue to express himself with body. He learnt the symbolic ways of adults. By conducting himself by those standards. Now his self-value depends on the internalised social rules. "I am good", "I am valued" "I am a human". Much effort and time devoted to protection, maintenance and aggrandizement of the symbolic edifice of self-esteem.  - By earning good grades.. a job. owning stuff.  - We are all peacock, just not so openly.  - Humanization process is one in which we exchange a natural, animal sense of our basic worth, for a contrived symbolic one.  - We become a symbol. - Life Style - is how we seek and earn self-esteem.  - But we dont really know, our sense of right and wrong, way of perceiving the world, feelings for it, for who we are are not "mental". We earn our early self-esteem not actively but in large part passively, by having our action blocked and re-oriented to the parents' pleasure.  - We are a collage of odd shapes . Thats why self-analysis is ongoing.  **Chapter 13: Religion: The quest for the ideal heroism**  - Page 191 - “From a personal point of view the problem of life is how to grow out of fetishism, of idol worship, and continually broaden and expand one’s horizons, allegiances, and quality of his preoccupations. This means that the person’s main task is to put his self-esteem as firmly as possible under his own control; he has to try to get individual and durable ways to earn self-esteem. It means, too, that he has to free himself from a slavery to things that are close at hand; he has to become less a reflex of his immediate social world. … He has to clear up the material in the _pseudopods_ of his selfs, put his contents under his firm control. That is why the first task of psychotherapy is to free the person from other people’s opinion; he learns not to be crushed because someone says his tie doesn’t match, or he has ugly ear lobes, body odour, or is not a good mixer. This is why therapists often put such a low valuation on the mind, on thought processes: the mind is the social self, the ays we have learned of attuning our self-esteem to the expectations of valuations of others; the mind automatically channels our self-esteem into society’s roles. Thought processes are mostly rationalisations that we use in order to keep our self-esteem in balance, they are the feverish direction of the _metteur-en-scene (like film director)_ of our inner newsreel. The person has to learn to derive his self-esteem more from within himself and less from the opinions of others; he has to try to base it on real qualities and capacities, things he can make or do, as Goethe argued, and not on the mere appearances that others like to judge by. He has to try to get as many ways of earning self-esteem as possible, to constantly broaden his skills, the things he genuinely takes pleasure in, in place of what others think he should take pleasure in. The value of deriving one’s power and meaning from the highest level of generality (referring the the four levels of meaning and power that an individual can “choose" to live by) is that it makes this task for the self-esteem easier: one can feel that he has ultimate value deep down  inside just by serving in the cosmic hero-system: he has a sense of duty to the very powers of creation and not principally or only to the social world. Ideally this would give him the liberation of the saint, who couldn’t care less of the jeerings and opinions of the mob, or even of his nearest loved ones.  - Remember the dignity of Kant’s pietistic parents: how little they chafed at the frustrations of this world. Since aggression is a reaction to frustration, by remaining tightly bound to the successes of our social world we increase our aggressiveness, life inevitably frustrates us. As Scheler knew, the great increase in bitterness and frustration in the modern world is largely due to the eclipse of the scared dimension, to the expectation that all satisfaction has to happen here, and now. From an ideal point of view, too, to root one’s life in the supreme power banishes fear and weakness: what is there really to be afraid of in only one, passing dimension of the myriad miracles of creation? And to draw’s one’s power from the source of creation itself can’t fail to give one more self-reliance in the world of men: one no longer needs to live in the power of others, or mere mortals, of acquaintances, friends, even parents and head of state. By leaning on his power the person can get his own footing; he can begin to search his own mind and soul for decisions, choices, judgements; he no longer has to lean reflexively on the directives of the world of men. This is why authentic religion has always been a threat to demagogues and bureaucrats.” Page 193.  -