Ernest Becker

… for the time being I gave up writing—there is
already too much truth in the world—an over-
production which apparently cannot be consumed!

what we call a creative gift is merely the social license to be obsessed.

daily madness of these jobs is a repeated vaccination against the madness of the asylum.

reason is precisely the advance of specialization, the impossibility of making safe general statements, which has led to a general imbecility.

depressed person exaggerates his guilt because it unblocks his dilemma in the safest and easiest way.8 He also, as Adler pointed out, gets the people around him to respond to him, to pity him, and to value him and take care of him. He controls them and heightens his own personality by his very self-pity and self-hatred.

Kierkegaard described these styles with a brilliance that today seems uncanny and with a vocabulary that sums up much of the psychoanalytic theory of character defenses. Whereas today we talk about the “mechanisms of defense” such as repression and denial, Kierkegaard talked about the same things with different terms: he referred to the fact that most men live in a “half-obscurity” about their own condition,10 they are in a state of “shut-upness” wherein they block off their own perceptions of reality.11 He understood the compulsive character, the rigidity of the person who has had to build extra-thick defenses against anxiety, a heavy character armor, and he described him in the following terms:

ways in which man succumbs to and is beaten by life and the world; beaten because he fails to face up to the existential truth of his situation—the truth that he is an inner symbolic self, which signifies a certain freedom, and that he is bound by a finite body, which limits that freedom.

This is precisely what he does in his discussion of the extremes of too much and too little possibility. Too much possibility is the attempt by the person to overvalue the powers of the symbolic self. It reflects the attempt to exaggerate one half of the human dualism at the expense of the other. In this sense, what we call schizophrenia is an attempt by the symbolic self to deny the limitations of the finite body; in doing so, the entire person is pulled off balance and destroyed. It is as though the freedom of creativity that stems from within the symbolic self cannot be contained by the body, and the person is torn apart. This is how we understand schizophrenia today, as the split of self and body, a split in which the self is unanchored, unlimited, not bound enough to everyday things, not contained enough in dependable physical behavior

For the self is a synthesis in which the finite is the limiting factor, and the infinite is the expanding factor. Infinitude’s despair is therefore the fantastical, the limitless

What Kierkegaard means here is that the development of the person is a development in depth from a fixed center in the personality, a center that unites both aspects of the existential dualism—the self and the body. But this kind of development needs precisely an acknowledgment of reality, the reality of one’s limits: