You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This work is, in a sense, a spiritual sequel to the late Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death.1 Its central thesis is that those who confront death, either the organic fact of it or the deeply felt idea of it, and who survive the confrontation can serve as guides—as creative survivors—to those who have not yet done so. But to survive the confrontation, it is necessary to avoid taking refuge in "psychic numbing,"
which Lifton sees both as the central fact in psychopathology and as a replacement term for repression.
The psychically numb live a "death-in-life," refusing, as Lifton quotes Otto Rank, to "accept the loan (life) in order to avoid paying the debt (death)" (p. 42). Lifton suggests that those who choose life in the form of ever-ready renewal and the capacity for change—such as his Protean Man—can transcend the mere fact of bodily death and survive through the symbolic immortality of their ideas. According to Lifton, Freud would qualify here (the psychoanalytic movement being his symbolic immortality), as well as Mao Tse-Tung, and Lifton himself, who writes, "the controlling image in my work is that of death and the continuity of life" (p. 61). The reader may wonder just what comfort can be taken in the idea of the compelling quality of the durable belief, when the ideas of Freud, Mao, and others can be seen undergoing such radical transformation. If I understand Lifton, the real durability of one's ideas is not as necessary as one's believing they are durable at the time of one's death. The important quality is the belief itself, and if an idea can no longer support its immortal purpose, it is time to shift to another.
Lifton recognizes that there is a "darker side" to the "multiplicity of possibilities … in the Protean style. Anxiety around diffuseness can in turn contribute to the kind of quest for certainty