"If fear of life is one aspect of transference, its companion fear is right at hand. As the growing child becomes aware of death, he has a twofold reason for taking shelter in the powers of the transference object. The castration complex makes the body an object of horror, and it is now the transference object who carries the weight of the abandoned causa-sui project. The child uses him to assure his immortality. What is more natural? I canāt resist quoting from another writing Gorkiās famous sentiment on Tolstoi, because it sums up so well this aspect of transference: āI am not bereft on this earth, so long as this old man is living on it.ā This comes from the depth of Gorkiās emotion; it is not a simple wish or a comforting thought: it is more like a driving belief that the mystery and solidity of the transference object will give one shelter as long as he lives. This use of the transference object explains the urge to deification of the other, the constant placing of certain select persons on pedestals, the reading into them of extra powers: the more they have, the more rubs off on us. We participate in their immortality, and so we create immortals. As Harrington put it graphically: āI am making a deeper impression on the cosmos because I know this famous person. When the ark sails I will be on it.ā Man is always hungry, as Rank so well put it, for material for his own immortalization. Groups need it too, which explains the constant hunger for heroes: "Every group, however small or great, has, as such, an āindividualā impulse for eternalization, which manifests itself in the creation of and care for national, religious, and artistic heroes ⦠the individual paves the way for this collective eternity impulse..."."
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Ernest Becker
Ernest Becker (27 September 1924 ā 6 March 1974) was an American cultural anthropologist and interdisciplinary thinker, noted for his 1974 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Denial of Death.
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