Schizophrenia, cultural marginalization, and dissociation of the body: An application of Ernest Becker’s work to psychotherapy

Abstract

Ernest Becker highlights the experience-limiting function of culture. Without such restriction, life, in all of its mystery and terror, is just too much for the self-conscious animal to bear. Culture has developed as a result of a need to minimize the force of life and anxiety associated with the inevitability of death. Successfully socialized individuals can envelop themselves in a death-denying and life-directing and limiting symbolic order. The set of symptoms we think of as schizophrenia are, on the one hand, associated with an inability to link up with the experience-managing, death-anxiety buffering, cultural order, and on the other, with the tendency to remain split off from the body. Individuals with the diagnosis of schizophrenia often do not rely on repression to manage their experience, but instead on the insufficient defense of dissociation. The paradoxical result of the dissociative defense is an overwhelming and terrifying experience. Successful psychotherapy involves helping the fearful, traumatized and interpersonally distant patient tolerate and even welcome body and affect. The attachment with the psychotherapist unblocks affect through an undoing of dissociative processes and a linking of the patient with the consensual, repression-based, symbolic order.