“Breaking Free from the Cultural Neurosis” by Dr. Alexander Lowen

We want to be more alive and feel more, but we are afraid of it.

Our fear of life is seen in the way we keep busy so as not to feel, keep running so as not to face ourselves, or get high on liquor or drugs so as not to sense our being. Because we are afraid of life, we seek to control or master it. We believe that it is bad or dangerous to be carried away by our emotions.

The modern individual is committed to being successful, not to being a person. He belongs rightly to the “action generation,” whose motto is “do more but feel less.” This attitude characterizes much of modern sexuality: more action but less passion.

If we can face our inner emptiness, we will find fulfillment.

Is it the fate of modern man to be neurotic, to be afraid of life? My answer is yes, if we define modern man as a member of a culture whose dominant values are power and progress.

The neurotic individual is in conflict with himself. Part of his being is trying to overcome another part. His ego is trying to master his body; his rational mind, to control his feelings; his will, to overcome his fears and anxieties.

Neurosis is internal conflict. The neurotic character takes many forms, but all of them involve a struggle in the individual between what he is and what he believes he should be. Every neurotic individual is caught in this struggle…

When guilt or shame are attached to feelings, the conflict is internalized and creates a neurotic character.

According to Freud, the neurotic character represents an inability to adapt to the cultural situation. He recognized that civilization denies the individual full instinctual gratification, but he believed that this denial was necessary for cultural progress. In effect he accepted the idea that it was the fate of modern man to be unhappy.

The cultural process that gave rise to modern society and modern man was the development of the ego. This development is associated with the acquisition of knowledge and the gaining of power over nature.

Man is part of nature like any other animal, fully subject to her laws; but he is also above nature, acting upon and controlling her. He does the same with his own nature; part of his personality, the ego, turns against the animal part, the body. The antithesis between ego and body produces a dynamic tension that furthers the growth of culture, but it also contains a destructive potential.

Given his culture and the character it produces, what is the fate of modern man?

If the story of Oedipus can serve as a prophecy, it is a prophecy of achieving the success and power one seeks only to find one's world coming apart or breaking down.

If success is measured by material possessions, as it is in the industrialized countries, and power by the ability to do and go (machines and energy), most people in the Western world have both success and power. The collapse of their world is the impoverishment of their inner or emotional lives.

Having committed themselves to success and power, they have little else to live for. And like Oedipus they have become wanderers on the earth, uprooted beings who can find no peace anywhere.

The challenge to modern man is to reconcile the antithetical aspects in his personality. On the body level he is an animal, on the ego level a would-be god. The fate of the animal is death, which the ego in its godlike aspirations is trying to avoid. But in trying to avoid this fate man creates an even worse one, namely, to live in fear of life.

When one stops struggling against fate, one loses his neurosis (internal conflict) and gains peace of mind. The result is a different attitude (no fear of life), expressed in a different character and associated with a different fate.

Failure seems to mean submission to an acceptable fate, but actually it amounts to self-acceptance, which makes change possible. To the degree that most people in Western culture are struggling to be different, they are neurotic. And since this is a fight one can't win, all who engage in this struggle will fail. Strangely, through the acceptance of failure, we become free from our neurosis.

The following was an excerpt from Dr. Alexander Lowen’s must-read book — Fear of Life: The Wisdom of Failure.