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

Warren Schwartz

Psychosis, 2013, vol. 5, issue 1, 26-35

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.

Date: 2013
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/17522439.2011.639900 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:rpsyxx:v:5:y:2013:i:1:p:26-35

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RPSY20

DOI: 10.1080/17522439.2011.639900

Access Statistics for this article

Psychosis is currently edited by Dr John Read

More articles in Psychosis from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().