Ruptureology and Rupturegenesis

Have you ever heard of those words? Probably not.

“Ruptureology” and “rupturegenesis” are words that I’ve created to use with my study of creativity and mortality.

Here are some of my notes on this topic as well as part of a self-directed study on the topic (all draft forms).

Ruptureology

The study and practice of living and creating through rupture.
Ruptureology examines what happens when existential defenses collapse—when illusions, cultural buffers, or inherited meanings no longer hold. It asks: how do we metabolize that collapse into form, meaning, and transformation?
In essence, ruptureology is both a psychology and a poetics of confrontation. It studies the processes—psychological, creative, and cultural—by which individuals and societies either deny or integrate death anxiety. The artist, for example, does not seek to repair rupture but to work within it, turning fragmentation into insight, and terror into trace.

“I don’t condemn the illusions people construct to buffer death anxiety. My interest is in what happens when those illusions collapse—whether creative practice can transform the raw terror of mortality into meaning, rather than violence or denial.” Jacobson, Response to Anxiety (n.d., p. 1)

Rupturegenesis

The generative aftermath of rupture—the birth that follows breakdown.
If ruptureology studies the terrain of collapse, rupturegenesis is the alchemical process by which something new emerges from it. It is the transmutation of existential dread into symbolic residue—art, insight, empathy, or ethical awareness.
Rupturegenesis is not redemption or transcendence; it is the slow, embodied making of meaning within finitude. It is how the artist metabolizes death anxiety into creative output—how “terror becomes trace.”

Alchemy

The symbolic process of transformation. In creative and psychological terms, alchemy is how matter—chemical, emotional, or symbolic—is transmuted into meaning. In the collodion process, silver becomes image through ritual and risk. In ruptureology, anxiety becomes insight through creation.

“The transformation of silver salts into an image isn’t just chemistry; it’s alchemy. That alchemical act becomes a metaphor for the way artists transmute existential terror into meaning.” — Jacobson, SDS Overview or Concept (2025, p. 1)

Collapse

The psychic and cultural moment when death anxiety breaches denial. Collapse reveals the fragility of our worldviews and the insufficiency of our myths. It is the point where symbolic immortality fails—and the raw void becomes visible.
But collapse can also mark the beginning of rupturegenesis: the opening through which new forms of meaning emerge. Artists dwell here—between fracture and formation.

Metabolize

The internal reworking of existential anxiety into creative or ethical form. To metabolize is to take in the unbearable and convert it into expression rather than repression. This word bridges Rank’s distinction between the artist and the neurotic: one chokes on the world, the other chews it into meaning.

“By transforming terror into form, the artist reworks rupture into creative output: an external trace, a witness to mortality.” Jacobson, SDS Overview or Concept (2025, p. 1)

Residue / Trace

The tangible and symbolic remainder of an encounter with mortality. Residue is the mark left behind—the plate, the scar, the sentence, the memory. It is both evidence and echo, proof that meaning once passed through matter. I’ve said these words for years. The art happens in the making. The plate itself is residue; it captures the essence of the moment, the shadow of the sitter (or still life), and the fragility of life.

Witness

The conscious act of seeing and staying with what culture denies. Witnessing is both artistic and ethical; it resists erasure by turning the gaze toward suffering, mortality, and historical trauma. In my practice, witness is not documentation—it’s participation. To witness is to stand in relation to the void and refuse to look away.

Immanence

Meaning found within finitude. Immanence rejects transcendence or escape; it roots significance in the here and now. In ruptureology, immanence is the field in which all transformation occurs—the realization that nothing lies beyond death and that creation itself is the sacred act.

Collapse → Rupture → Metabolize → Trace → Witness → Immanence → Rupturegenesis

This is my through line of rupture—a living process of descent and creation. It maps the cycle through which anxiety becomes art, illusion gives way to insight, and denial is replaced by presence.

Otto Rank’s Personality Types

Rank’s Three Personality Types

Adapted (the “normal” person): Finds security in culture, tradition, religion, consumerism, or ideology. Adapted individuals manage their fear of death by adhering to social norms. Creativity, if expressed, stays within socially approved channels.

Neurotic: Overwhelmed by existential fear. The individual withdraws inward, unable to sublimate their anxiety. “Chokes” on mortality awareness, unable to transform it into external work.

Creative / Artist: Equally exposed to death anxiety, but metabolizes it through art or thought. Reworks inner terror into external form (art, philosophy, writing). They exist in a state of tension with culture, frequently stepping outside its protective illusions.

This framework clarifies that the "normal/adapted" person is not absent; rather, they represent the cultural baseline.

Rank’s Types Through the Lens of Ruptureology (my conversion)

Adapted (Buffered): Aligns with the dominant worldview to avoid rupture. The individual utilizes cultural shields such as religion, nationalism, and consumerism to suppress their awareness of death. Lives are “protected” inside the illusion—death anxiety is smoothed over rather than faced.

Neurotic (Collapsed): The rupture breaks through without mediation. The individual feels overwhelmed by mortality and struggles to transform it into meaning. Anxiety implodes inward, leading to paralysis or dysfunction.

Creative / Artist (Metabolizing Rupture): Confronts the rupture rather than fully denying or collapsing under it. Death anxiety becomes raw material—transformed into art, philosophy, ritual, or resistance. Lives on the edge between denial and confrontation, where meaning is forged.

This dovetails with my Through Line of Rupture:

Buffer → Collapse → Metabolize

The adapted “normal” person lives buffered.

The neurotic collapses under rupture.

The artist metabolizes rupture into creation.

Proximal and distal terror management defenses

Rank (1932/1989) distinguished between the adapted person, the neurotic, and the artist in relation to how each responds to existential anxiety:

“The average man avoids the worst effects of the fear of life and of death by complete adaptation to the collective. He lives not in himself, but in society; he seeks not his own immortality, but to participate in the immortality of the group” (p. 34).

“The neurotic suffers from the same increased consciousness of self as the artist, but he cannot objectify and render it harmless in creative work. He chokes on his own introversions” (pp. 55–56).

“The artist lives the double conflict of the individual and the collective more consciously than others, but he overcomes it in the work of art which creates a new unity of his personality with nature and with humanity. … The artist is able to overcome introversion by projecting his fears into the work of art, where they are mastered, objectified, and given form” (pp. 58, 70).

References:

Jacobson, Q. (n.d.). Response to anxiety [Unpublished manuscript].

Jacobson, Q. (2025, October 3). SDS overview or concept [Unpublished manuscript].

Rank, O. (1989). Art and artist: Creative urge and personality development (C. F. Atkinson, Trans.). W. W. Norton. (Original work published 1932)

The Reverend Weldon from The Legendary Porch Pounders

I made this image sometime in 2003—August or September. I can’t remember exactly. I really like the break in it. I’m starting to embrace this idea of rupture or existential rupture. It plays well with my ideas; I will explore it more.

In the next couple of weeks, I’ll be back at making plates. These will be my New Mexican series, whatever that might mean. Stay tuned! I’ll post frequently.

Bird Bones

“Rank asked why the artist so often avoids clinical neurosis when he is so much a candidate for it because of his vivid imagination, his openness to the finest and broadest aspects of experience, his isolation from the cultural world-view that satisfies everyone else. The answer is that he takes in the world, but instead of being oppressed by it he reworks it in his own personality and recreates it in the work of art. The neurotic is precisely the one who cannot create—the “artiste-manque,” as Rank so aptly called him. We might say that both the artist and the neurotic bite off more than they can chew, but the artist spews it back out again and chews it over in an objectified way, as an ex­ternal, active, work project. The neurotic can’t marshal this creative response embodied in a specific work, and so he chokes on his in­troversions. The artist has similar large-scale introversions, but he uses them as material.”

―Ernest Becker
The Denial of Death

Spending Time in My History

I’ve had some unbelievable experiences in my life. I can’t fully express my gratitude for each of these experiences. I know I’ve had certain privileges; I’m fully aware of them and want to acknowledge that up front. At the same time, I’ve worked hard, sacrificed, and earned what I’ve received. Eternally grateful, no shame.

Something I'll Never See Again...

This was in a Paris publication. It did happen twice; I had a show in 2010 and then in 2012 and both times Joel-Peter Witkin was having a exhibition in the city as well.

Existential Illusions: Why We Can’t See Our Own Defenses Against Death

Most people cannot recognize their own existential illusions. These worldviews do not appear to them as constructions—they feel like reality itself. Becker understood this well: the defenses only work if they are lived as unquestionable truths. To call them illusions outright is to destabilize the very structure that protects a person from the terror of mortality. Terror Management Theory confirms this dynamic; even subtle challenges to a worldview often trigger defensiveness or hostility rather than openness.

Otto Rank helps clarify why this is the case. He drew a sharp distinction between the “common man,” who survives by surrendering to collective illusions, and the “artist,” who refuses that surrender. For Rank, the common man finds security in what he called life-lies—cultural narratives, religious doctrines, and social roles that buffer anxiety at the cost of individuality. The artist, by contrast, attempts to live and create without such shelter, carrying what Rank called the “artist’s burden”: confronting mortality without metaphysical guarantees and transforming that confrontation into creation.

Becker extended this insight into a broader cultural frame. In The Denial of Death (1973), he showed how the symbolic self is built upon illusions of permanence, generating both neurosis and creativity as defenses against finitude. But in Escape from Evil (1975), he pressed further: illusions are not only fragile, they are dangerous. When a personal defense collapses, the individual may experience anxiety or despair. When a collective illusion collapses, entire societies can respond with scapegoating, violence, and othering. Here lies the paradox: what protects us from death anxiety on one level can generate destruction on another. Terror Management Theory has since confirmed its findings empirically; mortality salience heightens prejudice, hardens worldview defense, and intensifies hostility toward out-groups.

This is why it is nearly impossible to “show” someone that their ritual or belief system—whether a religious heaven, ancestor worship, or syncretic borrowing of Indigenous practices—is, at its core, a defense against death. To expose that fact is to strip away their armor. Instead, the artist can take a different approach. Rather than dismantling another’s defenses, the artist models another path: refusing denial, holding mortality in view, and metabolizing its anxiety into creation.

For me, this principle is embodied in the wet collodion process. Each plate is unstable, fragile, and impermanent. It can peel, crack, or fade at any moment. There is no illusion of permanence—only the presence of a fragile image that carries mortality on its surface. Unlike religious or cultural illusions that promise continuity beyond death, the collodion plate insists on impermanence, even as it becomes an “immortality object.” It shows that meaning can be created without pretending to transcend death. Its beauty is inseparable from its fragility.

The task is not to convince others that their illusions are false, but to demonstrate through practice that meaning can be made without them. In this sense, art becomes an alternative to illusion, a fragile but honest gesture against oblivion. A collodion plate does not promise eternity—it offers presence. It is a reminder that creation itself can hold mortality in view, that the refusal of denial can yield not despair but form, memory, and meaning.

My Fifth Darkroom Build

My new darkroom in Las Cruces, New Mexico. 12’ x 15’ x 10’—I’ll share more as I detail it out for use.

I think this is my fifth darkroom build I’ve done in the last 30 years—it could be more, but I remember the other four quite well.

This is 180 square feet and has a 10’ ceiling. It’s part of my huge garage. We only have one vehicle, so this space was sitting idle, waiting to be used.

The space without the epoxy floor—the “before” picture.

I have a dedicated office space in the house but needed a place where I can spill paint and chemicals without worrying too much. If you know about AgNO₃, you know what I’m talking about.

The space with the epoxy floor—the “after” picture.

Racism isn’t innate – Here are Five Psychological Stages that may Lead to It

I encourage you to take a look at this article from The Conversation. It references Terror Management Theory, which to me is one of the most overlooked—and ignored—frameworks for understanding the problems we face today.

From racism to war, from bigotry and xenophobia to jingoism and religious dogma, we seem almost determined to find “the other.” As the old saying goes, I’ll hate you for the color of your shirt or the shape of your nose. Anything will do, so long as it puts someone in the “out group.” America has been marinating in this for a long time, and at this moment, I don’t see the future looking particularly bright. If anything, I’d caution people to prepare themselves for more, and larger, terrible events ahead.

You can already see it unfolding: Russia’s war in Ukraine, the genocide in Gaza, and climate disasters that grow more relentless each year—wildfires, hurricanes, and flooding. These events are not only catastrophic in themselves, but they remind us, again and again, of our own fragility and mortality. And when we are forced to face that, death anxiety tends to boil over into hostility, scapegoating, and division.

“We spend endless energy on the ‘what’ of our problems but rarely ask the ‘why.’ It’s like treating a cough while ignoring the virus that causes it.”

— Quinn Jacobson

Add to this the terrible political divide in America: the Kirk assassination, Trump sending troops into American cities, and the daily drumbeat of culture war rhetoric. Political party loyalties—red and blue alike—are tearing at the fabric of our society. Even in our everyday lives, people seem more standoffish, impatient, and cold (I’ve felt this for a few years). It’s as if the collective weight of death anxiety is bubbling up everywhere, pushing us further into our corners.

This is what my studies and interests revolve around: what the fear of non-existence means for people and how it runs outside of conscious awareness. Terror Management Theory and Ernest Becker’s work hold so much explanatory power, I can’t understand why more people don’t embrace them—don’t bring them into their lives. Our world would be a much better place if we did.

Sheldon Solomon, building on Becker, put it bluntly: We will always need a designated group of inferiors.

What do you think? Do you see this drive to divide and “other” playing out in your own circles, communities, or even in the way strangers treat each other on the street? I’d love to hear your perspective.

And yet, I can’t help but believe there’s another path. If we had the courage to face death honestly, maybe we wouldn’t need enemies at all.

Update from PhD Land

Read This Article

This is a wonderful article that succinctly covers Becker’s ideas, TMT, and the state of the world:
https://newrepublic.com/article/199347/1-fear-death-wreaking-havoc-world

The Ernest Becker Foundation Guide

I've always been interested in what the EBF does. They are amazing at taking incredibly hard-to-understand, complicated things and putting them into words that make sense. Let's be honest: it can be hard to understand and remember these ideas. But this tutorial does something unique: it breaks everything down to its most basic parts.

What stands out to me the most is how they've made something that seems impossible to understand easy to understand. These aren't just ideas that people in academia talk about; they're real frameworks that can change how we think about and deal with the world.

I'm interested in what you think: Do you think it's worth it to think about these ideas? What is it about these notions that makes them worth paying attention to?

For reference

Ernest Becker Foundation. (2023). A communications toolkit for campaigners on death anxiety and societal change. The Ernest Becker Foundation.

About Becker's synthesis:

"Being aware of death makes people invest in our cultural worldviews, which help us feel like we have an important place in a meaningful world." "Feeling that we have contributed to something that will live on after us reduces the anxiety and discomfort that come with knowing that we will one day die" (Ernest Becker Foundation, 2023, p. 1).

About cultural buffers:

“Culture can give us a sense of immortality that helps us deal with our fear of death and lets us live our lives and be part of society. For individuals who adhere to religious worldviews, a sense of immortality may be perceived literally (afterlife, heaven, reincarnation, etc.), whereas for others, immortality is understood symbolically (leaving a legacy, career advancement, attaining fame or notoriety, creating something of value, procreation, etc.) (Ernest Becker Foundation, 2023, p. 1).

About the beginnings of TMT:

Three social psychologists—Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, and Sheldon Solomon—came up with Terror Management Theory (TMT) in 1986 to see if Becker's ideas about how people use culture to deal with existential terror were true (Ernest Becker Foundation, 2023, p. 1).

On the breakdown of worldviews:

“If our cultural buffers are working right, most of the time people should feel pretty safe mentally. But when these cultural buffers are endangered or completely disrupted... worldviews can break down, and that underlying fear starts to come to the surface" (Ernest Becker Foundation, 2023, p. 1).

About defensive responses:

People mainly seek self-esteem by becoming more entrenched in their worldviews, values, and ideas; more loyal to their own culture and in-group; and more antagonistic toward others (Ernest Becker Foundation, 2023, p. 2).

On reminders of death in advocacy:

"Challenges to someone's cultural worldview or 'immortality project' can provoke death anxiety, leading to avoidance or, worse, aggression towards the message and the messenger" (Ernest Becker Foundation, 2023, p. 2).

About persuasive messaging:

"Most advocates know how important it is to send clear, persuasive messages, but does your approach take into account the fear of death?" Decades of TMT research have shown us that when we create messages, we should think about how people react to death dread. This can help stop defensive behaviors (Ernest Becker Foundation, 2023, p. 3).

On framing for the group:

“Using language that reflects the worldview or core beliefs shared by your audience will make them feel like they are part of a ‘in-group.’ "This makes them feel more connected and less defensive" (Ernest Becker Foundation, 2023, p. 3).