Ernest Becker, Otto Rank, and the Burden of Consciousness
The Creative Mind & Mortality Podcast
In this week's reading of Glass Bones: Art, Mortality, and the Human Mind, I bring Ernest Becker more fully into the conversation about the artist and the psychological consequences of mortality awareness.
In Chapter 13, I explored Otto Rank's understanding of the artist as someone caught between two powerful human needs: the desire to belong to a collective culture and the equally strong need to remain an individual. Rank believed this tension was central to the creative personality. Artists depend on culture for meaning, language, and symbolic expression, yet their work often requires them to question the very structures that provide psychological stability.
Becker takes us further into the existential implications of that tension.
He understood that human beings live with a profound contradiction. We possess symbolic minds capable of imagining permanence, significance, and transcendence, yet we inhabit biological bodies destined to deteriorate and die.
We want our lives to matter. We want continuity. We want to believe that something about us will endure.
And we know, at some level, that our physical existence is temporary.
Becker believed this contradiction shapes much of human psychology. To manage the anxiety it produces, we construct cultural systems of meaning that tell us who we are, what matters, and how our lives might contribute to something larger than ourselves. He called these cultural hero systems.
Religion, nationalism, professional achievement, social identity, and even artistic accomplishment can become ways of establishing significance in a world where permanence is impossible.
These systems provide essential psychological protection. They also create difficulties when we begin to recognize how much of our meaning depends on beliefs we've inherited or constructed.
This is where Becker's understanding of the artist becomes particularly interesting.
The Artist's Tragic Position
Becker saw the artist as someone who may experience the instability of cultural meaning more directly. The artist recognizes that the symbolic structures we depend on are human creations, yet still needs those structures to make sense of existence.
There's a difficult tension here.
We can recognize that meaning is constructed and still experience a profound need for it. We can understand that our work will eventually disappear and still feel compelled to make it.
Becker described this condition through the idea of tragic heroism.
For me, this is one of his most compelling insights.
Tragic heroism involves acknowledging our limitations, recognizing the absence of ultimate guarantees, and continuing to participate in life anyway.
In creative practice, this might mean returning to the studio knowing that the work will deteriorate, that our accomplishments may eventually be forgotten, and that nothing we make can permanently protect us from death.
And yet we continue.
Creativity and the Burden of Knowing
I've spent decades working with nineteenth-century photographic processes, particularly wet collodion, along with painting and mixed media.
These processes continually remind me of impermanence. The chemistry is unstable. Glass can break. Images can deteriorate. A photograph preserves a moment that has already passed.
I'm interested in what happens psychologically when we work with that awareness rather than immediately trying to escape it.
Rank helps explain the tension between the individual and the collective. Becker reveals the existential pressure beneath that tension: our need for symbolic significance within a finite biological life.
Together, they offer a useful framework for understanding why creative work can be psychologically demanding.
But I think there's another question worth asking.
What actually happens when an artist remains with existential uncertainty long enough for it to influence the work?
Does the creative process change our relationship with death anxiety? Can it help us metabolize experiences that might otherwise become overwhelming? And what happens when the beliefs and narratives that once sustained us begin to collapse?
These questions move beyond the artist's psychological position and into the experience of making.
Where the Inquiry Goes Next
Rank and Becker provide much of the theoretical foundation for my inquiry, but their accounts leave important questions about the actual process of creative engagement.
They help us understand why artists might experience tension with collective meaning and why mortality awareness creates such profound psychological pressure.
What remains to be examined is how that pressure unfolds.
In the chapters ahead, I'll turn toward Terror Management Theory, the instability of cultural worldviews, and the moments when familiar systems of meaning begin to fail.
I'm particularly interested in the threshold where awareness becomes difficult to contain, where the stories we've depended on no longer provide the protection they once did.
This is the territory of rupture.
For me, the central question remains whether creative practice offers a different way of encountering that instability, one that allows us to remain present without immediately constructing another protective narrative.
Becker's tragic heroism suggests that there may be dignity in acknowledging our condition and continuing to create without guarantees.
Perhaps that's one of the most important things art can offer.
A way to work with the knowledge of our impermanence, even when we cannot resolve what that knowledge means.
Glass Bones: Art, Mortality, and the Human Mind
Quinn B. Jacobson