Failed Heroics

One very interesting and consistent conclusion emerges from our overview of mental illness: that Adler was right to say that the mentally ill all have a basic problem of courage. They cannot assume responsibility for their own independent lives; they are hyperfearful of life and death. From this vantage point the theory of mental illness is really a general theory of the failures of death-transcendence. The avoidance of life and the terror of death become enmeshed in the personality to such an extent that it is crippled – unable to exercise the “normal cultural heroism” of other members of the society. The result is that the person cannot permit himself the routine heroic self-expansion nor the easy yielding to the superordinate cultural world-view that other members can. This is why he becomes a burden on others in some way. Mental illness, then, is also a way of talking about those people who burden others with their hyperfears of life and death, their own failed heroics.

E. Becker, p.248