I read the following lines in a book…liked it so much that I wrote it down. It’s by one of the greatest psychologists of all time…
Man is driven by an essential "dualism"; he needs both to be a part of something and to stick out. He needs at one and the same time to be a conforming member of a winning team and to be a star in his own right.
"Society.....is a vehicle for earthly heroism....Man transcends death by finding the meaning for his life....It is the burning desire for the creature to count....What man really fears is not so much extinction, but extinction with insignificance....Ritual is the technique for giving life.
His sense of self worth is constituted symbolically, his cherished narcissism feeds on symbols, on the abstract idea of his own worth.
[Man's] natural yearnings can be fed limitlessly in the domain of symbols"
"Men fashion unfreedom as a bribe for self-perpetuation."
- Ernest Becker (Escape from Evil & The Denial of Death)
Addendum 22/11/06:
Stanley Kubrick's 1987 film Full Metal Jacket features an underlying theme about the duality of man (Carl Jung's theory) throughout the action and dialogue of the film. One scene plays out this way:
A Colonel asks a soldier, "You write 'Born to Kill' on your helmet and you wear a peace button. What's that supposed to be, some kind of sick joke?"
To which the soldier replies, "I think I was trying to suggest something about the duality of man, sir... The Jungian thing, sir."
