For the collective as well as individual attachment structures, the collapse of any one part brings about a crisis, which can be more or less serious in nature according to its proximity to the foundational supports. In the internal spheres, where one is protected by the outer bulwark, such crises happen daily and are relatively painless (what we call ‘disappointments’); here it is even possible to play around with one’s valued attachments through, for example, jokes, jargon or alcohol. During this kind of play, however, one can cause serious damage by unwittingly opening a crack all the way through to the foundations, and in the blink of an eye the situation changes from light-hearted to macabre. The horror of existence stares us blank in the face and we sense, in one devastating blow, that all souls are hanging by their own web and that a hellish abyss lurks beneath.

Replacing the existing supports, the foundational ideas of a culture, is rarely achieved without intense social spasms and the risk of total disintegration (reformation, revolution). During such times, individuals are forced to fall back on their own capacity for constructing attachments, and consequently the number of those unable to cope is likely to increase. The result is depression, excess, suicide (as seen with the German officers after the war [WWI] or the Chinese students after the Revolution).

Another weakness of the structure follows from the fact that in order to fend off the various imposing dangers, it becomes necessary to lay down highly disparate supports. When superstructures are then built on top of these, it will eventually result in conflicts between incommensurable sets of values and feelings. This creates crevices which allow for desperation to seep in. In such cases, an individual can be possessed by the thrill of destruction, he or she dismantles the whole of the artificial life-support system, and in delightful terror sets out to make a clean sweep. The feeling of terror is caused by the loss of all comforting life values, while the feeling of delight stems from a reckless yet harmonious identification with the deepest secret of our being: its biologic unsustainability, its incessant disposition for annihilation.

We love our attachments because they save us, but we also hate them because they constrain our sense of freedom. At times when we feel strong enough, coming together to ceremoniously bury an outlived attachment is therefore a great source of joy. In this context, material objects often gain symbolic meaning and the festivities are considered expressions of a ‘radical’ life-attitude. When an individual has destroyed all of the perceivable attachments within himself, and is left only with the unconscious ones, he refers to himself as a ‘liberated’ person.

A very popular defence mechanism is distraction. Here, the attention is steered away from the dangerous outer limits by preoccupying it with an incessant stream of incoming impressions. This mechanism is, as before, typical already in childhood — without distractions even the child is unbearable to itself. ‘Mummy, there’s nothing to do!’ A small English girl I used to know was visiting her Norwegian aunts and constantly appeared from her room asking, ‘What are we doing now?’ Babysitters automatically become virtuosos of distractions: ‘Look, a little doggy!’

With people of high society, distraction is a life-strategy. It may be compared to an airplane — made out of heavy metal but with an inbuilt principle which, as long as it is fully functioning, keeps it in the air. Since the air will hold it for no more than a second, it needs to be constantly moving. Routine may cause the pilot to become drowsy and inattentive, but as soon as the engine fails the situation becomes critical.

The use of distraction is in most cases a fully deliberate strategy. Despair can lie immediately beneath the veneer and may surface at any moment in sudden bursts of sobbing. Once all possible modes of distraction are exhausted a feeling of ‘spleen’, falling anywhere between mild weariness and deadly depression, sets in. Woman, who by the way is less inclined towards existential insight than man and therefore more secure, more at ease with life than him, predominantly makes use of the distraction mechanism.

A significant evil of prison sentencing is that the prisoner is deprived of almost all options for distraction. And since prison in general offers very bad conditions for alternative modes of protection, the prisoner will, as a rule, find himself in perpetual proximity to desperation. Any act he may commit in order to ward off the last phase of this desperate state is therefore justified by the vital principle of self-preservation. At this final stage, he is momentarily experiencing his own soul within the universe, and in such an instant nothing else exists but the categorical unsustainability of existence.

Life panic in its pure, undiluted form will probably only ever occur very rarely, since the protective defence mechanisms described so far are both complex, automatic and, to a certain extent, always active. But its more watered-down forms are still tainted by death — even in these conditions life is only just sustainable under severe tribulation. Death always presents itself as an escape, leaving the possibilities beyond it open. And since the experience of death, as of anything else, depends upon the individual’s subjective feelings and perceptions, death may very well be viewed as an acceptable solution. If it is possible to achieve a certain posture in death, to sustain a gesture even in rigor mortis — that is, a certain form of final attachment or distraction — death is not at all the worst fate. The newspapers, which in this rare case serve the mechanisms of concealment, always manage to invent the least disturbing explanations: ‘It is thought that the cause [of the suicide] was the latest stock market drop on the price of wheat.’ When a man takes his own life in depression, it is an entirely natural death due to spiritual causes. The modern barbarity of attempting to ‘save’ suicides thus rests on a terrifying misunderstanding of the very nature of existence.

Only a small amount of people can do with mere ‘change’, whether relating to work, social life or pleasure. The cultured individual demands that the changes have continuity, direction, progression. Nothing is ultimately satisfactory: one moves on, gathers new knowledge, makes a career. This phenomenon can be termed ‘yearning’ or ‘transgressive tendency’: when one goal is reached, the yearning moves on; it is not the goal that matters, but rather that is has been reached — it is not the absolute height of, but the degree of increase on, life’s upward curve that is of importance. A promotion from private to corporal is in this respect likely to provide greater value experience than one from lieutenant to general. This fundamental psychological law destroys any foundation for optimism regarding progress.

Human yearning is thus characterised not only as a desire for something, but as much as a desire to escape from something. And if we use the word yearning in its religious meaning, the latter definition becomes the only viable one. For in the context of religion, no one has ever been quite clear about what it is he is longing for, while always being deeply aware of what it is he is longing to get a way from, namely the earthly vale of tears — that is, his own unsustainable existential situation. If the sense of this situation is the deepest truth of our soul, then it becomes understandable why religious yearning is often felt and understood as fundamental to our being. However, the hope that it is a religious criterion, and harbours a promise of its own fulfilment, is put in a rather miserable light by the observations made above.

Regarding the fourth defence mechanism, or fourth medicament for life-panic, sublimation, what occurs is more of a transformation than a suppression. In certain cases it is possible to convert the very agony of life into valuable experiences by stylistic or artistic means: positive impulses step in and skilfully exploit to their own advantage the painterly, dramatic, heroic, lyrical or even comical aspects of the evils of existence.

Such an exploitation, however, can only come about if suffering has already lost its most intense sting, or has not yet come to fully dominate one’s inner life. The mountaineer might here serve as an image: gazing down into the abyss is only pleasurable when the nauseating feeling of dizziness has been somewhat overcome — only then does it become possible for the mountaineer to enjoy the sight. Likewise, to be able to write a tragedy one must, to a certain extent, separate oneself from — betray — the tragic feeling, in order to look at it from a detached, aesthetic point of view. Such a position can also allow for a wild kind of play wherein one invents evermore dizzying levels of irony and self-embarrassment; in a butchery of one’s own self it becomes possible to fully enjoy how the various planes of consciousness have the power to destroy one another. This current essay, in fact, is a classic attempt at sublimation: the author is not suffering, rather he is filling in sheets of paper which are to be published. The self-inflicted ‘martyrdom’ of certain types of lonely ladies is another similar case of sublimation — being a martyr gives them a sense of importance.

Nevertheless, out of the four defence mechanisms mentioned, sublimation is probably the least common.