“The dilemma is escaped only by those willing to discard personality.”
Norman O. Brown
Thanotos, Freud’s death instinct, is the creator of the ego. It alienates man from nature and his own natural self by giving him the sense of being special. Specialness, in turn, exempts man from the laws of change that dominate all of nature, giving man the hope for an individualistic immortality. The trees and rocks of nature may come and go because of their lack of specialness, but historical man will live on because he has a special self – the ego that was ironically generated by his will to die.
The specialness in man’s ego allows him to transcend the boundaries of space and time. Man has a body that belongs to nature, obeying its laws of growth and decay in time, but man’s individual ego is separate from his vulnerable body, existing unchanged as his body ages and becomes frail. The ego of man is immortal and ageless because it is special, being exempt from nature and her laws.
However, man’s sense of specialness is the product of thanatos, his destructive wish to kill his natural self. The sense of being something apart is really alienation, the nightmare of isolation, fear, and guilt. Because he is special, man experiences a sense of regret for a past that shouldn’t have been and a fear of the future that might be. Because he is special and the father of himself, he must bear the responsibility for a guilty past and a fearful future.
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