When Samuel Johnson was asked, 'I wonder what pleasure men can take in making beasts of themselves?,' he answered: 'He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.' (Murray's Johnsonia)

Today we have caught up with Dr. Johnson's insight: existentialist works such as Heidegger's Being and Time highlight the anguish of the human condition, and psychoanalysis traces neurosis (including the low-grade neurosis called normality) back to anxiety. But why is it painful just to be a human being? Here I think the Buddhist concept of anatma can help us carry the analysis a step further, and in the process provide a new perspective on Being and Time.

　　 For Heidegger, as for existential psychology, our primary repression is death. Yet Heidegger fails to recognize 'the return of the repressed' in symbolic form and overlooks how future-oriented temporality can become what Brown calls 'a schema for the expiation of guilt'. The result is that Heidegger's authenticity is not authentic enough. Both his alternatives, the authentic as well as the inauthentic way of experiencing time, are preoccupied with the future because they are our two usual ways of reacting to the inevitable possibility of death. In order to see how time might be experienced without the shadow of death, Heidegger's approach will be contrasted with the Buddhist deconstruction of time, which denies the commonsense duality between self and time.

　　 Anatma, the denial of self, is essential to Buddhism. The early Pali sutras deconstruct the self synchronically into five skandha 'aggregates' and diachronically into pratitya-samutpada, 'dependent co-arising.' In both cases our delusive sense-of-self is due to the interaction of impersonal physical and mental phenomena. There is no 'pure' consciousness, only various sense-consciousnesses arising and passing away according to conditions. Later, Mahayana developed the doctrine of dependent co-arising in order to emphasize that nothing has self-existence; everything (including the self) is sunya, lacking any essence of its own.

　　 Today, in our deconstructing postmodern world, such a denial of ego-self is no longer so shocking. This paper will suggest a way to understand anatma that utilizes the psychoanalytic concept of repression. If we add what psychoanalysis has discovered about repression to what Buddhism teaches about the delusive sense-of-self, the cross-fertilization that occurs has many ramifications, among them a critique of Being and Time. So I begin with a brief account of existential psychoanalysis, which understands our primary repression to be death-fear. [1] This modification of Freudianism will itself be modified by anatma, to show that death-denial, too, symbolically re-presents something else even more basic and terrifying: the quite valid suspicion that 'I' don't really exist. The second part of the paper uses this Buddhist perspective to critique Being and Time, and the third part adumbrates an alternative Buddhist deconstruction of time.

The (sense of) self as (sense of) lack
　　 Freud emphasized that repression is the cornerstone of psychoanalysis. Repression occurs when something makes me uncomfortable and I choose to ignore or 'forget' it. This enables me to concentrate on something else, but -- this is the great discovery -- what has been repressed tends to return to consciousness, by adopting a disguise. This disguise is a symptom which is therefore symbolic (re-presenting the repressed thing in distorted form). Freud traced the hysterias and phobias of his middle-class Viennese patients back to denied sexual wishes, to conclude that sexual repression is our primal repression -- although, as happens to many of us, his attention gradually shifted from sex to death as he aged.

　　 William James once observed that 'mankind's common instinct for reality ... has always held the world to be essentially a theater for heroism' (Becker 1973: 1). Each of us yearns to feel of special value, 'first in the universe,' and heroism is how we justify that need, because it can qualify us for a special destiny. But why do we need a special destiny? Because the alternative is literally too much to contemplate. The irony of mankind's ability to symbolize is that it reveals our fate more clearly: man is the animal that knows it is going to die.

　　 According to Becker, 'everything that man does in his symbolic world is an attempt to deny and overcome his grotesque fate', because to see the world as it really is 'devastating and terrifying,' 'it makes routine, automatic, secure, self-confident activity impossible... It places a trembling animal at the mercy of the entire cosmos and the problem of the meaning of it' (Becker 1973: 27, 60) Thus the bite in Pascal's aphorism: 'Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.' (1958: 110, no. 414) For Becker, normality is our collective, protective madness, in which we repress the truth of the human condition, and those who have difficulty playing this game we call mentally-ill. The early experience of the child is his attempt 'to deny the anxiety of his emergence, his fear of losing his support, of standing alone, helpless and afraid.'