This despair he avoids by building defenses; and these defenses allow him to feel ... that he controls his life and his death, that he really does live and act as a willful and free individual, that he has a unique and self-fashioned identity, that he is somebody... (Becker 1973: 54, 55)

　　 This perspective transforms Freud's Oedipal complex into what Brown (1959: 118) calls an Oedipal project: the never-ending attempt to become father of oneself. The child wants to conquer death by becoming his/her own origin, the creator and sustainer of his/her own life. In Buddhist terms, this is the attempt of the developing sense-of-self to become svabhava 'self-existing', the quest to deny one's groundlessness by becoming one's own ground. Then the Oedipal project derives from our intuition that self-consciousness is not something obviously self-existing but a mental construct; like the surface of the sea, dependent on unknown depths that it cannot grasp because it is a manifestation of them. The problem arises when this conditioned consciousness wants to become autonomous. The paradox is that my essential groundlessness means I can do this only by trying to objectify myself in some fashion in the world. I try to make myself real by becoming something. The ego-self is this continuing attempt to objectify myself in order to grasp myself, something consciousness can no more do than a hand can grasp itself.

　　 The consequence of this perpetual failure is that the sense-of-self always has, as its inescapable shadow, a sense-of-lack, which it always tries to escape. Here 'the return of the repressed' shows us how to link this basic yet hopeless project with the symbolic ways we try to overcome our sense of lack by making ourselves real in the world. We experience this deep sense of lack as the feeling that 'there is something wrong with me,' but that feeling manifests in different forms and we react to it in different ways. The tragedy of these reactions is that (for example) no amount of fame can ever be enough if it's not really fame we want. When we don't understand what is actually motivating us, we end up compulsive, driven. Being and Time is perceptive about the ways we become 'dispersed' in the present, but is not sensitive to this opposite tendency; for Buddhism, mental health can be found only in an experience which transforms the sense-of-lack that 'shadows' the sense-of-self, by transforming the sense-of-self.

　　 Yet Heidegger does emphasize something also essential to Buddhism and now accepted by psychoanalysis: anxiety is fundamental to the self, not something we have but something we are. The anguish and despair that the neurotic complains of are not the result of symptoms but their cause; those symptoms shield him/her from the tragedies at the heart of the human situation: death, guilt, meaninglessness. 'The irony of man's condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive.' (Becker 1973: 181-2, 66) Then the guilt that haunts us is not the cause of our unhappiness but its effect. 'The ultimate problem is not guilt but the incapacity to live. The illusion of guilt is necessary for an animal that cannot enjoy life, in order to organize a life of nonenjoyment.' (Brown 1959: 270) If the autonomy of self-consciousness is a delusion which can never quite shake off its shadow-feeling that 'something is wrong with me,' we will need to rationalize that sense of inadequacy somehow. But when fear of death rebounds as fear of life, they become two sides of the same coin. Then genuine life cannot be opposed to death but must embrace both life and death. The great irony is that as long as we crave immortality we are dead.

　　 Anxiety about death is our reaction to becoming aware of ourselves and our inevitable fate. But is the dilemma of life-confronting-death an objective fact, or something constructed and projected, more like an unconscious, deeply repressed game that each of us is playing with himself? Not a game that I play, but a game that plays me, if my sense-of-self is constituted by this game. When being self-conscious is to be conscious of oneself as being alive, then death-terror isn't something the ego has but what it is.

　　 If, however, the ego is mentally constituted by such a dualistic way of thinking, it should be able to die without physical death. Such is the claim of Buddhism: the sense-of-self can disappear but that reveals something else which cannot die because it was never born. Anatma is the 'middle way' between the refuted extremes of eternalism (the self survives death) and annihilationism (the self is destroyed at death). Buddhism resolves the problem of life-and-death by deconstructing it. The evaporation of a dualistic way of experiencing life-and-death reveals what is prior to both. There are many names for this prior, but one of the most common is 'the unborn.' In the Pali Canon the two most famous descriptions of nirvana both refer to 'the unborn' (Udana VIII.1,3, in Thomas 1935: 110 - 111). That 'all things are perfectly resolved in the Unborn' was the great realization of the seventeenth-century Japanese Zen master Bankei (Waddell, 1984: 47). Many other examples could be cited.