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An audience will remain interested if the story is advancing in some sort of organised manner, but they want to see routines interrupted, and the action continuing between the actors. When a Greek messenger comes in with some ghastly story about events that have happened somewhere else, the important thing is the effect the revelation produces on the other characters. Otherwise it stops being theatre, and becomes 'literature'. "

 

"There's nothing very profound about such stories, and they don't require much imagination, but people are very happy to watch them. The rules are: (I) interrupt a routine; (2) keep the action onstage don't get diverted on to an action that has happened elsewhere, or at some other time; (3) don't cancel the story. "

 

"I began this essay by saying that an improviser shouldn't be concerned with content, because the content arrives automatically. This is true, and also not true. The best improvisers do, at some level, know what their work is about. They may have trouble expressing it to you, but they do understand the implications of what they are doing; and so do the audience. "

 

"I remember Richardson Morgan playing a scene in which I said he was to be fired, and in which he said he was failing at his work because he had cancer. I think Ben Benison was the boss and he treated Ric with amazing harshness. It was about the cruellest scene I've ever seen and the audience were hysterical with laughter. I've never heard people laugh more. The actors seemed to be dragging all the audience's greatest fears into the open, laying out all their insecurities, and the anxiety was releasing itself in waves of roaring, tearing laughter, and the actors absolutely knew what they were doing, and just how slowly to turn the screw.

 

You have to trick students into believing that content isn't important and that it looks after itself, or they never get anywhere. It's the same kind of trick you use when you tell them that they are not their imaginations, that their imaginations have nothing to do with them, and that they're in no way responsible for what their 'mind' gives them. In the end they learn how to abandon control while at the same time they exercise control. They begin to understand that everything is just a shell. You have to misdirect people to absolve them of responsibility. Then, much later, they become strong enough to resume the responsibility themselves. By that time they have a more truthful concept of what they are. "

I see the 'personality' as a public-relations department for the real mind, which remains unknown. My personality always seems to be functioning, at some level, in terms of what other people think."

 

"1. M. Lewis says: 'The possessed person who in the seance is the centre of attention says in effect, "Look at me, I am dancing" .... Haitian voodoo ceremonies are quite clearly theatres, in which problems and conflicts relating to the life situations of the participants are dramatically enacted with great symbolic force .... Everything takes on the tone and character of modern psychodrama or group therapy. Abreaction is the order of the day. Repressed urges and desires, the idiosyncratic as well as the socially conditioned, are given full public rein.'

 

 

"Self-revelation should be at the heart of improvising, but suggestions offer a way to hide the performers' true identities. 'Tickling a moose in shark-infested custard while licking food-stamps' will create utter rubbish, but it involves zero risk that anyone's secret self will be exposed. Joan Rivers, thinking back to her youth, wrote: 'I had no consistent image of myself onstage - and never thought about it. There was no core to me, nothing that made it all the same girl. I was only trying to be a funny girl . . . The minute there was no laugh, there was no me - and the audience knew it instantly.' Milt Kamen told her that 'comedy has to come from your centre, from who you really are . . .' but she found that this was 'still a concept too large, too all-encompassing, too frightening for me to grasp and make my own.'3 Start 'cold', and where will the ideas come from? From you, and then there's a chance that your inner demons may be released, and that's the price you pay for being an artist. "

 

.'. A show where you laugh more at the beginning than at the end is a disappointment. "

 

"Gags are fine for fifteen minutes, but not for hour after hour, because even if they're 'fresh', it'll soon be like a 'banquet of anchovies', as some classical author said about reading Seneca. 

 

"Destructive Feedback Pick your nose in life, and we'll discourage you, but do it on a stage, and some fools may laugh or even cheer and this 'validates' the behaviour. Drool on stage and a chuckle will encourage you to drool again. Should this process continue unchecked, you'll be known as 'the drooling comedian', which was not your ambition. Rock stars are under similar pressures. If they move their hands near their pelvis the teeny-boppers will scream. This coaxes the unwary to move their hands nearer and nearer to their crotch until they're leaping about the stage clutching themselves (it's even become a fashion). Oprah Winfrey asked Michael Jackson why he did this and he said, 'I think it's just me,' unaware that audiences had conditioned him to do it."

 

There are processes in the audience that are very subtle: a growing identification with the players, an excitement that comes from wondering if the performance will be a success, the expectation of a miracle. This 'communion' is destroyed when a section of the audience cheers indiscriminately. Long ago I saw a video of Robin Williams's stand-up performance in San Francisco where the audience so approved of him that he couldn't 'sense' them properly. He was like a fisherman in despair because the fish are leaping eagerly into his boat and yet not one of them is worth having. He did a 'comedian in hell' routine, and made 'penis' jokes, and after the show 'ended' he kept wandering back on stage, desperate for that moment-by-moment rapport when the audience responds with exquisite sensitivity. "

 

"Goya's 'The sleep of reason . . .' was quoted by intellectuals unaware that reason is utterly merciless and it's the sleep of compassion that breeds monsters. 

 

" Improvisation works when I tell you something, you tell me something. You don’t take information, you add information."

I've been increasingly interested in popular Buddhism as of late(Dalai Lama, Kornfield, TNH, Ram Dass, Alan Watts, Eckstein, the various western Ajahns, Ricard) - (but more from the secular POV).  It's interesting to see the strong connection between this 2,500 year old body of knowledge and modern psych/scientific understanding, and how it surpasses the latter as a whole.

 

 

"What do you think holds improvisation back and keeps it mediocre? It’s not all mediocre; I’ve seen some amazing work. Unfortunately the majority of the work out there is horribly mediocre. Our conditioning to survive in this world and be accepted in our ‘pack’ holds us back. We spend so much time trying to fi t in, impress and succeed it is hard to let go of that conditioning. It is all around us and starts from a very early age. As a result we carry a lot of fear—fear of revealing our inner thoughts, honesty, intimacy, abandonment, rejection, so much fear we carry with us. Fear of being on stage in front of people makes matters worse. What if I get it wrong? What if I look bad or stupid? What if I reveal something about myself? Those fears, mixed with ego and with how society conditions us, lead us towards making bad creative choices. The improvisation work starts to become based on success, on building our own ego, on impressing ourselves and others, and all of those choices hold back the improvisation work and our ability to push to the next level. "

 

" If you spend notes just stroking ego then people get a false sense of themselves in their work and they start doing it for this empty—and often untrue— gratifi cation, instead of doing it for the creative risk and joy. You have to love the failure. You really have to go out there and be fearless, constantly questing for what haven’t we done, where haven’t we gone? "

 

" people settle for mediocre because it is safe, comfortable and feels good to them. "

 Innovation comes from a desire and a need to explore. In improvisation, people start exploring when they need to impress others or build a larger audience. When you observe a group discussing inventing a new format, inevitably within the fi rst half hour they are talking about what the audience will like, how it could be sold. So they’re not actually talking about what they want to do, say, create, explore as a creative artist but how they can be more popular and successful. Art is often a statement against something. And sometimes when things are innovated it’s in opposition to what’s there."

 

" I see improvisation as a form of theatre that creates stories. Comedy is one form of story work we can do. For me it is important to work with improvisers who have something they want to say, question, reveal. We discover a lot about ourselves through our responses to literature, art, politics, world events. "

 

" The problem with improvisation is that the very core notion of it works against it being as easily analyzed or disseminated or commodifi ed, and that’s a good thing but a bad thing. We want to keep things spontaneous and fresh, within a kind of theoretical structure that should be rigorous. The problem is that when we capture it, it has a tendency to look like people just mucking around, but that’s actually its strength. "

 

"Because people don’t understand that it’s an artifi cial form, just like drama is an artifi cial form. It’s not real life, although it can mimic real life incredibly well. Drama is a construct. Time is condensed. There are issues of dramatic action. Everyone has something to do and it’s life sped up. So that’s part of the problem: People confuse improvisation with real life. Often when they go into improvisation, they don’t really understand on any genuine level the elements of drama themselves. They don’t understand that whole idea of dramatic tension—issues of time, space, focus—all of those dramatic elements. And so they go and think “If I stand around and say some funny things and talk over other people and pull focus, then surely I must be improvising.” And in some respects they are, they’re just improvising badly. "

 

" fi lm’s fi rst efforts were not stories but documented moments. Improvisation explored story from its inception. In some ways, because it requires so little in the way of accoutrements, its birth was more like a foal that walks on the fi rst day, rather than a baby which takes months to hold up its own head. "

 

"

"Many dull people claim to have 'forgotten' their entire childhood (all those years when their thinking was 'not adult'), and their minds are like maps scrawled with 'Here Be Monsters', but their imaginations aren't dead, just frozen. Reassure them, and protect them while they are coaxed into 'forbidden areas', and a seething mass of lunatic thoughts will emerge that aren't dull in the least. The teacher has to establish such 'craziness' as a mark of sanity, so that instead of panicking, the students can 'join the club'. Laughter is a great help in making forbidden ideas so acceptable that the students have no need to snap back into numbness. The best trick I know for releasing the imagination is to persuade the students that their imaginations have nothing to do with them. 'The imagination is a huge animal with a will of its own,' I say. 'Be interested in it, but accept no responsibility. You're not its keeper. Where do ideas come from, anyway? Why should I say "I thought of it", or "I thought of an idea", as if my creativity was something more than the acceptance of gifts from an unknown source?' Ultimately students have to accept that the imagination is the true self (as William Blake knew), but it's not easy to grasp this nettle. "

 

Polgar is against conventional schooling, he says, because 'it did not make learning a beloved activity;. . . Polgar's approach to learning is, he says, that 'the pleasure of the accomplishment must be several times as much as the experience of failure.' He claims to reject blind discipline. 'I have achieved discipline,' he says, 'by kindling interest in, and love for, the subject. I believe that early childhood is not at all early in respect of learning, not even of specialization. 

 

 'dramatic action', but I would define it now as the product of 'interaction', and I'd define 'interaction' as 'a shift in the balance between two people'. No matter how much the actors leap about, or hang from trapezes, or pluck chickens, unless someone is being altered, it'll still feel as if 'nothing's happening'. - I seduced your wife this afternoon. - [Pause] Enjoy it? - [Pause] Not really. This would be an example of action if it was clear that the relationship between the characters was shifting. 

. A hero suffers in pursuit of a goal "

 

"In another scene a 'wife' said, 'I'm so glad you're home, dear, because there are strange noises coming from the basement.' Her 'husband' said, 'I keep telling you, dear, we don't have a basement!', which got a laugh, but now no one had to descend those frightening stairs. Rejecting the role of hero keeps sending the players back to square one. Players who reject the role of hero suffer the very real agony of being trapped in front of a bored audience. "

 

"Moral Decisions All stories are trivial unless they involve a moral choice, and it can be especially thrilling to watch the hero make the 'wrong' choice (for example, Jack the Giant-killer selling the cow for a handful of beans). Making a moral choice alters you, makes your character experience relief, or sadness, or despair, or whatever, so moral choices are avoided. Demanding a scene that illustrates a moral is ineffective, but asking for a scene in which one character makes a moral choice usually works. 

The spectators create a 'shadow story' that exists alongside the improvisers' story. Storytelling goes well when there's a close match between the players' stories and the spectators' shadow stories. "

 

" Hence, the improviser becomes increasingly out of step, and the onlookers have less and less interest in what happens. The players who stay within the circle seem the most original. "

 

"the players claimed that this idea was an example of being 'original' something I tell them not to be - so I explained that the spectators had laughed so much precisely because the idea was so blindingly obvious. They had been expecting a vibrator, and as granny was very old, what could be more 'in the circle' than a vibrator from the era before electricity became generally available? The spectators' imagination works within the circle, but the improviser who tries to be 'original' is doomed to work outside the circle. "

 

"Mysteries Place anything, or anyone, on a stage and the spectators will think, Why should we be interested in this? You don't need 'clever' idea to start a scene because whatever you do will be accepted as a mystery to be solved (justified). If you're pretending to climb a mountain, we'll want you to find a dead parachutist with a haversack full of money, or for God to give you some more suitable commandments. The mystery of why we should watch you 'changing a wheel' is solved when you fall in love with the stranger who stops to assist you. Start dusting an armchair, and the spectators will give you their attention as a loan (that they expect to be repaid with interest), but if you finish dusting and wave the lights down, they'll feel cheated, no matter whether you dusted to music or managed to get a few laughs. "

 

"I'll create some 'mysteries', and allow some other part of my mind to justify them."

 

""Arbitrary leaps are integrated into a coherent structure, not by searching forwards (an error that has blocked many people), but by searching backwards. 

 

"This raises the stakes and by now even I want to know what happens. Mysteries are time-bombs that are expected to detonate"

 

"If the spectators lose confidence that any mysteries will be solved, the threads that grip their attention will begin to snap, which is why it's so difficult to win them back when they've lost interest. "

 

"Start any routine, ordinary or bizarre, and the spectators will watch patiently, hoping that you will 'break' it, and they see a routine that is not broken as an introduction to a routine that will be broken. "

 

"You know Aristotle says of tragedy that it must excite fear, if it is to be good. This is true, not only of tragedy, but of many other sorts of poetry . . . You find it in very good comedy - Goethe 

Platforms The platform is the stability that precedes the chaos. For example, it's interesting to see a road casualty being shovelled into an ambulance, but it's a lot more interesting when you realize it's someone you just had lunch with. This is why Odysseus discovers the cave with the huge cheeses before he meets the Cyclops, and why Circe invites his crew to a feast before she turns them into pigs. "

 

"The improviser who does not tell stories is chained to the treadmill of always needing a 'better' joke. "

 

"Being miserable minimizes the transitions the hero will have to make when something bad happens, whereas starting positively would maximize them. If there's a choice, be positive. Eddie Murphy understood this: handcuffed and thrown into a police car, he beamed expansively and said, 'This is the nicest, cleanest police car I've ever been in!' Audiences were very responsive to this. Positive interactions can make us laugh from sheer pleasure, but don't 
assume that improvisers are being positive just because they look positive. "

 

"The terms 'positive' and 'negative' are misleading but they're the best I can come up with. Think of 'positive' as 'forward-seeking'. "

 

"A friend who played in B-movies became fascinated by status transactions: he played high to agents and directors (and they hated him); he played low and they loved him (but they didn't give him work); he matched status with them and they gave him leads in A-movies: 'Keith,' he said, 'they thought I was one of them!' And now he is. "

 

""The evidence we currently have strongly suggests that social laughter (involuntary and hard to fake) has almost nothing to do with what happens to an audience in a theatre or a comedy club. When we laugh together in a group, we are sending a signal that says: We all feel the same way about this, we are the same. It is a form of group bonding. A comedian or a comedy actor triggers the same response in a signifi cantly different way, amplifi ed by the presence of a large group of people. "

 

"The other benefi t you gets from playing the game loudly and cheerfully is that it turns off your internal censor. Pretty much everyone over the age of seven has one of these—the little mechanism inside your head that likes to check what you say before you say it. A very useful thing to have: It stops you from swearing in front of your grandmother. (If I think I can get away with it, or want to lower inhibitions and shake up a starchy group, I’ll say “stops you saying ‘fuck’ in front of your grandmother.”) But when improvising, it can be a nuisance, so it’s helpful to discover mechanisms which will not disable it, but temporarily silence it. If your attitude is one of cheerfulness and delight, you will fool your censor into thinking that there’s nothing here that needs checking. "

 

Many adults have simply stopped being creative, so those muscles are tired and atrophied. The imagination is like a scared animal—it needs cosseting and encouraging. One negative remark—even from oneself !—is enough to cause it to shut down altogether. On the other hand, one positive remark—yes, even from oneself !—is enough to open the valve a little wider and let a torrent of ideas fl ood out. Think about how great you feel when someone tells you you’re talented—it can lift you for weeks. 

 

 

 

“We don't want to admit that we do not stand alone, that we always rely on something that transcends us, some system of ideas and powers in which we are embedded and which support us. This power is not always obvious. It need not be overtly a god or openly a stronger person, but it can be the power of an all-absorbing activity, a passion, a dedication to a game, a way of life, that like a comfortable web keeps a person buoyed up and ignorant of himself, of the fact that he does not rest on his own center. All of us are driven to be supported in a self-forgetful way, ignorant of what energies we really draw on, of the kind of lie we have fashioned in order to live securely and serenely. Augustine was a master analyst of this, as were Kierkegaard, Scheler, and Tillich in our day. They saw that man could strut and boast all he wanted, but that he really drew his "courage to be" from a god, a string of sexual conquests, a Big Brother, a flag, the proletariat, and the fetish of money and the size of a bank balance.” 
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

 

 

“Man must always imagine and believe in a "second" reality or a better world than the one that is given him by nature.” 

 

“Necessity with the illusion of meaning would be the highest achievement for man; but when it becomes trivial there is no sense to one’s life.” 

“Best of all, of course, religion solves the problem of death, which no living individuals can solve, no matter how they would support us. Religion, then, gives the possibility of heroic victory in freedom and solves the problem of human dignity at it highest level. The two ontological motives of the human condition are both met: the need to surrender oneself in full to the the rest of nature, to become a part of it by laying down one's whole existence to some higher meaning; and the need to expand oneself as an individual heroic personality. Finally, religion alone gives hope, because it holds open the dimension of the unknown and the unknowable, the fantastic mystery of creation that the human mind cannot even begin to approach, the possibility of a multidimensionality of spheres of existence, of heavens and possible embodiments that make a mockery of earthly logic-and in doing so, it relieves the absurdity of earthly life, all the impossible limitations and frustrations of living matter. In religious terms, to "see God" is to die, because the creature is too small and finite to be able to bear the higher meanings of creation. Religion takes one's very creatureliness, one's insignificance, and makes it a condition of hope. Full transcendence of the human condition means limitless possibility unimaginable to us.” 
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

 

“Since the main task of human life is to become heroic and transcend death, every culture must provide its members with an intricate symbolic system that is covertly religious. This means that ideological conflicts between cultures are essentially battles between immortality projects, holy wars.” 
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

“Why does man accept to live a trivial life? Because of the danger of a full horizon of experience, of course. This is the deeper motivation of philistinism, that it celebrates the triumph over possibility, over freedom. Philistinism knows its real enemy: freedom is dangerous. If you follow it too willingly it threatens to pull you into the air; if you give it up too wholly, you become a prisoner of necessity. The safest thing is to toe the mark of what is socially possible.” 

 

“But now the problem of the causa-sui project of the genius. In the normal Oedipal project the person internalizes the parents and the superego they embody, that is, the culture at large. But the genius cannot do this because his project is unique; it cannot be filled up by the parents or the culture. It is created specifically by a renunciation of the parents, a renunciation of what they represent and even of their own concrete persons-at least in fantasy-as there doesn't seem to be anything in them that has caused the genius. Here we see whence the genius gets his extra burden of guilt: he has renounced the father both spiritually and physically. This act gives him extra anxiety because now he is vulnerable in his turn, as he has no one to stand on. He is alone in his freedom. Guilt is a function of fear, as Rank said.” 

 

 

"“The defenses that form a person’s character support a grand illusion, and when we grasp this we can understand the full drivenness of man. He is driven away from himself, from self-knowledge, self-reflection. He is driven toward things that support the lie of his character, his automatic equanimity. But he is also drawn precisely toward those things that make him anxious, as a way of skirting them masterfully, testing himself against them, controlling them by defying them. As Kierkegaard taught us, anxiety lures us on, becomes the spur to much of our energetic activity: we flirt with our own growth, but also dishonestly. This explains much of the friction in our lives. We enter symbiotic relationships in order to get the security we need, in order to get relief from our anxieties, our aloneness and helplessness; but these relationships also bind us, they enslave us even further because they support the lie we have fashioned. So we strain against them in order to be more free. The irony is that we do this straining uncritically, in a struggle within our own armor, as it were; and so we increase our drivenness, the second-hand quality of our struggle for freedom. Even in our flirtations with anxiety we are unconscious of our motives. We seek stress, we push our own limits, but we do it with our screen against despair and not with despair itself. We do it with the stock market, with sports cars, with atomic missiles, with the success ladder in the corporation or the competition in the university. We do it in the prison of a dialogue with our own little family, by marrying against their wishes or choosing a way of life because they frown on it, and so on. Hence the complicated and second-hand quality of our entire drivenness. Even in our passions we are nursery children playing with toys that represent the real world. Even when these toys crash and cost us our lives or our sanity, we are cheated of the consolation that we were in the real world instead of the playpen of our fantasies. We still did not meet our doom on our own manly terms, in contest with objective reality. It is fateful and ironic how the lie we need in order to live dooms us to a life that is never really ours.” 
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death"

 

“He was my date. I got a massage, and I must have taken five aspirins to calm myself down. In the restaurant, I saw him from across the room, and I got such butterflies in my stomach and such a thing that went from head to toe. He had like a halo around his head of stars to me. He projected something I have never seen in my life…. when I’m with him I’m in awe, and I don’t know why I can’t snap out of it…. I can’t think. He’s so fascinating….” 

“Man's best efforts seem utterly fallible without appeal to something higher for justification, some conceptual support for the meaning of one's life from a transcendental dimension of some kind. As this belief has to absorb man's basic terror, it cannot be merely abstract but must be rooted in the emotions, in an inner feeling that one is secure in something stronger, larger, more important than one's own strength and life. It is as though one were to say: "My life pulse ebbs, I fade away into oblivion, but "God" (or "It) remains, even grows more glorious with and through my living sacrifice." At least, this feeling is belief at its most effective for the individual.” 

 

“But now the rub for man. If sex is a fulfillment of his role as an animal in the species, it reminds him that he is nothing himself but a link in the chain of being, exchangeable with any other and completely expendable in himself. Sex represents, then, species consciousness and, as such, the defeat of individuality, of personality. But it is just this personality that man wants to develop: the idea of himself as a special cosmic hero with special gifts for the universe. He doesn't want to be a mere fornicating animal like any other-this is not a truly human meaning, a truly distinctive contribution to world life. From the very beginning, then, the sexual act represents a double negation: by physical death and of distinctive personal gifts. This point is crucial because it explains why sexual taboos have been at the heart of human society since the very beginning. They affirm the triumph of human personality over animal sameness. With the complex codes for sexual self-denial, man was able to impose the cultural map for personal immortality over the animal body. He brought sexual taboos into being because he needed to triumph over the body, and he sacrificed the pleasures of the body to the highest pleasure of all: self-perpetuation as a spiritual being through all eternity. This is the substitution that Roheim was really describing when he made his penetrating observation on the Australian aborigines: "The repression and sublimation of the primal scene is at the bottom of totemistic ritual and religion," that is, the denial of the body as the transmitter of peculiarly human life.” 
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

This, after all is said and done, is the only real problem of life, the only worthwhile occupation preoccupation of man: What is one's true talent, his secret gift, his authentic vocation? In what way is one truly unique, and how can he express this uniqueness, give it form, dedicate it to something beyond himself? How can the person take his private inner being, the great mystery that he feels at the heart of himself, his emotions, his yearnings, and use them to live more distinctively, to enrich both himself and mankind with the peculiar quality of his talent? In adolescence, most of us throb with this dilemma, expressing it either with words and thoughts or with simple numb pain and longing. But usually life suck us up into standardized activities. The social hero-system into which we are born marks out paths for our heroism, paths to which we conform, to which we shape ourselves so that we can please others, become what they expect us to be. And instead of working our inner secret we gradually cover it over and forget it, while we become purely external men, playing successfully the standardized hero-game into which we happen to fall by accident, by family connection, by reflex patriotism, ro by the simple need to eat and the urge to procreate.” 
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

 

“How does one transcend himself; how does he open himself to new possibility? By realizing the truth of his situation, by dispelling the lie of his character, by breaking his spirit out of its conditioned prison. The enemy, for Kierkegaard as for Freud, is the Oedipus complex. The child has built up strategies and techniques for keeping his self-esteem in the face of the terror of his situation. These techniques become an armor that hold the person prisoner. The very defenses that he needs in order to move about with self-confidence and self-esteem become his life-long trap. In order to transcend himself he must break down that which he needs in order to live. Like Lear he must throw off all his "cultural lendings" and stand naked in the storm of life. Kierkegaard had no illusions about man's urge to freedom. He knew how comfortable people were inside the prison of their character defenses. Like many prisoners they are comfortable in their limited and protected routines, and the idea of a parole into the wide world of chance, accident, and choice terrifies them. We have only to glance back at Kierkegaard's confession in the epigraph to this chapter to see why. In the prison of one's character one can pretend and feel that he is somebody, that the world is manageable, that there is a reason for one's life, a ready justification for one's action. To live automatically and uncritically is to be assured of at least a minimum share of the programmed cultural heroics-what we might call "prison heroism": the smugness of the insiders who "know.” 
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

“And this brings us to our final type of man: the one who asserts himself out of defiance of his own weakness, who tries to be a god unto himself, the master of his fate, a self-created man. He will not be merely the pawn of others, of society; he will not be a passive sufferer and secret dreamer, nursing his own inner flame in oblivion. He will plunge into life,

into the distractions of great undertakings, he will become a restless spirit...which wants to forget...Or he will seek forgetfulness in sensuality, perhaps in debauchery....

At its extreme, defiant self-creation can become demonic, a passion which Kierkegaard calls "demoniac rage," an attack on all of life for what it has dared to do to one, a revolt against existence itself.” 
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

 

“The key to the creative type is that he is separated out of the common pool of shared meanings. There is something in his life experience that makes him take in the world as a problem; as a result he has to make personal sense out of it. This holds true for all creative people to a greater or lesser extent, but it is especially obvious with the artist. Existence becomes a problem that needs an ideal answer; but when you no longer accept the collective solution to the problem of existence, then you must fashion your own. The work of art is, then, the ideal answer of the creative type to the problem of existence as he takes it in-not only the existence of the external world, but especially his own: who he is as a painfully separate person with nothing shared to lean on. He has to answer to the burden of his extreme individuation, his so painful isolation. He wants to know how to earn immortality as a result of his own unique gifts. His creative work is at the same time the expression of his heroism and the justification of it. It is his "private religion"-as Rank put it. Its uniqueness gives him personal immortality; it is his own "beyond" and not that of others.” 
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

@Enrico_sw  Have you heard/read of the 1973 book "The Denial of Death"?  It may interest you:

 

https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/97366-the-denial-of-death

 

Becker won the Pulitzer Prize for the book and shortly died. 

 

I finished studying it and find it an important continuation of the ideas of Otto Rank, Kant, Kierkegaard, Campbell, and Fromm and synthesis of psychology/anthropology/philosophy.  It's a powerful theory and one that I personally agree with.  The book does the service of organizing it.  The main flaws of is that half of the book is about out-of date Freudian psychoanalysis.  The immortality  psychology and its insights are the best and most of it can be gathered in the goodreads quotes.  These insights were eventually organized as "terror management theory" in academic psychology.

 

His sequel to the study is "Escape from Evil" which is next on my list.  This text, half finished- was his analysis of mass cultural behavior circling around the fear of death and the quest for immortality.   Beyond that there is a modern (around 2016) analysis of Becker's ideas called "Worm at the Core" by a few social psychologists of the Ernest Becker Foundation which gathers 30 years of studies in support of the "Terror management theory".