DIALOGUE ON ANXIETY
155
point to violate the confidences of private analysis.) When that was
cleared up, there was a release of energies such as he had never known.
He became himself; or, rather, he became a self that he had been
capable of becoming.
H: I would not deny the existence of empirical obstacles (of
whatever kind) to the achievement of authenticity. But it wac; neither
my interest nor my province to consider these. I sought to analyze the
phenomenological structures of authenticity
as achieved.
So I would
ask, in the case of your patient: what was the quality of his life once
he began to live authentically? Did not the structure of his conscious–
ness become just that resolute pursuit of the project in the face of
death that I have described in detail in my writings?
F: I rather think he thought a good deal less of death. Frankly
speaking, I find these structures of consciousness you talk of entirely
too formalistic to concern me-unless, of course, I can relate them
to function; that is, precisely to that world of everyday behavior from
which you would rescue man. It seems to me we function better
when we forget about death than when we are conscious of it at
every moment. The scientist, when he becomes lost in a problem,
may forget that he is mortal and proceed till death cuts short his
investigations.
H: Ah, the existence of the scientist is a subject that would
take us too far afield. His is a quite specialized existence.
F: Well then, let us enter the more neurotic world of the
artist,
if
you prefer. May I cite the famous passage on the death of
Bergotte in Marcel Proust's
Remembrance of Things Past?
Proust
represents the writer as dedicated to certain artistic obligations which
seem to belie the fact that he is mortal. He appears to me to go a
little too far, it is true, when he seems willing to accept the writer's
perception of these obligations as evidence for immortality. On the
other hand, he does say that it is "as if" these obligations came to us
from another world. I prefer to hold to this "as if" since it permits
me to incorporate the whole passage into my own
Weltanschauung.
The artist, Proust would then be saying, is so possessed by this obli–
gation to his art that in giving himself to the practice of it he has
to forget that he
is
mortal. It
is
as if he had to abandon entirely
the thought that death may cut short his efforts when he gives himself
completely to the task of making the work right.
H:
But might not I, on the other hand, describe this as just
the complete artistic resoluteness in the face of death?
F: One lives authentically (you see, I am trying to accom-
