Angel in Armor

Review by Herbert L Calhoun (on Amazon): The metaphor "Angel in Armor" refers to Becker's interpretation of "man's being" and "strivings" as always being in a "defensive crouch" living inside his own "protective ego covering, " a self-made shell (cocoon) built of fear, a (national security) ego fortress, as it were, that both insulates him from his world and at the same time robs that world of all but "fetishized" and empty collateral meanings. In the final analysis, the world man has created for himself, in many ways is but a "spin-off' from his internal fears (his angels in armor) that he spends most of his waking hours over-protecting.

Since this kind of protective and defensive behavior is nowhere better exhibited than in his psychosexual behavior, this leads Becker to use sexual perversions as a platform to make the much larger point about the "fetishization" and "sexualization" of most of man's meanings. He shows how this predilection towards "fetishization" is reflected in everything that man does: in his art as well as in everyday life, and uses Kafka, and the movie "The Pawnbroker," among others as "object examples."

As in his other books, this too is a gentle, almost oblique attack on Freud's very limited sexual theories -- being "hemmed in" as they are by (according to Becker) a mis-reading of the meaning of the Oedipal complex, and all the ensuing mis-firings that resulted. Thus, in a real sense, the book attempts to make a "mid-course correction" to Freud's wrong turn at an important fork in the road of psychology.

Although Becker concludes that the existential phenomenologists were the ones that got it right: that fetishism is not merely a narrow aspect of psychosexual functioning and development, but part of a whole life style, "a special kind of consciousness" as he put it, Becker nevertheless seems reluctant to give the French full credit for having gotten it right.

As is usual for Becker, who always takes the broader perspective on all of the problems of man (no matter how small those problems may seem to be), his writings require the setting up of the correct psychological, social psychological and philosophical machinery and frameworks to place his points in their larger contexts. That is the beauty of his writings: He always leaves the readers with a lot more than he ever intended to convey. Becker is a true "heavyweight," and has the intellectual arena all to himself.