Terror Management Theory: The Mechanics Beneath Belief

Episode 9 — The Creative Mind & Mortality Series

There’s a moment in God Shuffled His Feet by Crash Test Dummies that lingers longer than it should.

It’s not dramatic. Nothing collapses. No revelation arrives. People sit in the shade with God, drinking wine, asking questions about death. What happens to the body? What carries forward? What remains? The questions are direct, almost childlike in their clarity.

And then something subtle shifts.

God answers with a story that doesn’t resolve. A boy with blue hair. It has the structure of a parable, but none of the closure. The meaning doesn’t land. It doesn’t return the listener to coherence. The people hesitate. They try to interpret. Someone finally asks what everyone is thinking: was that a parable or a joke?

God doesn’t answer.

He shuffles his feet.

What the song captures, almost inadvertently, is a moment of instability. Not the collapse of meaning, but a failure of resolution. The structure that is supposed to organize reality is still present, but it doesn’t quite hold. It hesitates.

That hesitation becomes a useful entry point into Terror Management Theory.

If Ernest Becker identified the central problem—the human awareness of death and the need to buffer it through culture—TMT attempts to observe what happens when that buffer is disturbed. It moves from philosophical diagnosis to experimental inquiry, asking whether mortality awareness can be measured in behavior.

The answer, across decades of research, appears to be yes.

TMT introduced the concept of mortality salience: the moment when death enters awareness, whether consciously or not. What is striking is how little it takes. A brief prompt asking someone to reflect on their own death. A passing image. A symbolic cue. The trigger can be minimal, almost incidental.

And yet, the effects are consistent.

When mortality is made salient, people do not typically report fear. There is no overt sense of panic. Instead, what emerges is a tightening. Worldviews become more rigid. Beliefs feel more certain. Cultural symbols take on increased emotional weight. Individuals show stronger preference for those who share their values and more hostility toward those who do not.

These are not random reactions. They follow a pattern.

Worldview defense intensifies. In-group loyalty strengthens. Out-group rejection increases. Self-esteem becomes more urgently pursued. What appears on the surface as conviction or moral clarity may, at least in part, be functioning as a buffer against existential threat (Solomon et al., 2015).

In this sense, culture operates less as a passive inheritance and more as an active defense system. It provides symbolic continuity, a way to feel that one’s life participates in something enduring. Becker described this as a “symbolic hero system,” a structure that allows individuals to experience significance in the face of finitude.

TMT shows how reactive that system can become when it is pressured.

What the laboratory captures, however, is primarily what happens after the disturbance. The worldview tightens. The armor is reinforced. The system re-stabilizes.

What the song offers is something slightly different.

It lingers in the moment before that re-stabilization fully takes hold.

The people in the song do not immediately defend. They hesitate. They attempt to interpret. They search for footing. The question—parable or joke—functions as an effort to restore structure, to reclassify ambiguity into something manageable. But for a brief moment, that effort does not succeed.

They remain in the gap.

This is a psychologically narrow space. One that is typically short-lived. The TMT literature would suggest that the system does not remain open for long. The need for coherence is too strong. The pressure of mortality too persistent.

And yet, that moment of hesitation may be worth examining more closely.

If worldview defense is a reflexive response to mortality awareness, then the question becomes whether it is possible to encounter that awareness without immediately reinforcing the structures that contain it. Not to eliminate defense, which is likely neither possible nor desirable, but to notice its activation. To recognize the moment when belief tightens, when identity hardens, when meaning is being secured rather than explored.

This is where the conversation begins to move beyond TMT.

The theory is precise in its observations, but it is limited in scope. It can demonstrate that mortality awareness shapes behavior. It can map the patterns of defense. But it does not fully address what it means to live with that awareness in a sustained way. It does not ask whether there are modes of engagement that are not primarily defensive.

That question opens into creative practice.

Art, at least in its more honest forms, does not always resolve tension. It does not necessarily restore coherence. It can hold ambiguity longer than most psychological systems are comfortable with. It can remain in that space where meaning has not yet stabilized, where the answer does not arrive cleanly.

In that sense, the hesitation in the song is not merely a failure of explanation. It is a condition.

A threshold.

The place where the worldview does not fully protect but has not yet been reinforced. The place where mortality is present, but not entirely covered over.

TMT helps us understand why that space is difficult to inhabit.

The question that follows is whether it is also where something generative begins.

To Buffer or Not to Buffer?

Why Not Just Buffer?

Buffering is the psychological and cultural process that regulates our awareness of death, embedding it within beliefs, identities, and meanings that make it tolerable enough to live and function. Most of us do this constantly, automatically, and without knowing it. The question worth sitting with is not whether buffering happens, but what it costs, and whether there is anything worth preserving on the other side of it.

Why not simply buffer and numb out to the reality of mortality? If it keeps us functional, stable, even relatively content, why not leave it in place?

One answer is pragmatic: in many cases, we probably do need some degree of numbing. Becker, Zapffe, and the Terror Management theorists who followed them are fairly clear on this. Zapffe, the Norwegian philosopher whose work predates and in some ways anticipates Becker's, argued that human consciousness is biologically overbuilt for survival. In "The Last Messiah" (1933), he wrote that we are the only creatures who can foresee our own deaths, and that this foresight is not a gift but a burden we spend most of our lives managing through what he called anchoring: attaching ourselves to fixed values, identities, and purposes that hold the abyss at a manageable distance. A fully unfiltered awareness of mortality is not something most people can sustain without consequence. The real question, then, is not whether buffering exists, but how much of it we rely on, and at what cost.

The argument for remaining conscious, at least intermittently, has less to do with moral superiority and more to do with what becomes available when the buffer loosens. When mortality is not fully suppressed, certain patterns become visible: the contingency of one's worldview, the constructed nature of identity, the fragility of meaning. That recognition can be destabilizing, but it can also open a different kind of responsiveness.

From one angle, this is about accuracy. You see more of what is actually structuring your experience rather than mistaking the structure for reality itself. That doesn't dissolve the structure, but it introduces a degree of reflexivity. You are not only inside it; you are also aware of being inside it.

From another angle, it shifts the register of creative work. If anxiety is only buffered, it tends to get displaced into symbolic systems that reinforce the existing worldview. If it is metabolized, even partially, it can move through the work differently, less as defense and more as material. That is where the distinction between buffering and processing becomes meaningful. It is not that one eliminates anxiety while the other doesn't. It is that one reorganizes how anxiety circulates. Rank made a related observation in Art and Artist (1932), arguing that the creative act is never simply a resolution of anxiety but a repeated negotiation with it, one that can either fortify the existing character structure or, in rarer cases, begin to transform it.

There is also an ethical dimension, and it is sharper than it might first appear. In Escape from Evil (1975), Becker argues that the same defensive structures which protect the individual from death anxiety can, under pressure, harden into aggression toward those who embody a different answer to the problem of mortality. We don't buffer privately alone; we buffer collectively, and we tend to protect those buffers by marginalizing or harming whoever threatens them. Greater consciousness doesn't automatically dissolve this dynamic, but it does make it harder to participate in unconsciously. You begin to see the mechanism, and seeing it introduces at least the possibility of refusal.

At the same time, there is no guarantee of relief or clarity. In some cases, increased awareness simply intensifies the tension. That is why many traditions, philosophical and religious alike, have treated this not as something to be exposed but contained. The Stoics practiced memento mori as a disciplined, bounded form of mortality awareness, not an invitation to sustained exposure (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, c. 161–180 CE). The point was regulation, not immersion.

What Does a Fully Unbuffered Life Actually Suffer?

If you take the idea seriously, "fully unbuffered" is not just more awareness. It is a qualitative shift in how experience is organized.

At the psychological level, the first consequence is overwhelm, not in a vague sense but something closer to what Becker describes in The Denial of Death (1973) as the terror that symbolic systems exist to manage. Without the usual filters, mortality is no longer abstract or deferred. It becomes immediate, pervasive, and difficult to bracket. The ordinary scaffolding that keeps experience coherent begins to loosen, and what follows can register as acute anxiety or panic.

Cognitively, meaning itself begins to destabilize. If cultural narratives, identities, and purposes are seen through completely, they may lose their binding force, not because they are simply false but because their constructed nature is no longer hidden. The risk is not just doubt. It is a kind of flattening, where distinctions between what matters and what doesn't become harder to sustain. That can slide toward nihilism or toward a collapse of motivational structure. Yalom describes something like this in Existential Psychotherapy (1980), noting that confrontations with mortality, when uncontained, can produce not liberation but a disorienting loss of the ordinary purposes that structure daily life.

Functionally, this matters. Action depends on a certain degree of selective blindness. You go to work, make plans, take risks, invest in relationships, all under conditions where death is backgrounded. If it moves fully into the foreground, it can interrupt those processes. Why build, strive, or commit if the endpoint is not just known but constantly present? Some people might still act, but the basis for action shifts, and often weakens.

There is also a social cost. Shared worldviews are not only individual defenses; they are collective agreements, what TMT researchers Greenberg, Pyszczynski, and Solomon (1986) describe as culturally constructed realities that function precisely because their members treat them as given rather than chosen. When one person steps too far outside them, communication strains. You begin to see the rules of the game while others are still playing it as if it were simply the world. That produces a particular kind of isolation, not dramatic, not always chosen, but persistent.

At the extreme, what full unbuffering describes starts to resemble states that clinical psychology would classify as pathological: severe anxiety disorders, depersonalization, certain forms of existential depression. That does not mean the perception is wrong. But it does suggest that the human system is not built to sustain that level of exposure continuously.

Which is why the metaphor of a dimmer switch is more useful than an on/off toggle. It implies regulation rather than elimination, a system that allows glimpses, moments where the structure thins and something more fundamental shows through, before reconstituting itself so that life can continue. The question is not how to remove the buffer entirely. It is how to move along that spectrum without collapsing; how to see more, at intervals, and still remain capable of living, acting, and making. That is the territory this work tries to stay inside, not because it is comfortable, but because it is honest, and because something that might be called clarity, or at least a less mediated relationship to being alive, waits on the other side of looking.

References
Aurelius, M. (2002). Meditations (G. Hays, Trans.). Modern Library. (Original work written c. 161–180 CE)

Becker, E. (1973). The denial of death. Free Press.

Becker, E. (1975). Escape from evil. Free Press.

Greenberg, J., Pyszczynski, T., & Solomon, S. (1986). The causes and consequences of a need for self-esteem: A terror management theory. In R. F. Baumeister (Ed.), Public self and private self (pp. 189–212). Springer.

Rank, O. (1932). Art and artist: Creative urge and personality development (C. F. Atkinson, Trans.). Alfred A. Knopf.

Yalom, I. D. (1980). Existential psychotherapy. Basic Books.

Zapffe, P. W. (1933). The last messiah (G. R. Tangenes, Trans.). Philosophy Now, 45, 21–24. (Original work published 1933)

Worldviews: The Stories That Hold Us Together

The Creative Mind & Mortality Podcast – Season 1, Episode 8

There’s a question sitting underneath everything we do that most of us never ask directly:

Why do we care that our lives mean something?

Not casually. Not in the self-help sense. I mean structurally. Why does that pressure exist at all? Why does it feel like our lives need to count for something?

Other animals don’t seem burdened by this. They exist, they act, and that’s enough. Human beings, though, seem incapable of leaving the question alone. Something in us insists on meaning. Something in us refuses a purely biological life (Becker, 1973).

This is where Ernest Becker becomes difficult to avoid.

The Problem Beneath the Story

Becker’s starting point is deceptively simple. Human beings exist in a tension that doesn’t resolve.

On one side, we are biological organisms. Fragile, finite, and exposed to contingency.

On the other, we are symbolic creatures. We imagine, create, and construct systems of meaning that extend far beyond our physical limits.

The problem is not just that we die. It’s that we know we’re going to die while simultaneously experiencing ourselves as capable of significance. That contradiction produces what Becker describes as a fundamental condition of terror, or at least the potential for it (Becker, 1973).

Left unmediated, that awareness would be destabilizing. It would make ordinary life difficult, if not impossible.

So we don’t live there.

We build something instead.

Worldviews as Psychological Structure

A worldview is often treated as an intellectual position, but that misses its function. It is less about belief and more about orientation.

It answers questions most of us never consciously formulate:

Where did I come from?
What matters?
Who am I in relation to others?
What remains when I’m gone?

These are not abstract problems. They are stabilizing mechanisms.

Becker’s claim, which aligns in interesting ways with Berger’s sociology of knowledge, is that these systems are not optional. They are required for functioning. Without them, the individual confronts what Berger later calls the “precariousness” of socially constructed reality (Berger, 1967/1990; Shilling, 2012).

If culture is the armor, then worldviews are the structure that holds it together.

The Defiant Creation of Meaning

Faced with mortality, human beings don’t simply retreat. They respond.

They create.

What Becker calls a “defiant creation of meaning” is the attempt to construct a life that feels significant despite its finitude (Becker, 1973).

This is visible everywhere:

In artistic production
In family life
In career ambition
In political identity
In religious commitment

Different forms, same underlying structure.

You align yourself with a system of value and participate in projects that extend beyond your individual lifespan. Becker names these immortality projects.

The aim is not literal immortality, but symbolic continuity. A way of mattering that outlasts the body.

The Role of “Necessary Illusions”

Becker’s use of the term illusion can be misleading if taken too literally.

He is not arguing that meaning is trivial or disposable. He is arguing that it is constructed. And more importantly, that it is necessary.

These “necessary lies,” as he sometimes calls them, are not moral failures. They are psychological conditions of stability. Without them, individuals would struggle to function within the awareness of their own impermanence (Becker, 1973).

This aligns with broader sociological claims that meaning systems must appear stable in order to be lived as real, even if they are, at base, contingent (Turner, 1992; Shilling, 2012).

The issue, then, is not illusion itself.

It’s mistaking a particular construction for an ultimate truth and defending it accordingly.

Culture as a Shared Project

At the collective level, these dynamics scale.

Culture can be understood as a coordinated system of meaning that allows individuals to participate in shared immortality projects. It distributes identity, value, and purpose across a population.

We don’t invent meaning in isolation. We inherit it.

We step into roles that already exist:

Artist
Parent
Worker
Believer
Citizen

These roles do more than describe behavior. They situate us within a broader symbolic structure that promises continuity.

In this sense, culture itself can be read as a response to mortality. A collective effort to stabilize meaning in the face of impermanence (Becker, 1973).

The Problem of Seeing Through It

There’s a moment, especially in modernity, where the structure becomes visible.

You begin to see that meaning is constructed. That identities are inherited. That systems of value are contingent.

At first, this can feel like clarity.

But Becker anticipates the consequence. If you become too good at seeing through the structure, you risk undermining the very conditions that allow meaning to function.

This tension is not just philosophical. It is psychological.

We require meaning, even if we recognize its constructed nature.

The task is not to eliminate illusion, but to relate to it consciously. To use it without being fully absorbed by it.

That balance is unstable.

Where This Leaves Us

Becker’s work doesn’t remove meaning. It relocates it.

Meaning is not guaranteed by the structure of the universe. It is generated in response to the problem of mortality.

And that reframing matters.

It suggests that what we create in the face of death is not trivial. It is, in some sense, the most human thing we do.

So the question shifts.

Not whether meaning is “real.”

But what kind of meaning we are willing to participate in.

That question remains open.

And it likely always will.

References

Becker, E. (1973). The denial of death. Free Press.

Berger, P. L. (1990). The sacred canopy: Elements of a sociological theory of religion (Original work published 1967). Anchor Books.

Shilling, C. (2012). The body and social theory (3rd ed.). Sage.

Turner, B. S. (1992). Regulating bodies: Essays in medical sociology. Routledge.

Quirke, J. P. (2014). Death and the persistence of meaning (Master’s thesis, University of Limerick).

The Creative Mind & Mortality Podcast - S1 E7: Culture As Armor

Culture as Armor: The Stories That Hold Us Together

I start this with a song.

An Old Norse piece about Skaði, a goddess who belongs to the mountains, to cold, and to distance. There’s no softness in that world. No attempt to hide what life is. Death is not pushed to the edges. It sits in the open, part of the terrain itself.

What hits me isn’t just the imagery. It’s the orientation.

In that world, there is no illusion that life is safe or permanent. And yet, it is still livable. Not because the conditions are resolved, but because they are accepted as given. Skaði doesn’t transcend that reality. She inhabits it.

That’s what interests me.

Because what we’re looking at there isn’t just mythology. It’s a worldview. A structure that allows a human being to stand inside existence without collapsing under it.

Every culture does this in its own way.

Some create warmth. They promise continuity, legacy, an afterlife, a sense that something of us endures. Others, like the world Skaði moves through, don’t offer that same kind of comfort. They hold beauty and severity in the same frame. They don’t deny death. They integrate it.

This is where Ernest Becker becomes difficult to ignore.

Becker argued that human beings are unique in one unsettling way. We know we are going to die. Not abstractly, not as a distant possibility, but as a certainty. And that awareness creates a psychological problem that the mind was never designed to solve.

We cannot live every day with the full weight of that knowledge. If we did, it would overwhelm us. The mind, at a basic level, has to regulate it. It has to soften the impact, turn the volume down just enough so that we can function.

But even that isn’t enough.

Because once the question is there—once we know that our lives are temporary—it doesn’t just disappear. It transforms into something else.

If we are going to die, then why live at all?

Why build anything? Why care? Why create meaning in a world where everything is passing?

Becker’s answer is as simple as it is unsettling. Culture exists because we need it to.

We tend to think of culture as something added onto life. Art, music, religion, tradition. Things that make life richer, more interesting, more expressive.

Becker flips that entirely.

Culture is not decoration. It is structure. It is a psychological shelter that allows human beings to live in the presence of death without being paralyzed by it (Becker, 1973).

It does this in a few essential ways.

First, it gives us meaning. It organizes experience so that life doesn’t feel random or chaotic. It tells us what matters and what doesn’t.

Second, it gives us a sense of heroism. Not necessarily in the dramatic sense, but in the quieter belief that our lives count for something, that we are participating in something larger than ourselves.

And third, it gives us continuity. A way of extending ourselves beyond our biological limits. Through family, religion, nation, art, legacy, history. Through the idea that something of us will persist.

Becker called this symbolic immortality.

And once you begin to see culture this way, a lot of human behavior starts to come into focus.

You start to understand why people defend their beliefs so intensely. Why challenges to religion, politics, identity, or tradition can feel deeply personal. Why disagreement escalates so quickly into conflict.

Because what is being threatened isn’t just an idea.

It’s the structure that holds the fear of death at bay.

When a worldview destabilizes, it doesn’t register as a simple intellectual disagreement. It feels like something much closer to survival. If the story that gives your life meaning begins to fall apart, the anxiety underneath it doesn’t stay contained.

It returns.

This is one of the tensions running through Becker’s work. Culture is what allows us to create beauty, art, love, and community. But it is also what divides us. The same structures that hold us together can set us against one another.

The armor protects. It also hardens.

And that raises a question Becker leaves open but doesn’t fully resolve.

What happens when the armor starts to crack?

What happens when mortality awareness breaks through, despite the structures we’ve built to contain it?

This is where Becker’s work moves toward what later became Terror Management Theory, where researchers began to study how people respond when they are reminded of their own mortality. The findings are consistent. When death becomes salient, people tend to cling more tightly to their existing worldviews, defend them more aggressively, and react more strongly to anything that threatens them (Greenberg, Pyszczynski, & Solomon, 1986).

In other words, the armor tightens under pressure.

But that isn’t the only possible response.

And this is where my own work begins to diverge slightly from Becker.

If culture is armor, then the question isn’t just how it protects us. It’s whether we can relate to that protection differently. Whether there are ways of engaging mortality that don’t rely entirely on defense.

Artists, at least at times, seem to move in that direction. Not by rejecting culture, but by exposing its limits. By stepping into spaces where meaning is less stable, where the usual structures don’t fully hold, and creating something from within that uncertainty.

Not resolution. Not escape.

But form.

Something that can carry the tension without immediately closing it down.

When I think back to the world of Skaði, that’s what I see.

Not a solution to death, but a way of standing inside it.

And maybe that’s the deeper question underneath all of this.

Not how we avoid the awareness of death, or how we defend against it, but how we live with it in a way that remains open, creative, and, at least at times, honest.

References

Becker, E. (1973). The denial of death. Free Press.

Greenberg, J., Pyszczynski, T., & Solomon, S. (1986). The causes and consequences of a need for self-esteem: A terror management theory. In R. F. Baumeister (Ed.), Public self and private self (pp. 189–212). Springer.

Holding the Unresolvable: Mortality and Form in a Kallitype Portrait

I made this image over the weekend. A friend, a fellow doctoral student, sitting in front of the camera. Bare-chested. Two skulls held against the torso, or resting there, or emerging from it. The preposition doesn’t quite hold, which is part of the point.

What you see is simple. What the image is doing is not.

I've been thinking for years about where images actually come from, not technically but psychologically. What pressures give rise to them. What gets carried into the frame, intended or not. This portrait didn't begin as a concept about mortality. It began as a feeling I've been circling a long time: that death isn't something we encounter occasionally, from a safe distance, but something we are already inside of. Always. The awareness held at arm's length. Functional, buffered, but never fully absent.

Ernest Becker called this the negotiated space of human existence—knowing, but not fully feeling (Becker, 1973). Culture itself, he argued, is largely a structure built to manage what we can't afford to fully face. We live between awareness and denial, close enough to the fact of mortality to be shaped by it and far enough to keep moving. This image tries to make that band visible. Not as argument. As form.

The Body as Pressure

The first decision was compositional: a frontal, centered figure. The kind of formal stability that early photographic portraiture used to convey dignity, legibility, and presence. That stability matters here because it sets up what follows.

Then the disruption.

The skulls aren't beside the body or held out for display. They're not props arranged for symbolic effect. They hover in the uncertain space between inside and outside the torso—not quite organs, not quite objects. The ambiguity is the point. If they were clearly internal, the image would collapse into anatomy. If they were clearly external, it would resolve too quickly into symbol. What I wanted was something less settled, something closer to what Becker describes as the ongoing, never-quite-finished negotiation between awareness and denial. Death not repressed, but not integrated either. Present, but unstable.

What I didn't anticipate until I saw the finished print was the gaze.

He isn't looking at the camera. He's looking past it, slightly—not evasively, but as if what he's attending to exists just outside the frame. That deflection changes the image's register entirely. It doesn't become a confrontation between viewer and subject. It becomes something more like shared witness: two figures—the one in the frame and the one looking at it—both oriented toward something that isn't fully visible. Something that hasn't arrived yet, or hasn't been named.

Trace, Not Symbol

There's always a risk with the skull. It's one of the most overdetermined objects in the history of art. From vanitas painting forward, it carries a ready-made meaning: mortality, transience, and memento mori.

That's not what I'm after. Or at least, not that way.

What I'm trying to do is shift the skull away from symbol and toward trace. The distinction matters. A symbol points toward meaning. A trace is the residue of a process already underway. Not a sign placed onto the surface to indicate death, but something more like the visible remains of a metabolic struggle that hasn't resolved.

In the framework I've been developing around rupture—what I'm calling the Rupture Field—this image sits somewhere between exposure and trace. The rupture has already occurred. Mortality awareness has exceeded the capacity of ordinary denial to contain it. What remains aren't conclusions. They're fragments. Partial forms. Something that couldn't be fully metabolized and so became visible instead.

That's what these skulls feel like to me. Not imposed onto the body from outside but surfaced from within it. The pressure finding form.

The Material Is Part of the Argument

The process here isn't incidental.

Kallitype, especially gold-toned, has a tonal range that is long, compressed, and quiet. Nothing leaps forward. The image doesn't announce itself—it accrues. There's something about the way the shadows pool and the highlights hold that makes the image feel like it already belongs to another time, even as it depicts someone sitting in front of a camera in the present.

And the paper—Revere Platinum—has a weight and tooth that digital processes can't replicate. You're aware that you're holding something. That the image exists on a surface that will age, fade, and eventually fail.

Otto Rank argued that the creative act is bound up with the desire to stabilize experience against loss—to produce something that persists beyond the individual life (Rank, 1932/1989). But I want to be careful here, because I don't think that's exactly what's happening in this print. The kallitype isn't trying to outlast anyone. It's not an immortality project in Rank's sense.

It's something closer to metabolization: making the pressure of mortality awareness visible while it is still being lived. Not preservation. Not transcendence. Processing. The print as a site where the rupture is held, turned over, and examined—without being resolved.

The difference matters. Preservation seals the wound. Metabolization keeps it open long enough to learn something from it.

The Necklace

I didn't plan for the necklace to do what it does. I noticed it after the print was finished, when I was looking at the full image for the first time.

Barthes would call this the punctum—the detail that arrives uninvited and redirects the image's meaning. But what interests me methodologically is something slightly different: not that the necklace pierced me as a viewer, but that it revealed itself to me as a researcher. The practice had generated something the conceptual framework hadn't predicted. The studio was thinking.

What it introduced was a different register entirely: relation, identity, and continuity. Something cultural and personal and chosen, against all the elements in the frame that belong to no one—the anonymous skulls, the bare torso, the ambiguous dark ground. The necklace says: this is a particular person. He has a history. He is located in a world of meaning.

And then everything around it reasserts: he is also mortal.

Rank makes a distinction that I keep returning to here. Religion, he suggests, emerges from collective belief in immortality—the promise that death will be overcome. Art arises from the individual's confrontation with impermanence—the refusal of that promise, or at least the refusal to look away from it (Rank, 1932/1989). This image seems to live between those poles. The necklace carries something like religious weight—continuity, relation, belonging—while everything surrounding it insists on the mortal body.

The body is no longer singular. It's carrying multiple realities at once: biological, relational, symbolic, and mortal. Not in sequence. Simultaneously.

What the Image Knows

I want to say something about methodology, because it matters here and I don't want to leave it implicit.

This image is not an illustration of a theoretical argument. It's not Becker made visual, or Rank translated into form. If it were, the essay would be sufficient and the image redundant. What I'm claiming—and what arts-based research methodology asks us to take seriously—is that the image produces a different kind of knowledge than the writing does. Not the same knowledge in a different register. Something the writing cannot replicate without remainder.

Propositional language can describe the negotiated space between awareness and denial. It can name it, analyze it, and situate it theoretically. What it cannot do is construct one. The kallitype doesn't point toward that space. It builds an instance of it. The viewer who stays with this image long enough, who lets the tonal range accrue rather than scanning for meaning, is briefly inside the condition the writing can only describe from outside.

That's not a claim about aesthetic experience. It's an epistemological one.

Practice-led research proceeds from the assumption that making is a form of inquiry, that the studio generates knowledge the conceptual framework hasn't yet predicted, and that this excess is methodologically significant rather than incidental. The necklace is my clearest evidence. I didn't plan for it to do what it does. I didn't theorize it in advance. It arrived in the finished print as something the process had produced independently of my intentions, and it changed what the image knew. That's the practice thinking. The researcher's job, afterward, is to follow where it went.

What the image knows that this essay doesn't: what it feels like to not be met by the subject's gaze. To stand in front of a figure who is looking past you, toward something outside the frame, and to realize that you are not the recipient of a statement but a fellow witness. The essay can describe that experience. It cannot produce it. The image produces it every time, for anyone willing to look long enough.

That gap, between what the writing can say and what the image can do, is not a limitation of the research. It's the point of it.

Condition, Not Conclusion

What I notice more and more in my own work is that I'm less interested in making statements than in staging conditions. This image doesn't explain anything. It doesn't arrive at a conclusion. It doesn't argue.

It presents a situation: a person, standing there, holding themselves together. With something else present. Not named. Not integrated. Not fully metabolized.

That feels honest to me.

If Becker is right, and I believe he is, then most of life unfolds precisely in that space. Not in full awareness, and not in complete denial. In the narrow band between them, where we can continue to function without being overwhelmed by what we know. The task isn't to resolve that tension. The task is to stay inside it long enough to make something true.

That's what I was trying to do here.

Not to illustrate mortality. Not to comfort anyone, including myself.

But to make the pressure visible. To let it take form. And to see what that form had to say.

References

Barthes, R. (1980). Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (R. Howard, Trans.). Hill and Wang.

Becker, E. (1973). The Denial of Death. Free Press.

Rank, O. (1989). Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development (C. F. Atkinson, Trans.). Agathon Press. (Original work published 1932)

Arts-Based Research Methodology

What is it?
Arts-based research treats creative practice as a site of inquiry rather than just expression. The work is not an illustration of an idea—it is where the thinking happens. Through process, material, and form, it allows aspects of experience, especially those tied to uncertainty, embodiment, and mortality, to surface in ways that exceed purely analytical methods.

A Metaphor
Think of two ways to understand the ocean: One person stands on the shore with instruments, measuring waves, salinity, and depth. Another person enters in the water, swims, feels the currents, struggles, and floats.

Both are learning something real.
But they’re learning different kinds of truth.

Arts-based research is closer to the second approach.

It assumes that some forms of knowledge, especially around experience, emotion, identity, or mortality, can’t be fully grasped from the shoreline. You have to enter the medium, work through it, and let something emerge.

Research?
In arts-based research:

The making is intentional inquiry, not just expression.

The process is examined, documented, and reflected on.

The work contributes to understanding something beyond itself.

So it’s not just “I made this painting or photograph.”
It’s: What did making this painting reveal that couldn’t have been known otherwise?

The Ocotillo Brush: Toned Kallitype Print
This isn’t really a photograph of a plant. It’s a record of an encounter. The ocotillo is there, but what I’m actually seeing is the condition under which it was seen—light slowed down, translated, fixed, and then reworked through chemistry. It feels less like representation and more like a process functioning as a way of knowing.

If I approach this work as arts-based research, the question shifts for me. I’m not asking, what is this an image of? I’m asking, what does this process allow me to see or understand that I couldn’t access any other way?

The spines hold that question. They’re sharp, repetitive, almost excessive. But in print, they do not read simply as the defensive structure of a desert plant. They start to feel like interruptions—points where the flow of the image becomes caught. The light hits them, slows, translates into tone, and something in my perception hesitates. My eye doesn’t move cleanly through the frame. It catches, adjusts, and recalibrates. That hesitation feels important. It mirrors something closer to lived experience, especially in moments where awareness intensifies.

The tonal range plays a part in that. The warmth of the toned kallitype doesn’t lock the image down the way silver might. It leaves it slightly unsettled. The forms hover a bit. Nothing feels fully resolved. I’m looking at something that seems to be in the process of becoming or maybe slipping away. That ambiguity matters. It keeps the image open. It resists closure.

The edges are doing their own kind of work. The pooled chemistry, the uneven border—those aren’t mistakes to me. They’re part of the evidence. They point back to the conditions of making (proof of process). They keep the process visible. Instead of pretending the image is clean or neutral, they remind me that it was constructed, handled, and negotiated.

When I place the image inside my framework, it feels like it sits somewhere between exposure and metabolization. The ocotillo itself is already a structure built for extremity—for heat, for scarcity, for survival under pressure. But the image doesn’t turn that into something heroic. Instead, it holds the tension. The spines protect, but they also expose something fragile. They mark a limit.

What the process seems to do is metabolize that tension into form.

The wet collodion negative brings duration into it. There’s time in the image—time that requires stillness, attention, a kind of agreement between me, the subject, and the environment. The kallitype print then translates that into another material language, one that carries its own instability and history. What I end up with isn’t a window onto the world. It’s an artifact of pressure, decisions, and transformation.

The knowledge here isn’t something I can easily state outside the work. It’s embedded in the relationships—between the plant and the desert, between my body and the exposure, between the chemistry and its limits, between the image and its refusal to fully settle.

What I recognize in it is this:
Perception under pressure doesn’t simplify—it thickens.
Form, if I stay with it long enough, starts to show me where it breaks down.
And the act of making isn’t about translating what I see. It’s about staying with something long enough that it can take shape without collapsing.

The Creative Mind & Mortality Podcast—S1E6: The Beginning of Denial

In this episode of The Creative Mind & Mortality—Season 1: Glass Bones, Episode 6—I explore Chapter 3 of the book, The Beginning of Denial, and the moment in human evolution when awareness of death forced the mind to develop ways to survive its own knowledge.

Opening with the song Hold On by Alabama Shakes, this episode looks at the tension between knowing life is fragile and still needing to keep going anyway. That tension may be one of the oldest human experiences. Once early humans became aware of their mortality, they could not live with that awareness at full intensity all the time. Something had to regulate it.

Drawing on Ernest Becker, Terror Management Theory, and evolutionary psychology, this episode examines the shift from neurological denial—the mind’s built-in dimmer switch that softens existential terror—to cultural denial, the symbolic systems humans created to make life feel meaningful in the face of death.

Ritual, language, identity, myth, religion, and culture itself may all have begun as ways to metabolize the rupture caused by the realization that we will die. These structures do not eliminate mortality, but they allow us to live without being overwhelmed by it.

This episode looks at how denial did not begin as a lie, but as regulation — and how that regulation eventually became the foundation of human culture.

This series is part of my ongoing work on creativity, death anxiety, and the psychology of meaning, inspired by Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death and my book project Glass Bones: Art, Mortality, and the Human Mind.

Ocotillo, Chihuahuan Desert

I’ve started working on my Self-Directed Study (SDS) and my book, Glass Bones.

I made this negative today in the desert near my house. I’ve always loved the ocotillo. I even made a large painting (in bloom) of one that hangs in our bedroom (see below). This image comes from the place where rupture enters experience and refuses to remain abstract. In the desert, beauty and threat are inseparable. The spines of the ocotillo catch the midday sun until they appear almost skeletal, held in that narrow space where form begins to emerge under pressure. The collodion plate becomes a vessel for that exposure. What remains on the glass is not just a picture of a plant but a trace of light, time, and the awareness that everything we see is already passing.

For the technical geeks: f/8 at 6 seconds, Dallmeyer 3B lens, redeveloped negative (pyro + AgNO₃). It felt good to make this plate today. I’ll print it on a few different POP papers and see which one speaks back.

New Mexico—March 24, 2026
© Quinn Jacobson

Ocotillo in bloom—36" x 48” acrylic and mixed media. 2025

Metabolizing the Polycrisis: The Rupture Field Approach

This is the final presentation from the course I just completed, Regenerative Leadership. It gives a sense of how I’m working to integrate the ideas from the program with my own ongoing interests and research. If I sound a little rushed in places, it’s because the presentation was limited to ten minutes, and I was already pushing past the time.

The Creative Mind & Mortality – S1: Glass Bones, E5, Why Awareness Alone Wasn’t Enough

In this episode of The Creative Mind & Mortality—Season 1: Glass Bones, Episode 5, Why Awareness Alone Wasn’t Enough, I open Chapter Two with the song “Walking in Your Footsteps” by The Police, a strange and unsettling reflection on extinction, impermanence, and the illusion that the present moment somehow is ours.

I talk about listening to this song years ago while driving through the desert in the middle of the night during my time in the Army and how the idea of extinction feels different when you’re alone in the dark with nothing but time and your thoughts.

From there, the episode moves into one of the central problems of human consciousness: the fact that awareness of death, by itself, is not something a species can live with.

Drawing on the work of Ernest Becker, Terror Management Theory, and the Mortality-Over-Reality Transition (M.O.R.T.) hypothesis proposed by Ajit Varki and Danny Brower, I explore the idea that the same cognitive leap that gave humans imagination and intelligence also exposed us to the unbearable knowledge that we will die.

If that awareness had arrived without some kind of psychological buffer, the species may not have survived. What evolved alongside intelligence was the ability to know and not fully feel at the same time—a built-in form of denial that made consciousness functional. Culture, ritual, religion, and art came later, not as luxuries, but as extensions of that same survival mechanism.

I also talk about what this concept means for artists and makers. Creative work is often described as a confrontation with mortality, but it may also be a way of regulating it—a controlled encounter with impermanence that lets us get close to the truth without being overwhelmed by it.

This episode continues the exploration of Glass Bones: Art, Mortality, and the Human Mind, part of my doctoral research on creativity, death anxiety, and the origins of meaning.