La negación de la muerte

by Ernest Becker

La negación de la muerte es la culminación de una vida de trabajo, y una brillante y apasionada respuesta al “por qué” de la existencia humana. En fuerte contraste con la predominante escuela freudiana de pensamiento, Becker aborda el problema de la mentira vital: el rechazo del hombre a admitir su propia mortalidad.

Genres: Philosophy, Psychology, Nonfiction, Death, Self Help, Science, Sociology

436 pages, Paperback

First published December 31, 1973

About the author

Ernest Becker was an American cultural anthropologist and author of the 1974 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Denial of Death.

Reviews

[Jafar · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying. I don’t want to live in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live in my apartment. —Woody Allen.

Becker’s main thesis in this book is that the most fundamental problem of mankind, sitting at his very core, is his fear of death. Being the only animal that is conscious of his inevitable mortality, his life’s project is to deny or repress this fear, and hence his need for some kind of a heroism. Every grandiosity, good or evil, is intended to make him transcend death and become immortal.

To prove his thesis, Becker resorts to psychoanalysis. The depth and breadth of his understanding of psychoanalysis is truly amazing for someone who doesn’t call himself a psychologist. He wants to put psychoanalysis on a different foundation from which Freud put it on: The primary repression is not sexuality, as Freud said, but our awareness of death.

To convince you of this fundamental change, Becker treats you to a rather thorough review of psychoanalysis in order to rearrange it. If you don’t like or don’t understand psychoanalysis, don’t read this book. If you have a love/hate relationship with it (so deeply beautiful, poetic, and philosophical, and yet, so ad-hoc and unscientific), this book will show you more of psychoanalysis’s insight and explanatory powers, and its absurdities. It’s not having a morbid subject that makes this book depressing; it’s its reliance on psychoanalysis. A discipline whose aim, as Becker puts it, is to show that man lives by lying to himself about himself, leaves you depressed, cynical, and pessimistic.

Becker relies extensively on Otto Rank (a psychoanalyst with a religious bent who was one of the most trusted and intellectually potent members of Freud’s inner circle until he broke away) and the Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard (whom Becker labels as a post-Freudian psychoanalyst even before Freud came along). It shouldn’t come as a surprise then that the solution that Becker suggests towards the end of book for ridding man of his vital lie is what he calls a fusion of psychology and religion: The only way that man can face his fate, deal with the inherent misery of his condition, and achieve his heroism, is to give himself to something outside the physical – call it God or whatever you want.

A rather disappointing solution, even though he is not talking about any traditional religion. How can we cure ourselves of our vital lie with an illusion? You can rewrite Freud’s The Future of an Illusion based on Becker’s version of psychoanalysis for a different explanation of why man invented God. Religion can’t be of any solace to a mankind who knows his situation vis-à-vis reality. Man, as Becker so chillingly puts it, “has no doubts; there is nothing you can say to sway him, to give him hope or trust. He is a miserable animal whose body decays, who will die, who will pass into dust and oblivion, disappear not only forever in this world but in all possible dimensions of the universe, whose life serves no conceivable purpose, who may as well not have been born.” Or, as Camus says in The Fall: “Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.”

In the end, the only practical solution might be what most people do (but not everyone can do) and what Kierkegaard called tranquilizing with triviality. Numb yourself with the banalities of life to forget the insignificance of your existence. Go to school, get a job, marry, pay mortgage, raise children... Fret over every little thing you can think of: your promotion at work, the car you drive, the cavities in your teeth, finding love, getting laid, your children’s college tuition, the annoying last five pounds that are defying your diet program... Act like any of these actually mattered.

[Greg · Rating 5 out of 5]

At my parents house the poster for this record is on my bedroom wall:

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The poster the added text that "Some ideas are poisonous, they can fuck up your life, change you and scar you."

This poster came to mind pretty often while reading The Denial of Death.

I hope this isn't going to come as a shock to anyone, but you are going to die. But you aren't just going to die, in the big picture there is nothing you will ever do, nothing you will ever be or effect matters one bit. In the long view we die, in the even longer view we don't matter at all. We will not be remembered, our entire stay on this planet will over time be totally forgotten. Poof, just like any of my ancestors prior to my great grand-parents are nothing but abstractions of people who had to have existed to give birth to people who gave birth to people who I knew in my life.

Or as Morrissey sings:

So we go inside and we gravely read the stones
All those people, all those lives
Where are they now ?
With loves, and hates
And passions just like mine
They were born
And then they lived
And then they died
It seems so unfair
I want to cry

In a psychoanalytical view of development (which I don't think I fully agree with, but which I think is much more accurate that some other cognitive theories of childhood development that would say that a child can't really comprehend death till they are closer to adolescence; maybe I'm an anomaly but I can remember brooding over my eventual death at five or six-and realizing that it meant that I would no longer be here, but everything else still would be) that Becker presents the child goes from a God-like state where every need is met just by willing (crying) it into existence, to the realization that it's body shits, that expels waste and that it is just a mere creature and not god-like (this is kind of heady stuff for whatever age your supposed to go through the anal stage of development). According to Becker no one navigates this primal dilemma successfully. Once the awareness comes that a)one is not immortal and b) that one is just a disgusting creature that has to eat and shit and eventually die-- then one just builds in repressions and neuroses to cope with that knowledge.

Besides the fact that we all die, we all can't really deal with that fact. The dualism of having a mind that can think beyond the mere instinctual and transcend the body along with at the physical level being merely just another collection of substances heading towards decay is a conflict that will drive us through out our lives. Well according to Becker.

The problem is that we all want to be something more than a shitting and fucking creature that dies. We want to be more than a vessel for our DNA. Our minds work in such a way that we believe there has to be some purpose to our existence, there has to be more than just staying alive. It's this part of our cognitive make up that at a symbolic, or meaning-driven level, that governs the way that we deal with the world. Even if one doesn't subscribe to the psychoanalytical premises of his argument (I have a bit of a problem with the high level of symbolic abstraction going on in an infants mind that can draw these complex almost Derrida-like deconstructions of shit and sex organs and lead it to ones own mortality, but whatever) I think one would find it really difficult to argue against the idea that we are all driven to be something than more than just a mere creature.

Or to put it as Becker does, to be driven by the heroic or that which is greater than ourselves (our physical selves that would be). The details of all the different ways that people can attempt to strive for the personal heroism in the modern age I'm not going to go into, but basically there are two types; the unreflective type that takes society's norms as it's own and covers up the fear of death and the need to give meaning to ones life through a career, a family, materialism, being a good provider, a pillar of the community, a sports fan, etc.; and someone who at some point has thrown off some of these cultural repressions and realized that there has to be more to life than just doing these things and just surviving.

One of the interesting things about this book is that it doesn't romanticize the latter. Becker doesn't seem to want to go out in the streets and tell everyone what an inauthentic life they are leading, how repressed they are because there is no unrepressed answer. It's kind of like you can take one of the predefined answers to life and that is one thing, but if you reject those you either have to a) go find your own answer and can support your own personal repressions and feelings of transference (which is why in his view Kierkegaard with his leap of faith and Freud with his agnosticism can each be their own successful attempts at personally dealing with finding meaning in the world, but which from an outsider point of view both can be seen as still living in the prison of their own neuroses and prejudices.

I'm realizing now that I have no real way of dealing with this topic in a review. I can already see comments coming from MFSO that will be poking holes in some of the things I'm saying and I'm doing a piss-poor job at giving the main ideas of this work- a main idea that can possibly be stated as we are all sick inside, and once you come to this realization you can either stop fighting the sickness and try to create something that will give you the feelings of worth that you need not to put a gun in your mouth and pull the trigger, or you can let yourself be destroyed by your own fears and mind. This is a simplistic way of summing up the book and misses a lot.

Sorry, I'm terrible at describing why books are really awesome. I'd recommend reading this book, it's really eye(mind)-opening in the ways we are trapped in our existence. If your happy with your life then this might be a mere curiosity of an interesting scholarly study, but it can also be a really great anti-self help book for people who can't buy into any of the answers out there because the answers are all lies.

[Tyler · Rating 1 out of 5]

If Ernest Becker can show that psychoanalysis is both a science and a mythic belief system, he will have found a way around man’s anxiety over death. Or maybe not. This book is a card trick that conjures sham religion out of sham science, with death playing a supporting role.

Becker tells us that the idea that man can give his life meaning through self-creation is wrong. Only a “mythico-religious” perspective will provide what’s needed to face the “terror of death.” That’s an interesting idea, but Becker makes a steaming mess of it. He uses pragmatic theory to show that science and religion make equivalent claims. It also implies the mythico-religious outlook is true if it works. He runs a teeny-tiny risk of nihilism here, but hey, when was the last time that ever got anyone into trouble? So off he goes.

First comes a hunt for human nature, an elusive quarry. Anything man does is part of his nature, so from the concept we can deduce only trivialities. But that doesn’t stop Becker, who at every turn represents his own alchemy as scientifically proven. From “the empirical science of psychology,” he proclaims, “we know everything important about human nature that there is to know...”. Oh, gosh. Already I’m getting nervous. What he knows is that meaning cannot be self-created because it amounts to a transparent act of transference. Man cannot mask mortality with some “vital lie.” Stronger medicine is needed, a belief system. For if a man fails to repose his psyche within such a system, the result will be the “annihilation” of the ego, whatever that means. Anyhow, it’s a proven fact.

This stronger medicine needs the survival instinct, Becker’s terror of death. To establish it he mortifies the sex instinct. Several chapters document the dismal findings of psychoanalytic research. “Personality is ultimately destroyed by and through sex,” he reports. The sex act, or fornication as he calls it, is modern man’s failed effort to replace the god-ideal. Males with sex drives are guilty of “phallic narcissism.” Anything beyond missionary sex with the lights out is perversion. Not even love and marriage help. “We might say the more guilt-free sex the better,” he explains, “ but only up to a certain point. In Hitlerism, we saw the misery that resulted when man confused two worlds ... Personal relationships carry the same danger...”

Becker smears the lens through which we view sex with a thin ordure, counseling us, in effect, just to close our eyes and think of the British Empire. This reductio of the sex drive thus exalts the survival instinct, and the author installs his psycho-mythic add-on to assuage the terror of death. Yet he concedes at the end that “... there is really no way to overcome the real dilemma of existence... ”, and baffled readers are left to wonder what the point of the book was.

That’s the big picture. The details are quite odd. No biological basis is allowed for mental disorders; all are amenable to psychotherapy, even schizophrenia, whose sufferers need only organize their jumbled symbolism into a mythic structure. That no schizophrenic patient has ever been cured by psychoanalysis is beside the point. So much for if it works, it’s true. Nowhere does Becker mention women, either, except to leer four or five times over the fright of children upon seeing mommy’s nudity: the boys don’t want to be castrated and not even little girls want to be the sex of their mothers. An Original Guilt replaces Original Sin, and women are still on the hook for it.

Then there’s Freud, “...a man who is always unhappy, helpless, anxious, bitter, looking into nothingness with fright ...”. Becker dwells for pages on the fact that Freud fainted, proving it was caused by his inability to accept religion and even linking Freud’s cancer to this. I myself have problems with Freud; so do many. But by the time this writer gets through there’s nothing left of Freud but litter.

Then still, explaining the minds of “primitives,” Becker notes:

“Many of the older American Indians were relieved when the Big Chiefs in Ottawa and Washington took control and prevented them from warring and feuding. It was a relief from the constant anxiety of death for their loved ones, if not for themselves.”

In light of what actually happened to the Indians this comes as a cruelty that runs for cover under its analytic context. The author’s style, indeed, uses analysis as a shield for many of his little jabs. The largely general nature of his claims would have worked better in a long essay format, but the psychoanalysis does appear to buttress the more caustic remarks.

Only psychiatry and religion can deal with the meaning of life, says Becker, who avoids philosophy. But this is one book where even a whiff of critical thinking helps, and not just with the reductio. Even assuming his premises, if truth really amounts to faith, then self-created meanings cannot be mistaken so long as man has faith in them. Most important, though, is a glaring lack of conceptual clarity. What exactly does he mean by religion and myth? There’s a world’s difference between a theological and an idealistic basis for belief. The author never explains why he conflates those terms. As a result he cannot meaningfully elucidate a subjective experience halfway between the temporal and the spiritual.

This vagueness hurts because the endeavor to state facts about another person’s mind isn’t as farfetched as it seems. Becker’s pragmatic brew, on the other hand, fizzes into nihilism. His claim to scientific proof of the psyche's functions is pseudoscience, and the pretense to authority has borne sour fruit. The false memory hysteria fanned by psychoanalysts 20 years ago derailed lives and careers, and sent innocent people to prison. And the author adds not one new insight on the subject of death, although I can’t deny the entertainment value of Victorian clichés dressed in psychedelic drag.

Unwilling to acknowledge either science or religion, The Denial of Death is neither fish nor fowl, but rather a foul and fishy fraud seasoned with petty barbs. Cautious readers will want to step back and let the white suits decontaminate this metaphysical meth lab and its doubtful dregs.

[Tammy Marie Jacintho · Rating 5 out of 5]

Do you feel like your days fly by? Or, that a month disappears into another month? How does a lifetime get swallowed up? Why do we live with regret? Aren’t we just living like all the other people? Why do we take risks with our health and with our financial resources? What is it all about?

After reading this book, the sheer madness of the 20th and 21st century seems apparent-- no longer mysterious. If you think you are living on a rollercoaster-- hate how you've been strapped onto the monster's back... this book will make sense of your secret fears.

We live in a world designed for speed, afraid of our own mortality, in a world where the dying get tucked away from our eyes. If we understood that there is only one life to live... that there are no promises as to the length of our lives…would we squander time? Would we make ourselves ill with petty jealousy? Would we spend a lifetime trying to scramble to the top of the economic food chain? Would we allow our real-selves to be designated to weekends, or that one-day a month vacation from the overwhelming pressures that demand a certain ideal for success? Or would we cut the straps that tie us to the monster's back? Would we learn to live in the moment, aware of our every exhalation, and begin to live for ourselves and for the ones we love?

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is extremely important. I can't emphasize this enough.

[Jessica]

I really only want to read this if it's going to give me concrete, practical, how-to tips on denying death.

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Denial of Death straddles the line between astounding intellectual ambition and crackpot theorizing; it is a compendium of brilliant intellectual exercises that are more satisfying poetically than scientifically; it is a desperately self-oblivious and quasi-futile attempt to resurrect the ruins of Freudian psychoanalysis by re-defining certain parameters and ostensibly de-Freudianizing them; there is an unhealthy mixture of jaw-dropping recognition and eye-rolling recognition.

It is important to note, however, that it is grossly unfair to discredit the ingenuity of a vintage intellectual by holding discoveries and findings found post-mortem against him or her. A psychology professor who claims Freud is "an idiot" is, at best, simply being arrogant on a chronological technicality. Freud did not take into account all of that which had debunked, and his findings are so flagrantly untrue; of course, those debunkings occurred after Freud's death. Something about the fact that geniuses have to be omnipotent and stand outside a life narrative is ridiculous, and at best arrogant. At the end of the day Freud revolutionized thought and his myths has carried a heavy cultural resonance, and we can apologize for his after-the-fact falseness. But it is completely unfair to say he had not taken into account all the factors that could have by no means been available to him contemporarily, and so it goes for every genius. No one is a genius when taken out of context, and that's precisely the point of such masturbatory put-downs. Some assert superiority by tearing others down on balderdash presumptions; others gain it through luck; and the rare few gain it on demonstrable merit.

Becker takes great pains to resurrect Freudian thought by moving the focus of "sexual instinct" and placing it under the broader "terror of death." It's mostly an attempt to keep the structural integrity of psychoanalysis intact by retrofitting a new cornerstone. Becker and Freud are both susceptible to the same poetic fervor, bias, and penchant toward romanticizing certain ideas. Whereas Freud took his transcendental principle and squeezed every thought through a prism of sexual instinct, Becker wants to do likewise with fear of mortality. Everything down to "sexual perversions" like fetishism, sadomasochism, and - this is where the book feels dated even for 1973 - homosexuality are all put through the "here's why these exist due to the innate terror of death" schema. It's an intellectual reduction we've seen time and time again, where a certain mythos or belief system can be twisted and turned to accommodate just about everything because it's so rhetorically versatile. While it looks pretty good and is amusing on paper, it should rouse suspicion. The absence of scientific findings hear does likewise; even if this is meant to be a reader-friendly book, the lack of viable citations beyond summations of psychoanalytic theory seems methodically irresponsible.

My other hesitation is in the relentless way by which Becker employs metaphor as transcendent, a priori interpretation. He clearly believes that people think, in short hand, via grand, sweeping metaphors. In other words, projecting his grandiose symbolism onto the thoughts of others. Sometimes his dalliances with figuring out child psychology - the terror of the penis-less mother, or the first experience of total dependence being somewhat violated - are expressed in a metaphorical language, where this gesture "represents" this or "seems to" instill a fear of castration, or that viewing one's parents engaging in a "primal act" strips them of their symbolic, enduring representations and places them in a lowly, carnal context. The act subtly de-idolizes them and traumatizes the child, if one allows for the fact that people sub-consciously think in grandiose metaphors. Breasts represent this, the body symbolizes decay, the mind symbolizes bodily transcendence, etc., etc. But shouldn't these representations be more intuitive and well-ingrained if they just so happen to govern how childhood experience shapes us?

The other problem is Becker's penchant for dualisms: the life is a war between the body and the mind, the failure of reconciliation between the body and the self, that sex is the war between the acceptance and subversion of the body, that love is an internalized and externalized transcendence, etc., etc. Everything is balanced on linearly as a conflict between two disparate entities, or a war between dual things. This form of thinking I don't find particularly viable because it just reeks of the constraints human reason has to place on itself to find a semblance of truth, not the truth itself. The human mind - even according to Becker - has to reduce segments of the vastness of life into smaller, comprehensible fragments. Some behavioral scientists have posited that beyond the number three, humans process numbers relatively. We cannot process 1 million as a concrete number, but only as a contextual anchor against numbers greater or smaller. It is hazily and less concretely defined; beyond three, our brains become exhausted. It is why jokes stop after a priest, a minister, and a rabbi. I'm surprised Becker didn't catch himself falling into this own tendency in his own work. The human mind analyzing itself is a troublesome thing; it just seems that his propensity toward surrogates and representation, in addition to his tendency to parse things down to two dependent variables, are less indicative of psychological truth in principle, and more indicative of a psychological aphorism that can only be teased out once the brain takes its usual short-cuts and acts of its own nature. He didn't turn his evaluation on ideological reductiveness inward, and his argument stems from the same heuristics that he critiques in similarly broad terms.

The bits on character-traits as psychoses is just a marvelous section of the book, also, and even the over-the-top, rabid attempts to resuscicate Freudian thinking (e.g. anality as a desperate fear of the acknowledgment of the creatureliness of man and the awful horror that we turn life into excrement) are amusing even if they seem rabidly desperate or intellectually impoverished. The book ought to balled "The Denial of Freud's Death." It so desperately tries to keep the spirit of him alive, with varying degrees of success.

Even in its datedness, its contradictions, and its often unsatisfying or sensational resolutions, The Denial of Death is an excellent demonstration of intellectual heroics; of a man trying, as best he can, to grasp beyond the very limits of the human mind to get to a greater place. The tragedy is that he never quite transcends the unduly habits of an analytical mind, which is hardly to be expected. But it's always marvelous to read something that gives such an impression.

The book is amazing rhetoric, but when it says something like man needs to disown the fortress of the body, throw off the cultural constraints, assassinate his character-psychoses, and come face-to-face with the full-on majesty and chaos of nature in order to transcend, what says: this is rhetorically eloquent, but what does it mean to fully take-on the majesty of nature? Are we supposed to move back into the trees? Are we to run around naked in the woods and constantly think about our own passing? He never quite plans out an agenda for what the eschewing of cultural trappings for full immersion in cosmic oneness would look like. The book has its internal logic and it is good enough to have the opportunity to bear witness to it, but I am doubtful of much of its credibility. A lot of The Denial of Death is saturated in the abstracts of problem-solving; none of its resolutions, conclusions, or even symptoms seem actionable.

Sometimes I don't think it's the denial of death so much as the incomprehensibility of it. Our brains can't even process two people talking simultaneously because it is an over-ride of information intake. Is it really tenable to say that death has taken in and repressed all the majesty and terror of a despairing and lonely, temporary existence? This probably gives the mind too much credit. Or is it more realistic to say that such a wide, cosmic void is perhaps greater than Freudian schematics? Maybe since we can't really look beyond three, stop mistaking metaphor for fundamental truth, or can't stop thinking in dualisms or can't hear more than two people once, we can't find the transcendence because of our own machine-based limitations. Much of what we are meant to be able to take-on fully to confront death and thrive in life is beyond our cognitive capacities. I believe there is repression, but psychology also tells us that the brain must - and does - filter its input. We can't pay attention to a whole scene, or focus on more than one thing, or hear more than such and such thing; I don't believe this is a sub-conscious device meant to save us from the throes of death; I just believe that evolution is stingy enough to grant humans the necessities to function and (at the very least) genetically propagate. It hardly seems necessary to give humans the omniscience to take on the full reality of its predicament. Instead it's given enough to simply go on, erm, living?

So, at the end of the day, I'm not sure The Denial of Death is much more than a grandiose attempt at fitting the grand scheme of things into a more digestible scheme of, yes, it all comes from a fear of dying. But for anyone who can acknowledge the distortions in one's own thinking and the limits of input processing with a brain, such a statement seems reductive, and well, too convenient and un-complicated. This is why it is often backed up with inconvenient and complicated scraps. While I do believe The Denial of Death is valuable because some people may be living under this schematic, it's best to read this as a possibility for some thinking, not as a blanket humanity statement. It's a good guidepost to do some back-of-the-envelope psycho-calculation, but it's just not committed enough to its own purported vastness to be worth much beyond that.

Anxiety, it says, is the dissonance some people feel because their confidence in their invincibility - the delusion given to some with self- esteem - is shaky. It's a natural response to the predicament of self-aware mortality. This is too metaphorical. Anxiety stems from imagined fantasies that have not coalesced into existence; does the brain's penchant for supposition and that subsequent worry really come from that? Given how much self-spun fiction creates worry and sadness...I'm not sure. It's not that I can wholly discredit Becker; I just feel that any categorical imperative is probably not able to grasp the full spectrum of complicating factors. The spidey-sense is triggered at any point objectivity declares carte blanche privileges over subjectivity.

The Denial of Death is a fantastic, provocative, and possibly life-changing read, but just so as an ambitious attempt; a pleasurable intellectual food-for-thought exercise. A valiant attempt, but again, some people kill themselves, and some people fetishize excrement. What of them, Becker? What of them?

[Mac · Rating 2 out of 5]

Going to school when I did, it’s hard to conceive of how important the psychoanalytic project was for so much of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The influence of Freud and the subsequent schools of psychology developed by his students spread into virtually every discipline, from literary analysis to economics, but by the time I got there it was all pretty much gone. I’m sure that somewhere there’s an Onoda-type holdout department that won’t let the old stuff go, or one or two octogenarian professors whose names are recognizable enough that they haven’t been forced into retirement, but for me psychoanalysis was primarily discussed in the past tense.

This book is from 1973, and clearly had quite an impact on American thought at the time (if Woody Allen movies are any representation, at least), but seems impossibly dated forty years later. In fact, aside from a handful of obscure movie references, I wouldn’t be too terribly surprised to find that this came from the 30’s or 40’s. Becker’s project here, rather than an actual mediation on death, is a reorientation of psychoanalysis, putting death at the top (or bottom?) of the pyramid in place of the sexual impulses that Freud spent so much time thinking about. This new direction for study is a kind of synthesis of Freud, Kierkegaard, and notably Otto Rank, one of Freud’s disciples who Becker believes hasn’t received the credit he is due.

In that way, there’s not a whole lot of original thought in this book, which is probably its most contemporary quality. Rather than present new ideas, he shuffles and reorganizes old ones from disparate sources that, due to various disciplinary and dispositional prejudices, have been kept at arm’s length from one another. It’s really an extended commentary on the work of prior psychoanalysts, and its (syn)thesis was apparently fairly revolutionary at the time (though, again, its late publication date makes me suspicious of that), but today it seems somewhat obvious.

And it all reads like a bunch of garbage. It’s clear that psychoanalytic thinking must have been a great deal of fun, finding all kinds of willy-nilly metaphors for everyday behaviors that can be pulled out of mythology or Shakespeare or one’s ass. When one isn’t beholden to any sort of evidence other than anecdotes from like-minded psychologists, one can say pretty much anything one wants and, if the voice is properly authoritative, say it to a whole lot of people. It’s like philosophy without all that pesky logic and rigorous thinking. It seems unfair to apply 2012 knowledge to a book that didn’t have access to it, but this is from 1973. Were we really still looking for cures-through-metaphor to things like schizophrenia and – appallingly – homosexuality at such a late date? (Psychiatric drugs for schizophrenics were available at least since the 50s, but you’ll have a hard time finding a suggestion of any potential biological/chemical causes to mental diseases here.)

Oh, and if you’re a woman, bad news: there’s either no hope for you, or Becker isn’t interested in looking for it. It’s your genitals, after all, that are causing all the problems in the world.

Even if we chock all this offensive nonsense up to being a sign o’ the times (which I can’t help but reiterate is 1973, much too late to excuse it), the book still buys into the “heroic soul” project that is to this reader extremely annoying. The idea that some people are just too sensitive for this world, and that the beautiful souls of our great men need special care is an adolescent concept that I’m always surprised can be found in so much literature written by people who should have been old enough to know better. “You just don’t get me, man.” Half of this book’s sentiments can be found on t-shirts at your local Hot Topic.

The concept that humanity lives in a state of denial of our own imminent demise is interesting, but doesn’t feel particularly new, considering mortality has been a theme in literature since… literature. That we need to shed our reliance on the common denials – materialism, status, class – and transfer them to the unhappy cure of Becker’s Rank-ian brand of psychoanalysis is not convincing in the least, and so this book feels like yet another (albeit depressive) common denial to add to the list. It may have been a big influence on everyone in the 1970’s, but thankfully we’ve put a lot of this stuff behind us.

[Joshua Nomen-Mutatio · Rating 5 out of 5]

"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."
—Ernest Becker

The sloppy latticework of gnarled tree branches anchors the foreground while Devlin and Geoffrey puff upon thick, stolen cigars, steathily removed from a father’s humidor, stashed in the closet of a house that was summarily purchased with blood, sweat and finely tuned 'n' directed tears. Their lanky fuzz-lined sillouettes bend and puff and laugh together within the sea of sundown hues that grant them visualization. Geoffrey digs deep into his tanned corduroy pockets and his left hand removes the distant, quiet clink of coins upon coins.

A square-jawed, stiff-limbed snake of iron and steel flows by the two teenagers. The word ‘train’ materializes within the skulls of both boys as their sleeves and trousers are shaken to a fluttering life by its newfound wind.

The pair reacts to the new calm by a continued puffing and swaggering, smirks etched step-by-step upon their faces.

"Let's do some penny dreadfuls," Devlin exhales along with a stacco waft of floating burnt tobacco.

Geoffrey nods affirmatively and re-digs into his corduroy for the fullest answer. He hands Devlin a metallic rustle of currency and steps over the first track in order to hover over the second. Geoffrey clinks his purchase down upon the iron and walks back towards Devlin doing the mirror-same.

They lie in wait for the next bulldozing carrier. A great silence envelopes them as they inhale and exhale, stare and unstare at nothing, anything and everything.

"Don't you ever worry about dying?" Devlin mews with unnerving sincerity.

"Of course. But at this millisecond I’m pretty much ready to go."

"Really?"

"Really. I keep thinking about an old friend who—even when he was merely eight years old—once told me—and told me with great certitude and sincerity—that he wouldn't care at all if his father hurled him off a cliff. This was a week before he was going to visit the Grand Canyon on a family vacation."

". . ."

"Death only really frightens me if I have the time to really, really think about it. When it's just an immediate thought, well, I usually just think about it as an either an inevitably or a blessing—which is sad, I know, but that's just how I feel most of the time. I mean, I don't want to die—I really, really don't—but more often than not, I just don't care enough either way. Darkness forever doesn't always seem like 'Darkness Forever.' Sometimes I stupidly think of it as a vacation—a vacation of blank peace—rather than the traditionally, plausibly understood, deep dark destination—the Big Sleep, the eternal dirt nap, etc—you know?"

"Wow. Yeah, I know what you mean. But most the time it mostly scares the living shit out of me and seems like the worst thing in the whole wide world."

"Well, it is! Of course! It's the worst! The worst reality there can every possibly be, I guess. But it's so inescapable that eventually I feel beaten into submission by the fact that it's so goddamn certain and ever-present."

". . ."

Devlin passes a pint of bourbon towards his closest friend who accepts it with a smile, a limp grip and then a simultaneously pleased and pained grimace.

"There's no real comfort to be found here, my friend. I’m sorry to say. I wish it was otherwise, but it just isn't. Sure, there's some distant "hope" to be found within the deep, deep, unanswerable mystery of it all, but all that's really real is this. This. Here. Right now. Us standing together, having a deep thought or two, sharing our thoughts—whatever those are, really—ya know?"

"Yeah, I think so, too. It's just so damn depressing—no matter what, ya know? It's so fucking hard for me to think about it all with any real seriousness. Just imagining the death of my mother makes me feel like, like, like...like, I dunno, the whole world is coming to an end. It's just the most awful feeling ever."

"Believe me, I know exactly what you mean. It's really the worst. If there's supposed to be a silver lining that's better than all the ol' cliché silver linings—which fail us left and right—well, I don’t know what that is. We—we human beings stuck in this predicament—we're simply forced to deal with it. It's horrific and unfair. Period. So let's just finish that bottle, smoke these cigars, and keep moving and talking and thinking until we can't."

The train announces its arrival in the distance. Devlin's head hangs low. Geoffrey's eyes well with fluid and his gaze cranes upward to the murky, bloody cloudiness of the slit vein of the sky, booming its melancholy echo around the world exclusively to those who can perceive it. The distance collapses at a brisk pace. The distance disappears and a single penny is ground down into a new shape for an audience of two.

[Shafaat · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was transforming. If I manage to live long enough to grow old despite my overwhelming urge to suicide now and then , I would look back on this book as my first lesson on 'human condition'. This book won Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction(1973). New York Times described it as ' One of the most challenging book of the decade .' And upon googling I came to know that this book is a seminal book iin psychology and one of the most influential books written on psychology in 20th century. It can be difficult to review of a book of such stature. So I'm going to review just a part of it.

The basic theme this book explores is this: Man is an incongruous jumble of two identities. One is his material body and the other is his symbolic inner self(You can call this mind if you want to ). This makes man at the same time the most powerful and unfortunate member of the animal kingdom. Why unfortunate , you ask? Because only man has been made aware that his body is going to decay soon, he has come to know death and the absurdity that comes with it. Man has eaten fruit from the ' Tree of Knowledge ', so he been banished from the haven of nature, has to pay for his knowledge by his existential hangover.

This symbolic self of man leads to more dilemmas. Man wants to stand out from the rest of nature, to curve out an unique self, to assert his individuality. But at the same time, he wants to merge with the rest of the creation, to have a holistic unification with nature. These two contradictory urges go in the face of each other . If you want to be unique, you can't be 'one' with the rest of the nature, and vice versa. That's the price you pay for your dualistic nature.

The symbolic self has made you a virtual God, but it also made you aware of your 'creatureliness'. However much you love your beloved and bask in the ecstasy of her love, you also have to be aware that your beloved has to defecate now and then.

So man has to somehow distract himself from his realization of the horrific nature of the reality. For this, he invented 'projects for heroism' in manifold forms, to transcend his animal identity beyond death, to deny his death. Even if your animal body dies, your symbolic self may live on forever through your immortality project. All religions, cultures, societies lays out the framework for our collective heroism projects.

Here things are beginning to get a little shaky. Religions aren't that sustainable heroism project now as they were in the middle ages. And cultures and societies are beginning to loose their structure and don't function to secure the identity of man as they once used to do. So the modern suffers from a lack of 'ideal illusion', which is vital to hide the terrors of his existence. He 'knows', knows too well, and therefore cannot be deceived, which is not good for him. Now, how do we deal with this extremely vulnerable, anxiety prone, suffering from meaninglessness, and as Becker puts it, the 'neurotic' model of the modern man? This question goes into the heart of psychotherapy. Becker explored statures like Freud,Kierkegaard, Otto Rank, Carl Jung in search for an answer, and tries to extract a synthesis out of it.

Now, I do not agree with the conclusion he draws here at the end of the book. Becker concludes by saying that there is really no way out of this dualistic conundrum in which man has found himself, and all we can aim at is some sort of mitigation of the absolute misery. We need to set a personal heroism project for ourselves , settle somewhat wisely within the walls, though we would never be quite at home. All aim for higher transcendence is delusional. He scolds Jung and Fromm for entertaining the possibility of a 'free man', while praising Freud for his 'more realistic somber pessimism'. And he also dismissed 'eastern mysticism ', saying it's sort of an cowardly evasion of the reality and thereby doesn't fit 'brave western man'.

I do not blame him though, as he had written those words nearly half a century ago. And I understand that eastern schools like Zen or Taoism might be too much for a western mind to have a firm purchase on, as eastern schools have a fundamentally different understanding of the nature reality. Nowhere this east-west dichotomy is explained more lucidly than by Fritjof Capra in his book 'The Tao of Physics.' More recently, Sam Harri's book 'Waking up: A guide to spiritually without religion' also does a quite fair job.

With the advent of modern noninvasive neuroimaging techniques, the scientific community has only recently been gaining an understanding of the potential for the radical transformation of human psyche that lies at the heart of the 'eastern mysticism '. There is empirical evidence that mindfulness meditation can literally change your neurochemistry and change the way how you perceive the world, and make your existence more at home(Watch the TED YouTube video 'How meditation can reshape your brain.') And every year many scientific papers are being published on the effect of mindfulness meditation on human psyche. To be frank, today more westerns practice yoga and meditation than easterners do, they are slowly absorbing the essence. But it seems to me as far as psychology of well being goes, east will always have the upper hand. But we also need the more analytical western science to look at what is really going on here.

It's nice that we live in an era where we are seeing the merger of east and west.

[Andy · Rating 1 out of 5]

Overall this is outdated psychobabble, of historical interest as another example of James Thurber's adage that "you can fool too many of the people too much of the time." [It won a Pulitzer!]

The author could have said he was producing philosophical musings or bad literature or random religious thoughts or whatever, but he didn't. Instead he was suffering from the delusion that he was doing science: Analyze that!

Not everything has to be science, but Becker repeats incessantly that this stuff is "scientific." It is not. It is closer to medieval scholasticism, i.e. opinionated commentary on received texts. In science, you state a hypothesis and you test it. Moreover, if you are recommending a method of treatment for human illness, then you provide some evidence for the benefit of your proposed therapy. But there's no experimental or even observational evidence anywhere in this book.


Better books on living a life of meaning in an absurd universe:
The Myth of Sisyphus/The Outsider/The Plague/The Rebel
Tao Te Ching by Stephen Mitchell Summary Study Guide
Warrior of the LightThe Power of Myth
Managing Your Mind: The Mental Fitness Guide

[Lani · Rating 1 out of 5]

Is there a 'couldn't bring myself to finish' rating? I feel like I'm cheating by putting this one on my "read" shelf...

Here's the thing... I'm fairly well read, I've taken philosophy classes, I've powered through some pretty dry books. But apparently I CANNOT bring myself to power through a dry book about PSYCHOANALYSIS.

Being a modern psych major, and a fairly well-read one at that, AND one who has dealt with mental issues personally... I can't bring myself to believe a god damned WORD that Freud said. I find psychoanalytic theory to be utter and complete crap, and that seems to be not just the foundation of this book, but pretty much the whole thing. Perhaps this "Otto Rank" mentioned CONSTANTLY is a more brilliant guy than Freud, but I find it difficult to take anyone who took Freud seriously with anything less than an enormous cup of salt.

I made it through the foreword and 50 pages of the actual book and had to stop. I don't know what the last book was that I could not only not finish, but couldn't even bring myself to put it back on the to-read at a later date shelf. This book is utterly dead to me.

I'm so embarassed, I really thought I could be all intellectual and learn something here. Even reading these 5 star reviews, I expected something pretty thought-provoking, and was really hoping I'd be able to choke through it with a good end result. But I think with my personal distaste for Freud I am just doomed. I tried to hop around a bit, but I don't even see where Becker's argument about death would tie in.

[Emma Sea · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a classic for a reason. It's a brilliant book, in which Becker discusses Otto Rank's writings in a highly accessible way, that is absolutely relevant to 21st century society. The knowledge that we will die defines our lives, and the ways humans choose to deal with this knowledge (consciously or subconsciously) are what creates culture - all culture; from BDSM to Quakerism.

The downside is that the book was first published in 1973, and therefore contains some highly offensive writing.

It's a big ask, but please overlook the bit about Greenacre and Boss's (1968) explanation of why women don't have kinks; because they are 100% passive, and naturally submissive. The male has to "perform the sexual act" so it is natural for him to develop fetishes. However women don't have to get aroused, or channel their desires (just lie there, I guess), so they don't have kinks. Ever (p. 243). Ugh.

Also, please ignore everything Becker says on homosexuality (i.e. the whole chapter on mental illness - as it was labelled in the DSM until 1973): namely that homosexuality is the "perversion" of weak men because of their sense of powerlessness, a lack of a father-figure, and a terror of the difference of women.** Also, the awful parts on "transvitites", who "believe they can transform animal reality by dressing it in cultural clothing" (p. 238).

And also can you please overlook all the gendered language, and the way women don't count as actual people to Becker?

Aside from all that this is a wonderful book, and everyone should read it. And luckily for me Greg already explained why, in detail, so go read his review.

**This is Becker's opinion, not Rank's. Rank actually linked homosexuality to creativity and freedom from society, which pisses Becker off: "Rank was so intent on accenting the positive, the ideal side of perversion, that he almost obscured the overall picture . . . [homosexual acts are] protests of weakness rather than strength . . . the bankruptcy of talent." Double ugh.

P.S. Weirdly, Becker repeats as fact (p. 249) that Hitler engaged in coprophilia, by getting a young girl (allegedly his neice) to crap on his head. There's no actual evidence for this. It's part of the attempt to frame Hitler as a monstrous being, rather than as a man who carried out monstrous acts. Over the years people have also attempted to frame Hitler as gay for the same reason.

[Kevin · Rating 5 out of 5]

"We repress our bodies to purchase a soul that time cannot destroy; we sacrifice pleasure to buy immortality; we encapsulate ourselves to avoid death. And life escapes us while we huddle within the defended fortress of character." ~Sam Keen

Consumption. There are books that I read and then there are books that I consume. Denial of Death was consumed. This reads more 1990's than 1970's, a testament to Ernest Becker's acumen. It is both critical and reverent of Sigmond Freud's psychoanalytical theories. A careful restructuring that tosses out the framework without collapsing the house.

Becker points to Charles Darwin as the harbinger of change in the mindset of modern psychology. It was Darwin's evolutionary theory that put the problem of death anxiety at the forefront of psychological assertions and, by extension, "heroism" as a defense mechanism against that anxiety. Becker elaborates on the role of heroism as a cultural construct, and theology as the standard bearer of that construct:

"...the crisis of society is, of course, the crisis of organized religion too: religion is no longer valid as a hero system, and so the youth scorn it. If traditional culture is discredited as heroics, then the church that supports that culture automatically discredits itself. If the church, on the other hand, chooses to insist on its own special heroics, it might find that in crucial ways it must work against culture, recruit youth to be anti-heroes to the ways of life of the society they live in. This is the dilemma of religion in our time."

The real conundrum of man's existence is that, in all of the animal kingdom, he alone is aware of his own mortality. It is this awareness that fuels his adult anxiety, an awareness that no matter what he accomplishes in his 60+ years of tarry and toil, he is ultimately food for worms. In the face of this terrifying realization, all of us, as sentient beings, as "meaningless creatures," deploy our coping mechanisms. Becker expounds on this assumption and analyzes it with dizzying efficiency. This is a challenging read, but one that is well worth the time.

[Beauregard Bottomley · Rating 1 out of 5]

This prize winning book from 1973 has immense value today because it captures how very smart people explained the world in those days and it is amazing we ever got out of the self referential tautological cave that was being created to explain who we are. There is nothing more dangerous than using just intuition and strong arguments without empirical data to reach your conclusions. That's what this author does.

He ties existential and psychoanalytical thought and the necessity for beliefs in God in to a worldview. He will tell us that it is our repression and our denial that end up giving us our neurosis. He does not use the psychoanalytical system developed by Freud because he makes our neurosis more than just dependent on sexual repressions, but nevertheless his system ends with 'castration', 'transference', and other such psychoanalytical belief systems. (That's why I feel comfortable characterizing his system as self-referential tautological. He's creating a system, some what like mathematics, by assuming truths within the system and using the system to justify the system. There's no way to refute the system unless one steps out of the system. That is to say, there is no way to show the system is incoherent within the system itself and there are things within the system which can neither be shown true or false).

He's just taking a pseudoscience and working within the system and uses the same techniques to develop his similar system of pseudoscience but he's going to call it post-Freudian. He will conclude things such as the schizophrenic and psychotic are 'neurotic' principally because they see the true reality better, the reality of the absurdity of life, the fact that we live with the certainty of death, and the inadequacy of life, the inability to live with the freedom we our given.

He will go into a whole host of reasons why we are inadequate. He'll even explain how LGBTQ people are perverted because fetishes created while growing up has led to that extreme denial of themselves (probably something to do with their lack of character).

The author emphasizes that character, culture and values determine who we become. Those who lack any of those three end up with 'neurosis', because under his psycho-dynamic system we know everyone is neurotic to some degree because one who denies his own repression must be neurotic and out of touch with reality. (There is a beautiful tautology within his belief system).

Unfortunately, to understand the 1970s one must understand how smart people did embrace the kind of thinking presented in this book. It's amazing that we as a society got out of that psychoanalytical trap. Now days, neurosis is not used as a category in the DSM for a reason.

I can highly recommend this book since it gives such an interesting window that psychoanalysis mistakenly provided to human understanding in 1973. It clearly gives a great peak into how psychiatry got off the rails. I would highly recommend reading "Shrinks: The Untold Story of Psychiatry" before attempting this pseudo-scientific book. "Shrinks" documents how psychiatry got so far off the rails and how it found itself by becoming a real science by including the empirical. This book, "Denial of Death", marks the start of the beginning from which a new era for human understanding began to finally find itself and jettison junk like this book contains.

[M.Qaid · Rating 3 out of 5]

إذا لم ننكر الموت، أو نتناساه على الأقل، فكيف سنستمر في الحياة.

لا شك أن الموت هو الحقيقة العظمى بصفته النهاية الدنيوية التي يشترك بها الجميع ويؤمن بها الجميع ولا تخضع لوجهات النظر.
في هذا الكتاب يناقش إيرنست بيكر تأثير هذا الحقيقة على نفسياتنا وطريقة تفكيرنا اللاواعية. بعكس فرويد الذي أحال جميع أنماط السلوك إلى الرغبة الجنسية، فإن بيكر فسر التصرفات البشرية بناءً على الخوف من الموت وما ينبثق عنه من رغبة في البطولة والخلود.

بالنسبة لي، من الصعب تقييم هذا الكتاب بشكل منصف. فالمحتوى في بعض المواضع قيم ويفتح عينيّ القارئ على أفكار مثيرة، ويغوص به إلى أعماقه كاشفاً التناقضات النفسية والروحية التي يعاني منها الكائن البشري. من جهة أخرى يعيبه التكرار إلى جانب التعمق في مواضيع جانبية قد تنسيك موضوع الكتاب الرئيسي.

كتاب جاد وعميق تميزه جرأة الطرح ويعيبه الاستطراد والتكرار.

[Maica · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have mixed thoughts and feelings while reading this book, because I intend to immerse myself through it, and there were instances that some parts of it really bored me, for example, the constant references to Nietzsche. Ernest Becker brilliantly synthesized Freud's psychoanalysis with the ideas of writers most notably, Otto Rank, Soren Kierkegaard, Carl Jung, Medard Boss, among others and poignantly illustrated their insights on the individual's attempts and striving against death, which entails projecting the self through expansion, cultural identification, or transcendence towards something greater.

I especially liked how he was able to point out this certain 'Causa Sui Project,' which is what most individuals are striving for: the need for self-reliance and self-determination to establish something beyond the self, i.e., he cites the example of Freud's erecting of psychoanalysis - which was his life long dream of responding to established religion or cultural traditions. It might be, according to Ernest Becker, that this Causa Sui Project, though he writes of his analysis as mostly assumptions based on Ernest Jones' biography of Freud, was a lie - that this project is the individual's attempt to overcome his smallness and limitations - because he is still in many ways bound to the laws of something that transcends him, and denying it would be tantamount to neurosis. Perhaps that portion of the book was the most poignant of all, because it was self-evident that to renounce the causa sui project would be to admit that any person's attempt for self-determination is bound to fail if it does not recognize that there is something that is more transcendent compared to the individual's will.

Ernest Becker also wrote on this book, the attempts and psychology of creativity, of creating personal fictions, of the ideal of mental health and illness - all of which are the person's attempts of making meaning, finding a center, remaining sane in an otherwise chaotic world. I highly recommend this book, it is enlightening and through it, and it is a reflection and a deep analysis on man's condition who is constantly asking questions and grapples on the inevitability of finitude and faith. Literally, this is one book that brought me back to my senses.

[Poncho González · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un libro un tanto difícil de calificar y que me ha dejado muy confundido, porque el inicio de la obra es espectacular en relación a lo que te plantea el título, es alucinante, pero conforme avanza el libro, todo se vuelve más complicado y se aleja mucho del tema de la muerte, se vuelve una apología hacia el psicoanálisis y en defensa del libro, está muy bien explicado, he aprendido más en estas páginas sobre el psicoanálisis que en toda mi licenciatura en psicología, ese es el gran mérito del libro, que aunque me decepciono un poco no encontrar todo lo que quería sobre la muerte y su negación, me llevo muy buenos conceptos del psicoanálisis, que es lo que es este libro, un completa apología a esta rama psicoterapéutica, es mi única observación, un libro algo difícil de leer que recomiendo tener un poco de interés hacia el tema del psicoanálisis para que sea más llevadero. Y de manera personal podría decir que lo que aprendí de este libro es que “todas nuestras conductas que desarrollamos a lo largo de nuestra vida no son más que nuestra manera de manifestar nuestro miedo a la muerte, muchas de ellas de manera inconsciente”.

[A.G. Stranger · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of those rare books that will change your perspective about EVERYTHING. Even though I don't agree with everything in this book I wish I could give it 10 stars.

[Diana · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Denial of Death [1973] – ★★★★

This non-fiction is both: a cry of a soul on the human condition, and a penetrating essay that demystifies the man and his actions.

“It is fateful and ironic how the lie we need in order to live dooms us to a life that is never really ours” [Becker, 1973: 56].

Ernest Becker (1924 – 1974) was a cultural anthropologist whose book The Denial of Death won the 1974 Pulitzer Prize. It deals with the topic that few people want to consider or talk about – their own mortality and death. The paradox is that, although this topic is considered to be a societal taboo, everyone on this earth will have to confront it sooner or later. In fact, Becker argues, everyone is confronting and dealing with it from the moment that they are born – they just do it subconsciously or unconsciously. The Denial of Death delves into the works of Sigmund Freud, Otto Rank and Søren Kierkegaard, as Becker puts his thesis forward that all humans have a natural fear (or terror) of death and their own mortality, and, thus, throughout their lives, employ certain mechanisms (including repression) and create illusions to deal with this fear and live. Though the book relies heavily on works by other authors, it is also a very deep and insightful read.

In his book, Becker has recourse to psychology, psychiatry, philosophy and anthropology, and begins his book by pointing out that, from birth, we feel the need to be “heroic” and cannot really comprehend our own death – the fact that we will die one day is too terrible a thought to live with and, thus, men [sic] never think about their own deaths seriously. People become attracted to a certain “hero” system in society and are conditioned from birth to admire people who face death courageously. This desire stems from a human being both a mortal and insignificant creature in the grand scheme of things and the universe (a simple body), and, at the same time, a human capable of self-awareness, consciousness, creativity, dreams, aspirations, desires, feelings and high intelligence (soul/self). It is very difficult (in fact, impossible) to reconcile these two elements and come to terms with the fact that this human being who has so much potential and awareness can just “bite the dust” and do so as easily as some insect flying next to him/her.

Relying on the work of Sigmund Freud, Becker speculates on child psychology, and goes to detail many mechanisms that human beings employ to escape the paradox outlined above, the condition of the perpetual fear of death, as well as the fact that life and death are so closely interlinked that one cannot live without “being awakened to life through death” [Becker, 1973: 66]. These mechanisms are the creations of various illusions, such as the “character” defence, as well as such activities as drinking and shopping to forget mortality, and various other activities, from writing books to having babies, to prolong one’s immortality. It is precisely the implicit denial of death and decay by everyone in society that makes sexuality such a taboo topic (because it exposes humans’ propensity to be mere creatures that procreate). Thus, death or bodily functions are best deemed forgotten, and, instead, humans set their minds on cultural things to get closer to the idea of being immortal. Love is explained by Becker as the desire to experience immortality through the lover or the love for another person, and one idolises that person to which one is attached to and, in this, way, seeks immortality (“the love partner becomes the divine idol within which to fulfil one’s life” [1973: 160]).

Becker goes to explain artistic creativity, masochism, group sadism, neuroses and mental illness in general through his idea of the terror of death. According to the author, neurosis is natural since everyone holds back from life at some point and to some extent, and Becker also points out that the happier and more well-adjusted a person appears to be, the more successful he is in creating illusions around him and fooling everyone close to him. In fact, it is neurotic personalities out there, those who are generally fearful and socially-handicapped, who really see the true picture and refuse to believe in the illusionary world created by others. Others are merely indulging in their “hellish” jobs to escape their innate feelings of insignificance and dread – men are protected from reality and truth through jobs and their routine – “the hellish [jobs that men toil at] is a repeated vaccination against the madness of the asylum” [1973: 160].

Becker then turns to Kierkegaard and says that religion previously provided an answer for the man to resolve this paradox of death and life, and it is through religion the man could previously finally accept that he would die. There is an urge in every human being from childhood to attach himself or herself to a high power figure (“expand by merging with the powerful” [1973: 149]), and religion provided the means of attachment to be able to transcend a being while remaining a being. Religion provided a comfortable answer to death, while enabling people to develop and realise themselves. However, now, the modern man cannot have recourse to that religion because it lost its conviction and he [sic] no longer believes in the mysterious. The modern man is stranded and lost, trying to reach his immortality by other means, sometimes through very undesirable means. The solution that Kierkegaard proposes is the “knight of faith”, who accepts everything in life and has faith – “the man must reach out for support to a dream, a metaphysic of hope that sustains him and makes his life worthwhile” [1973: 275].

The downside of Becker’s book is that it relies too heavily on what others have said before Becker, including Sigmund Freud, Otto Rank and Søren Kierkegaard, and there is this feeling that the whole book is merely a summary of other authors’ positions, including those of William James and Alfred Adler. It becomes difficult to distinguish Becker’s views from those he quotes so extensively, praises and criticises. Becker’s account is also very individualistic, with his thesis stemming from the premise that a human being is a very selfish being who primarily desires to make his own voice heard. In that vein, the author pays little attention to more collectivist and altruistic aspects of the human nature, and barely mentions such elements as self-sacrifice, suicide or Buddhism – though they are all very relevant to his topic. This is coupled with the endless repetitions by Becker, as well as his tendency to over-simplify human behaviour, reducing it to just a single driving force.

⚰️ Though hardly ground-breaking, The Denial of Death is, nevertheless, an essay of great insights which puts other people’s ideas intelligently together to become an almost essential read since the ideas put forward can really open one’s eyes on many things in life, and on how and why the man does what he does in life.

[Ayush · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker tries to essentially explore the human condition and its associated 'problems' by buttressing some new insights on the central concepts of psychoanalysis as popularly enunciated by the likes of Freud, Otto, Jung and Kierkegaard among others (Yes, Kierkegaard too if one is to believe this book). The book's fundamental premise is to view man as an animal primarily tortured by the tension of duality inherent within him in the form of a battle between the infinite symbol (mind) and the finite physicality (body). It then tries to fuse the dynamics of this anguished interplay to muse on the nature and consequences of terror of death and life, heroism, repression, transference, character, ego, hypnosis, love, anxiety, culture, creativity, neurosis, religion etc. In the end, it critiques the nature of psychology and science itself in relation to civilization by declining to give any definitive solution to man's problems.
Personally, I would not view this book as a highly original work but as an elegant synthesis and brief yet structured presentation of preexisting psychoanalytical ideas by the previous psychologists and philosophers with a few personal notions sprinkled and substantiated here and there. THIS informal feature makes this book highly readable for a beginner in psychology like me and helps better connect this work to my own personal life and Boy! It did help me to unravel my psyche to myself to such a great extent. I now look forward to reading more psychoanalytical work in this vein and would confidently recommend this book to anybody primarily seeking to better understand how their own anxieties arise or a first text in a path to later delve more deeply into the ideas of psychoanalysis.

[Andrew]

You know that scene in Annie Hall where Woody Allen summons Marshall McLuhan out of the shrubbery to shout down the movie queue bloviator? "You know nothing of my work!"
Becker sounded like that guy.

Maybe that was harsh. After all, Becker has a lot of useful tips for living properly, and for realizing how the death phobia infects our day-to-day interactions.

That being said, I had some skepticism from the beginning, and that kept growing... a few too many denunciations of orthodox Freudianism followed by relying on such fusty, unempirical notions as the castration complex and the "primal scene," before peaking in the mental illness sections. Turns out gays are just narcissists, fetishists are basically gays, depressives are just lazy, and schizophrenia is just an incorrect set of metaphors. And yes that phallus is the center of everything, especially if you're a woman!

Fuck that.

[Cool_guy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots of great stuff here. I imagine it'll resonate with other readers more than me, however, because I'm never going to die.

[Tom Quinn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quintessentially 1970s, this mish-mash of Freudian analysis and biological determinism starts out by exploring the principles of Sociobiology and making a lot of grandiose statements about human narcissism as an inborn trait resultant from "countless ages of evolution" (2). Blithely dismissing religious tradition and appealing to ideas of childhood imprinting and unconscious suppression as the primary drivers of adult thought and behavior, Becker's main thesis is that if only we could realize our deep-seated need for the heroic, if only we could know with certainty that our actions serve a purpose and will be recalled in time to come, then we wouldn't be so unsure or frightened in the face of death.

This book is mentally stimulating but ultimately, I think, unfounded. A friend likened much of philosophy to "mental masturbation" and that's what I'd classify this one as. I'm really curious as to why this was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1974, but can't find the reasoning or announcement online. Maybe the hullabaloo of Gravity's Rainbow being denied an award that same year stole all the headlines.

3 stars out of 5. While the style is fun—flowery academic flourishes abound!—the notion that people want to be the hero of their own life story is presented more cleanly and positively in Frankl's logotherapy classic Man's Search for Meaning, and the biodeterminism angle is better argued in primatology's staple, The Naked Ape. Read Denial of Death in your college days, mull it over some, have a few good late-night dorm room conversations, but don't base your whole life on it.

[Michael Britt · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not going to lie and pretend like I understood all of this book or fully grasped all of the philosophical points in the book, because I didn't. The things I did understand were really thought provoking, though, and that's what I loved about it. I don't think I could even do this book close to what it deserves through a book review. So I'm not even going to try. What I will say is that I do plan to keep reading it, to try and understand it better, quite often. Also plan on looking up some explanations of the parts I could tell were important but couldn't grasp.

What I'm really trying to say here is that you don't have to be extremely intelligent to enjoy this book, or even to get many of his points.

[Dann]

…
I think I’m over my psychoanalysis phase.

[Jimmy Ele · Rating 5 out of 5]

What more could I say about this book?

DISCLAIMER: I can not do this book justice with a review.

The artist, the pervert, the homosexual, Freud, adults, Hitler, kids.....basically all of humanity gets placed under the analytic microscope that is Ernest Becker's mind. With intense clarity of vision he exposes us all as the frail mortal human beings that we are. He embarrasses us for our petty quests for immortality. He exposes the artist for the fraud that he is. Oh vain wanna be creator! You can only vainly shadow the Great Artisan's infinite light! Wee mortal man! How many have you slain? How many books, paintings, sculptures!? In your quest to be remembered, how many will forget you in a decade?! (Artists, don't hate me, I can say this. I once had to channel my quest for immortality into many works. Poetic and musical in essence, but that topic is for another day.)

Back to the review.
According to Ernest Becker there is a thin line between the madman/woman and the genius. The neurotic and the artist.

That difference is an outlet for creativity.

Ernest Becker argues that the madmen/women suffer because they take in too much of the infinite REALITY of existence and cannot narrow their view. The madmen/women and the neurotic have no way of expressing the infinite. The genius and the artist do the same, they take more of REALITY in, but channel it in a healthy way into some kind of creative work. This is healthy. This channeling of the perceptive mind of man.
Ernest Becker argues that to cope with reality we all have to narrow and focus on what's most important to us. There is a filter that we willingly learn to place over reality so that we do not spend the whole day viewing the infinite beauty of a shaft of light piercing through the window. The delicate fibers of dust playing in its beam, the 360 degree view that one could take of it. The shadow it creates and elongates like a beautiful alive gray puppet. Uh, oh, I think I'm doing it again. Appreciating the infinite quality of the present. The artist will try to lovingly recreate that beam of light into a work of poetry, painting, novel, review (Lol) etc. While the neurotic will be lost in it, and not being able to escape its beauty, will be consumed.

To sum it all up. This book blew my mind, and I hope it blows your mind as well.

[Sandy · Rating 5 out of 5]

WHAT IS YOUR LEGACY?

Becker's Pulitzer Prize winning book was written while he was dying-- it is his final gift to humanity. Praised by Elizabeth Kubler Ross, The New York Times Book Review, Sam Keen, you name it. One of my brightest, most humane friends described it as, "The only book I've ever read twice." Becker says-- very thoroughly, too-- that everything we humans do is to blot out the understanding that we die. That includes all the monuments to our egos we leave behind: shopping centers, vineyards, hotels, motels, cities, piles of stuff for our relatives to clean up, as well as poetry, art, and literature. What is your legacy?

[Mehrsa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Most of this book was a fascinating contemplation of what drives human psychology. There was a lot of inside baseball where he takes on Freud, Kierkegaard and other philosophers on their wrong theories. There was a sliver of just unscientific theorizing about homosexuality (that was just tragically outdated and harmful). But on the whole, it was an excellent read by a great thinker and writer on the meaning of life (or lack thereof).

[JCJBergman · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most interesting philosophical books I've read, albeit with some underwhelming chapters. Watch my review of the book over on my YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1iWW...

2nd reading notes:

Absolutely profound. Here are my favourite quotes from the piece:

“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 weakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive.”

“We don’t want to admit that we are fundamentally dishonest about reality, that we do not really control our own lives. 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 imbedded 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, 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 centre. All of us are driven to be supported in a self-forgetful way, ignorance of what energies we really draw on, of the kind of lie we have fashion in order to live securely and serenely.”

“The knowledge of death is reflective and conceptual, and animals are spared of it. They live and they disappear with the same thoughtlessness: a few minutes of fear, a few seconds of anguish, and it is over. But to live a whole lifetime with the fate of death haunting one’s dreams and even the most sun-filled days — that’s something else.”

“The terror of death is so overwhelming we conspire to keep it unconscious.”

“[Man] drives himself into a blind obliviousness with social games, psychological tricks, personal preoccupations so far removed from the reality of his situation that they are forms of madness, but madness all the same.”

“Everything cultural is fabricated and given meaning by the mind, a meaning that was not given by physical nature. Culture is in this sense “supernatural,” and all systematisations of culture have in their end the same goal: to raise men above nature to assure them that in some ways their lives count more than merely physical things count.”

“One of the ironies of the creative process is that it partly cripples itself in order to function.” // preface p21

“This is why it is so difficult to have sex without guilt; guilt is there because the body casts a shadow on the person’s inner freedom, his ‘real’ self that — through the act of sex — is being forced into a standardised mechanical, biological role.” // pg42

“Sartre has called man a “useless passion” because he is so hopelessly bungled, so deluded about his true condition. He wants to be a god with only the equipment of an animal, so he thrives on fantasies.” // pg59

“If we don’t have the omnipotence of gods, we can at least destroy like gods.” // pg85

“Early theorists of group psychology tried to explain why men were so sheeplike when they functioned in groups. They developed ideas like ‘mental contagion’ and ‘herd instinct’, which became very popular. But as Freud was quick to see, these ideas never really did explain what men did with their judgement and common sense when they got caught up in groups. Freud saw right away what they did with it: they simply became dependent children again, blindly following the inner voice of their parents, which now came to them under the hypnotic spell of the leader. They abandoned their egos to his, identified with his power, tried to function with him as an ideal. […] And so, as Freud argues, it is not that groups bring out anything new in people; it is just that they satisfy the deep-seated erotic longings that people constantly carry around unconsciously. […] participation in the group redistills everyday reality and gives it the aura of the sacred — just as, in childhood, play created a heightened reality.” // Pg.132

“The first motive — to merge and lose oneself in something larger — comes from man’s horror of isolation, of being thrust back upon his own feeble energies alone; he feels tremblingly small and impotent in the face of transcendent nature. If he gives in to his natural feeling of cosmic dependence, the desire to be part of something bigger, it puts him at peace and at oneness, gives him a sense of self-expansion in a larger beyond, and so heightens his being, giving him truly a feeling of transcendent value.” // Pg152

“People create the reality they need in order to discover themselves.” // Pg158

“As [Otto] Rank so wisely saw, projection is a necessary unburdening of the individual; man cannot live closed upon himself and for himself. He must project the meaning of his life outward, the reason for it, even the blame for it. We did not create ourselves, but we are stuck with ourselves. Technically we say that transference is a distortion of reality. But now we see that this distortion has two dimensions: distortion due to the fear of life and death and distortion due to the heroic attempt to assure self-expansion and the intimate connection of one’s inner self to surrounding nature. […] transference reflects the whole of the human condition and raises the largest philosophical question about that condition.” // Pg158

“Culture opposes nature and transcends it. Culture is in its most intimate intent a heroic denial of creatureliness.” // Pg.159

“Christianity took creature consciousness — the thing man most wanted to deny — and made it the very condition for his cosmic heroism.” // Pg160

“Nietzsche railed at the Judeo-Christian renunciatory morality; but as Rank said, he ‘overlooked the deep need in the human being for just that kind of morality’. Rank goes so far as to say that the ‘need for a truly religious ideology is inherent in human nature and its fulfilment is basic to any kind of a social life’. […] Man is a ‘theological being’, concludes Rank, and not a biological one.” // Pg175

“There is just no way for the living creature to avoid life and death, and so it is probably poetic justice that if he tries too hard to do so he destroys himself.” // pg181

“What we call a creative gift is merely the social licence to be obsessed. And what we call “cultural routine” is a similar licence: the proletariat demands the obsession of work in order to keep from going crazy. […] The daily madness of these jobs is a repeated vaccination against the madness of the asylum. Look at the joy and eagerness with which workers return from vacation to their compulsive routines. They plunge into their work with equanimity and lightheartedness because it drowns out something more ominous. Men have to be protected from reality.” // Pg186

“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.” // pg204

“The person is, after all, not his own creator; he is sustained at all times by the workings of his psychochemistry — and, beneath that, of his atomic and subatomic structure. These structures contain within themselves the immense powers of nature, and so it seems logical to say that we are being constantly ‘created and sustained’ out of the ‘invisible void’.” // pg274

“Modern man is drinking and drugging himself out of awareness, or he spends his time shopping, which is the same thing. As awareness calls for types of heroic dedication that his culture no longer provides for him, society contrives to help him forget.” // Pg284

Hope you like the quotes I've noted.
Cheers.