The Denial of Death

by Ernest Becker

the idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity—activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for man.

the fact that the fear of death is indeed a universal in the human condition.

Most modern Westerners have trouble believing this any more, which is what makes the fear of death so prominent a part of our psychological make-up.

In these pages I try to show that the fear of death is a universal that unites data from several disciplines of the human sciences, and makes wonderfully clear and intelligible human actions that we have buried under mountains of fact, and obscured with endless back-and-forth arguments about the “true” human motives.

as though the future belonged to science and not to militarism.

the time is ripe for a synthesis that covers the best thought in many fields, from the human sciences to religion.

One thing that I hope my confrontation of Rank will do is to send the reader directly to his books.

in another book I will sketch his schema for a psychology of history.

immortality-symbol

the closure of psychoanalysis on religion.

Sometimes this makes for big lies that resolve tensions and make it easy for action to move forward with just the rationalizations that people need. But it also makes for the slow disengagement of truths that help men get a grip on what is happening to them, that tell them where the problems really are.

has always held the world to be essentially a theatre for heroism.”1

In man a working level of narcissism is inseparable from self-esteem, from a basic sense of self-worth.

In man a working level of narcissism is inseparable from self-esteem, from a basic sense of self-worth.

“cosmic significance.”

first in the universe, representing in himself all of life.

Reminds me of trying to eat all the chocolate chip cookies before my sisters got to them.

But underneath throbs the ache of cosmic specialness,

William James spoke very early for this school, and with his usual colorful realism he called death “the worm at the core” of man’s pretensions to happiness.15

Becker 2

Sartre

that to see the world as it really is is devastating and terrifying.

it makes routine, automatic, secure, self-confident activity impossible.

If man is the more normal, healthy and happy, the more he can … successfully … repress, displace, deny, rationalize, dramatize himself and deceive others, then it follows that the suffering of the neurotic comes … from painful truth… . Spiritually the neurotic has been long since where psychoanalysis wants to bring him without being able to, namely at the point of