The Denial of Death

by Ernest Becker

If the lie that he attempts to live is too flaunting of reality, a man can lose everything during his lifetime—and this is precisely what we mean by psychosis: the complete and utter breakdown of the character structure.

Too much possibility is the attempt by the person to overvalue the powers of the symbolic self. It reflects the attempt to exaggerate one half of the human dualism at the expense of the other. In this sense, what we call schizophrenia is an attempt by the symbolic self to deny the limitations of the finite body; in doing so, the entire person is pulled off balance and destroyed.

he may nevertheless… be perfectly well able to live on, to be a man, as it seems, to occupy himself with temporal things, get married, beget children, win honor and esteem—and perhaps no one notices that in a deeper sense he lacks a self.

Depressive psychosis is the extreme on the continuum of too much necessity, that is, too much finitude, too much limitation by the body and the behaviors of the person in the real world, and not enough freedom of the inner self, of inner symbolic possibility. This is how we understand depressive psychosis today: as a bogging down in the demands of others—family, job, the narrow horizon of daily duties.

In our time we would have no trouble recognizing these forms of defiant self-creation. We can see their effects so clearly on both personal and social levels. We are witness to the new cult of sensuality that seems to be repeating the sexual naturalism of the ancient Roman world. It is a living for the day alone, with a defiance of tomorrow; an immersion in the body and its immediate experiences and sensations, in the intensity of touch, swelling flesh, taste and smell.

The only thing that might be undignified about it is its desperate reflexivity, a defiance

How does one transcend himself; how does he open himself to new possibility? By realizing the truth of his situation, by dispelling the lie of his character, by breaking his spirit out of its conditioned prison.

Out of the ruins of the broken cultural self there remains the mystery of the private, invisible, inner self which yearned for ultimate significance, for cosmic heroism.

Evidently Freud poured his whole passion into the psychoanalytic movement and his own immortality. They were his “higher aspiration,” which could also reasonably include a spiritual homosexuality that offered no threat as an “animal need.”

Ferenczi pointed out how important it was for the hypnotist to be an imposing person, of high social rank, with a self-confident manner.

It is not so much that man is a herd animal, said Freud, but that he is a horde animal led by a chief.14 It is this alone that can explain the “uncanny and coercive characteristics of group formations.” The chief is a “dangerous personality, toward whom only a passive-masochistic attitude is possible, to whom one’s will has to be surrendered,—while to be alone with him, ‘to look him in the face,’ appears a hazardous enterprise.”

But he did find that in all groups there was what he called a “central person” who held the group together due to certain of his qualities.

There are leaders who seduce us because they do not have the conflicts that we have; we admire their equanimity where we feel shame and humiliation.

This is a logical fate for the utterly helpless person: the more you fear death and the emptier you are, the more you people your world with omnipotent father-figures, extra-magical helpers.

If he gives in to Agape he risks failing to develop himself, his active contribution to the rest of life. If he expands Eros too much he risks cutting himself off from natural dependency, from duty to a larger creation; he pulls away from the healing power of gratitude and humility that he must naturally feel for having been created, for having been given the opportunity of life experience.

You can see that man wants the impossible: He wants to lose his isolation and keep it at the same time. He can’t stand the sense of separateness, and yet

Culture is in its most intimate intent a heroic denial of creatureliness.

map for personal immortality over the animal body. He brought sexual taboos into being because he needed to triumph over the body, and he sacrificed the pleasures of the body to the highest pleasure of all: self-perpetuation as a spiritual being through all eternity.

As Rank beautifully argues, in this sense “sex education” is a kind of wishful thinking, a rationalization, and a pretense: we try to make believe that if we give instruction in the mechanics of sex we are explaining the mystery of life.

The partner represents a kind of fulfillment in freedom from self-consciousness and guilt; but at the same time he represents the negation of one’s distinctive personality.

However much we may idealize and idolize him, he inevitably reflects earthly decay and imperfection. And as he is our ideal measure of value, this imperfection falls back upon us. If your partner is your “All” then any shortcoming in him becomes a major threat to you.

After all, what is it that we want when we elevate the love partner to the position of God? We want redemption—nothing less. We want to be rid of our faults, of our feeling of nothingness. We want to be justified, to know that our creation has not been in vain.

Redemption can only come from outside the individual, from beyond, from our conceptualization of the ultimate source of things, the perfection of creation. It can only come, as Rank saw, when we lay down our individuality, give it up, admit our creatureliness and helplessness.

The most terrifying burden of the creature is to be isolated, which is what happens in individuation: one separates himself out of the herd. This move exposes the person to the sense of being completely crushed and annihilated because he sticks out so much, has to carry so much in himself.

We should not be surprised that Rank was brought to exactly the same conclusion as Kierkegaard: that the only way out of human conflict is full renunciation, to give one’s life as a gift to the highest powers.

One should reach for the highest beyond of religion: man should cultivate the passivity of renunciation to the highest powers no matter how diffcult it is. Anything less is less than full development, even if it seems like weakness and compromise to the best thinkers.

Rank goes so far as to say that the “need for a truly religious ideology… is inherent in human nature and its fulfillment is basic to any kind of social life.”

Only in this way, says Rank, only by surrendering to the bigness of nature on the highest, least-fetishized level, can man conquer death.

Neurosis has three interdependent aspects. In the first place it refers to people who are having trouble living with the truth of existence;

the second place, neurosis is private because each person fashions his own peculiar stylistic reaction to life.

neurosis is also historical to a large extent, because all the traditional ideologies that disguised and absorbed it have fallen away and modern ideologies are just too thin to contain

But we can also see at once that there is no line between normal and neurotic, as we all lie and are all bound in some ways by the lies. Neurosis is, then, something we all share; it is universal.

Generally speaking, we call neurotic any life style that begins to constrict too much, that prevents free forward momentum, new choices, and growth that a person may want and need.

We saw that these people feel their isolation, their individuality. They stick out, are less built-into normal society, less securely programmed for automatic cultural action. To have difficulty partializing experience is to have difficulty living. Not to be able to fetishize makes one susceptible to the world as a total problem—with all the living hell that this exposure raises.

One has to stick his neck out in the action without any guarantees about satisfaction or safety. One never knows how it will come out or how silly he will look, but the neurotic type wants these guarantees. He doesn’t want to risk his self-image.

Instead of living experience he ideates it; instead of arranging it in action he works it all out in his head.

The answer is that he takes in the world, but instead of being oppressed by it he reworks it in his own personality and recreates it in the work of art. The neurotic is precisely the one who cannot create—the “artiste-manqué,” as Rank so aptly called

your control and is perfectible in some real ways. Either you eat up yourself and others around you, trying for perfection; or you objectify that imperfection in a work, on which you then unleash your creative powers.

both experience the world in similar ways and only the quality and the power of the reaction differ.

If the neurotic feels vulnerable in the face of the world he takes in, he reacts by criticizing himself to excess. He can’t endure himself or the isolation that his individuality plunges him into.

With the truth, one cannot live. To be able to live one needs illusions, not only outer illusions such as art, religion, philosophy, science and love afford, but inner illusions which first condition the outer [i.e., a secure sense of one’s active powers, and of being able to count on the powers of others].

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. But they also knew, with a heavy heart, that this eclipse of their traditional hero-systems at the same time left them as good as dead.

be confident and secure in their personal heroism. What characterizes modern life is the failure of all traditional immortality ideologies to absorb and quicken man’s hunger for self-perpetuation and heroism.

Beyond a given point man is not helped by more “knowing,” but only by living and doing in a partly self-forgetful way.

All reflection and no plunging drives us mad; all plunging and no reflection, and we are brutes.

How many people have an independent gift to give to the cosmos in order to assure their special immortality? Only the creative person can manage that. When the average person can no longer convincingly perform his safe heroics or cannot hide his failure to be his own hero, then he bogs down in the failure of depression and its terrible guilt.

As we saw above, the childhood experience is crucial in developing a secure sense of one’s body, firm identification with the father, strong ego control over oneself, and dependable interpersonal skills. Only if one achieves these can he “do the species role” in a self-forgetful way, a way that does not threaten to submerge him with annihilation anxiety.

The final characteristic of mysterious rituals is that they be dramatized; and the activities of fetishists and allied perverts such as transvestites have always fascinated observers precisely because of that. They stage a complicated drama in which their gratification depends on a minutely correct staging of the scene; any small detail or failure to conform to the precise formula spoils the whole thing. The right words have to be pronounced at the right time, the shoes arranged in a certain way, the corset put on and laced correctly, and so

When indulging in his perverse practices, it was his custom, as soon as ejaculation had taken place, to tear the borrowed clothes off as quickly as possible. In connection with this he had the association that he had been warned that, if one made faces and the clock struck, one’s face would stay so.

Perversion has been called a “private religion”—and that it really is, but it testifies to fear and trembling and not to faith. It is an idiosyncratic, symbolic protest of control and safety by those who can rely on nothing—neither their own powers nor the shared cultural map for interpersonal action.