The Denial of Death

by Ernest Becker

Romm’s patient showed perfectly this shrinkage of a cosmic problem to the single partner: In an attempt to relieve his severe tension he struggled between the wish to be a dominant male, aggressive and sadistic toward his wife, and the desire to give up his masculinity, be castrated by his wife and thus return to a state of impotence, passivity and helplessness.

we want the partner to be like God, all-powerful to support our desires, and all-embracing to merge our desires into—but this is impossible.

The avoidance of life and the terror of death become enmeshed in the personality to such an extent that it is crippled—unable to exercise the “normal cultural heroism” of other members of the society. The result is that the person cannot permit himself the routine heroic self-expansion nor the easy yielding to the superordinate cultural world-view that other members can. This is why he becomes a burden on others in some way.

The religious geniuses of history have argued that to be really submissive means to be submissive to the highest power, the true infinity and absolute—and not to any human substitutes, lovers, leaders, nation-states.

What most people usually do is to follow one person’s ideas and then another’s, depending on who looms largest on one’s horizon at the time. The one with the deepest voice, the strongest appearance, the most authority and success, is usually the one who gets our momentary allegiance; and we try to pattern our ideals after him. But as life goes on we get a perspective on this, and all these different versions of truth become a little pathetic.

Today we know that people try so hard to win converts for their point of view because it is more than merely an outlook on life: it is an immortality formula.

What is there to choose between religious creatureliness and scientific creatureliness? The most one can achieve is a certain relaxedness, an openness to experience that makes him less of a driven burden on others.

If men lean too much on God they don’t accomplish what they have to in this world on their own powers. In order to do anything one must first be a man, apart from everything else.

That, I suppose, is another way of saying that in this world each organism lives to be consumed by its own energies; and those that are consumed with the most relentlessness, and burn with the brightest flame, seem to serve the purposes of nature best, so far as accomplishing anything on this planet is concerned.

guilt is not a result of infantile fantasy but of self-conscious adult reality.

How can we say that evolution has made a mistake with man, that the development of the forebrain, the power to symbolize, to delay experience, to bind time, was not “intended” by nature and so represents a self-defeat embodied in an improbable animal? The ego, on the contrary, represents the immense broadening of experience and potential control, a step into a true kind of sub-divinity in nature.

Admittedly, when evolution gave man a self, an inner symbolic world of experience, it split him in two, gave him an added burden. But this burden seems to be the price that had to be paid in order for organisms to attain more life, for the development of the life force on the furthest reach of experience and self-consciousness.

To admit this would make his whole thesis ambiguous—and what revolutionary wants that? He would have to put forth a program that is not totally revolutionary, that allows for repression, that questions what men may become, that sees how inevitably men work against their own better interests, how they must shut out life and pleasure, follow irrational hero-systems—that there is a demonism in human affairs that even the greatest and most sweeping revolution cannot undo.

The heaviest crosses are internal and men make them so that, thus skeletally supported, they can bear the burden of their flesh. Under the sign of this inner cross, a certain inner distance is achieved from the infantile desire to be and have everything.

He quotes Marx’s defiant revolutionary phrase: “I am nothing and should be everything.” For Rieff this is the undiluted infantile unconscious speaking. Or, as I would prefer to say with Rank, the neurotic consciousness—the “all or nothing” of the person who cannot “partialize” his world.

There is no secure ego balance to limit the intake of reality or to fashion the output of one’s own powers.

If there is tragic limitation in life there is also possibility. What we call maturity is the ability to see the two in some kind of balance into which we can fit creatively.

postponement of death is not a solution to the problem of the fear of death… there still will remain the fear of dying prematurely.”24 The smallest virus or the stupidest accident would deprive a man not of 90 years but of 900—and would be then 10 times more absurd.

Unrepression has become the only religion after Freud—as Philip Rieff so well argued in a recent book; evidently he did not realize that his argument was an updating and expansion of exactly what Rank had maintained about the historical role of psychology.

it takes sixty years of incredible suffering and effort to make such an individual, and then he is good only for dying. This painful paradox is not lost on the person himself—least of all himself. He feels agonizingly unique, and yet he knows that this doesn’t make any difference as far as ultimates are concerned. He has to go the way of the grasshopper, even though it takes longer.

Once you accept the truly desperate situation that man is in, you come to see not only that neurosis is normal, but that even psychotic failure represents only a little additional push in the routine stumbling along life’s way.

This fact turned Koestler against the East,39 just as it also led Tillich to argue so penetratingly that Eastern mysticism is not for Western man. It is an evasion of the courage to be; it prevents the absorption of maximum meaninglessness into oneself.

The empirical facts of the world will not fade away because one has analyzed his Oedipus complex, as Freud so well knew, or because one can make love with tenderness, as so many now believe. Forget it. In this sense again it is Freud’s somber pessimism, especially of his later writings such as Civilization and Its Discontents, that keeps him so contemporary. Men are doomed to live in an overwhelmingly tragic and demonic world.

The most that any one of us can seem to do is to fashion something—an object or ourselves—and drop it into the confusion, make an offering of it, so to speak, to the life force. More from the Author Birth and Death of… We hope you enjoyed reading this Simon & Schuster ebook. Get a FREE ebook when you join our mailing list. Plus, get updates on new releases, deals, recommended reads, and more from Simon & Schuster. Click below to sign up and see terms and conditions. CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP Already a subscriber? Provide your email again so we can register this ebook and send you more of what you like to read. You will continue to receive exclusive offers in your inbox.