The Denial of Death

by Ernest Becker

If you get rid of the four-layered neurotic shield, the armor that covers the characterological lie about life, how can you talk about “enjoying” this Pyrrhic victory? The person gives up something restricting and illusory, it is true, but only to come face to face with something even more awful: genuine despair.

The meaning of his symbolism is that no matter what men pretend, they are only one accidental bite away from utter fallibility.

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, and so he thrives on fantasies.

man uses his ideas for the defense of his existence, to frighten away reality.

the parents were thought to be responsible for the child’s repressions, for the character defenses that he developed, and for the kind of person he turned out to be, as they had provided him with an environment and molded him to it. Even more than that, as the parents had opposed the child’s natural energetic and free expansion and had demanded his surrender to their world, they could be

considered in some fundamental way as guilty for whatever warpings his character had. If the child had no instincts he at least had plenty of free energy and a natural innocence of the body. He sought continual activity and diversion, wanted to move about his world in its entirety, to bend it to his use and delight as much as possible. He sought to express himself spontaneously, feel the most satisfaction in his bodily processes, derive the most comfort, thrill, and pleasure from others. But as this kind of limitless expansion is not possible in the world, the child has to be checked for his own good; and the parents were the checkers of his activity. Whatever attitudes the child had toward himself, his body, and his world were considered to have been implanted by his experience with his trainers and with his immediate environment.

man as born free and then put into chains by training and by society.

the stamina and the authority necessary to live in full expansiveness with limitless horizons of perception and experience.

the child’s fall from natural perception into the artificialities of the cultural world?

What exactly would it mean on this earth to be wholly unrepressed, to live in full bodily and psychic expansiveness? It can only mean to be reborn into madness.

death is man’s peculiar and greatest anxiety.

most men live in a “half-obscurity” about their own condition,10 they are in a state of “shut-upness” wherein they block off their own perceptions of reality.

build extra-thick defenses against anxiety, a heavy character armor,

If the child is not burdened by too much parental blocking of his action, too much infection with the parents’ anxieties, he can develop his defenses in a less monopolizing way, can remain somewhat fluid and open in character. He is prepared to test reality more in terms of his own action and experimentation and less on the basis of delegated

authority and prejudgment or preperception.

It is of infinite importance that a child be brought up with a conception of the lofty shut-upness [reserve], and be saved from the mistaken kind. In an external respect it is easy to perceive when the moment has arrived that one ought to let the child walk alone;… the art is to be constantly present and yet not be present, to let the child be allowed to develop itself, while nevertheless one has constantly a survey clearly before one. The art is to leave the child to itself in the very highest measure and on the greatest possible scale, and to express this apparent abandonment in such a way that, unobserved, one at the same time knows everything…. And the father who educates or does everything for the child entrusted to him, but has not prevented him from becoming shut-up, has incurred a great accountability.

inner sustainment that allows the child to develop a “lofty” shut-upness, or reserve: that is, an ego-controlled and self-confident appraisal of the world by a personality that can open up more easily to experience.

“Mistaken” shut-upness, on the other hand, is the result of too much blockage, too much anxiety, too much effort to face up to experience by an organism that has been overburdened and weakened in its own controls:

the lie of character is built up because the child needs to adjust to the world, to the parents, and to his own existential dilemmas. It is built up before the child has a chance to learn about himself in an open or free way, and thus character defenses are automatic and unconscious.

the truth that he is an inner symbolic self, which signifies a certain freedom, and that he is bound by a finite body, which limits that freedom.

This is a superb characterization of the “culturally normal” man, the one who dares not stand up for his own meanings because this means too much danger, too much exposure. Better not to be oneself, better to live tucked into others, embedded in a safe framework of social and cultural obligations and duties.

The depressed person is so afraid of being himself, so fearful of exerting his own individuality, of insisting on what might be his own meanings, his own conditions for living, that he seems literally stupid.

depressive psychosis:

“normal neurosis.” Most men figure out how to live safely within the probabilities of a given set of social rules.

There is the type of man who has great contempt for “immediacy,” who tries to cultivate his interiority, base his pride on something deeper and inner, create a distance between himself and the average man. Kierkegaard calls this type of man the “introvert.” He is a little more concerned with what it means to be a person, with individuality and uniqueness. He enjoys solitude and withdraws periodically to reflect, perhaps to nurse ideas about his secret self, what it might be.

And instead of working our inner secret we gradually cover it over and forget it, while we become purely external men, playing successfully the standardized hero-game into which we happen to fall by accident, by family connection, by reflex patriotism, or by the simple need to eat and the urge to procreate.

he must throw off all his “cultural lendings” and stand naked in the storm of life.

the direct result of seeing the world as it really is in relation to his situation as a creature.

What does it mean to be a self-conscious animal? The idea is ludicrous, if it is not monstrous. It means to know that one is food for worms.

This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression—and with all this yet to die. It seems like a hoax, which is why one type of cultural man rebels openly against the idea of God. What kind of deity would create such complex and fancy worm food?

rather, a “school” that provides man with the ultimate education, the final maturity.

And so the arrival at new possibility, at new reality, by the destruction of the self through facing up to the anxiety of the terror of existence. The self must be destroyed, brought down to nothing, in order for self-transcendence to begin.

admit that you are a creature, you accomplish one basic thing: you demolish all your unconscious power linkages or supports.

Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful. Hence one must choose a master, God being out of style.

The thing that has to be explained in human relations is precisely the fascination of the person who holds or symbolizes

power.

Man has “an extreme passion for authority” and “wishes to be governed by unrestricted force.”15 It is this trait that the leader hypnotically embodies in his own masterful person. Or as Fenichel later put it, people have a “longing for being hypnotized” precisely because they want to get back to the magical protection, the participation in omnipotence, the “oceanic feeling” that they enjoyed when they were loved and protected by their parents.

Natural narcissism—the feeling that the person next to you will die, but not you—is reinforced by trusting dependence on the leader’s power.

demand illusions, answered Freud, they “constantly give what is unreal precedence over what is real.”17 And we know why. The real world is simply too terrible to admit; it tells man that he is a small, trembling animal who will decay and die.

These are the many ways in which men can play the hero, all the while that they are avoiding responsibility for their own acts in a cowardly way.

Transference

indicates a need to exert complete control over external circumstances…. In all its variety and multiplicity of manifestation… transference may be regarded as the enduring monument of man’s profound rebellion against reality and his stubborn persistence in the ways of immaturity.