A masterpiece in psychology. For me, this is the book of the year. It digs deep into you, strips you naked and spit on your ugly true nature and leave you there struggling in your pile of dirt and tears. Flawless.

I think I might have swallowed this whole had I read it when it was first published, but I have drifted quite a long way from the psychoanalytic tradition since then. It was certainly an interesting read, and although some parts were really unconvincing , there were a couple of times when something said actually challenged my ideas, so it was well worth the time.

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.

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.

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

This was one of a dozen books commonly used in my course on Coping with Life and Death: of course, Kubler-Ross also, and even Woody Allen, "Death: A Play." Poems like Frost's "Death of the Hired Man," many by Emily Dickinson, and Keats's Nightingale Ode--which I helped Director James Wolpaw make a film on, "Keats and His Nightingale: A Blind Date," Oscar nominated in 1985. The Director kindly used me as a talking head, and even for the sound of the Nightingale because I study Birdtalk. My Nightingale sounded more like the N. American Wood Thrush, a penatatonic singer, our most beautiful.

Expected more...

Lots of insights in the first chapters.
Chapter 8 was the best, afterwards it goes full bullshit.

The author criticizes Freud for the wrong reasons, and then praises psychoanalysis for other wrong reasons and interpretations which are totally bogus.

I purposefully skipped the chapters on neurosis and mental illness because I already know the bullshit psychoanalysts say about it so...

One where I nailed it on my initial review, haha—

FIRST REVIEW (2015):

Neither as terrifying nor as reassuring/enlightening as the title suggests!

Great primer on the concepts of duality, anxiety, culture as terror management. Lots of weird re-hashed Freud that warded me off Freud (shit is a dead dick! Men with fetishes don't have to be gay [this in a chapter about mental illness] because they can get over the fear of castration that the sight of women's genitals give them!) This is all fun but quite academic...

It is clearly true that we must create an illusion out of life in order to function- mine tend to form and shatter themselves of their own accord so I don't know what good it does to know this, though.

Lesson of the day: lower expectations; take life less seriously; not enough dancing in the world.

Becker introduces the very basic idea that we humans have four distinguishing features: (1) we can contemplate our death, we do contemplate -- and try to deny -- our death, and (2) we can create symbolic realities of thought and action, and (3) we project and perpetuate symbolic realities of thought and action to create systems that will outlive -- in an everyday sense "transcend" our physical mortality; we want to symbolically live on and some of us succeed in doing so (a major point at the end of the Epic of Gilgamesh); and (4) through projection and transference, and in order to feel we are participating in realities that transcend death, we latch onto heroes of all kinds, whether they be religious (Prophets, Gurus, Messiahs, saints), or cultural (writers, actors, musicians), or athletic (sports heroes and teams). But ultimately, Becker like Kierkegaard and Buber (whom he mentions often along with Otto Rank and Paul Tillach) is calling us to become our own heroes, or at least acknowledges that some of us rise to the occasion, raise the bar, so to speak and live our lives as our own kind of heroes, a life that Becker calls "cosmic heroism." For Becker, because death-anxiety is the pivot around which all symbolic action turns, because death generates the motivation for the symbolic construction of "immortality projects," society is essentially "a codified hero system" and every society is in the sense that it represents itself as ultimate, at its heart a religious system. Becker both critiques and validates our need for projection and transference because these are at times "life-enhancing" (p. 158) and "creative projections" that contribute to our relationships (here he cites Buber). Becker is also an exquisite writer. He is more than a pleasure to read -- he is an inspiration. I read Becker as saying that if we face the reality of our death, we can greater gain the power to consciously create our symbolic immortality and become "cosmic heroes." Becker has joined in my mind, for original break-through thinking the ranks of Buber, Bateson, and Burke (whom he often cites). You can read excellent essays on Becker's work at http://faculty.washington.edu/nelgee/ I present a fuller review of _Denial of Death_ and some of Becker's other writings at my site, which I encourage you to visit for a fuller review and overview of Becker and his work: www.halmantle.com . You can also find some very good YouTubes. Search under Becker, Sam Keen, & Sheldon Solomon. Sheldon Solomon is among a team of social psychologists who have empirically tested and validated Becker's ideas. Dare I say, "forever yours,"?

“Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level.”
- Ernest Becker

This book won the Pulitzer Prize the same year that Ernest Becker died in 1974. His long works on Oedipus Theory, heroism, psychoanalysis and neurosis are an eye opener and makes you dive deeper in this human brain.

In The Denial of Death, Becker tried to explore the human obsession with life and immortality and the unconscious fear of mortality and oblivion which we all try to suppress and forget. A great book for all fans of psychology and the depths of the human mind.

It was fascinating to read about the works of psychoanalysis in a neutral light and understand how the landscape of psycho-analytics developed in the past two centuries, especially with regards to death, religion and heroism. Also the various aspects of the works of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Otto Rank (mostly), Alfred Adler, Søren Kierkegaard etc. regarding the psychology behind people's denial of death.

“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.”
- Ernest Becker

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 is how we deal with the world. I think one would find it really difficult to disagree against the thought that we are all driven to be something than more than just a mere human being. Again the tension of mortality and our distinctive place in the world starts to matter most when our actions and reactions to these questions start to affect other people.

Sorry, I'm terrible at describing why books are really awesome. I'd recommend reading this book, it's really eye opening in the ways we are trapped in our existence. We have to do the best we can, not deny our mortality, and live bravely; all while ultimately knowing that even our must someday die.

Every answer is all lies.

“We are gods with anuses.”
- Ernest Becker

This book is one of those books that appeared to me in my life at the exact right time. I had read and internalised the theory of nonviolent communication and wanted to dig a bit deeper inside myself regarding where some of my needs resides from. The introduction of this book caught my instant interest with formulations about how the connection of brain and body creates a constant problem for the human being. The brain is able to imagine the infinite, to travel through the solar system and create abstract models over how the planets will move eons from now. This at the same time as we have to carry around this stinking meatbag of a body on which we can’t even control simple valves where brown matter resides from. The formulation of gods with anuses was hence a quote that struck a string in me.

I’m not familiar at all with psychoanalytic theory but the book gave me the impression of being a good introduction to some important concepts of it. Even though I don’t think the author does a much better case for our actions being formed because we have a denial of death than Freud seem to have done for it being repressed sexuality I do think the idea is an interesting one. I have myself wondered how much progress in mathematics are due to repressed sexuality and if we just create culture in order to avoid thinking about our insignificance and how fragile we are.

The chapters on transference was eyeopening to me. It was like the author gave me a vocabulary to express experiences that I over and over experiences in my own relationships. That my own previous language about how love is more built upon our inner model of what the other person constitutes got a well needed upgrade to the language of transference. The analysis of group dynamics from a psychoanalytic perspective also gave me some new ideas. That the group members have an urge to follow a godlike person and with transference such ideas is possible with a leader that can imitate god well enough. This is one explanation to the problems I’ve myself experienced with both being group leader and group follower. If I’m the leader I’ve always expected people to just work but it seems like they instead want me to create some sort of magic aura for them to work in. Basically to make them think that they are doing something of a bigger cause. To transcend their creatureliness.

I think that a lot of the things in this book is true and I really appreciate the ideas in it but I do recognise the kind of narrow and sometimes quite cynical thinking that I think is contained in this book from times in my life when I’ve had some kind of resentment towards people. Like I just want to destroy someones happy experience with snarky remarks of how useless life is and that all the persons life consists of is illusions. Some parts of this book is like revisiting the 18 year old me and giving him some credits for thinking about deep structures that constitute human behaviour but at the same time see that this is just one lens to view human life from. That the picture of us being lost creatures in a confusing and dangerous world is as true as the picture of us being star dust that travels through space on a mission to finally merge with the stars once again.

The author continues to discuss how sex (fornication) won’t help you and that including other people just will leave you feeling like you’re missing something in life. The solution to all the dread of life is creativity - which seems obvious to hear from a person who took the creative path through life and created this book. This does however converge with my own life experience as a person with quite high trait neuroticism. Since I discovered how to use the piano I don’t think I’ve been back to a mental institution. It helps me to make sense of some things that can’t be expressed in any other way. So the presented idea of taking in the world fully instead of being oppressed by it’s sheer chaotic totality and blend it with your personality in order to express it in your own way is definitely a way to handle this lack of ability to subscribe wholeheartedly to the existing culture in a society. I can also see the point of this need coming from the disintegration of the common belief system, but that is basically what I got from reading Nietzsche and Dostojevsky. I further think that the idea of psychology being the source of more neuroticism in the world also converge to my own view. By narrowing down the problem of existence to oneself eliminates the whole umwelt. The responsibility becomes unbearable. This is one reason to why I liked Heideggers Being and Time because it presented us beings in an environment in such a natural way in contrast to the classic quote by Descartes. This book just ties so many strings together for me and presents fundamental problems of existence in a way where they are easily accessible.

It further presents the modern mans problem as substituting religion with psychology and describes how it turns him into a neurotic. A neurotic that knows the whole tragic situation of human existence and has no foolish hope or belief in being something more than an unimportant speck of dust. Oh, how I recognise that feeling of logical digression into infinity, organizing the inner model of the world from a totally reductionistic and rational matter. So the author then poses the relevant question for psychatiry: How much foolishness is good for man and on what level of illusion should man live?

All in all a book full of blended ideas by giants such Freud, Jung, Rank, Kirkegaard and more presented in an accessible format. 5/5 existential crises.

A book that gives deep insight into the natural of humanity.