Becker says we are motivated by many things but the fear of death is primary and overarching. We are afflicted with minds that can transcend our obvious biological being. Knowing that, we also know we are insignificant in the vast scheme of things and then we will die. From childhood on, we mold our character to deal with this reality by seeking to align ourselves with heroes through transference (to leaders, gurus, God) to gain significance that way, we seek to be heroes in our own mind, and we use repression to defend against insignificance and death. From this basic view, Becker critiques and recasts much of contemporary psychological theory. He attributes, for example, the major forms of mental illness (depression occurs when we have given up hope; perversion, which includes for him homosexuality, is a protest against "species standardization"; schizophrenia is an awareness that we are burdened by an alien animal body) as the outcome of the repression of our "ontological" insignificance along with its capstone, death.

Becker is critical of most therapeutic approaches, which he characterizes as attempts at "unrepression." He says they can do good, but they can't give us immortality. While insignificance and death is an undeniable reality ("the terror of creation") that can't be repressed, Becker's own response is unsatisfactorily unclear. He points us in the direction of creating an illusion or myth that somehow works for us but, without elaboration, that suggestion is flat.

Becker is a strong and lively writer,and he does a good job of highlighting the central role that death plays in our psychological and religious makeup. Whether all of us look for "the immortality formula" in the way Becker suggests, or whether one can pull together most of the last century's psychological theory and place it under the denial of death banner, as Becker does, should be questioned. This seems to be an overreach that involves an over interpretation of what's out there in mental and emotional phenomena.

Becker is good at recognizing our essential biological makeup that goes along with our distinctive symbolic functions (e.g., "we are gods that shit" or words to that effect), but his theory does not draw on the biological evidence that could provide an alternative perspective to what he brings forward. It could be that our heroic quests are due to native ambition and need for value and rank that has less to do with the fear of death than what Becker would argue (although clearly building monuments to ourselves has the halo of an immortality quest). Our desire for merger with various social, political and religious movements may have more to do with our tribal nature and a need to belong for survival purposes than, as Becker argues, compensation for feelings of insignificance. Transference may have less to do with compensation for weakness and more to do with an evolutionary legacy to defer to leaders who will protect us. It could be that our various mental illnesses have as much to do with bad body chemistry than what the heavily-laden, overly-interpretive psychological theories argue. And, it could be that our denial of death is a natural by-product of an understandable evolutionary desire to survive, and not to compensate for a feeling of insignificance that is most powerfully revealed in our own demise.

I'm interested in almost everything. That's why I know a little about lots of things a lot about very little. When I saw this book at the library I realized I know virtually nothing about Freudian and post-Freudian psychoanalysis so I thought this would be a good overview. This was written in the 1970s, so it seemed a little dated, but it won the Pulitzer Prize and is continually being re-published as a classic so I assume some people still like it.
The basis of Becker's argument is that Freud was right about many things, but he was incorrect in believing everyone's problems are based on sex. They are instead, according to Becker, based on our terror of dying.
3% - interesting facts, thought-provoking ideas, and reasonable theories
62% - hogwash
35% - stuff I didn't understand but strongly suspect to be hogwash

The prose in this book is hard to read and the writing seems at times flowery and ambiguous, like a blind folded person trying to describe a statue he can only touch.

I sense that this book suited the zeitgeist of the 1970’s milieu, as they did all they could to reject Freud, for contemporary ideas. Some of the ideas expressed now seem dated. Much of what he wrote about Mental Illness would be considered heretical by some in my professional milieu (especially those who worship at the alter of scientific positivism). I suspect he might be onto something regarding art and symbology. They might be just as useful as tools in explaining mental illness, as brain chemistry and synaptic connections.

I was troubled by Becker characterisation of schizophrenia, as though you could lump all people with this diagnosis into one box. I have worked with people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia almost my entire working life. My own conclusion is that Schizophrenia is as real as Peter Pan. The combination of potential symptoms seems limitless, and has become so broad it is almost meaningless. I truly believe that if you took a view of anyone at a certain period of their life, as they responded to the despair of life, you could come up with a compelling argument for a diagnosis for schizophrenia.

I found myself agreeing with the juxtaposition of contemporary psychotherapy and religion. I have long believed they are just an intellectual base for living. Both have righteous proponents (zealots – just as science does). What is built on the foundation is what is important. Have you built a life that you are satisfied with? (I can answer yes ).

I am a believer in serendipity, and this book came into my life at just the right time. Becker has made an important contribution to my intellectual self – I will reflect on this work many times in the years to come. It has given my a new lens with which to view life and living.

We know we are going to die someday. This is the unique problem of the conscious animal. We know it but we don’t feel it because we need to repress this truth in order to function.
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So what to do? It’s really hard to accept that we are just worms in the dirt. Especially when our nature is so paradoxical; the body being so animalistic and limited yet our minds so godlike and boundless. We are gods with anuses.
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What we need is a lie. A vital and grand one that we can always rely on. We need something that transcends us, some system of ideas and powers that embed us, whether it’s a flag, the proletariat, a guru or religion.
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Kierkegaard, Freud, Jung, Maslow and Fromm are some of the characters you’ll get to familiarize with during this journey. I felt like each chapter demanded a following period of reflection. I was absolutely taken aback by this book.
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Some notes:
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This is a solid exposition on the ideas of Freud and Rank. The underpinning thesis of the book—that a fear of death unconsciously drives most of human experience—did not receive as many pages as I had hoped. Instead, a large portion of the book is spent analyzing works that (Dr. Becker argues) are correct insofar as they can be logically extended to support the idea that humans refuse to acknowledge their own mortality. This is a real hum-dinger that I would recommend to any person who denies that they have a paralyzing fear of death.

Most of this book was a fascinating contemplation of what drives human psychology. There was a lot of inside baseball where he takes on Freud, Kierkegaard and other philosophers on their wrong theories. There was a sliver of just unscientific theorizing about homosexuality (that was just tragically outdated and harmful). But on the whole, it was an excellent read by a great thinker and writer on the meaning of life (or lack thereof).

WHAT IS YOUR LEGACY?
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Becker's Pulitzer Prize winning book was written while he was dying-- it is his final gift to humanity. Praised by Elizabeth Kubler Ross, The New York Times Book Review, Sam Keen, you name it. One of my brightest, most humane friends described it as, "The only book I've ever read twice." Becker says-- very thoroughly, too-- that everything we humans do is to blot out the understanding that we die. That includes all the monuments to our egos we leave behind: shopping centers, vineyards, hotels, motels, cities, piles of stuff for our relatives to clean up, as well as poetry, art, and literature. What is your legacy?

It was a remarkable read that offered a different way of looking at life and the human condition. Becker puts fear of death as the central driving force of all human thought. It paints an absurd picture of life which is not pretty; where every life form is biting into and tearing up other life forms and excreting it out as foul substance. We, humans, are probably the only species on the planet that is aware of our ultimate end in death, and that plays a central and profound role in how we live life. How we deal with this truth is the subject of this book.

In my personal life, especially since I have gotten older, I can feel the tremendous effect death has on how I operate. Everything worthwhile that I do, including making art, acquiring knowledge and understanding, and reading, is an expression of the finiteness of available time that I am acutely aware of. It is the ultimate driving force for all that is passionate and non-mundane in my life. This may sound very negative to some, but if you think deeply enough, and avoid the positive imagery our cultures create to combat this very idea, I think you will realize that if we were immortal, there would be little reason to create, to fall in love, as you can always do it tomorrow. The urgency in life comes from the realization that it is finite; extremely finite.

In spite of its great central theme, the book necessarily spends most of its pages on Freudian psychoanalysis and it many variants. I am not educated enough in psychology or psychoanalysis where I can argue against it, but it always felt a little too contrived to me. It seems to me a bunch of extremely clever people trying desperately to make sense of a complex thing as our mind in terms of some basic assumptions, that are shaky at best. Is our subconscious as clever and inventive as these great thinkers? I doubt.

A book full of powerful, important ideas that could have a major impact on how you see the world, all wrapped in dense, academic writing that is not particularly accessible to (and to be fair, probably not written for) those outside the psychology/philosophy fields. It's worth reading, but be prepared to tune out some of the crappier parts (awkward ass-kissing of many eminent psychologists, including an obsession with Freud and Rank; a very male-centric view of the world; treating homosexuality as a neurosis; lots of pure speculation about human development, with no scientific backing whatsoever), so you can focus on the key ideas:

- Human beings are torn between two worlds: one is the world of thought and mind, which seems perfect and endless; the other is the world of the body, which is gross and dies. We are self-aware, conscious beings, who can contemplate the beauty of philosophy, math, and art, but we are also constantly faced with the grossness of our bodies: of sweat, hair, poop, disease, decay, and death.

- This reality of life—knowing that we are going to die and disappear entirely—is too overwhelming for humans. If we faced the truth of the world head on every day, it would crush us. As a result, to be able to function in this world, we have to lie to ourselves. We have to create an illusion where we matter; a narrative where we are the hero; an "immortality project" that allows us to live on forever.

- These immortality projects are a central driver of everything people do. Almost every aspect of human civilization is defense mechanism against the knowledge of our own mortality. People believe in religion, have kids, write books, start companies, and build nations all in an effort to create the illusion that you can live forever.

- Many of the problems of man, such as war and genocide, are the result of multiple conflicting immortality projects clashing. Many mental conditions, such as neurosis, anxiety, and schizophrenia are the result of failing to sustain an illusion, and being faced with the reality of life.

- Therefore, the central question of humanity is what illusions should we believe? What lies should we tell to ourselves to create the best possible life?

I'm not sure I believe all of these argument, but there is definitely a lot of truth here. As Yuval Noah Harari wrote in "Sapiens," what makes most of modern civilization possible—government, money, religion—is the ability of man to believe in illusions. Perhaps, if we are to believe Becker, believing in illusions is what makes it possible to be a self-aware human in the first place.



As always, I've saved some of my favorite quotes from the book:

“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 awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive.”

“Yet, at the same time, as the Eastern sages also knew, man is a worm and food for worms. This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it. His body is a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways—the strangest and most repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die. Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order to blindly and dumbly rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with.”

“...Erich Fromm wondered why most people did not become insane in the face of the existential contradiction between a symbolic self, that seems to give man infinite worth in a timeless scheme of things, and a body that is worth about 98¢.”

“The neurotic opts out of life because he is having trouble maintaining his illusions about it, which proves nothing less than that life is possible only with illusions.”

“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, consiousness 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 crate such a complex and fancy worm food?”

“Inter faeces et urinam nascimur. (We are born between shit and piss.)” ― Augustine of Hippo

“[...] we all see the world through obsessive eyes at least part of the time and to some degree; and as Freud said, not only neurotics take exception to the fact that "we are born between urine and feces." In this horror of the incongruity of man Swift the poet gives more tormented voice to the dilemma that haunts us all, and it is worth summing it up one final time: Excreting is the curse that threatens madness because it shows man his abject finitude, his physicalness, the likely unreality of his hopes and dreams. But even more immediately, it represents man's utter bafflement at the sheer non-sense of creation: to fashion the sublime miracle of the human face, the mysterium tremendum of radiant female beauty, the veritable goddesses that beautiful women are; to bring this out of nothing, out of the void, and make it shine in noonday; to take such a miracle and put miracles again within it, deep in the mystery of eyes that peer out-the eye that gave even the dry Darwin a chill; to do all this, and to combine it with an anus that shits! It is too much. Nature mocks us, and poets live in torture.”

“We are gods with anuses.”

أفكار قوية وبليغة في علم النفس بدا فيها "بيكر" متأثراً وشارحاً وناقداً لأفكار فرويد. الكلام حول مكنونات البطولة عند البشر يستحق التأمل... دعا المؤلف إلى دمج أفكار علم النفس مع الدين بسبب حاجة الإنسان لكليهما.

Psychoanalysis is nonsense

One of those rare books that will change your perspective about EVERYTHING. Even though I don't agree with everything in this book I wish I could give it 10 stars.