Há 3 anos, toda vez que eu venho com um perrengue existencial, meu marido me aponta esse livro e eu o ignoro.

Que erro.

Demorei para ler porque tive que ruminar as ideias, é um livro de ideias densas e fortes, mas de leitura fácil.

Desde que comecei a lê-lo penso em tudo nos seus termos, como se seus conceitos e ideias tivessem se assentado em mim.

What more could I say about this book?

DISCLAIMER: I can not do this book justice with a review.

The artist, the pervert, the homosexual, Freud, adults, Hitler, kids.....basically all of humanity gets placed under the analytic microscope that is Ernest Becker's mind. With intense clarity of vision he exposes us all as the frail mortal human beings that we are. He embarrasses us for our petty quests for immortality. He exposes the artist for the fraud that he is. Oh vain wanna be creator! You can only vainly shadow the Great Artisan's infinite light! Wee mortal man! How many have you slain? How many books, paintings, sculptures!? In your quest to be remembered, how many will forget you in a decade?! (Artists, don't hate me, I can say this. I once had to channel my quest for immortality into many works. Poetic and musical in essence, but that topic is for another day.)

Back to the review.
According to Ernest Becker there is a thin line between the madman/woman and the genius. The neurotic and the artist.

That difference is an outlet for creativity.

Ernest Becker argues that the madmen/women suffer because they take in too much of the infinite REALITY of existence and cannot narrow their view. The madmen/women and the neurotic have no way of expressing the infinite. The genius and the artist do the same, they take more of REALITY in, but channel it in a healthy way into some kind of creative work. This is healthy. This channeling of the perceptive mind of man.
Ernest Becker argues that to cope with reality we all have to narrow and focus on what's most important to us. There is a filter that we willingly learn to place over reality so that we do not spend the whole day viewing the infinite beauty of a shaft of light piercing through the window. The delicate fibers of dust playing in its beam, the 360 degree view that one could take of it. The shadow it creates and elongates like a beautiful alive gray puppet. Uh, oh, I think I'm doing it again. Appreciating the infinite quality of the present. The artist will try to lovingly recreate that beam of light into a work of poetry, painting, novel, review (Lol) etc. While the neurotic will be lost in it, and not being able to escape its beauty, will be consumed.

To sum it all up. This book blew my mind, and I hope it blows your mind as well.

I don't think I've ever felt so ambivalent about a book. This book was part OMG, part WTF. If this book was a person, I am not sure if I want to marry her, have kids with her and live happily ever after OR marry her, have kids with her, kill them all, hide in Mexico impersonating a famous journalist ( Hi, Christian Longo).

I picked up this book for I wanted to read about how the problem of death (the existential dilemma/crisis) has been tackled by psychologists. The book gave me much more than that. It touches upon religion, fetishism, heroism, and death, of course. This is a book reviewing and commenting on the various psychological insights starting with Freud and his successors. Pretty heavy going, and I find it hard to relate to a lot of some of the ‘complexes’ described in psychology (Oedipus, castration, primal scene, etc.). But the fundamental duality, the borderless world (at least in theory) of the mind, and the bordered reality of the body is powerful.

The way Becker asserts completely unscientific claims as scientific--rigorously scientific--is maddening. Particularly his handling of schizophrenia and depression, which he says are the consequences of being too unmoored from reality and too tied to it, respectively.

At the same time, the core concepts of The Denial of Death have been revolutionary for me. The book holds that human beings are the only creatures on Earth capable of contemplating the certainty of our own deaths, and because we are animals with drives for survival it is nearly impossible to function with this knowledge at the forefront of our conscious minds. We develop elaborate defense mechanisms against it, ways of feeling powerful and immortal. Some of these defenses are necessary in order to live; some of them, deeply held, can cause us to wreak unnecessary death, destruction and misery on one another. Quoting from the book : "How Darwinians thoughts of early men who were most afraid about their existence and survival, and how they passed on to their offspring a realism disguised as anxiety eventually leading to high survival probability and how man turned out to be a hyper anxious animal who constantly invents reasons for anxiety even when there are none."


All this sounds good but let me tell you about the incomprehensible part of this book. Author believes that narcissism is increased when one's childhood experiences have been securely life supporting and warmly enhancing to the sense of self, to the feeling of being really special.
Also that one can't cope easily with the emptiness, the gap that would be left by one's disappearance. As per the author, one can cope with someone else's grief over one's disappearance. In an attempt to paint death in such intriguing color, author was trying to over shadow grief and I think C.S. Lewis would join me in disagreeing with him.

The author seems to imply a Kierkegaard-esque view of the world may be most workable, yet later on criticizes the philosopher for not living up to his own ideals. He finally seems to suggest an almost anti-Zen like approach to life, where "man" should stand up to all the horrors and difficulties of life and still try and move humanity forward. It's a bit of an unsatisfying conclusion to an otherwise mesmerizing tour de force of the subject.
The insights are both penetrating and daring if sometimes off-base.

Leave it to a Psychologist to explain something in the darkest but a spot on manner. They explain organisms as : " tearing other apart with teeth of all types -biting, grinding flesh, plant stalks, bones between molar, pushing the pulp greedily down the gullet with delight, incorporating its essence into one's own organization, and then excreting with foul stench and gasses that residue. " . As per Freud, we are born between urine and faeces but I am pretty sure you must have heard/read something more messed up than this by him. The statement by William James calling death "the worm at the core" of man's pretensions to happiness don’t dissolve in the conscious and gets sedimented in dark corners of your mind.

This book has explained problems with children and men, how they think and how they craft their world around them. How child is ashamed of what he needs and wants. How his existence screams his natural narcissism. How children are extremely confused about cause-and-effect relationships and how unreal awareness they have of the limits of their own power.
And the explanation of why guilt and helplessness really thought provoking. When the child experiences inevitable and real frustrations from his parents, he directs hate and destructive feelings towards them, and he has no way of knowing that malevolent feelings cannot be fulfilled by the same magic as were his other wishes. How men define their bravery. Heroism is first and foremost a reflex of the terror of death. We admire most the courage to face death; we give such valor and highest and most constant adoration; it moves us deeply in our hearts because we have doubt above how brave we ourselves would be. How men are necessarily mad that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness. Helplessly attempting to deny and overcome his grotesque fate, but I think being unaware of that fact or the ability to look the other way from reality is the first line of defense that protects us from the painful awareness of our helplessness.

To a degree, we live in a world of denial and self-deception out of necessity. To even partially see the randomness and horrible possibilities of the world in all its truth would be overwhelming(actually I want to use the F work here). We must give our lives meaning and the ways we do so are innumerable and so few are legitimate. In a way, we're all neurotic to a degree for trying to gain control over the chaos of life.

I would be lying if I said that I understood every single line of this book. This one is brutally honest, and it will upset you if you aren't yet ready to accept the true nature of the human condition in all its absurdity. So I will read this again when I am 40 years old. And maybe this is one of the issue here which leads to someone being in denial of his death. We all are too blindly and unrealistically ambitious about our own existence and I was shocked when this was not addressed in the book. Who knows whether you will go to office tomorrow or would be able to pick up the phone when your mom is on the other end panicking after 5 missed call. May be the psychologist thought people already knew that. Would I recommend this book to someone? I don’t know. This book can leave people cold, disoriented and thinking that if you are still breathing, are you really the lucky one?

Amazing. I tattooed a phrase a long time ago: "memento mori". I've always been curious about death, what it means, why, and what's the purpose of living? First of all, I want to thank Becker because he made me love psychology books, and second, because he managed to come up with a book that uses many authors and studies, and merge into this one simple conclusion: we are all afraid to die.
Homo sapiens, or, the human animal, is the only one to live a duality: he has a physical body and a simbolic self. This simbolic self can be also called "spirit" or "soul" or "energy", depending most of the time of which religion we are talking about in context. However, at the same time, we go through an "anal" phase, where the child finds that his or her one body is weakness and decay. The book explains in a clear way (most of the time) the mental illnesses that we suffer due to a development of defense mechanisms against our own nature.
Evolution plays a main role here, and the history of our planet too. "Creation is a nightmare spectacular taking place on a planet that has been soaked for hundreds of millions of years in the blood of all its creatures."

I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying. I don’t want to live in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live in my apartment. —Woody Allen.

Becker’s main thesis in this book is that the most fundamental problem of mankind, sitting at his very core, is his fear of death. Being the only animal that is conscious of his inevitable mortality, his life’s project is to deny or repress this fear, and hence his need for some kind of a heroism. Every grandiosity, good or evil, is intended to make him transcend death and become immortal.

To prove his thesis, Becker resorts to psychoanalysis. The depth and breadth of his understanding of psychoanalysis is truly amazing for someone who doesn’t call himself a psychologist. He wants to put psychoanalysis on a different foundation from which Freud put it on: The primary repression is not sexuality, as Freud said, but our awareness of death.

To convince you of this fundamental change, Becker treats you to a rather thorough review of psychoanalysis in order to rearrange it. If you don’t like or don’t understand psychoanalysis, don’t read this book. If you have a love/hate relationship with it (so deeply beautiful, poetic, and philosophical, and yet, so ad-hoc and unscientific), this book will show you more of psychoanalysis’s insight and explanatory powers, and its absurdities. It’s not having a morbid subject that makes this book depressing; it’s its reliance on psychoanalysis. A discipline whose aim, as Becker puts it, is to show that man lives by lying to himself about himself, leaves you depressed, cynical, and pessimistic.

Becker relies extensively on Otto Rank (a psychoanalyst with a religious bent who was one of the most trusted and intellectually potent members of Freud’s inner circle until he broke away) and the Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard (whom Becker labels as a post-Freudian psychoanalyst even before Freud came along). It shouldn’t come as a surprise then that the solution that Becker suggests towards the end of book for ridding man of his vital lie is what he calls a fusion of psychology and religion: The only way that man can face his fate, deal with the inherent misery of his condition, and achieve his heroism, is to give himself to something outside the physical – call it God or whatever you want.

A rather disappointing solution, even though he is not talking about any traditional religion. How can we cure ourselves of our vital lie with an illusion? You can rewrite Freud’s The Future of an Illusion based on Becker’s version of psychoanalysis for a different explanation of why man invented God. Religion can’t be of any solace to a mankind who knows his situation vis-à-vis reality. Man, as Becker so chillingly puts it, “has no doubts; there is nothing you can say to sway him, to give him hope or trust. He is a miserable animal whose body decays, who will die, who will pass into dust and oblivion, disappear not only forever in this world but in all possible dimensions of the universe, whose life serves no conceivable purpose, who may as well not have been born.” Or, as Camus says in The Fall: “Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.”

In the end, the only practical solution might be what most people do (but not everyone can do) and what Kierkegaard called tranquilizing with triviality. Numb yourself with the banalities of life to forget the insignificance of your existence. Go to school, get a job, marry, pay mortgage, raise children... Fret over every little thing you can think of: your promotion at work, the car you drive, the cavities in your teeth, finding love, getting laid, your children’s college tuition, the annoying last five pounds that are defying your diet program... Act like any of these actually mattered.

July 2024:
Re-reading books has been a positive sort of "exposure therapy" for me as my FOMO has always driven me towards the new or undiscovered. Yet where does that rabbit hole end? We will never get to everything we want in life, hence one of the points in the book. One of the good points. The fear of death being foundational and the hero project being our instictual need were also interesting as was his claim that we all need something transcendent. We all need God basically, but that is also an illusion says Becker. So what are you actually saying to me - that the best we can hope for is a self-delusion? But then he must have been absolutely miserable at base. Convince me otherwise so I'm sated but it's illusion? There's nothing really higher even though we need it? Looking at this 6 years later all I see now is confusion, not necessarily innacuracy, just confusion as many things are true on their own level. The transcendence he referred to he appeared to have no real guidelines or idea of how to attain. If he did he likely wouldn't have referred to it as illusion. Instead, Becker has left me with more of a feeling of disconnection (on his part to anything really "higher") and nihilism not to mention some incredibly dated ideas of what stands for "perverse morality" thereby bringing into question all of his analysis. In 2018 I think I was reading this more as a form of validation outside the religious that humans have an inherent God need. I found that to an extent but I'd recommend William James or Carl Jung and skip this one for risk of despondency. I also highly recommend re-reading the books that have left a large impact on us. The reference point of the book itself will give you incredible insight as you are constantly changing and the read will feel new.

May 2018:
The arguments here will be ones I'll wrestle with, interpret, hold up other ideas to and reflect on for the rest of my life. There's so much that I've struggled to articulate in my own way but Becker has found the words for it - this idea of all of us working for our hero project is the positive side of the negativity implied - that at base what motivates us is the fear of death, not the sexual drive which too is only motivated from the fear of death. So we strive to be "heroes" in our own way, in our own individual sized universe to make something that will transcend us, something to deny the inevitable absurd death.

Becker died shortly after writing this (from cancer) which only adds more to the writing and what he must have been working with at a deeply personal level. He relates Kierkegaard's early genius in seeing the insights of modern psychoanalysis and Kierkegaard's place between belief and faith. That observation floored me. It carries so much of where I see myself. I see symbols pointing to transcendence everywhere but no one interpreting it clearly. We can conclude that a project as grand as the scientific-mythical construction of victory over human limitation is not something that can be programmed by science(330). We need both myth and empirical observation.

There's a lot of terror here if you honestly internalize what's being said. Everything around us is designed by our human imagination to help us forget how we'll end up - to deny death. Sitting and contemplating that makes so much of what we call success seem ridiculous. What makes life worth living? Love? Other humans? Family? Probably - but is this a hero project? Our ties to family a way of transcending our own ending? I think that taking life seriously means something such as this: that whatever man does on this planet has to be done in the lived truth of the terror of creation, of the grotesque, of the rumble of panic underneath everything. Otherwise it is false.(328)

Going to school when I did, it’s hard to conceive of how important the psychoanalytic project was for so much of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The influence of Freud and the subsequent schools of psychology developed by his students spread into virtually every discipline, from literary analysis to economics, but by the time I got there it was all pretty much gone. I’m sure that somewhere there’s an Onoda-type holdout department that won’t let the old stuff go, or one or two octogenarian professors whose names are recognizable enough that they haven’t been forced into retirement, but for me psychoanalysis was primarily discussed in the past tense.

This book is from 1973, and clearly had quite an impact on American thought at the time (if Woody Allen movies are any representation, at least), but seems impossibly dated forty years later. In fact, aside from a handful of obscure movie references, I wouldn’t be too terribly surprised to find that this came from the 30’s or 40’s. Becker’s project here, rather than an actual mediation on death, is a reorientation of psychoanalysis, putting death at the top (or bottom?) of the pyramid in place of the sexual impulses that Freud spent so much time thinking about. This new direction for study is a kind of synthesis of Freud, Kierkegaard, and notably Otto Rank, one of Freud’s disciples who Becker believes hasn’t received the credit he is due.

In that way, there’s not a whole lot of original thought in this book, which is probably its most contemporary quality. Rather than present new ideas, he shuffles and reorganizes old ones from disparate sources that, due to various disciplinary and dispositional prejudices, have been kept at arm’s length from one another. It’s really an extended commentary on the work of prior psychoanalysts, and its (syn)thesis was apparently fairly revolutionary at the time (though, again, its late publication date makes me suspicious of that), but today it seems somewhat obvious.

And it all reads like a bunch of garbage. It’s clear that psychoanalytic thinking must have been a great deal of fun, finding all kinds of willy-nilly metaphors for everyday behaviors that can be pulled out of mythology or Shakespeare or one’s ass. When one isn’t beholden to any sort of evidence other than anecdotes from like-minded psychologists, one can say pretty much anything one wants and, if the voice is properly authoritative, say it to a whole lot of people. It’s like philosophy without all that pesky logic and rigorous thinking. It seems unfair to apply 2012 knowledge to a book that didn’t have access to it, but this is from 1973. Were we really still looking for cures-through-metaphor to things like schizophrenia and – appallingly – homosexuality at such a late date? (Psychiatric drugs for schizophrenics were available at least since the 50s, but you’ll have a hard time finding a suggestion of any potential biological/chemical causes to mental diseases here.)

Oh, and if you’re a woman, bad news: there’s either no hope for you, or Becker isn’t interested in looking for it. It’s your genitals, after all, that are causing all the problems in the world.

Even if we chock all this offensive nonsense up to being a sign o’ the times (which I can’t help but reiterate is 1973, much too late to excuse it), the book still buys into the “heroic soul” project that is to this reader extremely annoying. The idea that some people are just too sensitive for this world, and that the beautiful souls of our great men need special care is an adolescent concept that I’m always surprised can be found in so much literature written by people who should have been old enough to know better. “You just don’t get me, man.” Half of this book’s sentiments can be found on t-shirts at your local Hot Topic.

The concept that humanity lives in a state of denial of our own imminent demise is interesting, but doesn’t feel particularly new, considering mortality has been a theme in literature since… literature. That we need to shed our reliance on the common denials – materialism, status, class – and transfer them to the unhappy cure of Becker’s Rank-ian brand of psychoanalysis is not convincing in the least, and so this book feels like yet another (albeit depressive) common denial to add to the list. It may have been a big influence on everyone in the 1970’s, but thankfully we’ve put a lot of this stuff behind us.

I really only want to read this if it's going to give me concrete, practical, how-to tips on denying death.

This was transforming. If I manage to live long enough to grow old despite my overwhelming urge to suicide now and then , I would look back on this book as my first lesson on 'human condition'. This book won Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction(1973). New York Times described it as ' One of the most challenging book of the decade .' And upon googling I came to know that this book is a seminal book iin psychology and one of the most influential books written on psychology in 20th century. It can be difficult to review of a book of such stature. So I'm going to review just a part of it.

The basic theme this book explores is this: Man is an incongruous jumble of two identities. One is his material body and the other is his symbolic inner self(You can call this mind if you want to ). This makes man at the same time the most powerful and unfortunate member of the animal kingdom. Why unfortunate , you ask? Because only man has been made aware that his body is going to decay soon, he has come to know death and the absurdity that comes with it. Man has eaten fruit from the ' Tree of Knowledge ', so he been banished from the haven of nature, has to pay for his knowledge by his existential hangover.

This symbolic self of man leads to more dilemmas. Man wants to stand out from the rest of nature, to curve out an unique self, to assert his individuality. But at the same time, he wants to merge with the rest of the creation, to have a holistic unification with nature. These two contradictory urges go in the face of each other . If you want to be unique, you can't be 'one' with the rest of the nature, and vice versa. That's the price you pay for your dualistic nature.

The symbolic self has made you a virtual God, but it also made you aware of your 'creatureliness'. However much you love your beloved and bask in the ecstasy of her love, you also have to be aware that your beloved has to defecate now and then.

So man has to somehow distract himself from his realization of the horrific nature of the reality. For this, he invented 'projects for heroism' in manifold forms, to transcend his animal identity beyond death, to deny his death. Even if your animal body dies, your symbolic self may live on forever through your immortality project. All religions, cultures, societies lays out the framework for our collective heroism projects.

Here things are beginning to get a little shaky. Religions aren't that sustainable heroism project now as they were in the middle ages. And cultures and societies are beginning to loose their structure and don't function to secure the identity of man as they once used to do. So the modern suffers from a lack of 'ideal illusion', which is vital to hide the terrors of his existence. He 'knows', knows too well, and therefore cannot be deceived, which is not good for him. Now, how do we deal with this extremely vulnerable, anxiety prone, suffering from meaninglessness, and as Becker puts it, the 'neurotic' model of the modern man? This question goes into the heart of psychotherapy. Becker explored statures like Freud,Kierkegaard, Otto Rank, Carl Jung in search for an answer, and tries to extract a synthesis out of it.

Now, I do not agree with the conclusion he draws here at the end of the book. Becker concludes by saying that there is really no way out of this dualistic conundrum in which man has found himself, and all we can aim at is some sort of mitigation of the absolute misery. We need to set a personal heroism project for ourselves , settle somewhat wisely within the walls, though we would never be quite at home. All aim for higher transcendence is delusional. He scolds Jung and Fromm for entertaining the possibility of a 'free man', while praising Freud for his 'more realistic somber pessimism'. And he also dismissed 'eastern mysticism ', saying it's sort of an cowardly evasion of the reality and thereby doesn't fit 'brave western man'.

I do not blame him though, as he had written those words nearly half a century ago. And I understand that eastern schools like Zen or Taoism might be too much for a western mind to have a firm purchase on, as eastern schools have a fundamentally different understanding of the nature reality. Nowhere this east-west dichotomy is explained more lucidly than by Fritjof Capra in his book 'The Tao of Physics.' More recently, Sam Harri's book 'Waking up: A guide to spiritually without religion' also does a quite fair job.

With the advent of modern noninvasive neuroimaging techniques, the scientific community has only recently been gaining an understanding of the potential for the radical transformation of human psyche that lies at the heart of the 'eastern mysticism '. There is empirical evidence that mindfulness meditation can literally change your neurochemistry and change the way how you perceive the world, and make your existence more at home(Watch the TED YouTube video 'How meditation can reshape your brain.') And every year many scientific papers are being published on the effect of mindfulness meditation on human psyche. To be frank, today more westerns practice yoga and meditation than easterners do, they are slowly absorbing the essence. But it seems to me as far as psychology of well being goes, east will always have the upper hand. But we also need the more analytical western science to look at what is really going on here.

It's nice that we live in an era where we are seeing the merger of east and west.

Some great food for thought but in general it is a hit and miss.
The start is fantastical - a lot of cool ideas reflecting on mind-body dualism in terms of accepting the death of the latter, while recognizing the amount of effort people put into immortality projects to save the former. The price we pay for having the ego and the intellectual capability to understand that all men must die, and how far we are willing to go to forget/deny it. It really tries to make you admit that you will die but does it in a way that is not nihilistic and does not take away the meaningfulness of one's life.
But then it goes off on a tangent to try and make all of it scientific psychoanalysis with some outdated views, an entire chapter devoted to making fun of Freud (actually that might be a plus) and some speculation sprinkled on top. It does a good job of retelling Ranks, Kierkegaards, and some other people ideas in a way even I can read them, but it seems even the author can not tie those ideas together in a meaningful way to come to some kind of conclusion, leaving me to wonder what really was the point of the latter half of the book.

5/5 for the philosophical part
1/5 for the scientific part

“I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying. I don't want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment.”
/Woody Allen/

The Denial of Death straddles the line between astounding intellectual ambition and crackpot theorizing; it is a compendium of brilliant intellectual exercises that are more satisfying poetically than scientifically; it is a desperately self-oblivious and quasi-futile attempt to resurrect the ruins of Freudian psychoanalysis by re-defining certain parameters and ostensibly de-Freudianizing them; there is an unhealthy mixture of jaw-dropping recognition and eye-rolling recognition.

It is important to note, however, that it is grossly unfair to discredit the ingenuity of a vintage intellectual by holding discoveries and findings found post-mortem against him or her. A psychology professor who claims Freud is "an idiot" is, at best, simply being arrogant on a chronological technicality. Freud did not take into account all of that which had debunked, and his findings are so flagrantly untrue; of course, those debunkings occurred after Freud's death. Something about the fact that geniuses have to be omnipotent and stand outside a life narrative is ridiculous, and at best arrogant. At the end of the day Freud revolutionized thought and his myths has carried a heavy cultural resonance, and we can apologize for his after-the-fact falseness. But it is completely unfair to say he had not taken into account all the factors that could have by no means been available to him contemporarily, and so it goes for every genius. No one is a genius when taken out of context, and that's precisely the point of such masturbatory put-downs. Some assert superiority by tearing others down on balderdash presumptions; others gain it through luck; and the rare few gain it on demonstrable merit.

Becker takes great pains to resurrect Freudian thought by moving the focus of "sexual instinct" and placing it under the broader "terror of death." It's mostly an attempt to keep the structural integrity of psychoanalysis intact by retrofitting a new cornerstone. Becker and Freud are both susceptible to the same poetic fervor, bias, and penchant toward romanticizing certain ideas. Whereas Freud took his transcendental principle and squeezed every thought through a prism of sexual instinct, Becker wants to do likewise with fear of mortality. Everything down to "sexual perversions" like fetishism, sadomasochism, and - this is where the book feels dated even for 1973 - homosexuality are all put through the "here's why these exist due to the innate terror of death" schema. It's an intellectual reduction we've seen time and time again, where a certain mythos or belief system can be twisted and turned to accommodate just about everything because it's so rhetorically versatile. While it looks pretty good and is amusing on paper, it should rouse suspicion. The absence of scientific findings hear does likewise; even if this is meant to be a reader-friendly book, the lack of viable citations beyond summations of psychoanalytic theory seems methodically irresponsible.

My other hesitation is in the relentless way by which Becker employs metaphor as transcendent, a priori interpretation. He clearly believes that people think, in short hand, via grand, sweeping metaphors. In other words, projecting his grandiose symbolism onto the thoughts of others. Sometimes his dalliances with figuring out child psychology - the terror of the penis-less mother, or the first experience of total dependence being somewhat violated - are expressed in a metaphorical language, where this gesture "represents" this or "seems to" instill a fear of castration, or that viewing one's parents engaging in a "primal act" strips them of their symbolic, enduring representations and places them in a lowly, carnal context. The act subtly de-idolizes them and traumatizes the child, if one allows for the fact that people sub-consciously think in grandiose metaphors. Breasts represent this, the body symbolizes decay, the mind symbolizes bodily transcendence, etc., etc. But shouldn't these representations be more intuitive and well-ingrained if they just so happen to govern how childhood experience shapes us?

The other problem is Becker's penchant for dualisms: the life is a war between the body and the mind, the failure of reconciliation between the body and the self, that sex is the war between the acceptance and subversion of the body, that love is an internalized and externalized transcendence, etc., etc. Everything is balanced on linearly as a conflict between two disparate entities, or a war between dual things. This form of thinking I don't find particularly viable because it just reeks of the constraints human reason has to place on itself to find a semblance of truth, not the truth itself. The human mind - even according to Becker - has to reduce segments of the vastness of life into smaller, comprehensible fragments. Some behavioral scientists have posited that beyond the number three, humans process numbers relatively. We cannot process 1 million as a concrete number, but only as a contextual anchor against numbers greater or smaller. It is hazily and less concretely defined; beyond three, our brains become exhausted. It is why jokes stop after a priest, a minister, and a rabbi. I'm surprised Becker didn't catch himself falling into this own tendency in his own work. The human mind analyzing itself is a troublesome thing; it just seems that his propensity toward surrogates and representation, in addition to his tendency to parse things down to two dependent variables, are less indicative of psychological truth in principle, and more indicative of a psychological aphorism that can only be teased out once the brain takes its usual short-cuts and acts of its own nature. He didn't turn his evaluation on ideological reductiveness inward, and his argument stems from the same heuristics that he critiques in similarly broad terms.

The bits on character-traits as psychoses is just a marvelous section of the book, also, and even the over-the-top, rabid attempts to resuscicate Freudian thinking (e.g. anality as a desperate fear of the acknowledgment of the creatureliness of man and the awful horror that we turn life into excrement) are amusing even if they seem rabidly desperate or intellectually impoverished. The book ought to balled "The Denial of Freud's Death." It so desperately tries to keep the spirit of him alive, with varying degrees of success.

Even in its datedness, its contradictions, and its often unsatisfying or sensational resolutions, The Denial of Death is an excellent demonstration of intellectual heroics; of a man trying, as best he can, to grasp beyond the very limits of the human mind to get to a greater place. The tragedy is that he never quite transcends the unduly habits of an analytical mind, which is hardly to be expected. But it's always marvelous to read something that gives such an impression.

The book is amazing rhetoric, but when it says something like man needs to disown the fortress of the body, throw off the cultural constraints, assassinate his character-psychoses, and come face-to-face with the full-on majesty and chaos of nature in order to transcend, what says: this is rhetorically eloquent, but what does it mean to fully take-on the majesty of nature? Are we supposed to move back into the trees? Are we to run around naked in the woods and constantly think about our own passing? He never quite plans out an agenda for what the eschewing of cultural trappings for full immersion in cosmic oneness would look like. The book has its internal logic and it is good enough to have the opportunity to bear witness to it, but I am doubtful of much of its credibility. A lot of The Denial of Death is saturated in the abstracts of problem-solving; none of its resolutions, conclusions, or even symptoms seem actionable.

Sometimes I don't think it's the denial of death so much as the incomprehensibility of it. Our brains can't even process two people talking simultaneously because it is an over-ride of information intake. Is it really tenable to say that death has taken in and repressed all the majesty and terror of a despairing and lonely, temporary existence? This probably gives the mind too much credit. Or is it more realistic to say that such a wide, cosmic void is perhaps greater than Freudian schematics? Maybe since we can't really look beyond three, stop mistaking metaphor for fundamental truth, or can't stop thinking in dualisms or can't hear more than two people once, we can't find the transcendence because of our own machine-based limitations. Much of what we are meant to be able to take-on fully to confront death and thrive in life is beyond our cognitive capacities. I believe there is repression, but psychology also tells us that the brain must - and does - filter its input. We can't pay attention to a whole scene, or focus on more than one thing, or hear more than such and such thing; I don't believe this is a sub-conscious device meant to save us from the throes of death; I just believe that evolution is stingy enough to grant humans the necessities to function and (at the very least) genetically propagate. It hardly seems necessary to give humans the omniscience to take on the full reality of its predicament. Instead it's given enough to simply go on, erm, living?

So, at the end of the day, I'm not sure The Denial of Death is much more than a grandiose attempt at fitting the grand scheme of things into a more digestible scheme of, yes, it all comes from a fear of dying. But for anyone who can acknowledge the distortions in one's own thinking and the limits of input processing with a brain, such a statement seems reductive, and well, too convenient and un-complicated. This is why it is often backed up with inconvenient and complicated scraps. While I do believe The Denial of Death is valuable because some people may be living under this schematic, it's best to read this as a possibility for some thinking, not as a blanket humanity statement. It's a good guidepost to do some back-of-the-envelope psycho-calculation, but it's just not committed enough to its own purported vastness to be worth much beyond that.

Anxiety, it says, is the dissonance some people feel because their confidence in their invincibility - the delusion given to some with self- esteem - is shaky. It's a natural response to the predicament of self-aware mortality. This is too metaphorical. Anxiety stems from imagined fantasies that have not coalesced into existence; does the brain's penchant for supposition and that subsequent worry really come from that? Given how much self-spun fiction creates worry and sadness...I'm not sure. It's not that I can wholly discredit Becker; I just feel that any categorical imperative is probably not able to grasp the full spectrum of complicating factors. The spidey-sense is triggered at any point objectivity declares carte blanche privileges over subjectivity.

The Denial of Death is a fantastic, provocative, and possibly life-changing read, but just so as an ambitious attempt; a pleasurable intellectual food-for-thought exercise. A valiant attempt, but again, some people kill themselves, and some people fetishize excrement. What of them, Becker? What of them?

…
I think I’m over my psychoanalysis phase.