At my parents house the poster for this record is on my bedroom wall:

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The poster the added text that "Some ideas are poisonous, they can fuck up your life, change you and scar you."

This poster came to mind pretty often while reading The Denial of Death.

I hope this isn't going to come as a shock to anyone, but you are going to die. But you aren't just going to die, in the big picture there is nothing you will ever do, nothing you will ever be or effect matters one bit. In the long view we die, in the even longer view we don't matter at all. We will not be remembered, our entire stay on this planet will over time be totally forgotten. Poof, just like any of my ancestors prior to my great grand-parents are nothing but abstractions of people who had to have existed to give birth to people who gave birth to people who I knew in my life.

Or as Morrissey sings:

So we go inside and we gravely read the stones
All those people, all those lives
Where are they now ?
With loves, and hates
And passions just like mine
They were born
And then they lived
And then they died
It seems so unfair
I want to cry

In a psychoanalytical view of development (which I don't think I fully agree with, but which I think is much more accurate that some other cognitive theories of childhood development that would say that a child can't really comprehend death till they are closer to adolescence; maybe I'm an anomaly but I can remember brooding over my eventual death at five or six-and realizing that it meant that I would no longer be here, but everything else still would be) that Becker presents the child goes from a God-like state where every need is met just by willing (crying) it into existence, to the realization that it's body shits, that expels waste and that it is just a mere creature and not god-like (this is kind of heady stuff for whatever age your supposed to go through the anal stage of development). According to Becker no one navigates this primal dilemma successfully. Once the awareness comes that a)one is not immortal and b) that one is just a disgusting creature that has to eat and shit and eventually die-- then one just builds in repressions and neuroses to cope with that knowledge.

Besides the fact that we all die, we all can't really deal with that fact. The dualism of having a mind that can think beyond the mere instinctual and transcend the body along with at the physical level being merely just another collection of substances heading towards decay is a conflict that will drive us through out our lives. Well according to Becker.

The problem is that we all want to be something more than a shitting and fucking creature that dies. We want to be more than a vessel for our DNA. 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's this part of our cognitive make up that at a symbolic, or meaning-driven level, that governs the way that we deal with the world. Even if one doesn't subscribe to the psychoanalytical premises of his argument (I have a bit of a problem with the high level of symbolic abstraction going on in an infants mind that can draw these complex almost Derrida-like deconstructions of shit and sex organs and lead it to ones own mortality, but whatever) I think one would find it really difficult to argue against the idea that we are all driven to be something than more than just a mere creature.

Or to put it as Becker does, to be driven by the heroic or that which is greater than ourselves (our physical selves that would be). The details of all the different ways that people can attempt to strive for the personal heroism in the modern age I'm not going to go into, but basically there are two types; the unreflective type that takes society's norms as it's own and covers up the fear of death and the need to give meaning to ones life through a career, a family, materialism, being a good provider, a pillar of the community, a sports fan, etc.; and someone who at some point has thrown off some of these cultural repressions and realized that there has to be more to life than just doing these things and just surviving.

One of the interesting things about this book is that it doesn't romanticize the latter. Becker doesn't seem to want to go out in the streets and tell everyone what an inauthentic life they are leading, how repressed they are because there is no unrepressed answer. It's kind of like you can take one of the predefined answers to life and that is one thing, but if you reject those you either have to a) go find your own answer and can support your own personal repressions and feelings of transference (which is why in his view Kierkegaard with his leap of faith and Freud with his agnosticism can each be their own successful attempts at personally dealing with finding meaning in the world, but which from an outsider point of view both can be seen as still living in the prison of their own neuroses and prejudices.

I'm realizing now that I have no real way of dealing with this topic in a review. I can already see comments coming from MFSO that will be poking holes in some of the things I'm saying and I'm doing a piss-poor job at giving the main ideas of this work- a main idea that can possibly be stated as we are all sick inside, and once you come to this realization you can either stop fighting the sickness and try to create something that will give you the feelings of worth that you need not to put a gun in your mouth and pull the trigger, or you can let yourself be destroyed by your own fears and mind. This is a simplistic way of summing up the book and misses a lot.

Sorry, I'm terrible at describing why books are really awesome. I'd recommend reading this book, it's really eye(mind)-opening in the ways we are trapped in our existence. If your happy with your life then this might be a mere curiosity of an interesting scholarly study, but it can also be a really great anti-self help book for people who can't buy into any of the answers out there because the answers are all lies.

Thought Provoking.

কিন্তু আমি Becker এবং তিনি যাদের উদ্ধৃতি দিয়েছেন প্রায়শই, সেই Yung, Rank, Kierkegaard প্রমুখের অবজার্ভেশনের তারিফ করছি বটে কিন্তু কনক্লুশনগুলো মেনে নিতে পারছি না।

তবে মনে রাখা উচিত, বইটা বেশ পুরনো। এরমধ্যে আমরা নিউরোসায়েন্স, সাইকোলজি, জেনেটিক্সে অনেকটা এগিয়েছি। যে স্টোয়িক ও পজিটিভ নিহিলিস্ট ভাবধারা আজকাল জনপ্রিয় হচ্ছে তা হয়ত তখনও অতটা জনপ্রিয় হয়নি। বাঁচার জন্য, স্যানিটি রক্ষার জন্য জীবনের যে একটা 'অর্থ' থাকতেই হবে এমন একটা ধারণা এই বইটার ভিত্তি। আরেকটা জিনিস অ্যাজিউম করে নিয়েছেন বেকার যে ইভোল্যুশন আমাদের কিছু ক্ষমতা 'দিয়েছে', এমনটা যেন ইভোল্যুশের স্বাধীন ইচ্ছা আছে। ইভোল্যুশন, আমরা যতদূর জানি, অন্ধ।

বেকার সাহেব (এবং অটো র‍্যাঙ্কও) মনে করেন, শেষমেশ একজন ঈশ্বর এবং ধর্ম প্রয়োজন পড়ে মানুষের এক্সিস্টেনশিয়াল ক্রাইসিস থেকে মুক্তি পেতে। মূল যুক্তিটা হচ্ছে কোনো একটি হায়ার অথোরিটির এনডোর্সমেন্ট ছাড়া মানুষ চলতে পারে না। শেষ পয়েন্টটিতে আমি খানিকটা একমত, তবে এরজন্য ধর্ম প্রয়োজন (আমরা সাধারণত ধর্ম বলতে যা বুঝি সেই ধর্মের কথা বলছি না, বরং হারিরি ধর্মের যে সংজ্ঞা দিয়েছেন তার বইতে, অর্থাৎ মোটাদাগে, "যা আমাদের এথিকসকে অথরিটি দেয় তাই ধর্ম")। তা হতে পারে লিবারালিজম, লিবারালিজমের সংকট কী হতে পারে তা এখানে গুরুত্বপূর্ণ না। আমি শুধু বলতে চাচ্ছি ঈশ্বরবিহীন নতুন 'ধর্ম'গুলো সে জায়গায় আসতে পারে, এবং তা হচ্ছেও।

সাইকোঅ্যানালাইসিস আজ অব্দি বোধহয় শুদ্ধ বিজ্ঞান না। এর অনেকটাই মানুষের সাবজেক্টিভ রিয়্যালিটির ওপর নির্ভরশীল এবং সাবজেক্টিভ রিয়্যালিটির এই অংশগুলো যথার্থভাবে ট্রান্সফার বা প্রকাশের বিশেষ সুবিধা মানুষের নেই। কনভার্সেশনই শেষ ভরসা। অনেকটাই অন্ধের হাতি দেখার মত অবস্থা। সেসব মেনে নিলে সাইকোঅ্যালাইসিসের রথী-মহারথীরা যথার্থই জিনিয়াস। কিন্তু শুদ্ধ বিজ্ঞান হতে হয়ত অনেকটা দূর যেতে হবে।

This book is one of the few books I would consider required reading by all the minds capable of following its subject matter. I'd go further and suggest we should encourage it for everyone but the fact is most people would find it undigestable.

While i don't agree to the full with what he suggests, I find so many of the topics to be highly interesting and this is a book that could spawn years of consideration and it's very likely much of the insight will find its way to my day to day understanding of the world.

It would be impossible to even summarize the content, or depth of this book and so I won't bother. I will just suggest as strongly as I can that you read it.

Ni siquiera soy capaz de reseñar tan prolífica obra. Es todo una riqueza filosófica que toma de la psicología analítica. No hay una respuesta en concreto. No sabemos cómo es que le damos el sentido a la vida ¿es por la sexualidad que planteó Freud? ¿es por Dios¿ ¿es por la ciencia? ¿por valores morales? No, quizás es la misma muerte quien le da sentido. O quizás es por nuestro anhelo de eternizarnos. No queremos perecer, aunque sepamos que es inminente, y la única verdad. Queremos seguir viviendo en la memoria de los otros. Queremos ser los héroes de la humanidad y de la historia. Héroes en la bondad y en la maldad, héroes en nuestra comunidad religiosa, héroes de nuestros oficios y profesiones, héroes en nuestros círculos sociales. Queremos demostrar nuestro ser es real en las conciencias de los otros, en el presente y en el futuro.

This book may have caused us to coin the phrase, "Books that destroyed me"... a huge part in the senior year radical change of worldview. Key in my process of discovering mortality. Brilliant social-anthro insight into the ways in which humans try and get immortality -- and all the harm this does. Connects Freud and Kierkegaard. This is existential psychoanalytic theory at its best!

A mix of psychology and philosophy is definitely not my thing.

A book for reflection and meditation. It was a joy to read despite the title. The Denial of Death is an easy read. And it is enlightening. The only fault I find with it (there must be one, yea?) is that it focuses too much on psychology/psychoanalysis. Granted, the book does require a strong assertion of these fields, but I feel that at some points, it was giving us more summaries of theories than coming up with something original. Still, it is a must read for anyone who is curious about how one consciously or ( mostly) unconsciously deals with death.

Sometimes to procrastinate, I browse Hacker News - a news community designed by Y Combinator, one of the big US startup hubs. As such, the community has developed into an almost religious cult-like thing around the "start-up life": "why don't you work 22 hours a day, why don't you sleep under your desk, you have to pivot/disrupt/boot-strap/pitch/iterate/, why don't you follow our hero Zuckerberg/pg/Thiel, you have to become great now" and more boring platitudes. The religious nature comes out in often-used terms like "angel investor" ( = someone who wastes their rich parents' money on an overvalued team, i.e., fantasy football with programmers).

Often a extreme fear of death comes out in these interviews and texts, now culminating in money not being focused on useless mobile apps, but on medical companies that treat death as a disease in the hopes of reversing or postponing your eventual demise (see for example here).

This is where The Denial of Death comes in. Becker summarizes Otto Rank's life work into a straightforward chain of argument, which goes a little bit like this:

1. Man has a natural urge to heroism, someone who needs to justify their own existence as an object of value - this is due to his "evolutionary and organismic constitution" (nice hand-waving there).

2. Man is also the only animal that knows he is nothing but "food for worms", one slip in the shower and you're done for.

3. This creates an inner conflict as you have the "God-like" inner heroism and the outer shell of a sickly creature, and both these points collide in your existence.

4. The job of a child is to come to terms with this conflict by more or less learning to repress, and all adults have more or less repressed this conflict. This repression is in everyone, is healthy and expected. Only when you can't handle the repression or when it becomes too extreme do you run into problems with your existence - Becker/Rank discuss this with the example of artists and "great", but problematic men like Freud.

5. Along with the fear of death comes the fear of "too much life", when you know so much about your condition that it becomes too hard to bear:

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. If repression makes an untenable life liveable, self-knowledge can entirely destroy it for some people.

6. Can we escape this dilemma? No. One solution to handle it better is to become a Kierkegaard-ian "knight of faith", someone who has given the meaning of his/her life over to the creator (whoever/whatever that may be), someone who accepts death and life by becoming part of a bigger system. Unlike the "gurus" of psychotherapy, of religion etc. (there's a nice, negative discussion of the overlap of 70s psychotherapy and religious movements), there is nothing you can do to fix or to transcend the conflict in your existence. "Men are doomed to live in an overwhelmingly tragic and demonic world."

He does make a fun case that Christianity (the idealized Christianity, not the power-structure with its own mountain of problems) has found a nice way to "sidestep" these problems:

This is the most remarkable achievement of the Christian world picture: that it could take slaves, cripples, imbeciles, the simple and the mighty, and make them all secure heroes, simply by taking a step back from the world into another dimension of things, the dimension called heaven. Or we might better say that Christianity took creature consciousness - the thing man most wanted to deny - and made it the very condition for his cosmic heroism.

All of these arguments are straight out of the tradition of psycho-analysis; lots of interpretation, little supporting data. When Becker/Rank try to "update" Freud's ideas on transference by saying it's not the oedipal conflict of the child, but the fear of either death or of too much living, then you can't help but wonder if they're just trying to replace "unprovable, logically sounding chain of arguments nr. 1" with "unprovable, logically sounding chain of arguments nr. 2".

The problems of pure interpretation become apparent in the last chapter when Becker tries to apply the above points on many mental diseases, and here scientific knowledge has long surpassed his points, and he (as he acknowledges) extremely oversimplifies. He says that depression is "just" a inability to cope with their fear of life and death, but by now we know that depression is caused by a whole spectrum of causes, from genetic predisposition, prolonged substance abuse, broken neuro-transmitters, vulnerability factors, social isolation etc. pp. Please, don't go up to people with mental illness and try to explain their illness with these 40 years old ideas.

My above points on "start up culture" can be interpreted from this chain of arguments - you have people who are aware of their death, but instead of repressing it or becoming part of something bigger than them, they fight death, something that's (according to Becker/Rank) not fight-able. Their example: If you live to 900 years instead of 90, then each accident becomes so much more grave, the fear of life becomes more extreme. Let's say you're supposed to die at 900, but you have a car accident and die at 80 - that means you "lost" 820 years. If you're supposed to die at 90 and you die at 80, you've lost "only" 10 years. What will happen is that people will worship security too much as each accident's impact will become extreme.

Bonus-quote:

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. The soberest conclusion that we could make about what has actually been taking place on the planet for about three billion years is that it is being turned into a vast pit of fertilizer. But the sun distracts our attention, always baking the blood dry, making things grow over it, and with its warmth giving the hope that comes with the organism's comfort and expansiveness.

Recommended for: People who like to think about their lives.

Not recommended for: People who can't read critically, or who immediately model their lives after everything they read. These ideas are fun to entertain, but it would be unwise to immediately accept them.

This was a somewhat different kind of book than I'd assumed it to be. It's written in very technical psychological & psychoanalytical terms. Nevertheless, though I didn't understand all of it, the main message came through & was really an education for me in the advances of psychoanalytical thought, especially of Freud's, since I'd studied some of these things way back in my formative years.

Ernest Becker wrote this book in 1973 as he himself was in the process of dying of terminal cancer, which he did a year later in 1974 at the age of 49. His initial words to Sam Keen, contributing editor of Psychology Today to whom he'd sent his manuscript, were: "You are catching me in extremis. This is a test of everything I've written about death. And I've got a chance to show how one dies, the attitude one takes. Whether one does it in a dignified, manly way; what kinds of thoughts one surrounds it with; how one accepts his death."

In many ways Becker's message, largely influenced by the teachings of Otto Rank, is a positive one, & surely an honest, truthful exploration. What he terms the "dilemma of life" is the chief issue which every human being faces & deals with in a variety of ways: being a "mortal animal who at the same time is conscious of his mortality." Becker notes how a person spends years coming into his/her own, developing talents & gifts, broadening & sharpening the appetites, bearing life's disappointments, growing up & maturing, emerging as a unique creature in nature, with dignity & nobility, transcending one's animality, "no longer driven, no longer a complete reflex, not stamped out of any mold." Becker then cites André Malraux's description of "the real tragedy": " that it takes sixty years of incredible suffering and effort to make such an individual, and then he is good only for dying…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."

I know that my own personal theological, religious, & spiritual belief colors my vision, but I found Becker's ultimate conclusions somewhat hopeless. He remarks, referring to Freud & Kierkegaard, both of whom he admired without always agreeing with them: "I am talking matter-of-factly about some of the surest giants in the history of humanity only to say that in the game of life and death no one stands taller than any other, unless it be a true saint, and only to conclude that sainthood itself is a matter of grace and not of human effort. My point is that for man not everything is possible. 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…How does a man create from all his living energies a system of thought, as Freud did, a system directed wholly to the problems of this world, and then just give it up to the invisible one? How, in other words, can one be a saint and still organize scientific movements of world-historical importance? How does one lean on God and give over everything to Him and still stand on his own feet as a passionate human being? These are not rhetorical questions, they are real ones that go right to the heart of the problem of 'how to be a man' -- a problem that no one can satisfactorily advise anyone else on…" Becker concludes that we don't understand all this simply because "we don't know the purpose of creation…Life seeks to expand in an unknown direction for unknown reasons."

It takes immense courage to acknowledge these vital questions, to honestly & openly ponder them for ourselves, & to let our conclusions lead us to appropriate action.

After 300+ pages of pscyhoanalytic word salad I've come to the conclusion that Becker is merely a 70's Jordan Peterson; a crypto-reactionary iconoclast. The core tenet of the book, as the title suggests, is that all of our cultural and psychological behavior can be reduced to the fear of death.

Becker's reductionism is a blunt unscientifc instrument. A question-begging thesis that will admit no counter to its claims. All the nuances and pluralities of human motivation can be hand-waved away by his formula, almost like Ayn Rand's Egoism. In the face of our all-consuming dread, Becker tells us that all we have is some incredibly convoluted psychoanalytic mythology and church.

All intellectual dishonesty aside, Becker's prose throughout is visceral and engaging. I simply believe The Denial of Death would have been better served as a more creative literary endeavor rather than as bloated, self-serious, Freudian+Christian apologia.

don dellilo used this to write *white noise*. denial is our birthright, as it is the birthright of all cultures--probably. though no culture is quite so adept as the american. the problem is, of course, like average intelligence, no one believes denial applies to them. and all the denial starts here, with this: you are going to die, and pretty fucking soon. that is the fate of all sexually reproducing creatures.

it's an important place to start, though montaigne had a different solution, but hey, that's montaigne.

This book started off fantastically. He went into the history of man’s mortality and we seek to leave our mark and fear death. Then it devolves into a study of Freud, Kant and others And never results the initial question