إنكار الموت
(1)
دائمًا ما أجد نفسي عاجزًا عن مراجعة الكتب المهمة؛ لإنني متى ما حاولتُ ذلك، يكون الكتابُ قد تسرّب داخل (عقلي) وبدأت أفكارهُ تتصالح وتتصادم مع أفكارٍ قديمة؛ لذلك عادةً ما أميلُ إلى أن الكتب الجيدة تُقرأ ولا يُكتَب عنها، لكني سأحاول رغم ذلك. ولكي أبلور فكرتي الخاصة، عليّ أولًا أن أنسَ أني قد قرأتُ ما كُتِبَ على غلاف الكتاب الأخير، وكذلك ما كتبه مارك مانسون في "فن اللامبالاة" مع أني ممتن لهذا الأخير؛ حيث شجعني على قراءة كتاب إرنست بيكر ولا يمكنني تجاهل ما قاله عن شخصية الكاتب في بضعة صفحاتٍ، في آخر "لامبالاته".
(2)
لعلّ عنوانَ الكتاب يخدع القارئ في بداية الأمر (وهذا ما حدث معي)؛ فهو لا يتحدّث عن الموت كما تتوقع منه، وإن كان الموت وهواجسٌ أخر جوهر هذا الكتاب. إذن، ما هو موضوع الكتاب؟
البدايةُ، مَنْ هو الإنسان؟ إنّهُ حيوانٌ ورمز - بحسب إريك فروم، أو حيوانٌ وخيال - بحسب يوڤال نوح هَراري. التعريفان ينطويان على جزئين: بايولوجي وثقافي-حضاري. لا يهمنا الجزء الأول منه؛ فوعيّ الإنسان بذاته، هو محنته الأكبر، شعوره بضعفه ودونيته، أو ما يسميه الكاتب (مخلوقيّة الإنسان) ولا أظنّ ذلك اعترافًا دينيًا لإلهٍ أو دين. بحثَ الإنسانُ منذُ البداية عن ماهيته، لكنهُ لم يجد شيئًا، ويعتقد فروم أن ليس هناك ماهيّة وإنّما (جوهر الإنسان هو طبيعته المتناقضة)، لا تمتلك الحيوانات الأخرى ذلك التناقض، لا تشعر بالزمن، فالموت بالنسبة لها محض ثوانٍ من الألم أما الإنسان فإنّه فرد مطاردٌ طوال حياته من مصير الموت، ولو تمكّن هذا الهاجسُ منه لذهب إلى الجنون. الإنسانُ إلهٌ، أو هكذا يريد أن يكون لكنّه يحمل جسدًا حيوانيًّا، يتغوّط وتسيطرُ عليه الغرائز، أو كما يقول ماسلو: نحنُ (ديدانٌ وآلهة).
(3)
يكاد الكتاب أن يكون تاريخًا للتحليل النفسي، لكنّه لا يبتدأ بفرويد؛ فوجوديّة اللاهوتي الدنماركي كيركيغارد، كانت تعي مدى ضعف الإنسان الفرد ونهائيته مقابل لا نهائية الله والطبيعة، فلا طريقَ له إلّا بالانصهار في اللانهائية تلك، وبالتالي فلا يمكن أن تتمكّن منه هواجسه وإنّما يصبح خالدًا، انهزاميّة كيركيغارد مريحة جدًا رغم تنكرها لإنسانيتنا وانتصارها للغيب.
لم يتصوّر فرويد الإنسانَ إلّا حيوانًا تحركه الغرائز، وأيّ مقاومةٍ يوجهها الإنسان لها (الغرائز) بحكم (الحضارة والتربية والأخلاق والدين) فإنها سوف تؤدي إلى كبت، لذلك لجأ منذ البداية إلى محاولة وضع الإنسان أمام مرآة تفضح له بواطن لا وعيه، والغرائز التي كُبتت منذ الطفولة المبكرة. إذن فإنسانُ فرويد هو حيوانٌ يبحث عن المتعة، والحضارة تكبت الجنسانيّة. في أواخر كتاباته اهتمّ فرويد بمسألة الموت، لكنّه ناقش (غريزة الموت): الرغبةُ في الموت تؤدي إلى القتل، أي أن فرويد لم يتخلَّ عن نظرته الحيوانيّة للإنسان (الإنسان حيوانٌ يرتجف من الموت)، أما رانك وبراون، فيعتقدان أن ما يعاني منه الإنسان هو كبت الموت، فيصبح الموت هنا (مشكلةً). وهذا الرأي قريبٌ إلى رأي تلميذ فرويد (وعدوه فيما بعد)، يونغ.
(4)
يطرح المؤلف سؤلًا: ما هو الوهم الأفضل الذي يجب أن نتّبعه لتجاوز مشكلة الإنسان؟
بالنسبة لكيركيغارد ورانك (ويونغ؟)، هو الدين. ليس الدين الطقوسي وإنّما الدين الذي يمثل الأمل، والتفاني من أجل الخلود الجماعي، خلود الإنسانية مقابل فناء الفرد، الذي تماهى معها. أما فرويد فلا شيءَ لديه قادرٌ على ذلك، سوى المواجهة. ولو أردتُ تجاوز الكتاب قليلًا، ففي الفلسفة الألمانية ما يشبه هذين الرأيين المتناقضين، فهيغل، يعتقد بإن الإنسان، دون اللجوء إلى المطلق سوف يعاني الاغتراب، أما تلميذه فيورباخ، فيقلب ديالكتيك أستاذه رأسًا على عقب، ويظن أن الاغتراب ينشأ من تنكّر الإنسان لطبيعته وضياعه في ذلك الأمل الذي سبق وأن خلقه الإنسان نفسه لصورة الإنسان الكامل وهو الله.
(5)
يحاول المؤلف أن يجمع التحليل النفسي والدين والفلسفة، ليجد جوابًا لمعضلة الإنسان الأزليّة: الموت. لكنّه، وكما أظن لم يستطع إعطاء جوابًا مريحًا، كما لم يستطع گلگامش في بداية التاريخ، ولا يبدو لي ذلك فشلًا، فلا إجابات خارج الوهم، ولكنّي أميل إلى الوهم الشخصي، أو نسخة شخصيّة من وهم ملائم، لا يتنكّر للحظة الراهنة ويتكلّم لغة الحضارة العالميّة القائمة.
كان إرنست بيكر يعاني من السرطان ، فكتب هذا الكتاب، فقد أنكر الموتَ بالكتابة.

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 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.

You know that scene in Annie Hall where Woody Allen summons Marshall McLuhan out of the shrubbery to shout down the movie queue bloviator? "You know nothing of my work!"
Becker sounded like that guy.

Maybe that was harsh. After all, Becker has a lot of useful tips for living properly, and for realizing how the death phobia infects our day-to-day interactions.

That being said, I had some skepticism from the beginning, and that kept growing... a few too many denunciations of orthodox Freudianism followed by relying on such fusty, unempirical notions as the castration complex and the "primal scene," before peaking in the mental illness sections. Turns out gays are just narcissists, fetishists are basically gays, depressives are just lazy, and schizophrenia is just an incorrect set of metaphors. And yes that phallus is the center of everything, especially if you're a woman!

Fuck that.

It makes a whole lot of sense that this book won a Pulitzer. For a book about the centrality of death in the human psyche, it does a great job painting a nuanced, expansive picture of life itself. Becker's analysis and reorientation of Freudian thought around more broad existential principles is as impressive as it is vital; it redeemed a lot of Freud I've found kinda lacking, for one thing. Also, I really appreciated his focus on Kierkegaard as a progenitor of psychoanalysis—I've always thought of him as a uniquely talented observer of the human condition and how to transcend one's limits, so it was nice to have that echoed much more eloquently by someone as insightful as Becker! Overall, this really is the sort of book that'll hit you on every level. It's intellectually stimulating as it is spiritually satisfying; even if Becker doesn't solve how to deal with our innate fear of death and all the ways we destructively manifest that in our psyches and cultures, he gives you a crystal clear picture of things as they stand. For that alone, he's a voice I'm very grateful to have encountered.

Insightful, well-referenced, and easy to follow. Just imagining the author's pains and convulsions while writing under the curse of cancer makes it somewhat unethical to properly evaluate the merit of Becker's magnum opus. In the closing chapters it is advisable for the reader to pay close attention as these are the only instances where comparisons go at length and Becker's thought loses track, only to return by repeating the main message he wanted to deliver. This is a wonderful read for anyone who is interested in psychology but doesn't have the background or confidence to immediately get to grips with the terminology. I won't hesitate buying.

I have mixed thoughts and feelings while reading this book, because I intend to immerse myself through it, and there were instances that some parts of it really bored me, for example, the constant references to Nietzsche. Ernest Becker brilliantly synthesized Freud's psychoanalysis with the ideas of writers most notably, Otto Rank, Soren Kierkegaard, Carl Jung, Medard Boss, among others and poignantly illustrated their insights on the individual's attempts and striving against death, which entails projecting the self through expansion, cultural identification, or transcendence towards something greater.

I especially liked how he was able to point out this certain 'Causa Sui Project,' which is what most individuals are striving for: the need for self-reliance and self-determination to establish something beyond the self, i.e., he cites the example of Freud's erecting of psychoanalysis - which was his life long dream of responding to established religion or cultural traditions. It might be, according to Ernest Becker, that this Causa Sui Project, though he writes of his analysis as mostly assumptions based on Ernest Jones' biography of Freud, was a lie - that this project is the individual's attempt to overcome his smallness and limitations - because he is still in many ways bound to the laws of something that transcends him, and denying it would be tantamount to neurosis. Perhaps that portion of the book was the most poignant of all, because it was self-evident that to renounce the causa sui project would be to admit that any person's attempt for self-determination is bound to fail if it does not recognize that there is something that is more transcendent compared to the individual's will.

Ernest Becker also wrote on this book, the attempts and psychology of creativity, of creating personal fictions, of the ideal of mental health and illness - all of which are the person's attempts of making meaning, finding a center, remaining sane in an otherwise chaotic world. I highly recommend this book, it is enlightening and through it, and it is a reflection and a deep analysis on man's condition who is constantly asking questions and grapples on the inevitability of finitude and faith. Literally, this is one book that brought me back to my senses.

من بين كل الأشياء التي تحرك الإنسان ، فإن أهم الأسباب هو خوفه من الموت. بعد داروين ، ظهرت مشكلة الموت باعتبارها مشكلة تطورية ، ورأى العديد من المفكرين على الفور أنها مشكلة نفسية كبيرة للإنسان . كما حددوا بسرعة كبيرة ما معنى البطولة الحقيقية ، كما كتب (شالر) في مطلع القرن: البطولة هي قبل كل شيء رد الفعل على رعب الموت. نعجب أكثر بشجاعة من يواجه الموت. نعطي مثل هذه البسالة لدينا أعلى المراتب . إنها تحركنا بعمق في الداخل لأن لدينا شكوك حول مدى شجاعتنا نحن . عندما نرى رجلاً يواجه موته بشجاعة ، نكون أمام أعظم انتصار يمكننا تخيله. وهكذا كان للبطل مركز الشرف والإشادة الإنسانية منذ بداية الإنسان !!

Ernest Becker
The Denial Of Death
ترجمة :#Maher_Razouk

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)

Un libro un tanto difícil de calificar y que me ha dejado muy confundido, porque el inicio de la obra es espectacular en relación a lo que te plantea el título, es alucinante, pero conforme avanza el libro, todo se vuelve más complicado y se aleja mucho del tema de la muerte, se vuelve una apología hacia el psicoanálisis y en defensa del libro, está muy bien explicado, he aprendido más en estas páginas sobre el psicoanálisis que en toda mi licenciatura en psicología, ese es el gran mérito del libro, que aunque me decepciono un poco no encontrar todo lo que quería sobre la muerte y su negación, me llevo muy buenos conceptos del psicoanálisis, que es lo que es este libro, un completa apología a esta rama psicoterapéutica, es mi única observación, un libro algo difícil de leer que recomiendo tener un poco de interés hacia el tema del psicoanálisis para que sea más llevadero. Y de manera personal podría decir que lo que aprendí de este libro es que “todas nuestras conductas que desarrollamos a lo largo de nuestra vida no son más que nuestra manera de manifestar nuestro miedo a la muerte, muchas de ellas de manera inconsciente”.

This book will transform your view of everything, if you are only honest with yourself and let it. The language assumes some great familiarity with Freudian psychology, but the layman can definitely power through it with a little help from Wikipedia, Google, etc.

I was a little disappointed that as I progressed through the book, I saw fewer and fewer passages highlighted in my kindle, which means that a number of people gave up before getting to the later chapters, which were filled with amazing insights.

I am planning on reading this again, if only to be able to think about it a little more deeply, but throughout the book I felt myself saying "aha" and "ahh" a lot. Very insightful, damning, and in the end illuminating.