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

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

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!

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

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.

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/

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?

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

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.

Is there a 'couldn't bring myself to finish' rating? I feel like I'm cheating by putting this one on my "read" shelf...

Here's the thing... I'm fairly well read, I've taken philosophy classes, I've powered through some pretty dry books. But apparently I CANNOT bring myself to power through a dry book about PSYCHOANALYSIS.

Being a modern psych major, and a fairly well-read one at that, AND one who has dealt with mental issues personally... I can't bring myself to believe a god damned WORD that Freud said. I find psychoanalytic theory to be utter and complete crap, and that seems to be not just the foundation of this book, but pretty much the whole thing. Perhaps this "Otto Rank" mentioned CONSTANTLY is a more brilliant guy than Freud, but I find it difficult to take anyone who took Freud seriously with anything less than an enormous cup of salt.

I made it through the foreword and 50 pages of the actual book and had to stop. I don't know what the last book was that I could not only not finish, but couldn't even bring myself to put it back on the to-read at a later date shelf. This book is utterly dead to me.

I'm so embarassed, I really thought I could be all intellectual and learn something here. Even reading these 5 star reviews, I expected something pretty thought-provoking, and was really hoping I'd be able to choke through it with a good end result. But I think with my personal distaste for Freud I am just doomed. I tried to hop around a bit, but I don't even see where Becker's argument about death would tie in.

If Ernest Becker can show that psychoanalysis is both a science and a mythic belief system, he will have found a way around man’s anxiety over death. Or maybe not. This book is a card trick that conjures sham religion out of sham science, with death playing a supporting role.

Becker tells us that the idea that man can give his life meaning through self-creation is wrong. Only a “mythico-religious” perspective will provide what’s needed to face the “terror of death.” That’s an interesting idea, but Becker makes a steaming mess of it. He uses pragmatic theory to show that science and religion make equivalent claims. It also implies the mythico-religious outlook is true if it works. He runs a teeny-tiny risk of nihilism here, but hey, when was the last time that ever got anyone into trouble? So off he goes.

First comes a hunt for human nature, an elusive quarry. Anything man does is part of his nature, so from the concept we can deduce only trivialities. But that doesn’t stop Becker, who at every turn represents his own alchemy as scientifically proven. From “the empirical science of psychology,” he proclaims, “we know everything important about human nature that there is to know...”. Oh, gosh. Already I’m getting nervous. What he knows is that meaning cannot be self-created because it amounts to a transparent act of transference. Man cannot mask mortality with some “vital lie.” Stronger medicine is needed, a belief system. For if a man fails to repose his psyche within such a system, the result will be the “annihilation” of the ego, whatever that means. Anyhow, it’s a proven fact.

This stronger medicine needs the survival instinct, Becker’s terror of death. To establish it he mortifies the sex instinct. Several chapters document the dismal findings of psychoanalytic research. “Personality is ultimately destroyed by and through sex,” he reports. The sex act, or fornication as he calls it, is modern man’s failed effort to replace the god-ideal. Males with sex drives are guilty of “phallic narcissism.” Anything beyond missionary sex with the lights out is perversion. Not even love and marriage help. “We might say the more guilt-free sex the better,” he explains, “ but only up to a certain point. In Hitlerism, we saw the misery that resulted when man confused two worlds ... Personal relationships carry the same danger...”

Becker smears the lens through which we view sex with a thin ordure, counseling us, in effect, just to close our eyes and think of the British Empire. This reductio of the sex drive thus exalts the survival instinct, and the author installs his psycho-mythic add-on to assuage the terror of death. Yet he concedes at the end that “... there is really no way to overcome the real dilemma of existence... ”, and baffled readers are left to wonder what the point of the book was.tt

That’s the big picture. The details are quite odd. No biological basis is allowed for mental disorders; all are amenable to psychotherapy, even schizophrenia, whose sufferers need only organize their jumbled symbolism into a mythic structure. That no schizophrenic patient has ever been cured by psychoanalysis is beside the point. So much for if it works, it’s true. Nowhere does Becker mention women, either, except to leer four or five times over the fright of children upon seeing mommy’s nudity: the boys don’t want to be castrated and not even little girls want to be the sex of their mothers. An Original Guilt replaces Original Sin, and women are still on the hook for it.

Then there’s Freud, “...a man who is always unhappy, helpless, anxious, bitter, looking into nothingness with fright ...”. Becker dwells for pages on the fact that Freud fainted, proving it was caused by his inability to accept religion and even linking Freud’s cancer to this. I myself have problems with Freud; so do many. But by the time this writer gets through there’s nothing left of Freud but litter.

Then still, explaining the minds of “primitives,” Becker notes:

“Many of the older American Indians were relieved when the Big Chiefs in Ottawa and Washington took control and prevented them from warring and feuding. It was a relief from the constant anxiety of death for their loved ones, if not for themselves.”

In light of what actually happened to the Indians this comes as a cruelty that runs for cover under its analytic context. The author’s style, indeed, uses analysis as a shield for many of his little jabs. The largely general nature of his claims would have worked better in a long essay format, but the psychoanalysis does appear to buttress the more caustic remarks.

Only psychiatry and religion can deal with the meaning of life, says Becker, who avoids philosophy. But this is one book where even a whiff of critical thinking helps, and not just with the reductio. Even assuming his premises, if truth really amounts to faith, then self-created meanings cannot be mistaken so long as man has faith in them. Most important, though, is a glaring lack of conceptual clarity. What exactly does he mean by religion and myth? There’s a world’s difference between a theological and an idealistic basis for belief. The author never explains why he conflates those terms. As a result he cannot meaningfully elucidate a subjective experience halfway between the temporal and the spiritual.

This vagueness hurts because the endeavor to state facts about another person’s mind isn’t as farfetched as it seems. Becker’s pragmatic brew, on the other hand, fizzes into nihilism. His claim to scientific proof of the psyche's functions is pseudoscience, and the pretense to authority has borne sour fruit. The false memory hysteria fanned by psychoanalysts 20 years ago derailed lives and careers, and sent innocent people to prison. And the author adds not one new insight on the subject of death, although I can’t deny the entertainment value of Victorian clichés dressed in psychedelic drag.

Unwilling to acknowledge either science or religion, The Denial of Death is neither fish nor fowl, but rather a foul and fishy fraud seasoned with petty barbs. Cautious readers will want to step back and let the white suits decontaminate this metaphysical meth lab and its doubtful dregs.

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.