This is a classic for a reason. It's a brilliant book, in which Becker discusses Otto Rank's writings in a highly accessible way, that is absolutely relevant to 21st century society. The knowledge that we will die defines our lives, and the ways humans choose to deal with this knowledge (consciously or subconsciously) are what creates culture - all culture; from BDSM to Quakerism.

The downside is that the book was first published in 1973, and therefore contains some highly offensive writing.

It's a big ask, but please overlook the bit about Greenacre and Boss's (1968) explanation of why women don't have kinks; because they are 100% passive, and naturally submissive. The male has to "perform the sexual act" so it is natural for him to develop fetishes. However women don't have to get aroused, or channel their desires (just lie there, I guess), so they don't have kinks. Ever (p. 243). Ugh.

Also, please ignore everything Becker says on homosexuality (i.e. the whole chapter on mental illness - as it was labelled in the DSM until 1973): namely that homosexuality is the "perversion" of weak men because of their sense of powerlessness, a lack of a father-figure, and a terror of the difference of women.** Also, the awful parts on "transvitites", who "believe they can transform animal reality by dressing it in cultural clothing" (p. 238).

And also can you please overlook all the gendered language, and the way women don't count as actual people to Becker?

Aside from all that this is a wonderful book, and everyone should read it. And luckily for me Greg already explained why, in detail, so go read his review.

**This is Becker's opinion, not Rank's. Rank actually linked homosexuality to creativity and freedom from society, which pisses Becker off: "Rank was so intent on accenting the positive, the ideal side of perversion, that he almost obscured the overall picture . . . [homosexual acts are] protests of weakness rather than strength . . . the bankruptcy of talent." Double ugh.

P.S. Weirdly, Becker repeats as fact (p. 249) that Hitler engaged in coprophilia, by getting a young girl (allegedly his neice) to crap on his head. There's no actual evidence for this. It's part of the attempt to frame Hitler as a monstrous being, rather than as a man who carried out monstrous acts. Over the years people have also attempted to frame Hitler as gay for the same reason.

Lots of great stuff here. I imagine it'll resonate with other readers more than me, however, because I'm never going to die.

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.

Lots to say about this. This is a brilliant book and folks interested in death studies, philosophy around death, and the psychology of sex and religion should read it.

In short, he posits human culture is shaped by our aversion to our existence as animals. As he puts in the book, we are "Gods with anuses." He comes to this conclusion by exploring religion, social roles, and diversions from social roles as examples of humans seeking hero roles to avoid mortality as a our core certainty.

It is wild, intelligent, revelatory, and still relevant. I can see his argument applying to political extremism, media figure worship, information illiteracy, and a number of other things I fixate on.

That being said, we have to use our "academics of the past" hat while engaging, which makes me nervous to recommend it. Becker was well past the thinkers of his time while remaining behind our current considerations of gender, sex, and psychology.

He is pulling primarily from Freud, which is a whole other rant of mine (Freud introduced secular post human considerations that we all take for granted now), but he is quick to criticize where it needs to be done. He ties his thesis to iterations of mental illness and loosely defined "fetishes" which does not (and could not) include contemporary understandings of gender, orientation, and spectrums of illness.

He is clear that he is not making value statements, but I know for a fact folks will toss out the value of this work with language yet to be informed by the last 50 years of research.

Also, this reads like a dissertation so it goes fucking on and on and on. If you delve, do the audiobook.

Not reviewing the whole book but tempted to share an interesting point raised by Becker while making an analogy of religion and science. He considered both religion and science are in pursuit of the same goal ie. To attain immortality. Religion offers immortality in the afterlife and to attain it you have to "Believe" in this promise. While science not buying this irrationality tried a completely opposite position. But the ultimate goal is the same, "Long and quality life".
It's hard for me to disagree. When someone asks me perks of science and specifically medicine my first argument usually is something like " see how it has increased average life and quality of life." Which validates the above claim. Furthermore, this reminded me of two main goals of early alchemists which were, creation of an elixir of life (immortality) and changes others matters to gold ( which I think refers to economic conditions, hence quality) .modern science although never admitted it publicly but goals remain the same. Science after rejecting religion immortality project, simply started its own project and is working on immortal life in this world.

Hard to take any of this book seriously when it rests on the shaky, crumbling foundations of Freudian psychology. As the below article says, "The primary trouble with Freud is that, while his ideas appear intriguing and even common sensical, there’s very little empirical evidence to back them up." (I think this is generous; in fact there's basically no evidence.)

https://io9.gizmodo.com/why-freud-sti...

Not only that, this book's scope of humanity is extremely narrow, getting things wrong about: "transvestites", post-menopausal women, unmarried women, children, many mental illnesses, and Chinese people, to name a few.

The experiences of women, non-protestants, girls, people who aren't white, and cultures with different worldviews regarding death are nearly completely ignored.

It's almost hilarious how the psychologist men referenced in this book thought of their work as anything close to universal, when it was so clearly steeped in their extremely narrow worldview.

The kernel of truth in this book - how the fear of the "animal-ness" of the human condition, and the cruel and arbitrary inevitability of death drive us - is nearly obscured under all this hogwash.

This is a solid exposition on the ideas of Freud and Rank. The underpinning thesis of the book—that a fear of death unconsciously drives most of human experience—did not receive as many pages as I had hoped. Instead, a large portion of the book is spent analyzing works that (Dr. Becker argues) are correct insofar as they can be logically extended to support the idea that humans refuse to acknowledge their own mortality. This is a real hum-dinger that I would recommend to any person who denies that they have a paralyzing fear of death.

This book won the 1974 Pulitzer Prize but I cannot fathom the reason why. I suppose Freud and his disbanded and disloyal colleagues upon whose work this book is primarily based were still considered giants of psychological therapy back then but actually were too overly interested in the human anus and the smelly excretions that periodically plop out of it and of course the Freudian obsession with sex is bizarre to say the least. So although there is a genuine truth concerning death hidden amongst the fallacious therapeutic claptrap of a bygone era - it is twisted and lost in perverse psychoanalytical thinking and one would be better giving the book a miss and finding something more modern. Ernest Becker could clearly write and communicate very well and I am sure it would have been accepted as groundbreaking in the era it was written but 45 years later this book isn't even ironically funny or helpful. The theories verge on the absolute ridiculous - theories such as Freud felt sexual attraction to his mother (Oedipus complex) and assumed the rest of us have that same impulse. Becker doesn't wholly agree with Freud but he doesn't abandon the theories either - rather he interprets them into something that they never were in a bid to modernise them and create an entirely different meaning altogether than was ever intended. It is clear Freud was a sick man and should never have received the respect or popularity that he was afforded because he causes more harm in therapy than good. So for me this book is a serious waste of time but the theory of the fear of death is worth pursuing at all costs. The theory has been around for thousands of years but the likes of William James, Ernest Becker and the creators of Terror Management Theory periodically reinvent the wheel and apply for a brand new patent to say its their theory. A bit harsh on Becker that last criticism but he gets a lot of credit for this book and its not original nor deserving of praise - in my opinion.

TDoD is one of the, if not the most, impactful book I have ever read in my life. With its exact, blunt, objective style and its lack of shame in discussing the deepest and most intimate aspects of man. This book will always be on my desk and a point of reference for everything I will do in my life and every difficult moment of depression and anxiety. This is not the secret sauce for happiness, this does not exist, but rather a map of the human psyche with the most human admission that there is no way out, or better that there is, but that outside is no place for sanity.

This is a little spoiler, but below the paragraph that touched me the most.

“Finally, then, we can see how truly inseparable are the domains of psychiatry and religion, as they both deal with human nature and the ultimate meaning of life. To leave behind stupidity is to become aware of life as a problem of heroics, which inevitably becomes a reflection about what life ought to be in its ideal dimensions. From this point of view we can see that the perversione of “private religions” are not “false” in comparison to “true religions”. They are simply less expansive, less humanly noble and responsible. All living organisms are condemned to perversity, to the narrowness of being mere fragments of a larger totality that overwhelms then, which they cannot understand or truly cope with - yet must still live and struggle in. We still must ask, then, in the spirit of the wise old Epictetus, what kind of perversity is fitting for man”.

"We repress our bodies to purchase a soul that time cannot destroy; we sacrifice pleasure to buy immortality; we encapsulate ourselves to avoid death. And life escapes us while we huddle within the defended fortress of character." ~Sam Keen

Consumption. There are books that I read and then there are books that I consume. Denial of Death was consumed. This reads more 1990's than 1970's, a testament to Ernest Becker's acumen. It is both critical and reverent of Sigmond Freud's psychoanalytical theories. A careful restructuring that tosses out the framework without collapsing the house.

Becker points to Charles Darwin as the harbinger of change in the mindset of modern psychology. It was Darwin's evolutionary theory that put the problem of death anxiety at the forefront of psychological assertions and, by extension, "heroism" as a defense mechanism against that anxiety. Becker elaborates on the role of heroism as a cultural construct, and theology as the standard bearer of that construct:

"...the crisis of society is, of course, the crisis of organized religion too: religion is no longer valid as a hero system, and so the youth scorn it. If traditional culture is discredited as heroics, then the church that supports that culture automatically discredits itself. If the church, on the other hand, chooses to insist on its own special heroics, it might find that in crucial ways it must work against culture, recruit youth to be anti-heroes to the ways of life of the society they live in. This is the dilemma of religion in our time."

The real conundrum of man's existence is that, in all of the animal kingdom, he alone is aware of his own mortality. It is this awareness that fuels his adult anxiety, an awareness that no matter what he accomplishes in his 60+ years of tarry and toil, he is ultimately food for worms. In the face of this terrifying realization, all of us, as sentient beings, as "meaningless creatures," deploy our coping mechanisms. Becker expounds on this assumption and analyzes it with dizzying efficiency. This is a challenging read, but one that is well worth the time.

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

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

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

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

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