Life changing. It gives an insightful perspective on human nature and on the meaning of life. It goes deep into the core. Accepting the idea of repressing the inevitable death and different coping mechanisms of humans. It requires some knowledge of the philosophy to fully understand it. Different views on philosophers Freud, Jung, Rank, Kierkegaard.. You might want to read it slowly. Everyone should read it once in his life.

Misschien wel het beste boek dat ik al heb gelezen: grote aanrader!

I read this book for a couple reasons, the first being that I'd always been mildly interested in in it, ever since I heard Woody Allen talk about it in "Annie Hall". I asked one of my friends in school a few years ago about the book, and he said it was pretty hard reading. I'd had one psychology class at the time and figured he was probably right, that it would be difficult reading for someone who had a hard time getting through any of his text books and didn't have much interest in psychoanalysis, except as a subject in Woody Allen movies.

For various reasons--and not to sound morbid--the subject of death and mortality has been on my mind for a little while, and after watching "Annie Hall" again, and being reminded of this book again, I decided I'd give it a shot.

I'm definitely glad I decided to read "The Denial of Death," because it's given me more to think about than any nonfiction book I can recall. Maybe since I'm not used to reading books on psychoanalysis, I'd have found that with another book as well, or a number of books. I have a feeling that wouldn't be the case, though; Becker's book is written in a way that a non-psychology student like myself can understand relatively easily, but that doesn't mean it isn't insightful or professionally-written. I found the book a whole lot easier to read than I thought I would, though I did have to concentrate a little harder than I do for my normal reading. But my limited knowledge of Freud, Jung, and the other important thinkers that Becker discusses, did not prevent me from understanding or getting a lot out of this book.

Becker talks about different areas of psychoanalytical thought, arguing that a human's basic and most natural struggle is to rationalize himself as a mortal animal aware of his own mortality, something which makes him unique on this planet and also in a constant state of fear. He develops different, mostly subconscious, ways of avoiding or distracting himself from that fear. Those that succeed in this distraction live as normal people, and those who cannot find a way to cope with this often have a much rougher time.

I'm not going to try to summarize the book, as all I'd end up with is a poor description written by someone with no ability to summarize a work like this (see above paragraph for an example of this inability). Becker discusses psychoanalysis in relation to religion, dimentia, depression, and perversion, among other things. I found myself hurrying to finish pages or chapters on lunch breaks at work, eager to find out what the author was going to say next--something I don't usually feel when reading nonfiction.

If there was anything I didn't "like" about "The Denial of Death" it's that, for the seven or eight days I was reading it, I had death on my mind a lot more often than usual. I'd imagine that's natural, though, when reading a book such as this. That said, there is nothing particularly pessimistic or downbeat about the book. Becker writes in a friendly, straight-forward manner, and if anything, his tone is optimistic throughout.

Así como Kierkegaard creía que nada tenía sentido y el único propósito podía ser Jesucristo, Freud que el libido y el amor por nuestra madre impulsaba todo nuestro actuar, Becker plantea que el único móvil del hombre es el heroicismo. Pero sorpresivamente no ahonda demasiado sino que cita ejemplos de filósofos/psicólogos anteriores y su vision de la muerte.

Evidentemente tengo que madurar como lector porque no es el primer ganador de un Pulitzer que me deja con gusto amargo.

Lectura muy pesada y sin demasiado sentido.

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.

The winner of the 1974 Pulitzer Prize and the culmination of a career, The Denial of Death is a brilliant work.

Becker argues, convincingly, that evolution has brought individuals to a point where we are trapped between our “creatureliness” and “symbolic self.” Consciousness has made us aware of our own powers, but also of our miserable creatureliness and destiny to die.

This insight allows Becker to explain and re-interpret human nature and history in a new, and fruitful, light.

Some choice quotes:

“those who speculate that a full apprehension of man’s condition would drive him insane are right, quite literally right.”
“To grow up at all is to conceal the mass of internal scar tissue that throbs in our dreams.”
“early men who were most afraid were those who were most realistic about their situation in nature, and they passed on to their offspring a realism that had a high survival value. The result was the emergence of man as we know him: a hyper-anxious animal who constantly invents reasons for anxiety even where there are none.”

A book full of powerful, important ideas that could have a major impact on how you see the world, all wrapped in dense, academic writing that is not particularly accessible to (and to be fair, probably not written for) those outside the psychology/philosophy fields. It's worth reading, but be prepared to tune out some of the crappier parts (awkward ass-kissing of many eminent psychologists, including an obsession with Freud and Rank; a very male-centric view of the world; treating homosexuality as a neurosis; lots of pure speculation about human development, with no scientific backing whatsoever), so you can focus on the key ideas:

- Human beings are torn between two worlds: one is the world of thought and mind, which seems perfect and endless; the other is the world of the body, which is gross and dies. We are self-aware, conscious beings, who can contemplate the beauty of philosophy, math, and art, but we are also constantly faced with the grossness of our bodies: of sweat, hair, poop, disease, decay, and death.

- This reality of life—knowing that we are going to die and disappear entirely—is too overwhelming for humans. If we faced the truth of the world head on every day, it would crush us. As a result, to be able to function in this world, we have to lie to ourselves. We have to create an illusion where we matter; a narrative where we are the hero; an "immortality project" that allows us to live on forever.

- These immortality projects are a central driver of everything people do. Almost every aspect of human civilization is defense mechanism against the knowledge of our own mortality. People believe in religion, have kids, write books, start companies, and build nations all in an effort to create the illusion that you can live forever.

- Many of the problems of man, such as war and genocide, are the result of multiple conflicting immortality projects clashing. Many mental conditions, such as neurosis, anxiety, and schizophrenia are the result of failing to sustain an illusion, and being faced with the reality of life.

- Therefore, the central question of humanity is what illusions should we believe? What lies should we tell to ourselves to create the best possible life?

I'm not sure I believe all of these argument, but there is definitely a lot of truth here. As Yuval Noah Harari wrote in "Sapiens," what makes most of modern civilization possible—government, money, religion—is the ability of man to believe in illusions. Perhaps, if we are to believe Becker, believing in illusions is what makes it possible to be a self-aware human in the first place.



As always, I've saved some of my favorite quotes from the book:

“The irony of man's condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive.”

“Yet, at the same time, as the Eastern sages also knew, man is a worm and food for worms. This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it. His body is a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways—the strangest and most repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die. Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order to blindly and dumbly rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with.”

“...Erich Fromm wondered why most people did not become insane in the face of the existential contradiction between a symbolic self, that seems to give man infinite worth in a timeless scheme of things, and a body that is worth about 98¢.”

“The neurotic opts out of life because he is having trouble maintaining his illusions about it, which proves nothing less than that life is possible only with illusions.”

“What does it mean to be a self-conscious animal? The idea is ludicrous, if it is not monstrous. It means to know that one is food for worms. This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consiousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression and with all this yet to die. It seems like a hoax, which is why one type of cultural man rebels openly against the idea of God. What kind of deity would crate such a complex and fancy worm food?”

“Inter faeces et urinam nascimur. (We are born between shit and piss.)” ― Augustine of Hippo

“[...] we all see the world through obsessive eyes at least part of the time and to some degree; and as Freud said, not only neurotics take exception to the fact that "we are born between urine and feces." In this horror of the incongruity of man Swift the poet gives more tormented voice to the dilemma that haunts us all, and it is worth summing it up one final time: Excreting is the curse that threatens madness because it shows man his abject finitude, his physicalness, the likely unreality of his hopes and dreams. But even more immediately, it represents man's utter bafflement at the sheer non-sense of creation: to fashion the sublime miracle of the human face, the mysterium tremendum of radiant female beauty, the veritable goddesses that beautiful women are; to bring this out of nothing, out of the void, and make it shine in noonday; to take such a miracle and put miracles again within it, deep in the mystery of eyes that peer out-the eye that gave even the dry Darwin a chill; to do all this, and to combine it with an anus that shits! It is too much. Nature mocks us, and poets live in torture.”

“We are gods with anuses.”

Most of this book was a fascinating contemplation of what drives human psychology. There was a lot of inside baseball where he takes on Freud, Kierkegaard and other philosophers on their wrong theories. There was a sliver of just unscientific theorizing about homosexuality (that was just tragically outdated and harmful). But on the whole, it was an excellent read by a great thinker and writer on the meaning of life (or lack thereof).

Extremely interesting book, full of deep insights about human beings and full both of understatements and overstatements about how our mind works.
The book makes a very strong point in favor of the view that the driving force of all human existence is the fear of death, however, I feel that in light of our current knowledge of the mechanisms of the brain it places too much emphasis on certain exaggerations of psychoanalysis.
It is, all in all a tour de force in its explanation of the human psyche and a book I would wholeheartedly recommend to everyone.

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.

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

[image error]

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.

Mostly embarrassing fanboyism.