Tim Keller referenced this book in a sermon I listened to a couple of years ago, and it’s been on my radar since.

It was super fascinating, kinda rocked my world. The more psychologically dense sections forced me to slow down and I’m sure a lot of it went over my head, but it was really fascinating to dwell on how we all go through life ignoring its brutal realities.

All in all a super lighthearted and casual read!

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

This book is often read amongst antinatalist and pessimist circles and its first few chapters, which focus on the meaninglessness of existence and how most of our actions are subconsciously motivated by our fear of death, are indeed quite brilliant.

However, the book quickly goes from that to attempting to explain all of human nature through an extremely obsolete lens of psychoanalysis, which at times is so ridiculous that it almost seems like a parody. Moreover, there is not a single iota of doubt in the author about the views espoused, regardless of how unlikely they are from a modern neuroscience viewpoint (which was advanced enough by the 70s, when this book was released, to rule out most of its absurd proclamations). Similarly, the author clearly has a huge hard-on for Kierkegaard, who he keeps praising throughout the book, never finding a single thing wrong with his philosophy.

Of course, this is not surprising considering the book manages to get even worse from there on, its latter part consisting of a feeble defence and justification of religious thinking as a way to cope with the tragedy of man's existence (which is largely what Kierkegaard's philosophy is also about).

The author essentially proclaims that man, after having discovered that everything is completely illusory and worthless, should nevertheless proceed breeding more slaves to this meaningless life as long as they can be brainwashed to believe that it is worthwhile through religious thinking.

This shows an utter cowardice and inability to follow a line of questioning where it leads you, regardless of how disturbing that may be—which is what a true philosophical pessimist does. In this, the ending of the book reminds me of the last episode of the first season of True Detective, where Rust Cohle completely betrays every single belief he has previously held in order to become just another cowardly and delusional optimist who cowers behind magical thinking.

Amazing. I tattooed a phrase a long time ago: "memento mori". I've always been curious about death, what it means, why, and what's the purpose of living? First of all, I want to thank Becker because he made me love psychology books, and second, because he managed to come up with a book that uses many authors and studies, and merge into this one simple conclusion: we are all afraid to die.
Homo sapiens, or, the human animal, is the only one to live a duality: he has a physical body and a simbolic self. This simbolic self can be also called "spirit" or "soul" or "energy", depending most of the time of which religion we are talking about in context. However, at the same time, we go through an "anal" phase, where the child finds that his or her one body is weakness and decay. The book explains in a clear way (most of the time) the mental illnesses that we suffer due to a development of defense mechanisms against our own nature.
Evolution plays a main role here, and the history of our planet too. "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."

We know we are going to die someday. This is the unique problem of the conscious animal. We know it but we don’t feel it because we need to repress this truth in order to function.
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So what to do? It’s really hard to accept that we are just worms in the dirt. Especially when our nature is so paradoxical; the body being so animalistic and limited yet our minds so godlike and boundless. We are gods with anuses.
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What we need is a lie. A vital and grand one that we can always rely on. We need something that transcends us, some system of ideas and powers that embed us, whether it’s a flag, the proletariat, a guru or religion.
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Kierkegaard, Freud, Jung, Maslow and Fromm are some of the characters you’ll get to familiarize with during this journey. I felt like each chapter demanded a following period of reflection. I was absolutely taken aback by this book.
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Some notes:
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The Denial of Death straddles the line between astounding intellectual ambition and crackpot theorizing; it is a compendium of brilliant intellectual exercises that are more satisfying poetically than scientifically; it is a desperately self-oblivious and quasi-futile attempt to resurrect the ruins of Freudian psychoanalysis by re-defining certain parameters and ostensibly de-Freudianizing them; there is an unhealthy mixture of jaw-dropping recognition and eye-rolling recognition.

It is important to note, however, that it is grossly unfair to discredit the ingenuity of a vintage intellectual by holding discoveries and findings found post-mortem against him or her. A psychology professor who claims Freud is "an idiot" is, at best, simply being arrogant on a chronological technicality. Freud did not take into account all of that which had debunked, and his findings are so flagrantly untrue; of course, those debunkings occurred after Freud's death. Something about the fact that geniuses have to be omnipotent and stand outside a life narrative is ridiculous, and at best arrogant. At the end of the day Freud revolutionized thought and his myths has carried a heavy cultural resonance, and we can apologize for his after-the-fact falseness. But it is completely unfair to say he had not taken into account all the factors that could have by no means been available to him contemporarily, and so it goes for every genius. No one is a genius when taken out of context, and that's precisely the point of such masturbatory put-downs. Some assert superiority by tearing others down on balderdash presumptions; others gain it through luck; and the rare few gain it on demonstrable merit.

Becker takes great pains to resurrect Freudian thought by moving the focus of "sexual instinct" and placing it under the broader "terror of death." It's mostly an attempt to keep the structural integrity of psychoanalysis intact by retrofitting a new cornerstone. Becker and Freud are both susceptible to the same poetic fervor, bias, and penchant toward romanticizing certain ideas. Whereas Freud took his transcendental principle and squeezed every thought through a prism of sexual instinct, Becker wants to do likewise with fear of mortality. Everything down to "sexual perversions" like fetishism, sadomasochism, and - this is where the book feels dated even for 1973 - homosexuality are all put through the "here's why these exist due to the innate terror of death" schema. It's an intellectual reduction we've seen time and time again, where a certain mythos or belief system can be twisted and turned to accommodate just about everything because it's so rhetorically versatile. While it looks pretty good and is amusing on paper, it should rouse suspicion. The absence of scientific findings hear does likewise; even if this is meant to be a reader-friendly book, the lack of viable citations beyond summations of psychoanalytic theory seems methodically irresponsible.

My other hesitation is in the relentless way by which Becker employs metaphor as transcendent, a priori interpretation. He clearly believes that people think, in short hand, via grand, sweeping metaphors. In other words, projecting his grandiose symbolism onto the thoughts of others. Sometimes his dalliances with figuring out child psychology - the terror of the penis-less mother, or the first experience of total dependence being somewhat violated - are expressed in a metaphorical language, where this gesture "represents" this or "seems to" instill a fear of castration, or that viewing one's parents engaging in a "primal act" strips them of their symbolic, enduring representations and places them in a lowly, carnal context. The act subtly de-idolizes them and traumatizes the child, if one allows for the fact that people sub-consciously think in grandiose metaphors. Breasts represent this, the body symbolizes decay, the mind symbolizes bodily transcendence, etc., etc. But shouldn't these representations be more intuitive and well-ingrained if they just so happen to govern how childhood experience shapes us?

The other problem is Becker's penchant for dualisms: the life is a war between the body and the mind, the failure of reconciliation between the body and the self, that sex is the war between the acceptance and subversion of the body, that love is an internalized and externalized transcendence, etc., etc. Everything is balanced on linearly as a conflict between two disparate entities, or a war between dual things. This form of thinking I don't find particularly viable because it just reeks of the constraints human reason has to place on itself to find a semblance of truth, not the truth itself. The human mind - even according to Becker - has to reduce segments of the vastness of life into smaller, comprehensible fragments. Some behavioral scientists have posited that beyond the number three, humans process numbers relatively. We cannot process 1 million as a concrete number, but only as a contextual anchor against numbers greater or smaller. It is hazily and less concretely defined; beyond three, our brains become exhausted. It is why jokes stop after a priest, a minister, and a rabbi. I'm surprised Becker didn't catch himself falling into this own tendency in his own work. The human mind analyzing itself is a troublesome thing; it just seems that his propensity toward surrogates and representation, in addition to his tendency to parse things down to two dependent variables, are less indicative of psychological truth in principle, and more indicative of a psychological aphorism that can only be teased out once the brain takes its usual short-cuts and acts of its own nature. He didn't turn his evaluation on ideological reductiveness inward, and his argument stems from the same heuristics that he critiques in similarly broad terms.

The bits on character-traits as psychoses is just a marvelous section of the book, also, and even the over-the-top, rabid attempts to resuscicate Freudian thinking (e.g. anality as a desperate fear of the acknowledgment of the creatureliness of man and the awful horror that we turn life into excrement) are amusing even if they seem rabidly desperate or intellectually impoverished. The book ought to balled "The Denial of Freud's Death." It so desperately tries to keep the spirit of him alive, with varying degrees of success.

Even in its datedness, its contradictions, and its often unsatisfying or sensational resolutions, The Denial of Death is an excellent demonstration of intellectual heroics; of a man trying, as best he can, to grasp beyond the very limits of the human mind to get to a greater place. The tragedy is that he never quite transcends the unduly habits of an analytical mind, which is hardly to be expected. But it's always marvelous to read something that gives such an impression.

The book is amazing rhetoric, but when it says something like man needs to disown the fortress of the body, throw off the cultural constraints, assassinate his character-psychoses, and come face-to-face with the full-on majesty and chaos of nature in order to transcend, what says: this is rhetorically eloquent, but what does it mean to fully take-on the majesty of nature? Are we supposed to move back into the trees? Are we to run around naked in the woods and constantly think about our own passing? He never quite plans out an agenda for what the eschewing of cultural trappings for full immersion in cosmic oneness would look like. The book has its internal logic and it is good enough to have the opportunity to bear witness to it, but I am doubtful of much of its credibility. A lot of The Denial of Death is saturated in the abstracts of problem-solving; none of its resolutions, conclusions, or even symptoms seem actionable.

Sometimes I don't think it's the denial of death so much as the incomprehensibility of it. Our brains can't even process two people talking simultaneously because it is an over-ride of information intake. Is it really tenable to say that death has taken in and repressed all the majesty and terror of a despairing and lonely, temporary existence? This probably gives the mind too much credit. Or is it more realistic to say that such a wide, cosmic void is perhaps greater than Freudian schematics? Maybe since we can't really look beyond three, stop mistaking metaphor for fundamental truth, or can't stop thinking in dualisms or can't hear more than two people once, we can't find the transcendence because of our own machine-based limitations. Much of what we are meant to be able to take-on fully to confront death and thrive in life is beyond our cognitive capacities. I believe there is repression, but psychology also tells us that the brain must - and does - filter its input. We can't pay attention to a whole scene, or focus on more than one thing, or hear more than such and such thing; I don't believe this is a sub-conscious device meant to save us from the throes of death; I just believe that evolution is stingy enough to grant humans the necessities to function and (at the very least) genetically propagate. It hardly seems necessary to give humans the omniscience to take on the full reality of its predicament. Instead it's given enough to simply go on, erm, living?

So, at the end of the day, I'm not sure The Denial of Death is much more than a grandiose attempt at fitting the grand scheme of things into a more digestible scheme of, yes, it all comes from a fear of dying. But for anyone who can acknowledge the distortions in one's own thinking and the limits of input processing with a brain, such a statement seems reductive, and well, too convenient and un-complicated. This is why it is often backed up with inconvenient and complicated scraps. While I do believe The Denial of Death is valuable because some people may be living under this schematic, it's best to read this as a possibility for some thinking, not as a blanket humanity statement. It's a good guidepost to do some back-of-the-envelope psycho-calculation, but it's just not committed enough to its own purported vastness to be worth much beyond that.

Anxiety, it says, is the dissonance some people feel because their confidence in their invincibility - the delusion given to some with self- esteem - is shaky. It's a natural response to the predicament of self-aware mortality. This is too metaphorical. Anxiety stems from imagined fantasies that have not coalesced into existence; does the brain's penchant for supposition and that subsequent worry really come from that? Given how much self-spun fiction creates worry and sadness...I'm not sure. It's not that I can wholly discredit Becker; I just feel that any categorical imperative is probably not able to grasp the full spectrum of complicating factors. The spidey-sense is triggered at any point objectivity declares carte blanche privileges over subjectivity.

The Denial of Death is a fantastic, provocative, and possibly life-changing read, but just so as an ambitious attempt; a pleasurable intellectual food-for-thought exercise. A valiant attempt, but again, some people kill themselves, and some people fetishize excrement. What of them, Becker? What of them?

Um livro tão referenciado, tão elogiado, com direito a Pulitzer, é à partida algo que devemos reconhecer, se não gostar, pelo menos admirar, essa foi a minha a condição de partida. Mas nada me tinha preparado para o que aqui encontrei, apesar de ter lido várias reviews, foi um choque... Por isso lhe peguei em 2013 e não avancei, nem disse nada sobre o mesmo, quis ler mais e tentar compreender melhor o porquê. Entretanto depois de ter lido que Don DeLillo teria partido daqui para o seu 8º romance, "White Noise", resolvi voltar a ele. Aqui fica o que tenho a dizer sobre o mesmo.

Temos de começar por compreender que "The Denial of Death" é de 1973 e que se viviam tempos de ciência muito diferentes, mas isso não pode permitir que um livro destes passe por entre os pingos de chuva incólume, sem crítica, ainda para mais com pessoas bem posicionadas fazendo-lhe elogios nos dias de hoje (Ex. Bill Clinton colocou-o na sua lista de 21 melhores livros, em 2003).

O que é então "The Denial of Death"? Podemos dizer que é do tipo pseudocientífico, porque assenta num conjunto de crenças, construídas no tempo, mas não se assume como tal. Apresenta-se como discussão científica baseado em estudos, que não o são, são apenas outros textos como este, e que servem para se reafirmar a si mesmos, por via do aumento de um caudal de suposta prova. "The Denial of Death" é um fruto do seu tempo, do tempo das grandes teorias da Psicanálise, Freud, Lacan, Jung, etc. Um conjunto de pessoas inteligentes que acreditou que poderia dar sentido ao mundo por via das suas certezas pessoais, e que por isso mesmo não passaram de artistas do significado.

Becker constrói assim todo um argumentário à volta do suposto Medo da Morte que os humanos sentem, e que é responsável por tudo aquilo que somos. Existe aqui uma base de partida real, e esse foi o problema pelo qual a psicanálise durou tanto tempo no meio académico, quando existem pontas conectadas à realidade temos maior dificuldade em derrubá-las apenas por apresentarem fraca metodologia. Ou seja, aqui parte-se do elemento primário da espécie, a sobrevivência. É verdade que esse é o nosso primeiro e mais relevante instinto, sobreviver, desenvolvemos todo um sistema emocional que serve apenas a sobrevivência — o medo que nos garante que não ficamos debaixo de um carro ao atravessar uma estrada, a alegria e tristeza que nos garante relações humanas, o nojo que nos alerta para a doença, ou a raiva que nos ativa contra os predadores. Mas por isso mesmo, não temos necessidade de ter em mente, ou seja, de ao nível da consciência estar sempre a pensar na morte, desenvolvemos um sistema não-consciente, as emoções que fazem todo esse trabalho de modo automático, tal como desenvolvemos um sistema nervoso autónomo que garante que inspiramos, expiramos e batemos o nosso coração x vezes por minuto, mantendo a necessária homeostasia. Nem tudo está ao nível da consciência e é aqui que reside o grande problema da psicanálise, ter acreditado com as suas teorias simbólicas, que poderia escavar ideias e significados onde elas não existem.

O tema não deixa de ser interessante, e existe quem o trabalhe hoje, mas com seriedade metodológica. O que pode interessar neste caso, mais do que qualquer abordagem psicológica, é uma abordagem etnográfica, compreender como cada um de nós vê ou sente a morte, e poder trabalhar essas ideias, construir daí alguns padrões, mas esse é todo um outro universo que nada tem que ver com aquilo que Becker aqui nos apresenta.

Não queria ser crítico, nem demasiado agressivo, mas com um livro tão referenciado é inevitável que o sejamos, correndo o risco de estarmos a perpetuar ideias que não o merecem. "The Denial of Death" é uma fraude.

This is a classic tome, blending psychology with mythology for a dense, provocative meditation on how death drives us. Becker explores our primal terrors, hero quests, and immortality projects. He examines our compulsions to deny death, associate with things of lasting worth, achieve “cosmic significance,” or literally find a life-raft to immortality. It’s fairly difficult reading, with lots of psychological theories. But it’s a great meditation on facing life and death with honesty and maturity.

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 transforming. If I manage to live long enough to grow old despite my overwhelming urge to suicide now and then , I would look back on this book as my first lesson on 'human condition'. This book won Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction(1973). New York Times described it as ' One of the most challenging book of the decade .' And upon googling I came to know that this book is a seminal book iin psychology and one of the most influential books written on psychology in 20th century. It can be difficult to review of a book of such stature. So I'm going to review just a part of it.

The basic theme this book explores is this: Man is an incongruous jumble of two identities. One is his material body and the other is his symbolic inner self(You can call this mind if you want to ). This makes man at the same time the most powerful and unfortunate member of the animal kingdom. Why unfortunate , you ask? Because only man has been made aware that his body is going to decay soon, he has come to know death and the absurdity that comes with it. Man has eaten fruit from the ' Tree of Knowledge ', so he been banished from the haven of nature, has to pay for his knowledge by his existential hangover.

This symbolic self of man leads to more dilemmas. Man wants to stand out from the rest of nature, to curve out an unique self, to assert his individuality. But at the same time, he wants to merge with the rest of the creation, to have a holistic unification with nature. These two contradictory urges go in the face of each other . If you want to be unique, you can't be 'one' with the rest of the nature, and vice versa. That's the price you pay for your dualistic nature.

The symbolic self has made you a virtual God, but it also made you aware of your 'creatureliness'. However much you love your beloved and bask in the ecstasy of her love, you also have to be aware that your beloved has to defecate now and then.

So man has to somehow distract himself from his realization of the horrific nature of the reality. For this, he invented 'projects for heroism' in manifold forms, to transcend his animal identity beyond death, to deny his death. Even if your animal body dies, your symbolic self may live on forever through your immortality project. All religions, cultures, societies lays out the framework for our collective heroism projects.

Here things are beginning to get a little shaky. Religions aren't that sustainable heroism project now as they were in the middle ages. And cultures and societies are beginning to loose their structure and don't function to secure the identity of man as they once used to do. So the modern suffers from a lack of 'ideal illusion', which is vital to hide the terrors of his existence. He 'knows', knows too well, and therefore cannot be deceived, which is not good for him. Now, how do we deal with this extremely vulnerable, anxiety prone, suffering from meaninglessness, and as Becker puts it, the 'neurotic' model of the modern man? This question goes into the heart of psychotherapy. Becker explored statures like Freud,Kierkegaard, Otto Rank, Carl Jung in search for an answer, and tries to extract a synthesis out of it.

Now, I do not agree with the conclusion he draws here at the end of the book. Becker concludes by saying that there is really no way out of this dualistic conundrum in which man has found himself, and all we can aim at is some sort of mitigation of the absolute misery. We need to set a personal heroism project for ourselves , settle somewhat wisely within the walls, though we would never be quite at home. All aim for higher transcendence is delusional. He scolds Jung and Fromm for entertaining the possibility of a 'free man', while praising Freud for his 'more realistic somber pessimism'. And he also dismissed 'eastern mysticism ', saying it's sort of an cowardly evasion of the reality and thereby doesn't fit 'brave western man'.

I do not blame him though, as he had written those words nearly half a century ago. And I understand that eastern schools like Zen or Taoism might be too much for a western mind to have a firm purchase on, as eastern schools have a fundamentally different understanding of the nature reality. Nowhere this east-west dichotomy is explained more lucidly than by Fritjof Capra in his book 'The Tao of Physics.' More recently, Sam Harri's book 'Waking up: A guide to spiritually without religion' also does a quite fair job.

With the advent of modern noninvasive neuroimaging techniques, the scientific community has only recently been gaining an understanding of the potential for the radical transformation of human psyche that lies at the heart of the 'eastern mysticism '. There is empirical evidence that mindfulness meditation can literally change your neurochemistry and change the way how you perceive the world, and make your existence more at home(Watch the TED YouTube video 'How meditation can reshape your brain.') And every year many scientific papers are being published on the effect of mindfulness meditation on human psyche. To be frank, today more westerns practice yoga and meditation than easterners do, they are slowly absorbing the essence. But it seems to me as far as psychology of well being goes, east will always have the upper hand. But we also need the more analytical western science to look at what is really going on here.

It's nice that we live in an era where we are seeing the merger of east and west.

When I read this book I was all like "OFtCOURSE." The thesis is as follows: As humans we are the only creatures to understand abstract concepts and thus the only creatures to understand our mortality. This knowledge is so terrifying that our psyches build up defenses to repress the true horror of our impending demise.. An example is our tendancy to believe that some ideas are greater than life or death. Thus heroism and the ideologies that lead to war are manifistations of this death repression. Far out!

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.