The DENIAL OF DEATH

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Summary: Beyond brilliant, absolutely unforgettable masterpiece
Review: "The Denial of Death" is one of the most brilliant books I've ever read, without a doubt. It is a work of absolute passion and brilliance, and it is obviously Becker's 'magnum opus', the product of a lifetime's worth of study and reflection on the mystery and underlying meaning of human existence. First, Becker courageously faces what he knows to be true: that human culture and everyday activitity is a 'frantic sedative' of sorts and is not at all what it appears to be. Second, he admits that the human condition is in some ways terrifying and maddeningly paradoxical, in that human beings are quite vulnerable animals unfortunate enough to have the capacity to reflect on their horrid fate:death. He has no illusions about what so called 'neurosis' actually is--Becker knows that the people society call 'neurotic' or 'weird' are precisely those who have a deeper philosophical insight into the nearly paralyzing fundamental questions of human existence. His 'answers', (although as Sam Keen puts it, they are really only palliative solutions) are mostly pragmatic in nature and require what Kierkegaard (to whom a chapter is devoted)termed 'the leap of faith'. The only consolation Becker offers, really, is the acknowledgment that these agonizing ultimate questions are what all the great souls in the history of man (Tolstoy, Peguy, Nietzsche are just a few of those mentioned), have struggled with. The book's reputation as being depressing and heavy handed is not entirely unjustified, but this in no way detracts from its beauty or undeniable importance. Sometimes chilling, but nonetheless a supreme work of perfection, beauty, and authenticity.

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Summary: A Broad-Based and Meaningful Theory of Human Motivation
Review: About the Book: All animal species are pre-wired with a survival instinct. Unlike other species, man is cursed with self-awareness which makes known to him his ultimate destiny with death. This realization engenders abject terror. Yet, man has to repress this terror (narrow consciousness) so that he can move through life with equanimity and precision. To do so, culture provides immortality scripts that if lived up to, help attenuate death-related terror through cognitive and emotional means. Emotionally, cultural prescriptions toward immortality elevates self-esteem and buffers against death related fear. This is possible because on a cognitive level, cultural scripts allows one to deny their mortality either through literal (heaven or Nirvana) or symbolic means (e.g., literary immortatlity). Because these cultural prescriptions to immortality are important to everyday functioning, they are refered to as man's vital lies. The problem with these immortality scripts is that they create continuous holy wars between people of differing worldviews: The very prescence of an alternative immortality script insinuates that the favored immortality script may be wrong. This motivates attempts at transelytization or the murder of dissentors (clearing the world of evil). This books well explains the basic human condition, why man's narsisistic nature cannot be helped, why man needs others to build a symbolic (or false) self, why human interaction is fraught with the policing of experience (politics), why being closer to God requires a hierarchy of subordinates and superiors, why man cannot handle freedom (he wishes to be enslaved), how man diffuses responsibility across a group, and more generally, why life, for most, cannot be fully lived (present centered) because most live life as a preperation for death (a chronic outcome- or future orientation taking man out of life). This theory of human motivation is broad and thus meaningful and well synthesizes many otherwise disparate theories or schools of thought into one coherent work. In recent years, Terror Management Theory has provided empirical support for some of Beckers central claims. A must to put into your theoretical toolkit. A good contrast to Beckers work which argues that human motivation leans toward a don't die orientation, is the idea of autotelic motives or human motivation as a live well orientation. To this end, you may want to read Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Flow is described as timeless absorption into the task at hand. The task inducing flow is said to bring one's consciosness to a present-centered state (where the devinity - life itself - exists). People who are often in flow are said to be happier. Present centeredness is emphasized by the ancients and many present day therapists alike. I recomend comparing and contrasting these two aforementioned theories.

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Summary: A deep and brutally honest treatment
Review: All lovers of existentialism will enjoy Becker's treatment of life and death. Becker won the Pulitzer Prize for this work when it was first published in 1974. Ironically and tragically, Becker himself died of cancer that very same year. He was 50 years old. I have been unsuccessful in my efforts to find out whether or not Becker knew of his sickness when he wrote the work. He certainly writes as one who understands the darkness of human life. Becker's thesis is that human personality and behavior has its deepest roots in our denying our death (thus the title). By this he means not only our death itself, but all of the horrors associated with our mortality as human beings. Becker makes frequent reference to Otto Rank, and reiterates Rank's point that all human cultural creation is inevitably religious in nature. There is also a wonderful treatment of Freud which will be especially refreshing to all those nauseauted by modern attempts to dress up Freud's theories and make them appear more optomistic than they are, as well as a discussion of Freud's breaks with Jung and others. There is even a chapter on Kierkegaard. Becker also attempts to show that neurosis is at least in part a result of not being able to erect the 'denial of death' defense mechanisms so many do, and that those who traverse the depths of human existence cannot but go mad to some degree. He says at one point, "No wonder the road of the artist so often detous through the madhouse." Finally, Becker bashes modern psychology, which makes this book an absolute must for any deep thinker who is considering entering this field. The Denial of Death is brutally honest, scholastic, and beautiful. Best of all, Becker doesn't make the all too common mistake of attempting to provide a solution (something all lovers of Camus will appreciate). The last 10 pages alone make this book worth reading. Read it thoughtfully and you will never be quite the same

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Summary: Rank and Becker
Review: Becker acknowledges a great debt to Otto Rank in this book, and in writing it he has brought Rank back into the limelight. The key source, Rank's 1930 _Psychology and the Soul_ has been newly translated and is published by Johns Hopkins U. Press (1998).

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Summary: Helps you be human
Review: Book Review / The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker

Nearly 60 reviews have already been posted on this book, many delving into the ins and outs of the psychological theories Becker proposes. So, I simply want to report the impact this book had on me.

Over decades of reading, I have sought authors who will admit the truth. Becker does.

To find a book that insightfully examines -- with a clear, steady gaze -- the profoundest fundamentals of human existence is quite rare. I have read thousands of books in my life, and Becker's is one of the few that genuinely qualifies. He dares go where many fear to tread. But, death and our denial of it, he establishes, is at the core of human existence and a root force shaping both human personality and human society. I imagine it is impossible to understand life without grasping this. Becker brilliantly analyzes why and how we avoid acknowledging this fact at all costs.

If you have the courage to look at the core of things; to examine your own denial of death and how it has -- and currently is -- shaping your life; then this book is for you. It is for readers who find the truth fundamentally more liberating, than intimidating.

Becker helped me become more honestly human. He also helped me feel less weird, ( i.e. neurotic) by acknowledging that much neurosis stems from being constantly and painfully aware of the actual facts of existence.

Despite the "heavy" topic, Becker's overall writing style is lucid, accessible, even engaging, and without posturing. Only occasional sections lapse into rather turgid debate of psychological theory.

If you want a book that calmly stares you straight in the face, while dissecting what really matters; if you are looking for a book that can help ground you in the center of reality, here it is.

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Summary: This book will change the way you look at life.
Review: Brilliant, insightful, profound, wonderous, the list could go on and on. This book helped teach me how to think. In analyzing death and the way death is central to all human thought, Becker digs right to the core. It left me awestruck and changed.

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Summary: A fascinating analysis of illusion formation
Review: Ernest Becker's Denial of Death explicates the human propensity to create illusions which obfuscate consciousness of the immanence of death and meaninglesnness. Drawing on cultural anthropology, social psychology, and psychoanalysis, Becker explores the human need to ornament reality with illusions and palliative fantasies which protect consciousness from our mortal fear and dread. Becker proposes that death is the "worm at the core" of human self-awareness, and we suffer intense fear and despair at the prospect of our own finitude, mortal decay, and meaninglesness. We therefore resort to character defenses and illusions to blot out our meaninglessness, helplessness, and creatureliness from consciousness. Becker claims that we could not survive without such illusions, and that we create religion, myth, and ideology to establish a meaningful and dependable universe. Such fictions also provide a fantasy in which we can establish a personal sense of importance and esteem, a feeling of cosmic heroism in an otherwise terrifying universe. However, whereas human beings functioned historically through the operation of these religious fantasies to evade death and meaninglessness, religion no longer provides a coherent meaning system for many people. Hence, we now create our own fantasies of "the dramatic apotheosis of man." We are now forced to invent our own personal illusions. In other words, where the social fantasy no longer holds, we become neurotics divorced from community and reality. According to Becker, the human animal is the sick animal. Normalcy is neurosis, since we cannot endure reality without anodynous illusions. In addition, we engage in violent struggle against others to conquer death and weakness. Becker uses the word "sadism" to describe the means we employ to arouse euphoric power over the body and demonstrate control over life itself. By trampling in the guts of others, we achieve a sense of control and mastery which is otherwise absent in an existence where our bodies decay and putrefy, in a universe which can destroy us at any time. Hence sadism can become addictive, and the most vicious atrocities may be committed to attain that euphoric transcendence over death. Thus Becker concludes that we must make the Kierkegaardian leap to faith if we have any hopes of overcoming our own brutality. Only by opening ourselves up to the very grounds of creation and renouncing our defensive egotism will we be able to shed our character armor and cease destroying each other in the maniacal attempt to overcome death. Becker's analysis of the psychodynamics motivating illusion is penetrating and imaginative. Through his incorporation of anthropological and psychological theory, Becker provides a vision of broad scope and depth which avoids hasty generalization and the problem of enumerative inductivism. Becker also synthesizes his perspective from ostensibly antithetical sources within psychology. Becker's amalgamation of Freud and Rank is imaginative and of deep importance since both thinkers bequeated brilliant insights. However, such a synthesis has rarely occurred because Freud and Rank have been considered oppositional thinkers, and communications between their respective schools has been understandably infrequent. Through Becker's synthesis, we now have a dynamic understanding of unconscious motivation amalgamated with a more existential perspective that delves into the nature of human meaning. Perhaps the most crucial problem in Becker's text is his Kierkegaardian solution to the problem of illusion formation. While advocating faith might alleviate a certain amount of human misery, it is questionable whether adherence to another system of meanings equally unamenable to reason or criticism is a sensible solution to a very serious psychological problem. We may be resigned to a certain amount of misery, and throwing ourselves headlong into faith might be an escape of the self, not a genuine solution. Nevertheless, this does not invalidate Becker's central arguments. After reading this book carefully, one must admit that Becker's insights and perspicacity are a tremendous contribution to our self understanding.

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Summary: Words for a Lifetime
Review: Ernest Becker's remarkable book "The Denial of Death", along with its companion work "Escape From Evil", is the best book I have ever read. Becker tackles an enormous quantity of topics smoothly and gracefully, and goes directly to the jugular vein of existence with a writing style which is at once erratic and cohesive, and always conversational. Beyond the content of the book itself, "The Denial of Death" has provided me a gateway to other provocative reading matter, primarily the work of Otto Rank. The material contained in Becker's thought and words are tools for a lifetime, taking on new and enriched meaning with the passing of time. I found Becker's penetrating critique of the last chapter from Norman O. Brown's "Life Against Death" to be especially compelling; how could such an heroic thinker as Brown, queries Becker, fly directly in the face of everything he had said throughout the duration of an otherwise ground-breaking book by concluding that guilt is an aritificial construct when, in fact, it is the rudiment of all societal enterprise and an inescapable fact of being alive? Such brutally frank perspicacity is what makes Ernest Becker someone to take extremely seriously, not only as a writer but as a social theorist and iconoclast as well. If there were any one book I would recommend to any student of life who truly wants to get at the core of human interaction and fragility, it would certainly be "The Denial of Death". If there were two such recommended books, I would add "Escape From Evil" to it.

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Summary: I question Goleman's listing as author. Sam Keen foreword.
Review: I am just pointing out what I take to be an error in your listing. I don't know of any connection of Goleman with Becker or Denial of Death. Sam Keen's new foreword is superb and might warrant mention.

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Summary: "Show me a hero,and I will show you a tragedy"
Review: I just finished the book today. It took me a while to finish it, but a book of this caliper takes time to read. A very good book about why some of us are what we are. I guess religion is our way of dealing with the finality of death. I highly recommend it to everybody.