The DENIAL OF DEATH

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating
Review: This is one powerful book! Becker borrows from many disciplines to weave together a comprehensive view of the human personality and society. Drawing from Freud, Rank and Kierkegard he manages a brilliant synthesis that transcends the view of any one of these thinkers.

Rating:
Summary: Becker is my Hero
Review: This tour de force is Becker's immorality project, his fitting gift to all mankind. In it, he tackles the preeminent problem of mankind. What he refers to as "the vital lie": man's refusal to accept his own lack of immortality. The author brilliantly, passionately, honestly and convincingly analyzes man's failure to confront his own finititude.

Man's denial of the inevitability of death is an attempt to escape the terror of the ultimate fear, to escape the ultimate human psychological debilitation, to evade the ultimate human dilemma. It is the fear of death that drives him into an existential and ontological black hole, all escapes from which are either temporary or existentially incomplete or dishonest.

Since he cannot transcend his mortality, man can only maintain denial at tremendous cost to himself: his mind. He is forced to live a life of either meaninglessness or a lie, psychological delusion. In either case his only choice is the brand of neurosis he will choose.

Man, ever the narcissistic being, can assign value and meaning to his life only by making himself a hero in his own symbolically created world, the most important of which is society itself. In this self-defined, self-created self-contained drama (society's cultural system), man proceeds to create a script for his heroism in his own life project.

From the start, this project is doomed to an ignominious existential failure for man has no respectable escapes other than that of facing the truth of his condition and then having to endure the abject terror that implies; or remaining in denial by choosing an appropriate role as hero in his own symbolically created drama.

Whether that drama is religious or not is somewhat beside the point since the escape is through the same delusional door. In either case, achieving heroism in his own self-defined fantasized world, leaves man with the false feeling that he has somehow transcended mortality. It is a monumental lie.

In the process of unfolding this drama of man's confrontation with the fear of death, Becker explains a great deal about what we currently understand about the basic human condition.

Few books possess the power and clarity of this one. Six stars!!!!!!