The Denial of Death

much of the arguments are based on questionable foundations, but it is be useful to spark thoughts as to why they are questionable and therefore what would be better. whether their points are acceptable or not, any idea which aids in further examination of the world is a good thing.

For those who are interested in who we really are, what we really want and the basic urge behind our life story,this book is a must reading.Becker,with his extraordinary deep insights about the human predicament, elabotates on basic human motivator:the denial of death by our immortality projects created to live securely in a terrifying world..İlluminating..

The author satisfied the subject matter pretty well. The insights that were unbeknownst to me is why I read the book. Subjects with in the book that I was familiar with and expected to see were readily available.

You need a PhD to understand it. My doc suggested it to me for my thanatophobia...yup...that's a fear of dying. I'm fairly sure we all have that fear but some of us just choose to focus on it and worry when the Reaper will come visit. I'm fairly educated with a master's degree but WOW! Reading this book is fairly difficult. I'm sure it's a good read for someone studying this type of phobia but not really for the layperson just trying to work through their worries. That, and the fact that I'm not too keen on reading an academic level book when I'm just looking for resources to work through my fear. Although I am sure it's a brilliant book as many others have mentioned, I've yet to comfortably get through it all with meaning. IF you feel like digging deep in your soul, don't have any other things going on to where you want to dissect what you've read, reflect on it, and philosophize on it...it's probably spectacular!

This astonishing reinterpretation of Freudian theory was first published to widespread acclaim in 1973, and deservedly won the 1974 Pulitzer prize for general nonfiction. I recently decided to go back and read it for a second time, and as I pulled my surprisingly well-preserved original paperback edition down from my bookshelf, I wondered if it would still have the same profound impact on me today as it did in 1975. And now, as I get ready to return my copy to its place on the shelf, I can say without reservation that the passage of four decades has done nothing to diminish either the brilliance of Becker’s thinking or the power of his writing. Forty years on, The Denial of Death astonishes still.

Here is a perfect example of both the thinking and the writing (from p.26 in my old edition) - a passage in which Becker describes what he refers to as the existential dilemma of humanity: “Man has a symbolic identity that brings him sharply out of nature. … He is a creator with a mind that soars out to speculate about atoms and infinity, who can place himself imaginatively at a point in space and contemplate bemusedly his own planet. This … self-consciousness gives to man literally the status of a small god in nature. Yet, at the same time … 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-grasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it. … 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 blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with.”

A long quote, indeed. But Becker’s majestic style does not easily lend itself to paraphrasing. As it is, I struggled with the quote above in terms of deciding where to edit out a particular phrase or sentence for space purposes. Every cut I made, I questioned. Every ellipsis I inserted, I was tempted to take back. Becker’s prose is that rich and that compelling.

Similarly, Becker’s thesis is so carefully and so fully argued over the course of the book’s nearly 300 pages that it defies a simple summarization. Nonetheless, I will make an attempt. Becker asserts that Freud, while correctly seeing how big a part anxiety plays in human existence, incorrectly attributed it to infantile sexual traumas. Instead, the true source of humanity’s angst is this “terrifying dilemma” described above – we feel immortal in our minds, but our bodies remind us constantly that we are mortal.

The way we deal with this unbearable duality of our nature is by repressing awareness of what Becker terms our “creatureliness” – our mind’s utter dependence upon the puny physical body in which it is housed. We do so by applying our energies to the constant pursuit of symbolic accomplishments that our minds dream up for us. For those who are gifted with artistic talent, this symbolic pursuit expresses itself in creative activity of one form or another; for those not so artistically endowed, this pursuit takes the form of conventional social status seeking behaviors, such as advancing in one’s chosen profession, finding a mate and raising a family, acquiring wealth, and any number of other socially approved ways of being seen by others as “successful”.

While sympathetic to each type of symbolic endeavor, Becker is supportive of neither, and asserts that both strategies are bound to fail in the long run. No success – artistic or otherwise – will spare any of us from the impending death that we are attempting to deny.

So, what hope is there for us in the face of this existential dilemma? Becker holds up Otto Rank’s ideal of “the heroic individual” (foreshadowed in Soren Kierkegaard’s “knight of faith”) as the one and only way to achieve a meaningful existence despite the implacable fact of death. This heroic individual does not merely reject all such symbolic efforts to deny her death, but instead boldly goes where others dare not go – right up to the edge of the abyss of meaninglessness that our creatureliness condemns us to.

While Becker affords both Rank and Kierkegaard a significant presence throughout the book – even to the extent of devoting a full chapter exclusively to each – he waits until the final pages of his concluding chapter, “Psychology and Religion: What Is the Heroic Individual?”, to introduce Paul Tillich, who is granted the final word to say in support of Becker’s argument. Interesting enough, not only does Tillich make such a late appearance, without being accorded a chapter of his own, but he is not even listed in the index (almost certainly an accidental oversight, which hopefully was corrected in subsequent editions).

Once again, my summary must suffice where Becker’s full text cannot fit. Tillich’s metaphysical concept of New Being describes “a new type of person who would be more in harmony with nature, less driven, more perceptive, more in touch with his own creative energies, and who might …form genuine communities to replace the collectivities of our time, communities of truer persons in place of the objective creatures created by our materialistic culture.”

This concept of Tillich’s is merely an ideal, but it is an ideal that folds neatly into the one Becker has been leading up to from his very first page – that of the heroic individual as foreseen by Kierkegaard and Rank. “If you are going to have a myth of New Being, then, like Tillich, you have to use this myth as a call to the highest and most difficult effort. … What singles out Tillich’s cogitations about New Being is that there is no nonsense here. Tillich means that man has to have the ‘courage to be’ himself, to stand on his own feet, to face up to the eternal contradictions of the real world. … His daily life, then, becomes truly a duty of cosmic proportions, and his courage to face the anxiety becomes a true cosmic heroism.”

And right here, atop this most idealistic and optimistic plateau to which Becker has patiently led us, we encounter what is perhaps the one disappointment for the reader of this exhilarating treatise on human nature. No sooner has Becker brought Tillich into the picture, giving us the briefest glimpse of the ideal of the heroic individual, then he brings The Denial of Death to an end, without elaborating further on how he imagines this ideal of “New Being” might be realized by us in spite of our creatureliness.

Not that he intended to leave us in the lurch. A companion volume was planned, and its manuscript mostly finished, when Becker tragically succumbed to cancer at the age of 49. This singular scholar, who warned us so insistently that we could never successfully evade the limits of our creatureliness, of course could not evade his own.

The tragedy is not in the fact of Becker’s death, but in its timing. He surely had many more books in mind to write. But he surely also understood the limitations that he – and all of us – must resign ourselves to. The final sentence of The Denial of Death capture this understanding perfectly: “The most that any one of us can seem to do is to fashion something – an object or ourselves – and drop it into the confusion, make an offering of it, so to speak, to the life force.”

We can be grateful that Becker fashioned this book – as well as the companion piece mentioned above, published posthumously under the title Escape from Evil – and made the two of them his final offering to us.

All that is left is for us to have to courage to step up to the abyss he so bravely pointed us toward.

“The real world is simply too terrible to admit. It tells man that he is a small, trembling animal who will someday decay and die. Illusion changes all of this; makes man seem important, vital to the universe. Immortal in some ways.”

If this quote makes you at all uneasy, then you might find the stark revelations in this book to be terrifying. Becker's brute honesty and undeniably cogent exposure of the trite sentimentalities and illusions of character which we human beings create and protect ourselves with in order to deal with the reality of life (which is DEATH) could easily lead one into an existential depression. As a truth-seeker, I'm grateful for the shattering of illusions that came with reading The Denial of Death, but there is no comfort to be found in the wisdom that lies within these pages. Nonetheless, this is one of the best and most important books I've ever read.

Typical psychoanalytic silliness. I was expecting a Pulitzer prize-worthy exposition of death; what I got was a rehash of Freudian claptrap, Oedipus complex and all. One might charitably extract the occasional, banal insight, but these are thoroughly buried under great steaming heaps of pseudoscientific nonsense. Not worth the paper it's printed on (and I read it on Kindle).

Forty years ago, as a Presbyterian seminarian, I was required to read Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death. Like most the store 1- and 2-star reviewers below, I found it enormously difficult, and like some of them, I found it not especially relevant. So I faked my way through it.

Now 63 years old, early-retired from ministry, enamored of new atheists such as Dawkins, Harris and Dennett, I saw last week the book’s spine peering from my bookshelf and impulsively I plucked it out and noticed by my underlinings and notations that I’d made it to about page 55. I don’t know why, but last week I decided to give it another go. (Maybe because I had a full week of nothing to do before the new school year began.)

Still--as the 1- and 2-star reviewers attest--it was NOT an easy read. But this time, owing perhaps to my accumulated life experience, Becker began to take hold of me, though this required patience, re-reading, notating, regularly putting the book down to reflect.

Quickly I became amazed that Becker--writing nearly a half century ago and now long dead--was not just holding his own against the new atheists, he was--from my view--kicking their ass.

To be clear, Becker is no apologist for any one religion, though much of his argument utilizes Christian thinkers (e.g. Kierkegaard especially, Chesterton, Tillich). But he argues stunningly and convincingly that myth-ritual is essential to sanity in any culture. And while he departs from Freudian psychoanalysis, he truly departs, showing that Freud himself was, in the end, a tragic figure for the reason that he would not make “leap of faith” into transcendent illusion.

This book has curbed if not cured my cynicism, has considerably blunted my veer toward atheistic materialism, and has greatly expanded my thinking. I imagine that the 1- and 2-star reviewers below are, as I was when I first encounter the book, younger and more understandably distracted by the swirl of the world around them. Hoping not to sound condescending or patronizing, I encourage each of them to wait a few years, pick up the book again, give it another go. It may very well reward you. It is one of the best books I’ve ever read.

I have read other reviews here stating the readers frustration with this book. This book is not an easy read, especially if the layperson does not familiarize themselves with terms like "Oedipus complex". Or with the works of Otto Rank, the psychoanalyst and departed Freud disciple of whom this book is heavily influenced. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1974 (my birth year) "The Denial of Death" attempts to deal with the existential problem of life. That problem being that man is aware of his animal body and is aware that he will die. As man becomes more neurotic how is he to deal with this. The problem of the psychological character in man being revealed by psychoanalysis today is that his character finds no escape from the nature of reality. Becker classifies mental illness as being too sensitive to reality without a way to cope.

Drawing on existential giants such as Kierkegaard, Carl Jung, Rank and others, self transcendence or "heroism" is necessary to reduce the terrors of existence. The restriction of the world and its harsh realities are necessary for man to function normally, and how effectively man can "lie" to himself about his condition is how heroic he can be. Heroism simply meaning "a reason to live". As man turns his back on the religion of his fathers the more he dives into the culture to find his place of meaning and hence we have the loss of transcendence and the rise of the cold psychiatrist's office.

Their is also an intentional rebuttal of Freud's idea that man's anxieties stem from finding his place in the world sexually. The Oedipus Complex is a theory that a child, unconsciously wants to have sexual relations with the parent of the opposite sex and is only settled by the relationship with the same sex parent. While this theory was endorsed by Rank and others, Becker sets out to prove it is not the be-all and end-all. " The Denial of Death" was worth the effort as I came away enlightened, and found myself at times to be mortified by what I was reading.

This is an incredible book. Let me say that again: this is an incredible book.

It is not the most efficiently organized, well written, or easily comprehensible book, and, truth be told, there are certainly chapters that can be skipped without detracting from the overall impact. But if you read carefully and follow Becker's (sometimes circuitous) reasoning step by step and with an open mind, I suspect there is no way you could not come away with a fundamentally altered outlook on life.

As others have noted, the main thesis is a disarmingly simple one: that the terror of death underlies everything in our lives -- conscious decisions and unconscious desires. From this flows an intricate web of insight into the human condition that defies any kind of easy summary. You will also be disappointed if, after 285 dense, difficult pages, you expect Becker to give you some kind of prescription for a mentally healthy life. Readers in search of easy answers would better served to look elsewhere.

For me, one of the most appealing features of existentialist writers of the mid-twentieth century is their syncretic approach: their ability to find common truths in the realms of philosophy, psychoanalysis, religion, literature, etc. Becker is by no means one-dimensional. While he is grounded primarily in psychoanalytic literature, he also draws on theologians like Kierkegaard and Tillich, as well as public intellectuals like William James and poets like Sylvia Plath.

While the book is full of powerfully articulated truths, it is still a work of the mid-1970s, and suffers from numerous (mostly non-critical) drawbacks. By any standard, the organization of the material is poor, and Becker's style can be both bizarrely colloquial and frustratingly vague. Certain chapters do not seem to follow logically from the preceding one, and Becker frequently digresses from the main theme to belabor or contest (what seem to me) relatively trivial points of 1970s psychoanalytic theory. On a more serious note, since Becker is fundamentally grounded in psychoanalysis, he predictably ignores the biological basis for mental illness. Everything from schizophrenia to depression to sexual fetishism is explainable and logical if one has the correct insights, and not dependent on misfiring neurons or chemical imbalances. The penultimate chapter, "A General View of Mental Illness," is surely the most dated (particularly the lamentable discussion of homosexuality as a perversion) and least satisfying, but as it adds little to the book's thesis it can also easily be ignored. The indebtedness to psychoanalysis also means that Becker is operating from a primarily male-centered world-view, with the concomitant emphasis on masculine phenomena, issues, and theories. I don't think this seriously detracts from the overall truth of his insights, however, which are based on the universalities of human existence.

In sum, there are powerful insights here that take a bit of digging and diligent reading to really follow, but it is time well spent. provided the reader approaches the work with an open mind. It seems to me that many of the negative reviews here stem from 21st-century cynicism rather than any actual flaws -- a desire, as Tillich puts it, to "courageously reject any solution which would deprive them of their freedom of rejecting whatever they want to reject."

This book will make you soberly reevaluate your life-goals and ambitions, for it makes a thoroughly rational case for considering one's self-concept an illusion--more so than any eastern philosophy. In fact The Denial of Death gave rise to a well-established theory in psychology (Terror Management), which tested Becker's postulates in hundreds of studies.
The basic thesis is that the defining feature of Homo Sapiens' behavior is a very strong need to transcend the end-of-self awareness that came about as an unfortunate byproduct of developing a large brain and realizing our animal insignificance.
The main mode of transcendence is through thoughts and actions (culture) that allow humans to elevate themselves above the insignificance and mortality of other animals (self-esteem). This avoids conscious awareness of the anxiety of death, allowing it to remain safely stored in the deep recesses of the unconscious. This is why most people say that they hardly ever think of death: As long as they have some self-esteem left, they can prevent this anxiety from reaching conscious awareness. And the more self-esteem one obtains the more one can push this awareness into the unconscious.
Self-esteem, in other words, has a death-denying, tranquilizing effect, and is obtained by living up to (or even better, exceeding) the standards of the culture one subscribes to, often the cultural worldview one happens to exist in by sheer accident of birth or circumstances. Culture lives on beyond the death of the individual, so any contribution to it provides a sense of legacy and symbolic immortality.
One's subscription to a culture is thus not merely an instinctive ape-like interest in matters concerning one's place in the pecking order for the purpose of animal survival and reproduction (like some evolutionary psychologists suggest).
Rather, it entails the transcendence of this insignificant, purely physical animal self through a faith in the paramount importance of a series of created cultural activities and worldviews -- fortuitously selected out of an infinity of possible ones.
Is, for instance, our judgement of Van Gough as an important painter more correct than the judgement of his contemporaries who disregarded his paintings? And how would this disregard differ from an eagle's, which in spite of its superb vision, can not show the same appreciation we do today for The Starry Night - or even for the real Starry Night Village landscape -- were it to fly over it.
The human mental framework guiding or evaluating art, money, goods, religion, science and cultural manifestations generally, is not grounded on the physical reality that guides other animals.
An eagle's, or for that matter any intelligent animal's interest in an object or phenomena can be said to often involve a natural pragmatic application of its mental powers, which, relative to brain size/intelligence, achieves high levels of accuracy in perception and meaning attribution.
The framework in which these mental powers are applied is nature, guided by standard evolutionary processes.
However, throughout its history, Homo Sapiens has staunchly subscribed to many inaccurate views of reality, which, relative to brain size/intelligence, entailed low levels of accuracy in perception and meaning attribution.
That's because the framework in which Homo Sapiens' mental powers are applied is culture -- the result, once again, of an unfortunate byproduct of developing a larger brain. In other words, our large brain evolved to make Homo sapiens a more rational and efficient problem solver, but our fear of death shifted him from a rational to a rationalizing predisposition, from the physical to the symbolic, leading to the need for self-esteem, which in turn led to the need to create frameworks of trumped-up meaning (cultures) that would make self-esteem believable.
This is easy to see when looking at attempts to grant humans cosmic significance and immortality (religion), but Becker explains that there are many ways of gaining a sense of self-worth or "heroism"-- basically as many activities as humans can invent, from putting arrows through a fish's head and balls through hoops, to dollar bills in one's bank account and frosting on a cake. And of course romanticizing/idealizing partners is another way to transcend the carnal aspect of animal insignificance.
In general, most people can't achieve very high social status or stand out, so they gain their self-esteem by attributing an inflated significance to their day to day actions and following the standard scenarios laid down by society (family, marriage, career etc). Often this is accomplished by being part of something bigger than themselves, becoming what Becker calls "a cog in a heroic machine"- a nation state, an ideology of progress, a church, political party, a groupie to a rock band or celebrity, part of a community formed around a hobby like stamp-collecting, chess playing etc. Human history can thus be considered a succession, interaction and competition of various heroic death-denying ideologies. Human evil/destructiveness is mostly the attempt of one death-denying ideology to destroy another that threatens its credibility and legitimacy and is thus labeled "evil". The legitimacy/credibility of the rich who oppress the poor is threatened by efforts to redistribute wealth. The legitimacy/credibility of one religion is undermined if another religion's claims are true. The legitimacy/credibility of one nation is undermined by the threat of a competing one etc
Even the highest levels of accuracy in perception and meaning attribution today, what we call "modern science" functions in death denying cultural frameworks, as the highly specialized, professional scientific or technical devotion to narrow areas of research is guided by the priorities of other social, psychological and historical forces in the culture.
Certainly, if we end up driving ourselves, and countless other species, to extinction, we will not be able to make many claims about progress or our understanding of empirical reality.
Ironically, even the most accomplished scientist cannot be said to be closer to empirical reality than a primitive hunter-gatherer, who, in spite of his irrational religious beliefs, must have had vast knowledge of many plants, animals, minerals and sophisticated methods of rationally analyzing and successfully interacting with the empirical reality of nature.
The difference is simply a shift in the area of analysis, from one guided primarily by nature, to another guided primarily by culture.
The question, as far as self-esteem goes, is what inaccuracies does it entail if it is based on living up to the standards of culture, an ideological framework that has no basis in empirical reality?
Becker quotes Jose Ortega Y Gasset who explained how the self is a style of performance, a learned set of arbitrary conventions - a more or less blind commitment to socially validated activities and points of view that give us enough confidence to walk around with a certain level of equanimity:

“Take stock of those around you and you will hear them talk in precise terms about themselves and their surroundings, which would seem to point to them having ideas on the the matter. But start to analyse those ideas and you will find that they hardly reflect in any way the reality to which they appear to refer, and if you go deeper you will discover that there is not even an attempt to adjust the ideas to this reality. Quite the contrary: through these notions the individual is trying to cut off any personal vision of reality, of his own very life. For life is at the start a chaos in which one is lost. The individual suspects this, but he is frightened at finding himself face to face with this terrible reality, and tries to cover it over with a curtain of fantasy, where everything is clear. It does not worry him that his “ideas” are not true, he uses them as trenches for the defense of his existence, as scarecrows to frighten away reality.”

Since we all need the scarecrows - we all need self-esteem - the question is, to quote Ernest Becker "What is the best [cultural] illusion under which to live? Or, what is the most legitimate, [least destructive] foolishness?"
I'm not sure what this foolishness would be, but we might speculate that a Homo Sapiens without fear of death might have stayed as a pragmatic, atheistic, largely ego-less hunter-gatherer, as the shift to civilization might not have been seen as an advantage. Indeed, for most of the span of civilization, individual humans didn't have a better health, lifespan or way of life. Industrial civilization, while improving on some of these parameters, could not have been foreseen; and in any case, is quite ecocidal, so it lowers prospects of long-term survival as compared to a hunter-gatherer society.
Also, lacking a fear of death, we would more easily accept our animal insignificance -- applying our moral instincts and rationality without culture -- and perhaps finding more common ground with other species. I suspect that just as we don't see much sense in apes or dolphins owning lots of wealth, we'd have no way to justify the material wealth we have acquired, either as as a society or as individuals.

Metaphorically speaking, this book is a very large pen of pig dookie with a handful of pearls dispersed throughout. That is, much of the book is not worth reading, but it contains a few key insights that are absolutely incredible. It starts with a bang; Becker forcefully claims that "our main task on this planet is heroic...Man's tragic destiny" is that he "must desperately justify himself as an object of primary value in the universe." He must do this because death threatens him constantly. Heroism is a way of defying death by means of achieving lasting value outside of one's transient self. The heroes of the ancient world were heroic precisely because they faced death with valor and thereby outlasted it in the minds of others. Aneis even went into the underworld--and came back alive! Buddhism, Becker claims, with its notion of exiting the cycle of rebirth upon attaining enlightenment, is a sort of "negative magic" in that it pretends not to want what it really wants most of all: eternal life. Becoming conscious of one's own methods of heroism is the primary self-analytic problem of life, he says. And sadly, religion is no longer a valid hero system, although it used to be. Wow! So many compelling ideas right at the start! So far, so good.

Shortly thereafter, Becker puts forth the most compelling insight I have ever encountered: that man is half animal, half symbolic; his mind soars out of nature to contemplate the infinite, yet his body is hopelessly stuck in nature, unable to escape it and destined to be eaten by worms. Becker eloquently and passionately elucidates this central idea on pages 26-7, and those pages alone are worth the price of this book.

Next, in the section titled "the meaning of anality," Becker almost outdoes himself with a riveting analysis of the human anus. The bunghole, says Becker, represents the inescapable animal part of man that he cannot control; try as he might, poo will continue to flow out of him so long as he is living. It forces man to acknowledge his animal self, and thus it confronts him with the inevitability of his death. The anus's excretions are a further reminder that all corporeal things are destined to odoriferous decay. Becker soundly concludes that "With anal play the child is already becoming a philosopher of the human condition." He writes with grace and deep passion in this section. Again--worth the price of the book.

But soon Becker starts making bizarre claims about human nature that are at odds with modern science. For example, he says that with man, "Nature seems to have thrown caution to the winds along with preprogrammed instincts." In fact, behavioral geneticists are currently establishing clear connections between people's genes and their behavior.
Becker also says that a person's character is created "largely by the parents," and by "accidents of the environment." Evolutionary psychologists are actually discovering that children are influenced more by their parents' genes than by their interactions and environments. For example, test after test reveals that identical twins (having the same genes) who are raised in different homes are far more similar than unrelated children who are raised in the same house. Even regular siblings raised apart are more similar than unrelated children raised together.
Becker goes on to say that "Man has no innate instincts of sexuality and aggression." Common sense overthrows this assertion. Look at our closest relative: the chimpanzee. Chimps are extremely aggressive! Chimp clans do battle with each other and often resort to cannibalism. And any organism without a sex instinct would be quickly selected out and replaced by those with the sex instinct. Lastly, Becker argues that "Today we generally see homosexuality as a broad problem of ineptness, vague identity, passivity, helplessness--all in all, an inability to take a powerful stance toward life." What!?!?! This claim is almost as offensive as it is absurd. Modern biology explains homosexuality in terms of empirical genetics, whereas Becker confronts the issue from a purely abstract, almost philosophical perspective.

This, I believe, is the primary problem with the book: it is comprised entirely of inferences that are based on an abstract existential idea. The idea (anality and individuality within finitude) is amazing, but it will only take you so far. Becker does not site any experiments that fortify his theories. Rather, he evokes "clinical work" as the universal method of understanding human psychology. Thus the book is one gigantic series of abstract ideas that are seldom grounded in real world examples and studies.

Becker also seems to be caught up in his own little hero project with the thinkers he sites: Kierkegaard, Rank, Freud, and a few others. He takes every opportunity to emphasize their status as "giants" and often evokes the adjective "towering." Becker would do well to confront his own hero project and to deviate slightly from psychoanalytic dogma in favor of more empirical methods of understanding man.

The "essential idea" in this book is stated by Ernest Becker on page 283: "Whatever man does on this planet has to be done in the lived truth of the terror of creation." Becker admits overstating and simplifying many of his positions, but he knowingly does so because he views his message as one vital for survival that must be heard--a message that summarizes the great truths of social science then available (in 1974) to the general public.

A culturally-induced denial of this "lived truth of the terror of creation"--a denial to which we are all exposed--explains our individual neuroses, our abandonment of freedom and responsibility through transferences, and society's collective "evils" (war, religious fanaticism, dictatorships, etc.). The generalized human behaviors resulting from these denials were first expressed clearly by the Danish existentialist Soren Kierkegaard as "Stages on Life's Way" (the pursuit of diversions, the illusion of character, and the finality of despair.) If these topics are of interest to you, and you are willing to see past Becker's dramatic simplifications (and his politically incorrect biases from the 1970s), then you should read this book (more than once). A great follow-on read is his "Escape from Evil"--a shorter work with more focus that is less demanding on the reader.

As Becker says of Otto Rank, I can say of Ernest Becker: "His books and writings are 'beyond praise!'"

The most important book I have ever read and probably will ever read. A life tranforming book, in a good way. I have yet to decide whether it is optimistic or not. When I finished reading it, a kind of a veil was removed from the understanding of the human kind. Evething about the human kind became suddenly "3 Dimensional". Becker is probably one of the most genious persons in the entire world. A folllow-up movie, called "Flight from Death", which can be purchased from the "Earnest Becker Foundation", a non-profit organization founded to commemorate his lifetime achievments, for $20, will apeall to those of you who don't have the patience, or the extremely complex English needed to understand the book.

Ernest Becker’s ‘Denial of Death’ introduces the basic way that humans behave when it comes to death. He states quite a few different theories in three parts of his novel all revolving around the pros and cons of the human ideas of heroism. Heroism is part of human nature, as Becker describes, and is built in to every human with a sense of selfishness. The overall aspect of the book that the author is trying to get across is a simple yet powerful one. That message being that every aspect of our human nature directly correlates to our fear and underlying ‘denial of death’. Becker states that the reasons why these psychological disorders have increased over the years is linked to the fact that humans are putting emphasis on different things in their lives today then they used to. For instance, rather then making a spiritual journey, man makes this journey a selfish one and considers only the outcome of themself. This slowly evolves into the problem that Becker presents as it being hard for humans to understand, grasp and even believe in God and an afterlife.

The overall idea of this book struck me head on and I found it to be a difficult bite to chew and swallow. However, seeing as this topic is of such interest to me, I was determined to fully grasp what Becker had to say. It was a difficult read because the concepts are brutally honest but I would definitely recommend this to any avid reader and to anyone interested in the human nature.

Denial of Death is a existential interpretation of Freudian and psychodynamic ideas. Becker argues that our fear of death is denied and repressed and comes out in odd ways, particularly in the development of culture, and the monuments we build--financial, literary, intellectual--to reassure ourselves of our immortality, or to gain, in Becker's words, "symbolic immortality." Our fear of death is also a fear of our own animality, our creaturliness, our basic organic nature, and supressing thoughts of our own temporality is the role of our defenses. The denial of our animal nature allows us to avoid recognizing the ultimately uncontrollable eventuality of death. Becker looks at the writing of many authors, including Jonothan Swiftand Swift's "excremental vision", which posits the basis of culture on an avoidance of our terminal nature. He also speaks a great deal about Soren Kierkegaard, and that philosopher's positing of a meaningless universe. Becker wrote the book sometime before he died, and the scope of references is impressive, as is the stated goal of the book. The notion that humans try to impute control to what essentially is uncontrollable--the awareness of aging and death--is a strong thesis, and also consistent with a wide range of thinkers whose work he synthesizes. Also, it can easily be adapted forward, as psychologists, since his death have put much emphasis on the importance of perceived control (e.g., learned helplessness, executive monkey experiments) in the development of pathology. The writing is far ranging, though perhaps occassionally overinvested in the synthetic style, but in the end provides a good, philosophical underpinning for understand much western philosophical, literary and psychological writing. Damon LaBarbera, PhD

This tour de force is Becker's immortality 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!!!!!!

Since we actually had at least one President who could and did read, please allow me to share with you the following:

Bill Clinton's Review of The Denial of Death
(From page 235 of his "My Life:")

"I read one book in Acapulco, Ernest Becker's "The Denial of Death - heavy reading for a honeymoon, but I was also a year older than my father when he died, and I had taken a big step. It seemed like a good time to keep exploring the meaning of life.

According to Becker, as we grow up, at some point we become aware of death, then the fact that people we know and love die, then the fact that someday we, too, will die. Most of us do what we can to avoid it. Meanwhile, in ways we understand only dimly if at all, we embrace identities and the illusion of self-sufficiency. We pursue activities, both positive and negative, that we hope will lift us above the chains of ordinary existence and perhaps endure after we are gone. All this we do in a desperate push against the certainty that death is our ultimate destiny. Some of us seek power and wealth, others romantic love, sex, or some other indulgence. Some want to be great, others to do good and be good. Whether we succeed or fail, we are still going to die. The only solace, of course is to believe that since we were created, there must be a Creator, one to whom we matter and will in some way return.

Where does Becker's analysis leave us? He concludes: "Who knows what form the forward momentum of life will take in the time ahead ... The most that any one of us can seem to do is to fashion something - an object or ourselves - and drop it into the confusion, make an offering of it, so to speak, to the life force." Ernest Becker died shortly before the Denial of Death was published, but seemed to have met Immanuel Kant's test of life: "How to occupy properly that place in creation that is assigned to man, and how to learn from it what one must be in order to be a man. I've spent a lifetime trying to do that. Becker's book helped convince me it was an effort worth making.

In the serendipity of life, we encounter persons, things or events which have a profound impact on our lives. In the fall of 1975, I read The Denial of Death which changed my life. I remember coming home from work wanting to read more and yet somehow being afraid because of the truth that I would find.

As I remember it, Becker’s contention was that man uses all sorts of crutches to deal with the fear associated with his mortality, crutches like power, money, sex, drugs etc. If one wants to be really free, one has to abandon oneself to some infinite power out there somewhere which has its own angst, but it’s the only way to true freedom. I don’t remember Becker ever calling that power God, but I thought Becker was right on. Yes, that is the truth, and I want to be free.

Now, being a believing existentialist is very nice. Your god is between your ears. You make the rules. I did enjoy my existentialist phase and would certainly recommend the book; however, that phase ended when I became gravely ill in the summer of 1977 (one of those events). That god out there? What’s his or her name? Frankly, too much angst for me, so I returned to my Christian roots. Jesus is a person and has a name. I prayed to Jesus. My disease disappeared, but the lesson I had learned did not go away. I became a believing, practicing Catholic.

In 1979, I experienced God as real, most important day of my life, bar none. I became zealous which is a whole other story. God certainly wasn’t finished with me. Some 22 years ago, I was introduced to True Life in God (http://www.tlig.org/), a mystical work being written thru Vassula Ryden. I have come to believe that our Triune God is the author of the work. While the Bible is the blueprint for my life, this is my instruction manual – quite different from being an existentialist. I now know what He wants and try to follow His will. To love is to do the will of God.

I tried to read it three different times over maybe a decade. Never got past about page 120. I have a Ph.D. in psychology but found it ponderous and dense. The author seems too caught up in Freudian and Rank inspired navel gazing. Yes, the premise of our denial of our mortality and defenses against this is workable, but I felt like I was walking through water with weights on. Read Freud in his own words if you are interested....much clearer, if dated, expositions.

Many of these the store reviews present a book I fail to recognize. This is a most remarkable book. If you are deciding whether or not to purchase and read this book, in short you should ... but with some caution. It is a book and an author that deserves a serious critical study and contemplation. However, it certainly seems a book liable to misinterpretation and misunderstanding.

This is a book of great synthesis. Its sweeping broad analytical strokes achieve miraculous human insights, but requires of its readers, especially critical readers, to have a modest background in social psychology, social theory, and philosophy. Becker has attempted to write a popular accessible text. It is not clear he has been successful in making extremely difficult philosophical subjects (the meaning[lessness] of life, the meaning[lessness] of death, human nature, repression, transference, human motivations, happiness, misery, etc.) accessible to a wide audience.

If this book makes you melancholic or depressed, by all means put it down. Read instead Erich Fromm ("The Sane Society" or "Escape from Freedom") and/or Herbert Marcuse ("Eros and Civilization" or "One Dimensional Man"). Much of the same territory is covered, but with much less demands upon the reader in terms of action and self-analysis.

What Becker shares in common with Fromm and Marcuse (along with other post-Freudians, Marxists and Platonists) is an understanding of the social character of human identity. Individual character is a radically cultural determination. According to the post-Freudians, to change society and social relations is to effectively change culture and individual awareness. In this sense, Fromm and Marcuse are thoroughly "post"-Freudian. Becker instead says not so fast. Freud (in for example "Civilization and Its Discontent") must be dealt with much more sincerely and profoundly.

Ultimately Becker takes more serious Freud's pessimism of the human condition, than do most post-Freudians and anti-Freudians. If post-Freudians believe that we can augment human happiness by changing society, Freud articulated the futility of such efforts. For Freud the internal contradictions of the individual are too thick, and the drive of the "pleasure principle" too strong. According to Freud, our desires for sexual conquest (or "the id" more generally) and the resentfulness we (as Egos) hold toward authoritative figures (Super-ego) fates human beings to social circumstances and societies that are necessarily highly competitive. In this Freudian view, human fate is bourgeois culture, (Hobbesian) laws (and an internal Super-ego) to control and/or punish our natural tendencies toward aggressive behavior, and (Weberian) bureaucratic rules and order.

Becker attempts to weave an alternative path from Freudian pessimism and post-Freudian utopianism.

Becker demonstrates that the most crucial problems are not merely social, but rooted in the fears and hopes of individuals. In this sense he is Freudian. Becker further accepts with Freud that human behavior is to a significant degree spontaneously competitive, even vicious.

He reinterprets Freud's explanation for the empirical ubiquitous viciousness of human beings (e.g., war, murder, rape, etc.) and finds the Oedipus complex, castration, penis envy unable to carry the theoretical weight of Freud's conclusions. Here he is post-Freudian. He offers a radically innovative reinterpretation drawing heavily from Otto Rank and Norman Brown (among others).

At the same time he agrees with Freud's intuition, the social nature and cultural determinations of human beings fail to fully explain the misery, terror, viciousness of the human condition.

Becker identifies two ontological motives internal to human beings: (1) the desire for personal development, more life, greater understanding, extension of experience, an internal drive towards greatness; and (2) the desire to (re)merge with nature, or a yearning "for a `feeling of kinship with the All.'"

This second ontological motive: to (re)merge is manifest from the "horror" of human individual isolation and our finite inability to understand the awesomeness of life and the meaning, or possible meaninglessness, of "death." We "repress" the horror of isolation and terror of our inevitable death, to enable the ontological motive of Eros i.e., for personal development, more life, etc. The repression of the horror of isolation and terror death, are necessarily accomplished through Freudian "transference," or identification with a greater being or thing (e.g., parents, society, cultural rituals, religion, God).

The Freudian transference toward a greater being or thing is the basis and real warrant of the post-Freudian critique of social conventions and culture. Becker accepts this critique to be important and essential for the liberation of human bondage. But full liberation from our bondage to society, or culture, or a person, or a leader, or any false idols, fails to overcome the reasons we transfer our powers to begin with, i.e., the horror of our isolation and the terror of our inevitable death.

Far from being an epistemological mistake, the transference is an ontological necessity of each and every individual. Human society and human culture is testament to this fact. Nonetheless the transference can be either productive or degenerative. Here again Becker is siding with the post-Freudian, but in a highly circumvented way.

Becker believes (with, and via, Soren Kierkegaard) religion was (and is) a more productive transference then (post-)industrial society and commercial culture. Surely this will turn-off many readers. But as Becker makes clear this is not a rally-call for blind faith, or a simple return to pre-modern culture. Rather it is to recognize the human need for cosmic understanding, to find meaning in existence. He fully accepts "faith" as a way forward is nonscientific. However, we are highly scientific in our understanding of the alternative, which demonstrates spectacular failures, pathologies, personal suffering, and unhappiness.

Becker's "Denial of Death" will help the reader understand the existential paradox of the human condition. But there is no simply formula for living or for the achievement of happiness, or avoidance of unhappiness. This is not necessarily a book about processing the loss of a loved one, nor how to orientate ourselves toward our own death. This is a book in social philosophy, with implications for individual action. It is a book which has the potential to inspire social engagement; for others it may be discouraging. It is a book that can augment your understanding of yourself, and help emancipate yourself from false idolatry and trivial or conventional personal commitments. It is an achievement that will become a Classic in social theory and will be with us for centuries to come.

There is a truly brilliant thesis in this Pulitzer Prize winning book, one that ties together the advancements in psychology and philosophy of some of the greatest minds ever, like Freud and Kierkegaard and Rank. Becker argues convincingly that the fear of death is the single greatest human motivator, and that everything we do, all of our paranoia and perversions, stem from this fear. In order to survive and function in this world, we are forced to deny the reality of our own mortality, a mortality that is obvious in everything around us, especially in our own flawed physical bodies.

From this premise, Becker moves on to many brilliant insights. His exploration of the earliest contradictions that infants face, trying to reconcile their feelings of omnipotence with the obvious flaws of their anatomy, is absolutely fascinating. Also fascinating is his treatment of how humans approach sexuality, a topic many would consider to be life-affirming but which in reality is one of the strongest indicators of the fragile and ephemeral nature of our existence.

As with most works of non-fiction thirty years after their publication, this one is not perfect. Even a reader with no experience in psychology or philosophy will find an obvious flaw here and there. And the book is dense enough that it can be a frustrating read - indeed, some passages get so chewy that you might feel like skimming them. But it still remains a landmark work in its field, and one that has given me new insight into my own ideas about life and death.

This book gave me two lessons. First Becker masterfully shows us how and why our society is now driven by our fear of death. Second, he reaffirms the imperative of inter-disciplinary learning, even as hyper-specialization becomes more common.

I first stumbled on this book as a young Psychology and Philosophy major in university; its intersection with my studies seemed beyond coincidence. I had just completed work on Kierkegaard, and I was personally reading up on Rollo May and Carl Rogers. Freud had left me feeling like a loser, a dark product of repression since birth and yearning to kill my father ever since. These writers gave me some hope.
But Becker went beyond psychotherapy for me. He tied together what I was embracing in Philosophy as well as my life experience, synthesizing important constructs in a way I hadn't seen before. He re-arranged thoughts in my mind until my heart plummeted downward and found roots in my soul. I remember not sleeping much in the three days it took to ingest this incredible work.

Becker's main premise is that modern man is lost in a mountain of knowledge, useless to him not only because it's impossible to ingest it all, but because he no longer has a "throbbing vital center" with which to synthesize it. The age of specialization has brought a multitude of competing fractured data, while the major insights of our age are ignored. Modern man, in rejecting a central core, has allowed the fear of death to become his central impetus for activity for the simple reason that he has stripped away his understanding of it, and can no longer face its implications.

In such a world, our powers of rational thought hold little sway over this one devastating truth, magnified by our conscious self-awareness. Others have argued that our rejection of a quest for meaning has allowed our narcissism to overtake us, sentencing us to immaturity and moral vacuity. Becker crystallizes these thoughts by spanning traditional scholastic models and challenging us with implications to our daily lives and society of living under the fear of death.

Becker's answer is really twofold. We must personally integrate our knowledge in order to make sense of it. Science in and of itself can never be a sustaining answer to the human mind. There is always something more. Second, Becker posits that something more naturally becomes a quest for something outside himself; a religious experience and affiliation with God, (or "Life" or "Nature" if you will) that brings some order and answer to the human spirit.

Many readers view "The Denial of Death" as one of the most important books written in the twentieth century. Unlike some others, I found it neither depressing nor difficult to read. The challenge of the book lies in its disruption of your world view and readers may find it helpful to allow some passages to ruminate in their minds for a couple days before venturing onward.

Becker was a genius. Don't miss him.

This is the single piece of literature that has given me the most insight into the human condition, for it lays bare the core around which the human psyche revolves. No wonder why this book is not more popular: it brings to the forefront the elephant in the room that everybody is trying so hard to obviate, the greatest taboo of almost all human cultures throughout history, the existential paradox: that humans can imagine and long the divine, but it is all too evident that they are "a worm and food for worms". Don't let yourself be discouraged by the psychoanalytic mumbo-jumbo and read between the lines.
The only thing that I have to criticize from the book is the overly gloomy future that Berker forecasts for mankind, but let us not forget that the thesis of the book was the causa-sui of a human all too human.

"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.

Reading this book I was floored time and time again at how accurately Becker describes the condition of the modern man.Chapter Eight alone is worth the price of the book.Becker pulls no punches in smashing the pretenses of our contemporary age;an age that has tried with disastrous results to replace the loss of religious faith with romantic love,limitless self-indulgence,utopian political ideology(Marxism,etc)and psychological self-awareness.Becker rightly concludes that it is no wonder why we see such widespread neuroticism in modern society.What is most refreshing about the book is Becker's intellectual honesty,something rare for academics.He makes it clear that there is no such thing as a life without fear or repression;that these things are constants and cannot be done without.How different is such a message than the reams of gobbedlygook and inane nonsense that usually emerges from self-help books and all manner of feel-good psychology.Especially worthwhile are the chapters on Kierkegaard and Otto Rank.Overall a great book.A must read.

Matthew Fox recommended this book in his Stanford Lectures on Creation Spirituality particularly as an extension of the thinking of Otto Rank. For me, a non-expert in psychology, a lot of the early stuff in the book was a bit of a slog, but Becker's conclusions that we are all neurotic by necessity and why we need to strive to create purpose and meaning where none is self-evident in the Universe, is really insightful.

Other reviews have expounded more fully on the contents of this masterpiece. If you're interested in the psychology of religion or just interested in a book which gives you brilliant insights into "purpose and meaning of existence" then this is a MUST read.