In 1973, anthropologist Ernest Becker published The Denial of Death, and one year later, at the age of 49, he died of cancer. Then, just two months after his death, the book won the Pulitzer Prize.
Although it’s dated in many ways, and I’m still not sure that I find the central thesis convincing, I’ve read the book several times and it remains one of my favorite works of psychology.
The basic argument goes like this:
- Contrary to Freud’s insistence on sexuality as the primary driver of human behavior, Becker saw the fear of death as even more fundamental. Specifically, because human beings have godlike capacities for consciousness, reflection, and symbolic thought, we alone among animals know that we are doomed to die within decaying physical bodies. So we fear death and our own mortality more than anything and, with varying degrees of consciousness, we build our lives around avoiding this fear.
- Becker then reinterpreted many of Freud’s ideas like The Oedipal Complex as responses to mortality, not sexuality. From the very youngest ages, we learn to cover over our intolerable “creatureliness” and fear of death through a variety of defense mechanisms. In fact, most people are so well defended against their fear of death, that they have no conscious experience of it—a theory Becker himself acknowledged as unfalsifiable.
- Our fear of death is most evident in our pursuit of heroism: the striving toward agency, meaning, and significance. Traditionally the form of our heroism was handed down by our culture. Religion was often the most powerful because it offered meaning that transcended death itself. But with the birth of modernity and the decline of faith, modern man started looking for substitutes: romantic love, which makes a god out of a partner, and eventually psychology (and psychoanalysis, specifically) which seeks meaning in self-knowledge and personal insight.
- The book ends on a fairly bleak note with Becker unconvinced that religion, romantic love, or self-understanding are suitable vessels for a healthy expression of the heroic in today’s world. He does, however, suggest the possibility of “new heroisms” that are likely to be products of “belief and will,” rather than insight.
Here are some of my favorite passages from the book with brief thoughts of my own.
On Death
The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity—activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny of man.
Haunts is a perfect word here. Like a ghost, we can never verify the fear of death in our lives, but it drives us forward nonetheless.
On Heroism
The crisis of modern society is precisely that the youth no longer feel heroic in the plan for action that their culture has set up.
My tendency is to be dismissive of anything that begins with the phrase the youth… But regardless of whether the youth these days feel more or less heroic than the youth of previous generations, it’s worth a ponder: What does our culture hold up as the ideal of heroism?
On Evil
Psychoanalysis revealed to us the complex penalties of denying the truth of man’s condition, what we might call the costs of pretending not to be mad. If we had to offer the briefest explanation of all the evil that men have wreaked upon themselves and upon their world since the beginning of time right up until tomorrow, it would be not in terms of man’s animal heredity, his instincts and his evolution: it would be simply in the toll that his pretense of sanity takes, as he tried to deny his true condition.
If the pretense of sanity is what leads to evil, what does that imply about virtue?
On Oedipus
The Oedipus complex is the Oedipal project, a project that sums up the basic problem of the child’s life: whether he will be a passive object of fate, an appendage of others, a plaything of the world or whether he will be an active center within himself—whether he will control his own destiny with his own powers or not… The Oedipal project is the flight from passivity, from obliteration, from contingency: the child wants to conquer death by becoming the father of himself, the creator and sustainer of his own life.
The Oedipal complex is about agency, not sex.
On Psychodynamics
The hostility to psychoanalysis in the past, today, and in the future, will always be a hostility against admitting that man lives by lying to himself about himself and about his world, and that character is a vital lie… Maslow has summed up this contribution of Freudian thought: “Freud’s greatest discovery, the one which lies at the root of psychodynamics, is that the great cause of much psychological illness is the fear of knowledge of oneself—of one’s emotions, impulses, memories, capacities, potentialities, of one’s destiny. We have discovered that fear of knowledge of oneself is very often isomorphic with, and parallel with, fear of the outside world.”
I was at least modestly hostile to psychodynamic thinking for most of my education and career as a psychologist, mostly because, however intellectually sophisticated it appeared, it didn’t seem to work all that well—especially compared to more behavioral approaches. And while I’m far from having been converted, I’m much more sympathetic to the psychodynamic worldview because I suspect that I’ve been more than a little naive in my thinking about the extent to which different forms of psychotherapy “work” or not.
On Anxiety
The irony of man’s condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive… For Kierkegaard, the “good” is the opening toward new possibility and choice, the ability to face into anxiety; the closed is the evil, that which turns one away from newness and broader perceptions and experiences.
I remember reading something in graduate school claiming that the common denominator of all psychopathology is rigidity. I still think there’s a lot of truth to that. But I wonder if something like closedoffness is even better?
On Depression
This is how we understand depressive psychosis today: as a blogging down in the demands of others—family, job, the narrow horizon of daily duties…. The depressed person avoids the possibility of independence and more life precisely because these are what threaten him with destruction and death.
Depression as a phobia of living.
On Armor
The enemy, for Kierkegaard as for Freud, is the Oedipus Complex. The child has built up strategies and techniques for keeping his self-esteem in the face of the terror of his situation. These techniques become an armor that holds the person prisoner. The very defenses that he needs in order to move about with self-confidence and self-esteem, become his life-long trap.
Agency 1.0: Putting on armor. Agency 2.0: Getting naked.
On Transference
In transference we see the grown person as a child at heart, a child who distorts the world to relieve his helplessness and fears, who sees things as he wishes them to be for his own safety, who acts automatically and uncritically, just as he did in the pre-Oedipal period…. But Freud was quick to see, these ideas never really did explain what men did with their judgment and common sense when they got caught up in groups. Freud saw right away what they did with it: they simply became dependent children again, blindly following the inner voice of their parents, which now came to them under the hypnotic spell of the leader.
If psychologists have any kind of professional superpower it’s something like this: Learning to see people as children with varying degrees of competence at playing grown up. A lot of otherwise strange, infuriating, or baffling behavior starts to make a lot more sense when you use this lens. Of course the real trick is trying to apply that thinking to ourselves.
On Self-Criticism
Do we wonder why one of man’s chief characteristics is his tortured dissatisfaction with himself, his constant self-criticism? It is the only way he has to overcome the sense of hopeless limitation inherent in his real situation. Dictators, revivalists, and sadists know that people like to be lashed with accusations of their own basic unworthiness because it reflects how they truly feel about themselves. The sadist doesn’t create a masochist; he finds him ready made.
Aggression is always about power—not primarily the exercise of power or the results it brings—but the feeling of power. Self-criticism makes a lot more sense when viewed as an act of self-aggression against the self motivated by the desire to feel powerful.
On Christianity
This is the 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.
There’s an interesting parallel between modernity’s disavowal of both Christianity and Freudianism. We find both distasteful but can’t seem to extricate ourselves fully.
On Neurosis
In order to function normally, man has to achieve from the beginning a serious constriction of the world and himself. We can say that the essence of normality is the refusal of reality. What we call neurosis enters precisely at this point: Some people have more trouble with their lies than others. The world is too much with them, and the techniques that they have developed for holding it at bay and cutting it down to size finally begin to choke the person himself. This is neurosis in a nutshell: the miscarriage of clumsy lies about reality.
Which lie is worse: the clumsy one or the effective one?
On Constriction
Generally speaking, we call neurotic any life style that begins to constrict too much, that prevents free forward momentum, new choices, and growth that a person may want and need.
Mental health as optimal life constriction.
On Overthinking
To live is to engage in experience at least partly on the terms of the experience itself. One has to stick his neck out in the action without any guarantees about satisfaction or safety. One never knows how it will come out or how silly he will look, but the neurotic type wants these guarantees. He doesn’t want to risk his self-image…. He won’t pay the price that nature wants of him: to age, fall ill or be injured, and die. Instead of living experience he ideates it; instead of arranging it in action he works it all out in his head.
“We are men of action. Lies do not become us.”
On Modern Man
Modern man became psychological because he became isolated from protective collective ideologies. He had to justify himself from within himself.
Maybe this is a distinction without a difference, but I’m not sure modern man is more psychological than his pre-modern counterparts so much as more preoccupied with his own psychology. To the extent that we can infer how pre-modern people thought via literature, for example, it’s not obvious to me that Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare were less psychological than Dostoevsky, Melville, and Faulkner. We moderns certainly have a distinctively obsessive inward view, but to conflate that with being more psychological seems incorrect.
On Sin
Sin and neurosis are two ways of talking about the same thing—the complete isolation of the individual, his disharmony with the rest of nature, his hyper individualism, his attempt to create his own world from within himself…. “The neurotic type suffers from a consciousness of sin just as much as did his religious ancestor, without believing in the conception of sin. This is precisely what makes him ‘neurotic’; he feels a sinner without the religious belief in sin for which he therefore needs a new rational explanation.”
An interesting example of horseshoe theory where the Freudians and theologians mostly agree.
On Psychoanalysis
The emotional impoverishment of psychoanalysis must extend also to many analysts themselves and to psychiatrists who come under its ideology. This fact helps to explain the terrible deadness of emotion that one experiences in psychiatric settings, the heavy weight of character armor erected against the world.
I wonder if we’ve swung to the other end of the spectrum today with most mental health provisionals not having enough character armor?
On Despair
The defeat of despair is not mainly an intellectual problem for an active organism, but the problem of self-stimulation via movement. Beyond a given point man is not helped by more “knowing,” but only by living and doing in a partly self-forgetful way. As Goethe put it, we must plunge into experience and then reflect on the meaning of it. All reflection and no plunging drives us mad; all plunging and no reflection, and we are brutes.
What does it mean to live in a partly self-forgetting way? What parts of our experience are important to forget—or at least be forgetful of? In what ways does our culture suffer from too little forgetting and a kind of constant knowing of everything, everywhere, all at once? Here’s one example: Doesn’t forgiveness and letting go depend at least partly on a kind of deliberate forgetting? And don’t rumination and chronic anger represent a kind of defective self-forgetting mechanism? Not forgetting in the sense of the literal annihilation of memories—but in the sense of resisting the impulse to revisit those memories?
On Self-Esteem
The more you shrink back from the difficulties and the darings of life, the more you naturally come to feel inept, the lower is your self-evaluation. It is ineluctable. If one’s life has been a series of “silent retreats,” one ends up firmly wedged into a corner and has nowhere else to retreat. This state is the bogging down of depression.
“Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
On Taking Risks
In some way one must pay with life and consent daily to die, to give oneself up to the risks and dangers of the world, allow oneself to be engulfed and used up. Otherwise one ends up as though dead in trying to avoid life and death.
It reminds me of the apocryphal Mark Twain quote:
Most men die at 27, we just bury them at 72.
On Guilt
The terrible guilt feelings of the depressed person are existential, that is, they represent the failure to live one’s own life, to fulfill one’s own potential because of the twisting and turning to be “good” in the eyes of the other…. Better guilt than the terrible burden of freedom and responsibility, especially when the choice comes too late in life for one to be able to start over again…. The depressed person exaggerates his guilt because it unblocks his dilemma in the safest and easiest way…. The natural bogging-down of an unheroic life.
To ignore the existential causes of emotional struggles is as naive and dangerous as it is to ignore the physical or social ones.
On Aging
One of the crucial projects of a person’s life, of true maturity, is to resign oneself to the process of aging.
After a 20-year hiatus, I’ve started playing pick-up basketball again. And there’s definitely something extremely immature and wonderfully gratifying about ten middle-aged men running around a gym pretending to be 24 again.
On Psychotherapy
Psychotherapy is such a growing vogue today because people want to know why they are unhappy in hedonism and look for the faults within themselves.
Where exactly is the problem: the hedonism, the introspection, or the urge to know?
On Self-Knowledge
If repression makes an untenable life livable, self-knowledge can entirely destroy it for some people.
Iatrogenics in mental health remains underrated despite the clumsily executed recent fad of dunking on therapy and mental health.
On Heroism
Modern man is drinking and drugging himself out of awareness, or he spends his time shopping, which is the same thing. As awareness calls for types of heroic dedication that his culture no longer provides for him, society contrives to help him forget. Or, alternatively, he buries himself in psychology in the belief that awareness all by itself will be some kind of magical cure for his problems. But psychology was born with the breakdown of shared social heroisms; it can only be gone beyond with the creation of new heroisms that are basically matters of belief and will, dedication to a vision.
The great Bonnie Tyler captured this same observation:
“Where have all the good men gone
And where are all the Gods?
Where’s the streetwise Hercules to fight the rising odds?
Isn’t there a white knight upon a fiery steed?
Late at night, I toss and I turn
And I dream of what I need…”
Learn More
A few resources if you’d like to learn more about the book and its author:
More Resources
If you enjoyed this quote review, here are a few more like it:
- Wanting and the Hidden Power of Mimetic Desire
- Schopenhauer’s Dark Philosophy of Living Well
- The Inner Game of Tennis: Lessons on the Psychology of High Performance
Work with Me
If you’re interested in working with me directly, I have a small mindset coaching practice where I work with anxious high-achievers who want to do their best work with less stress and anxiety.
