The DENIAL OF DEATH
Author: Ernest Becker, Sam Keen
List Price: $14.00
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ISBN: 0684832402
Publisher: Free Press (08 May, 1997)
Sales Rank: 7,360
Average Customer Rating: 4.83 out of 5
Customer Reviews
Rating: 5 out of 5
Life-Changing
This is one of the most important books I've ever read. My father was dying. I nearly had a breakdown. I found this book and began to confront, for the first time in my life, my profound fear of death, my pathological inability to accept that it happens.
I got involved in destructive relationships, I smoked two packs a day, I drank till 4 in the morning with "friends".... two years later, I have grieved and confronted my father's death, given up smoking, stopped drinking, and began making smarter sexual choices.
Is it all because of this book? No. But Becker began me on a road confronting my mortality -- what he would call my creatureliness. This led to further reading in this area and a radical change in my perspective on my own body.
Confronting death makes one grow up -- and it also gives one a real genuine chance at authentic loving. Investigating Freud, Otto Rank, Fromm, Norman O. Brown, and Kierkegaard (among others) Becker shows himself to be lively, friendly, realistic, severe, grandiose, and humble, all at once. His genial prose is a delight to read. Even when he is illuminating the darkest, most frightening areas of human experience, he is rigorous and hopeful and, frankly, utterly bewitching.
Most of the book remains relevant on personal and political grounds. Only his more fanciful theories of mental illness strike me as irrelevant today, though there is a poetry in them that neurotics (not psychotics) may very well find illuminating.
Let's bring Becker back. It's a delight to see him referenced in Peter Shabad's new psychoanalytic book. I hope this is a harbinger in a resurgence of Beckerian thought!
Rating: 5 out of 5
A great summary of psychology
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.
Rating: 4 out of 5
HONESTY: a terrifying black well, even for Becker.
In Becker's The Denial Of Death, death, as it turns out in the book, equals ultimate helplessness , that is to say, man is a creature who lives in fantasizing denial of the fact that he is incapable of freeing himself from the cage of his mortality which is not only physical, but ontological, without a transcendent escape-hatch.
Throughout the book Becker skillfully and powerfully accumulates empirical and logical evidence, including a very strong analysis of infant and child psychology as well as one of adult society, to support his premise. As one approaches the end of the book the effect of all this is quite powerful and I enjoyed it immensely, but the conclusion of the book was for me rather anti-climactic and somewhat annoying and I will give the precise reason for why I feel this way. I would ask any reader who admires and takes Becker's book seriously, to please consider my viewpoint and understand that I too take very seriously what Becker struggled with in this book which, in spite of my qualification, I highly recommend.
First of all, my problem is not that Becker did not supply an 'answer' for all the dark difficulties he heaped up in front of us throughout the book. If he had attempted such an answer, I don't know how it could have looked anything but ludicrous. The word ludicrous comes from the Latin, ludus (game) and implies that one is playing a game. Becker carefully avoids the game of facile answers and prides himself on this. In fact, I think he prides himself a little too much and this pride hides what is a deeper game.
Please note how frequently Becker speaks favorably, positively and admiringly of the 'fall from grace' metaphysics of Augustine and Kierkegaard as representatives of a certain strain of Christian belief. This metaphysical position holds that man is incapable of essentially altering his condition for the good and is absolutely dependent in his fallen state on the grace and mercy of God. Becker has only scorn for any metaphysical position that allows for human consciousness having any access to anything transcendent, such as is found in the later works of Brown, Fromm, Jung and even Tillich, among others. He continually praises the insight shown by Augustine and especially Kierkegaard into human psychology, particularly the human tendency toward fantasizing false realities into existence. And even at the end of the book he praises the "beauty" of this religion. Now, the very serious problem with this is that there is no indication that Becker has the slightest belief in the reality of this religious metaphysics which he strangely uses to defend his own view of reality. And his own view seems to be, in part, that man is incapable of even formulating a valid metaphysics precisely because he has no transcendent capacity, he is helplessly mortal and that is exactly what he is in denial of. Something is clearly amiss here. Is Becker saying that Augustine and Kierkegaard had remarkable insights into human psychology but were both typical human fantasizing failures in regards to their religious belief? Or does Becker believe that maybe these men really did receive the grace of transcendent revelations from a transcendent deity? Becker is absolutely silent on these questions. What is so important about this is that after Becker does such an admirable job of laying out the human problem of the 'denial of death', he then implies that we must take this seriously and address it. But address it with what? Borrowed metaphysics? Well, presumably not. We suppose his answer would be to address it with honesty. Well, I would like an honest answer to the question of why Becker uses religious beliefs that he does not even hold to reveal and support the truth of his own viewpoint? There is something not quite forthright about this and it belies his criticism at the end of the book of what he considers Norman O. Brown's lapse into facile mysticism. And what exactly is Becker's viewpoint? That humans are generally terrified into denial and fantasy by the reality of guilt and death? That is a profound fact, but in the end I don't really need Becker to know that and it tells me nothing about how Becker himself approached his guilt and death. I am not asking Becker to tell us something that he does not know, but precisely rather to attempt to describe what he does not know instead of covering it up with the grandiose religious fantasies of Augustine. I simply wish that at the conclusion of his book he would have given a more personal vision of what he believed he was "offering... to the life force."
I recommend the book strongly, but give it only four stars because of its conclusion.
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