Becker’s Denial of Death is possibly the greatest psychoanalytic book I’ve ever read. Few ideas that struck me hard:
– we are a culturally trained meat puppet. We develop resentment towards parents at an early age when they stop listening to every cry of ours and condition us
– the twin ontological needs of man (paradoxically) are to be a part of the nature as well as stand out as an individual self.
– our modern selves seek refuge elsewhere given the enlightened mind knows God was a myth and is no longer believing in this age-old myth-ritual complex
Would love to hear from the community on how they approach and cope with life knowing these bare truths.
by nastronaut_42
39 Comments
Becker is one of the greats. I also reccomend escape from evil and birth and death of meaning
The myth ritual complex just shifted to political affiliation really. “Our righteousness will bring utopia, and outsiders are morally corrupt”
This sounds awesome. I’m going to put it on my wishlist.
I have not read this book yet, but it’s on my list. But your second point has something in common with Rousseau. He thought that we were pulled by both, and essentially unable to yield to both fully.
Disagree with the notion of how an enlightened person views mythology.
Myths (religions) are the dawn of cognition and scientific practice. They are foundational and to overlook thier collective value is foolish. They are our first documented attempts at rationalizing our observations of reality. They are bizarre because they were attempting to tackle many of the same problems we face today using only large scale phenomena (social, celestial, weather, etc…).
Modern civilization is built from a collection of small civilizations which have almost all been guided be mythology. To forsake the backbone of life as we know it is not enlightenment, it is foolish. One doesn’t have to live in a mythology to be enlightened, but to see mythos as something which we need to seek refuge from is to forsake the foundations of humanity.
I’m regularly going through an existential crisis at 3am every month or so. Then I remember Camus and feel much better.
It’s an amazing book isn’t it? I read it back in college, I think 7 years ago? Anyway, I developed the understanding that creative pursuits were the ultimate method of death denial. That is because you’re essentially making artifacts that will outlive you. It was very gratifying because I myself am an artist and writer, it helped me make sense of why I like making things and made me eager to make more.
We’re stuck tween angel and worm. Really enjoyed that book.
It’s really a book that changes your life. I read it when I was 23 and it completely unsettled me. And like you I think it’s the greatest psychoanalytic book. Now every subsequent read i find myself referring back to this book. It’s a book i wanna tell everyone about but I know I shouldn’t because of how daunting it is.
I’ll read it, and only because I take umbrage at the notion that God is myth. The ‘enlightened mind’ is one which trades one idol for another and calls it progress.
Point one doesn’t seem like a fact because everyone parents differently and everyone reacts to their parents differently.
Known the meat puppet and stand out/fit in for a while.
I think its ridiculous to say that we hate our parents because they don’t answer to our every beck and call as children. That theory also invalidates survivors of childhood neglect, and that’s a lot different than just letting your kid cry cause their favorite movie ended.
As for the God thing, I have never met anyone more pretentious and bitter than an atheist who refuses to get therapy for their religious trauma.
Myths are just stories. All things started out as stories. Stories that made sense evolved into theories and some of those theories evolved into science.
“Magic is just science we don’t understand yet.” -Arthur C. Clarke
I particularly like the concept that in the face of the terror of death we create a vital lie that is our ego that in turn represses our terror and imprisons us. We then make a hero system that makes me believe I am immortal. This hero system is part of our prison.
Society is a codified hero system. Being a hero is a reflects of the terror of death. We create a personality or a self that is armor made out of character. Society creates a hero system to transcend death. PTSD is a sudden collapse of the prison and lets the terror in. To transcend the lie means to eliminate the self by breaking his spirit out of its conditioned self. The prison bars are made out of self-esteem, order, cultural safety, predictability, self-confidence, wealth, routines, and the feeling like I am somebody. All of this is to deny my creature likeness.
The courage to face the anxiety of meaninglessness becomes the true cosmic heroism. We live in utter darkness about who we are and why we are here yet we know it Has to have a meaning.
Am I just being weirdly semantic or is it wrong to label these *ideas* as “bare truths”? They sound like things to consider, not to take as dogma.
Yep. Read it maybe 5 years ago and life is not the same and for the better.
That’s a fantastic book as is ‘Escape from Evil’
Honestly I thought this book was crap. These aren’t truth, they’re just the opinons of a cynical man dressed up as something profound.
The “God as myth” idea might be true for certain conceptualizations but certainly doesn’t explain the idea or phenomenon in full. It only takes a short while of reading high level Theology/Philosophy on the matter to realize that it is much more of a “Theory.” (thinkers like Augustine, Aquinas, or someone like Leibniz make that clear).
Books like this can be eye opening and important for the insights they provide, but before accepting the thoughts within them as “bare truths” I have always found it useful to read opposing or viewpoints as well in order to get a more complete picture.
Having not read the book, I’m slightly concerned at the notion that an enlightened mind necessarily rejects God as a myth. Even if it’s sensible to reject classical “myth-ritual complexes,” is it really sensible to reject the notion of a powerful creator or governor being?
It would seem to me that the simulation theory, the many worlds interpretation, in fact all of the best current understandings of reality would necessitate a creator or governor entity, little-g god and not capital-G God.
I’ll need to pick up the book because I’m sure there’s much more nuance in his position.
Next you want to read The Worm at the Core, terror management theory from psychologists who read Denial of Death and made methodologies.
There is a great deal that is insightful in this book, what stayed with me was the impact of death denial on our actions and in particular the focus on legacy projects. As I understand it Becker thinks the benefit of creativity is in the act rather than in the product. A word of warning elements of this book haven’t aged well. In particular Becker described any relations that are not hetero normative as “perversion” this undermines the value of the book for the enlightened reader.
I wouldn’t call much of Denial of Death a truth, but one little piece of it stuck with me:
The common conception is that the mentally ill are delusional or see the world through a lens that makes things seem worse than they are. On the contrary, you could make an argument that the mentally ill are actually seeing the world in more raw form, and it’s actually neurotypical people who are propping up an illusion in order to filter the world and keep themselves sane.
I can’t quite remember but I think he was specifically talking about schizophrenics in this example, but that passage made me think.
Amazing book. If you want to see where the TMT field of psychology has progressed since becker wrote this, check out “The Worm at the Core” by Solomon, Greenberg, and pyszczynksi, the leading contemporary psychologists doing research in this area. A bit dry at times but this is a fascinating and evolving field of thought.
one of the 3 or 4 best books I ever read. I read it around 30 years ago. if I recall correctly, it was Becker‘s final book, written as he was dying. He died at age 57. Won a posthumous Pulitzer for the book
I did a book report on this in high school. It was sort of life changing for me, but my teacher sounded like a lot of the comments in here… well, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.
I can’t remember if it was in this book or another of his, because the topics overlap, but one thing that really stuck with me was the idea of “immortality projects” – whether metaphysical or mundane. Somewhere in there he says that when you view things from the perspective (which I think has some overlap with the Wilson/Leary idea of “reality tunnels”) it becomes apparent why some people fight so vehemently for their ideology. They have invested that ideology with their own immortality, so proving their ideology wrong is literally killing them – forever. Of course they’ll fight!
Try *Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World*. Ernest Becker has great insights, but it’s very anachronistic–and frankly negative when it needed be. Rene Girard’s theory covers the same basics, buts it is much more hopeful.
It’s maybe the most influential book I’ve ever read.
Philosophize This! has an interesting episode on Becker. Highly recommend!
I was hearing one of my favorite comedians Talking about this book and it actually offset me from reading it because I don’t have the time to go through another life altering situation
I’ve always wondered why we seek to be individualistic while, at the same time, we desire so much to be a part of a community.
Reminder that psychoanalysis is fraud, pseudoprofound BS, and pseudoscience.
I will be blunt: The notion of ‘bare truths’ is incompatible with ‘psychoanalytic book’.
You would love lex Friedman podcast with Sheldon Solomon
I’ve always considered my body a meat suit, it definitely helps with how you treat it because you’re much more likely to be healthy and make healthy choices when you see your body as a sort of detached thing that you only get ever get one of it’s like a car that you can’t replace.
It’s a nihilistic ideological piece. Check out Dostoyevsky for the rebuttal.
Nobody in psychology has taken psychoanalysis as truth since the 1960s or 1970s. The fields of psychology and psychiatry moved on long ago from this nonsense. I wouldn’t take it as reality.
Quick review article – https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5459228/
Seriously, it’s nonsense. Most of us, it turns out, don’t resent our parents. Especially because they let us cry for too long thirty years prior (just on face value, consider the absolute absurdity of that statement – you can’t remember being an infant, yet it’s supposedly secretly affected you your entire life?).
“The science of man has shown us that society will always be composed of passive subjects, powerful leaders, and enemies upon whom we project our guilt and self-hatred. This knowledge may allow us to develop an “objective hatred” in which the hate object is not a human (or country, in cases of war) scapegoat, but something ‘impersonal’ like poverty, disease, oppression, or natural disasters. By making our inevitable hatred intelligent and informed, we may be able to turn our destructive energy to a creative use.” – Ernest Becker, Denial of Death
Please consider Becker’s words in relation to your own experience, that is, your perceived reality.
He’s an anthropologist not a psych so maybe be careful there lol
Here’s the issue: God exists and the author is a douche. You’re welcome.