WHAT IS YOUR LEGACY? Personally, I would not view this book as a highly original work but as an elegant synthesis and brief yet structured presentation of preexisting psychoanalytical ideas by the previous psychologists and philosophers with a few personal notions sprinkled and substantiated here and there. He will choose to throw himself on a grenade to save his comrades; he is capable of the highest generosity and self-sacrifice. The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker tries to essentially explore the human condition and its associated 'problems' by buttressing some new insights on the central concepts of psychoanalysis as popularly enunciated by the likes of Freud, Otto, Jung and Kierkegaard among others (Yes, Kierkegaard too if one is to believe this book). —The Minnesota Daily. When we see a man bravely facing his own extinction we rehearse the greatest victory we can imagine. There's a world s difference between a theological and an idealistic basis for belief. Though the book relies heavily on the works by other authors, it is also a very deep and insightful read – a cry of the soul on the human condition, as well as a penetrating essay that demystifies the man and his actions. As we shall see further on, it was Otto Rank who showed psychologically this religious nature of all human cultural creation; and more recently the idea was revived by Norman O. In the more passive masses of mediocre men it is disguised as they humbly and complainingly follow out the roles that society provides for their heroics and try to earn their promotions within the system: wearing the standard uniforms—but allowing themselves to stick out, but ever so little and so safely, with a little ribbon or a red boutonniere, but not with head and shoulders. I drink not from mere joy in wine nor to scoff at faith—no, only to forget myself for a moment, that only do I want of intoxication, that alone. "This is why it is so difficult to have sex without guilt; guilt is there because the body casts a shadow on the person's inner freedom, his 'real' self that — through the act of sex — is being forced into a standardised mechanical, biological role. " The first of his nine books, Zen, A Rational Critique (1961) was based on his doctoral dissertation. For the latter, it's simple: you follow your instincts, and then you die.
Cultivating awareness of our death leads to disillusionment, loss of character armor, and a conscious choice to abide in the face of terror. This power is not always obvious. Would we spend a lifetime trying to scramble to the top of the economic food chain? The Denial of Death is a fantastic, provocative, and possibly life-changing read, but just so as an ambitious attempt; a pleasurable intellectual food-for-thought exercise. "Shrinks" documents how psychiatry got so far off the rails and how it found itself by becoming a real science by including the empirical. … balanced, suggestive, original. To be sure, primitives often celebrate death—as Hocart and others have shown—because they believe that death is the ultimate promotion, the final ritual elevation to a higher form of life, to the enjoyment of eternity in some form. It's just so damn depressing—no matter what, ya know? And cultures and societies are beginning to loose their structure and don't function to secure the identity of man as they once used to do. At the same time that Kubler-Ross gave us permission to practice the art of dying gracefully, Becker taught us that awe, fear, and ontological anxiety were natural accompaniments to our contemplation of the fact of death. Becker says we are motivated by many things but the fear of death is primary and overarching. In our culture anyway, especially in modern times, the heroic seems too big for us, or we too small for it. I actively disliked the chapter on "perversions", for instance, as homosexuality is included here.
Some of the above information is from the EBF website and used by permission. But the truth about the need for heroism is not easy for anyone to admit, even the very ones who want to have their claims recognized. He knew where he wanted to begin, what body of data he had to pass through, and where it all pointed. I am not a psychologist, so I cannot really comment on its insights in any depth, but I can say that it was very convincing and clearly written. The author emphasizes that character, culture and values determine who we become.
Nowhere this east-west dichotomy is explained more lucidly than by Fritjof Capra in his book 'The Tao of Physics. ' Society itself is a codified hero system, which means that society everywhere is a living myth of the significance of human life, a defiant creation of meaning. We can't pay attention to a whole scene, or focus on more than one thing, or hear more than such and such thing; I don't believe this is a sub-conscious device meant to save us from the throes of death; I just believe that evolution is stingy enough to grant humans the necessities to function and (at the very least) genetically propagate. This allows him to be selective and choose some wild speculations, based on lifetimes of clinical work done by Freud and others, but none by Becker himself. The thought frightens us; we don't know how we could do it without others—yet at bottom the basic resource is there: we could suffice alone if need be, if we could trust ourselves as Emerson wanted. For example, the fear of death can be repressed by heroism, proving that one is not afraid at all; or by personal distinction, proving one is superior to the others and attaining thereby a kind of immortality.
From "the empirical science of psychology, " he proclaims, "we know everything important about human nature that there is to know... ". ². I have written this book fundamentally as a study in harmonization of the Babel of views on man and on the human condition, in the belief that the time is ripe for a synthesis that covers the best thought in many fields, from the human sciences to religion. At the end of the day Freud revolutionized thought and his myths has carried a heavy cultural resonance, and we can apologize for his after-the-fact falseness. The nearness of his death and the severe limits of his energy stripped away the impulse to chatter. We like to speak casually about "sibling rivalry, " as though it were some kind of byproduct of growing up, a bit of competitiveness and selfishness of children who have been spoiled, who haven't yet grown into a generous social nature. The book is concerned with dispelling many of the myths concerning psychology, especially Freud's views on sexuality as the bedrock of psycho-analysis. Not everything has to be science, but Becker repeats incessantly that this stuff is "scientific. " Sadly, it is he who's confused; who can't see the difference between religion and psychology, Kierkegaard and psychoanalysts, morbid and healthy psychology. Becker relies extensively on Otto Rank (a psychoanalyst with a religious bent who was one of the most trusted and intellectually potent members of Freud's inner circle until he broke away) and the Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard (whom Becker labels as a post-Freudian psychoanalyst even before Freud came along). Fiction & Literature. It was referred to by Spalding Gray in his work It's a Slippery Slope. Becker also investigates Freud's own psychology, which is shares wonderful insights into the psychology of anxiety towards death, and how this is impacted by our dual nature of embodiment and selfhood.
But most the time it mostly scares the living shit out of me and seems like the worst thing in the whole wide world. The word 'train' materializes within the skulls of both boys as their sleeves and trousers are shaken to a fluttering life by its newfound wind. Becker's pragmatic brew, on the other hand, fizzes into nihilism. "Everything cultural is fabricated and given meaning by the mind, a meaning that was not given by physical nature. In his Preface, he actually says that the "prospect of death... is the mainspring of human activity" (my italics). The solution that Kierkegaard proposes is the "knight of faith", who accepts everything in life and has faith – "the man must reach out for support to a dream, a metaphysic of hope that sustains him and makes his life worthwhile" [1973: 275]. We live in a world designed for speed, afraid of our own mortality, in a world where the dying get tucked away from our eyes. The urge to heroism is natural, and to admit it honest. CHAPTER FIVE: The Psychoanalyst Kierkegaard. What I have tried to do in this brief introduction is to suggest that the problem of heroics is the central one of human life, that it goes deeper into human nature than anything else because it is based on organismic narcissism and on the child's need for self-esteem as the. Sometimes his dalliances with figuring out child psychology - the terror of the penis-less mother, or the first experience of total dependence being somewhat violated - are expressed in a metaphorical language, where this gesture "represents" this or "seems to" instill a fear of castration, or that viewing one's parents engaging in a "primal act" strips them of their symbolic, enduring representations and places them in a lowly, carnal context.
It is why jokes stop after a priest, a minister, and a rabbi. So the odd one out is Becker himself, for he was certainly not a psychologist by trade. If traditional culture is discredited as heroics, then the church that supports that culture automatically discredits itself. I made it through the foreword and 50 pages of the actual book and had to stop.