The Denial of Death

In this chapter, Becker focuses on the work and life of Freud. Quoting Freud’s friend and student Carl Jung, Becker notes that Freud was fixated on sex as an explanation for human psychology. This was to the extent that Freud viewed everything spiritual and unknowable about humanity as stemming from sexual repression. Becker even states that Freud’s own shield against death was his “most intense belief that his authentic talent, his most private and cherished self-image and mission for that talent, was that of a truth-teller on the unspeakables of the human condition” (95).

Becker views Freud as being correct about humanity’s “creatureliness” (96). Where Becker disagrees is that he sees consciousness of death, not sexuality, as the main cause of self-repression in people. Freud only wrote of a “death instinct,” where people instinctively desire to die and resolve that desire through the urge to kill others (98). Becker dismisses this idea. He reflects that while psychiatry could not “scientifically cure the terror of life and death,” it could at least cure “the problems of sex” (100).

Freud himself seemed to address death in two ways. The first was with what Becker describes as “magical games” (103) with the idea of his own death, such as believing he would die in February 1918 and being afraid that his parents would still be alive when he died and grieve for him. The second way was by developing a severe anxiety about trains.

From all this biographical information, Becker concludes that Freud “had greater trouble yielding” either to society or to abstract, supernatural “laws and powers” (105). This suggests Freud was reluctant to admit his own helplessness. Becker finds further evidence in two incidents recorded by Jung where Freud fainted, once when Jung was discussing at length preserved bodies found in Germany’s peat bogs. The second incident was when Jung argued that the Pharaoh Ikhnaton did not destroy statues and inscriptions of his father out of hatred but simply to remove monuments related to the god Amon (108-09). Becker points out that a biographer of Freud, Paul Roazen, suggested that these fainting episodes were because Freud saw Jung as being like a son and felt Jung’s comments invoked the idea of “father-murder” (110). For Becker, this means that Freud sought to identify himself with fatherhood and attempted “to be father of oneself” (116).

Becker argues fixation on fatherhood is also seen in Freud’s relationship with the psychiatrist Robert Fleiss, a relationship that Freud himself thought had some homosexual tendencies (117). Becker interprets this as showing that Freud deliberately sought out talented young men and tried to recreate them in his own image (118-19). In sum, Freud dealt with his own anxieties over death by throwing himself into his psychiatric work, achieving fame, and making himself the intellectual father of various students. This is despite the fact that Freud mocked the idea of being remembered by destroying his letters: “As you fear that life in this dimension may not count, may not have any real meaning, you relieve your anxiety by being especially scornful of the very thing that you wish for most” (121), Becker asserts.