The Denial of Death

“It is not that children are vicious, selfish, or domineering. It is that they so openly express man’s tragic dynasty: he must desperately justify himself as an object of primary value in the universe; he must stand out, be a hero, make the biggest contribution to world life, show that he counts more than anything or anyone else.”

The primary way people respond to death and their awareness of their animal natures is to try to assert themselves as individuals. As Becker will go on to argue throughout The Denial of Death, cultures primarily exist to give individuals that outlet for their heroism (4-5).

“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.”

Becker asserts that ancient cultures and traditional religion provided a means for people to assert their individuality or heroism. However, modern society is less efficient at this because of greater skepticism toward traditional religion and toward the metaphysical. For Becker, this is The Problem of the Modern World.

“In other words, the fear of death must be present behind all our normal functioning, in order for the organism to be armed toward self-preservation. But the fear of death cannot be present constantly in one’s mental functioning, else the organism could not function.”

This passage establishes a key point, asserting that the fear of death is a powerful factor in people’s lives. However, at the same time, we are all affected by it to a significant degree, making the problem, in Becker’s eyes, a universal dilemma. This fear of death needs to be transcended through heroism, which the modern world does not readily provide.

“This is the paradox: [humanity] is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it. His body is a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways—the strangest and most repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die.”

The paradox Becker describes here is the Binary of the Bodily and Symbolic. Essentially, humanity is caught between two opposing aspects of themselves: the physical or animal, and the spiritual or symbolic.

“We might say that 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.”

Becker’s arguments in The Denial of Death are heavily influenced by Freudian psychoanalysis. In particular, Becker draws on Freud’s idea that some kind of neuroticism is universal to every person.

“Sex is an inevitable component of man’s confusion over the meaning of his life, a meaning split hopelessly into two realms—symbols (freedom) and body (fate).”

Sex and sexual development are central to Freud’s thought. These elements of human nature are still important to Becker, but for him, they are what continues to remind people of the split between the physical/animal and spiritual/symbolic.

“The result is that we now know that the human animal is characterized by two great fears that other animals are protected from: the fear of life and the fear of death.”

Key to Becker’s argument is the assumption that humans are unique among other animals in truly comprehending and fearing their own deaths. This is partly why he believes that humans are both a part of nature and yet separate from it, causing a sense of conflict and displacement.

“Even in our flirtations with anxiety we are unconscious of our motives. We seek stress, we push against our own limits, but we do it with our screen against despair and not with despair itself. We do it with the stock market, with sports cars, with atomic missiles, with the success ladder in the corporation or the competition in the university. We do it in the prison of a dialogue with our own little family, by marrying against their wishes or choosing a way of life because they frown on it, and so on.”

For Becker, The Problem of the Modern World and the modern human condition is that humans seek to avoid dealing with their innate fear of death—and the “anxiety” that results from it—through indulging in minor and trivial things, like materialism ("sports cars”), careers (“the success ladder in the corporation”), or through our domestic and familial relations. Becker suggests that none of these things actually provides enough meaning to quell the anxiety.

“Why does man accept to live a trivial life? Because of the danger of a full horizon of experience, of course.”

A potentially confusing but important point Becker makes is that the fear of death also leads to a fear of life. When we are aware of our own mortality and physical frailty, we also begin to fear not only the possibility of bad and dangerous experiences but the size and scope of the cosmos itself. Part of the problem is therefore Dealing With the World and Culture, which modern man is ill-equipped to do.

“[T]he depressed person avoids the possibility of independence and more life precisely because these are what threaten him with destruction and death.”

Although Becker views neurosis as a universal phenomenon, he argues that severer forms of mental illness exist in people who cannot cope with their fear of death or life, or who cannot accept their culture’s solution to the problem of the fear of death.

“The prison of one’s character is painstakingly built to deny one thing and one thing alone: one’s creatureliness.”

Becker argues that our personalities, our ambitions, and even our quirks may be part of how we, at least on a subconscious level, deal with the problem of death and our own animal natures. This construction of “character” is a response to the Binary of the Bodily and Symbolic.

“To yield is to dispense one’s shored-up center, let down one’s guard, one’s character armor, admit one’s lack of self-sufficiency.”

Describing the personality and biography of Freud, Becker gives Freud’s stubbornness as an example of how the fear of death shapes our personality. In this case, surrendering on any matter represents an admission of depending on others.

“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, while underneath your writing desk you have your fingers crossed.”

In this passage, Becker describes why Freud was contemptuous of the idea of metaphysical possibilities like God and an afterlife. Even this, Becker argues, is a kind of coping strategy.

“The masses look to the leaders to give them just the untruth that they need; the leader continues the illusions that triumph over the castration complex and magnifies them into a truly heroic victory.”

To cope with the fear of death and life, Becker argues that many people will gladly put themselves under the influence of someone or something else to achieve a sense of security. In this passage, he gives the example of a “leader” who can serve as an outlet for the anxiety of the “masses”—a phenomenon he calls “transference” (see: Index of Terms).

“Transference is a form of fetishism, a form of narrow control that anchors our own problems.”

Here, Becker discusses a paradox: If people are trying to control their own anxieties over death and the world, then why do they surrender themselves through transference? Becker argues that it is actually a form of taking power, as it allows people to project their own needs and anxieties onto a person or an object.

“People create the reality they need in order to discover themselves.”

Whether it is developing a sexual fetish or identifying with a political or religious leader, Becker suggests transference is a way for a person to take control of their environment and the world around them.

“Modern man fulfills his urge to self-expansion in the love object just as it was once fulfilled in God.”

One of the modern substitutes for the “mythical heroic system” (5) that has been lost with the decline of traditional religion is romantic love. Like with transference, a romantic partner gives an individual an opportunity to express their individuality and sense of transcendence through identifying with another person. Becker regards romantic love, like all other modern alternatives, as insufficient.

“It is impossible to get blood from a stone, to get spirituality from a physical being, and so one feels ‘inferior’ that his life has somehow not succeeded, that he has not realized his true gifts, and so on.”

Becker here explains why romantic love cannot fulfill the purpose of letting an individual achieve a sense of heroism. Romantic love cannot offer the same sense of metaphysical transcendence that is necessary for overcoming the fear of death and the fear of too much life; it therefore fails to solve The Problem of the Modern World.

“Neurosis is, then, something we all share; it is universal. Or, putting it another way, normality is neurosis, and vice versa.”

The idea that neurosis is “universal” is a key idea that Becker adopts directly from Freud. However, while Freud sees childhood sexual development as the universal factor all people share, for Becker it is the awareness that people are in bodies that can decay or be destroyed. Still, Becker agrees with Freud that the child’s realization of sexual difference is the crucial stage in childhood development.

“The causa-sui project is a pretense that one is invulnerable because protected by the power of others and culture, that one is important in nature and can do something about the world. But in back of the causa-sui project whispers the voice of possible truth: that human life may not be more than a meaningless interlude in a vicious drama of flesh and bones that we call evolution.”

This passage summarizes how, according to The Denial of Death, people develop strategies for dealing with their mortality. The combination of transference to other people or objects, the outlets for heroism provided by culture, and an individual’s own ambitions and relationships are all ways to silence the “voice” Becker describes here.

“Man is thereby deprived of the absolute mystery he needs, and the only omnipotent thing that remains is the man who explained it away. And so the patient clings to the analyst with all his might and dreads terminating the analysis.”

Becker explains why psychoanalysis itself has become an alternative to traditional religion in the modern world. Essentially, psychoanalysis provides authority and an explanation to help people. However, as Becker explains, this is inefficient, since it lacks the power of myth and the sacred provided by religion (190).

“In schizophrenia, like depression, we see the problem of heroics in stark nudity. How does one become a hero from a position in which he has hardly any resources at all?”

This passage is an example of how Becker traces the origins of mental illness to problems with not only the idea of death but culture and one’s own sense of heroism.

“We can conclude quite categorically that hypochondrias and phobias are localizations of the terror of life and death by an animal who doesn’t want to be one.”

Freud attributed the origins of mental illness to the development of sexual awareness. Becker adapts many of Freud’s basic concepts, but he argues that it is the fear of death, not sexuality, that drives human nature. Humans are tormented by the Binary of the Bodily and Symbolic because they are “an animal who doesn’t want to be one” and long for transcendence.