The Denial of Death, by Ernest Becker
🖤😵💫🤯☠️
How to sum up this 1974 Pulitzer winner, this magnum opus that covers so much ground in such a short space — from heroism, to sexuality, to characterology, to mental illness, all suffused with an existentialism with its own complex explorations of unfreedom, vital lies, illusion, and paradox?
The answer is simple, if hard to swallow. The summation is in the title. Freud had many things right — repression, projection, transference, the unconscious idea, anality, and more — but what he couldn’t admit, what he couldn’t let go of, was the fact that the human condition stems not from our denial of sex instincts, but from our denial of death — from the sheer, awful terror of being a self-conscious animal, continually torn apart by the opposing forces of low and high, creatureliness and godliness, integration and differentiation, living with the foreknowledge of our own deaths — with the knowledge that we will rot and decay, that we are the most complex form of worm food the universe has yet mustered.
With the terror of death, not sex, as the primum mobile of humanity, Becker begins by revisiting and recasting many of the fundamental insights of psychoanalytics. The castration complex becomes the horror of biological fact, and the crumbling of the body as the vehicle for the child’s causa-sui pursuit. The primal scene ceases to be a source of trauma via sexual-frustration and jealousy of the father, but the discovery of the dualism of human nature, the failure of earthly transcendence. Anality — the character that tries “extra-hard to protect himself against the accidents of death, trying to use the symbols of culture as a sure means of triumph over natural mystery, trying to pass himself off as anything but an animal” — reveals that “all culture, all man’s creative life-ways, are in some basic part of them a fabricated protest against natural reality, a denial of the truth of the human condition, and an attempt to forget the pathetic creature that man is.” Or, if you prefer something with more pith: “With anal play the child is already becoming a philosopher of the human condition.”
But this exploration is really just the beginning; Becker goes on to explore the prescience of Kierkegaard, the problem of Freud’s character, the nexus of unfreedom, the nature of terror transference into human immortality projects, the general meaning of mental illness, and finally, the ineluctable truth of the human condition. With a prose that is both piercing and breathtaking, Becker continuously pulls back the veil on the deepest and most fiercely held illusions of humankind:
What are we to make of a creation in which the routine activity is for organisms to be tearing others apart with teeth of all types—biting, grinding flesh, plant stalks, bones between molars, pushing the pulp greedily down the gullet with delight, incorporating its essence into one’s own organization, and then excreting with foul stench and gasses the residue… Creation is a nightmare spectacular taking place on a planet that has been soaked for hundreds of millions of years in the blood of all its creatures. The soberest conclusion that we could make about what has actually been taking place on the planet for about three billion years is that it is being turned into a vast pit of fertilizer. But the sun distracts our attention, always baking the blood dry, making things grow over it, and with its warmth giving the hope that comes with the organism’s comfort and expansiveness.
This is a troubling book. It’s hard to read — not because of the way it’s written, but because of the insights it yields. What’s hardest is the mirror it holds up to the reader. It’s not a pretty picture.
