The Denial of Death
Rating: 5 / 5 stars
Read more on Amazon | Subscribe to my monthly newsletter
High-Level Thoughts
This is one of those books that challenges your whole perception of reality. The vocabulary and discussion points are one where you will have to sit and pause to think about them for a bit. Concepts not typically discussed are brought up and it is an uncomfortable read at times. Overall, a book I would revisit again to have that same stimulation.
“Mankind’s common instinct for reality…has always held the world to be essentially a theatre for heroism.”
Summary Notes
“There is a darker tally too, of course, and perhaps as Becker envisioned, knowledge of our desperate need to deny death will someday shorten that tally by revealing that to kill is but a futile attempt to control mortality, a delusion that in the end does nothing to change mortality’s rigid calculus.”
“This means that ideological conflicts between cultures are essentially battles between immortality projects, holy wars.”
1: Introduction: Human Nature and the Heroism
“He must desperately justify himself as an object of primary value in the universe; he must stand out, be a hero, make the biggest possible contribution to world life, show that he counts more than anything or anyone else.”
“How conscious is he of what he is doing to earn his feeling of heroism?”
Part I: The Depth Psychology of Heroism
2: The Terror of Death
“Heroism is first and foremost a reflex of the terror of death.”
“The anxiety neuroses, the various phobic state, even of considerable number of depressive suicidal states and many schizophrenias amply demonstrate the ever-present fear of death which becomes woven into the major conflicts of the given psychopathological conditions.”
“A hyperanxious animal who constantly invents reason for anxiety even where there are none.”
3: The Reacting of Some Basic Psychoanalytic Ideas
“From the child of five to myself is but a step. But from the new-born baby to the child of five is an appalling distance,” – Leo Tolstoy
“It would be not in terms of man’s animal heredity, his instincts and his evolution; it would be simply in the toll that his pretense of sanity takes, as he tries to deny his true condition.”
“The Oedipal project is the flight from passivity, from obliteration, from contingency: the child wants to conquer death by becoming the father himself,”
“On the one hand the mother is a pure source of pleasure and satisfaction, a secure power to lean on.”
“Even worse, the inner self is not even being called into consideration at all; the body takes over completely for the total person, and this kind of guilt makes the inner self shrink and threaten to disappear.”
“Woman asks for assurance that the man wants ‘me’ and not ‘only my body’”
“But there is no real difference between a child impossibility and an adult one; the only thing that the person achieves is a practiced self-deceit–what we call the ‘mature’ character.”
4: Human Character as a Vital Lie
“Take stock of those around you and you will…hear them talk in precise terms about themselves and their surroundings, which would seem to point to them having ideas on the matter. But start to analyse those ideas and you will find that they hardly reflect in any way the reality to which they appear to refer, and if you go deeper you will discover that there is not even an attempt to adjust the ideas to this reality. Quite the contrary: through these notions the individual is trying to cut off any personal vision of reality, of his own very life. For life is at the start a chaos in which one is lost. The individual suspsects this but he is frightened at finding himself face to face with this terrible reality, and tries to cover it over with a curtain of fantasy, where everything is clear. It does not worry him that his ‘ideas’ are not true, he uses them as trenches for the defense of his existence, as scarecrows to frighten away reality.” – Jose Ortega Y Gasset
“Freud’s greatest discovery, the one which lies at the root of psychodynamics, is that the great cause of much psychological illness is the fear of knowledge of oneself—of one’s emotions, impulses, memories, capacities, potentialities, of one’s destiny. We have discovered that fear of knowledge of oneself is very often isomorphic with, and parallel with, fear of the outside world.”
“The great scientific simplification of psychoanalysis is the concept that the whole of early experience is an attempt by the children to deny the anxiety of his emergence, his fear of losing his support, of standing alone, helpless and afraid.”
“They allow him to feel that he controls his life and his death, that he really does live and act as a willful and free individual, that he has a unique and self-fashioned identity, that he is somebody– not just a trembling accident germinated on a hothouse planet that Carlyle for all time called a ‘half of doom.’”
“That the armor of character was so vital to us that to shed it meant to risk death and madness.”
“He can never take his cure for granted, and the best sign of the genuineness of that cure is that he lives with humility.”
“Man uses his ideas for the defense of his existence, to frighten away reality. This is a serious game, the defense of one’s existence–how take it away from people and leave them joyous?”
“Every human being is…equally unfree, that is, we… create out of freedom, a prison….”
“The irony of man’s condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation, but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive.”
5: The Psychoanalyst Kierkegaard
“The whole order of things fills me with a sense of anguish, from the gnat to the mysteries of incarnation; all is entirely unintelligible to me, and particularly my own person. Great is my sorrow, without limits. None knows of it, except God in Heaven, and He cannot have pity.” – Soren Kierkegaard
“Man’s anxiety is a function of his sheer ambiguity and of his complete powerlessness to overcome that ambiguity, to be straightforwardly an animal or an angel.”
“The art is to leave the child to itself in the very highest measure and on the greatest possible scale, and to express this apparent abandonment in such a way that, unobserved, one at the same time knows everything,”
“If one will compare the tendency to run wild in possibility with the efforts of a child to enunciate words, the lack of possibility is like being dumb…for without possibility a man cannot, as it were, draw breath.”
“Sometimes the inventiveness of the human imagination suffices to procure possibility…”
“Most men figure out how to live safely within the probabilities of a given set of social rules.”
“Anxiety is the result of the perception of the truth of one’s condition. What does it mean to be a self-conscious animal? The idea is ludicrous, if it is not monstrous.”
“The man with the clear head is the man who frees himself from those fantastic ‘ideas’ [the characterological lie about reality] and looks life in the face, realizes that everything in it is problematic, and feels himself lost. And this is the simple truth—that to live is to feel oneself lost–he who accepts it has already begun to find himself to be on firm ground.”
“Each child grounds himself in some power that transcends him. Usually it is a combination of his parents, his social group, and the symbols of his society and nation.”
“One goes through it all to arrive at faith, the faith that one’s very creatureliness has some meaning to a Creator; that despite one’s true insigfniicance, weakness, death, one’s existence has meaning in some ultimate sense because it exists within an eternal and infinite scheme of things brought about and maintained to some kind of design by some creative force.”
“Man breaks through the bounds of merely cultural heroism; he destroys the character lie that had him perform as a hero int he everyday social scheme of things; and by doing so he opens himself up to infinity, to the possibility of cosmic heroism, to the very service of God.”
6: The Problem of Freud’s Character, Noch Einmal
“Human aggressiveness comes about through a fusion of the life instinct and the death instinct. The death instinct represents the organism’s desire to die, but the organism can save itself from its own impulsion toward death by redirecting it outward.”
“The death fear of the ego is lessened by the killing, the sacrifice, of the other through the death of the other, one buys oneself free from the penalty of dying, of being killed.”
“For a Jew-boy out of a Viennese subrb a death in Aberdeen is an unheard-of-career in itself, and a proof how far he had got on. The world really rewarded him richly for his service of contradicting psychoanalysis.”
“My death does not terrify me, what terrifies me is the thought of the grief it would cause her.”
“‘Freud came back again and again to the fantasy of being raised father-less.’ Now, you cannot become your own father until you can have your own sons,”
“...a man whose sexual needs and activity were exceptionally reduced, as if a higher aspiration had raised him above the common animal need of mankind.”
“Immortality means being loved by many anonymous people.”
“In order to move from scientific creatureliness to religious creatureliness, the terror of death would have to replace sex, and inner passivity would have to replace obsessive Eros, the drive of the creature”
Part II: The Failures of Heroism
“Neurosis and psychosis are modes of expression for human beings who have lost courage. Anyone who has acquired this much insight… will thenceforth refrain from undertaking with persons in this state of discouragement tedious excursions into mysterious regions of the psyche.” – Alfred Adler
7: The Spell Cast by Persons — The Nexus of Unfreedom
“...men, incapable of liberty—who cannot stand the terror of the sacred that manifest itself before their open eyes—must turn to mystery, must hide…the…truth.” – Carlo Levi
“The need to be subject to someone remains; only the part of the father is transferred to teachers, superiors, impressive personalities; the submissive loyalty to rulers that is so wide-spread is also a transference of this sort.”
“It is not so much that man is a herd animal, said Freud, but that he is a horde animal led by a chief.”
“Life is, after all, a challenge to the creature, a fascinating opportunity to expand. Psychologically it is the urge for individuation: how do I realize my distinctive gifts, make my own contribution to the world through my own self-expansion?”
“Distortion due to the fear of life and death and distortion due to the heroic attempt to assure self-expansion and the intimate connection of one’s inner self to surrounding nature.”
8: Otto Rank and the Closure of Psychoanalysis on Kierkegaard
“He must then find the absolute in himself, in the vitality that the woman arouses and unleashes.”
“If you are going to be a hero then you must give a gift. If you are the average man you give your heroic gift to the society in which you live, and you give the gift that society specifies in advance.”
9: The Present Outcome of Psychoanalysis
“That repression is normal self-protection and creative self-restriction–in a real sense, man’s natural substitute for instinct.”
“Guilt, remember, is the bind that man experiences when he is humbled and stopped in ways that he does not understand, when he is overshadowed in his energies by the world.”
“If you feel vulnerable it is because you feel bad and inferior, not big or strong enough to face up to the terror of the universe. You work out your need for perfection (bigness, invulnerability) in the symptom–say, hand-washing or the avoidance of sex in marriage.”
“Human life may not be more than a meaningless interlude ina vicious drama of flesh and bones that we call evolution; that the Creator may not care any more for the destiny of the man or the self-perpetuation of individual men than He seems to have cared for the dinosaurs or the Tasmanians.”
“As Anais Nin put it graphically; ‘The caricature aspect of life appears whenever the drunkenness of illusion wears off.’”
“Modern man became psychological because he became isolated from protective collective ideologies.”
“Modern man needs a ‘thou’ to whom to turn for spiritual and moral dependence, and as God was in eclipse, the therapist has had to replace HIm–just as the lover and the parents did.”
“The neurotic type suffers from a consciousness of sin just as much as did his religious ancestor, without believing in the conception of sin. This is precisely what makes him ‘neurotic’; he feels a sinner without the religious belief in sin for which he therefore needs a new rational explanation.”
“But faith asks that man expands himself trustingly into the nonlogical, into the truly fantastic.”
“Religion, then, gives the possibility of heroic victory in freedom and solves the problem of human dignity at its highest level.”
10: A General View of Mental Illness
“Mental illness is a way of talking about people who have lost courage, which is the same as saying that it reflects the failure of heroism.”
“‘Narcissistic neurosis’: the ballooning of the self in fantasy, the complete megalomanic self-inflation as a last defense, as an attempt at utter symbolic power in the absence of lived physical power.”
“...in essence sexuality is a collective phenomenon which is the individual at all stages of civilization wants to individualize, that is, control. This explains all [!] sexual conflicts in the individual, from masturbation to the most varied perversions and perversitiei, above all the keeping secret of everything sexual by individuals as an expression of a personal tendency to individualize as much as possible collective elements in it.”
“They have glimpsed the truth that all men live, that culture can indeed transform natural reality. There is no hard and fast line between cultural and natural creativity. Culture is a symbol system that actually does give power to overcome the castration complex.”
“If he continued to see the girl she would become increasingly repulsive to him, especially as his attention seemed inevitably focused on her body orifices. Even the pores of her skin began to be too conspicuous, to loom larger and become repellent… Gradually he found too that he could be more successful if he approached a girl from the rear and did not have to be visually or tactually too aware of the difference between them.”
“In an an attempt to relive his severe tension he struggled between the wish to be a dominant male, aggressive and sadistic toward his wife, and the desire to give up his masculinity, be castrated by his wife and thus return to a state of impoetence, passivity and helplessness.”
“All living organisms are condemned to perversity, to the narrowness of being mere fragments of a larger totality that overwhelms them, which they cannot understand or truly cope with — yet must still live and struggle in. We still must ask, then, in the spirit of the wise old Epictetus, what kind of perversity is fitting for man.”
Part III: Retrospect and Conclusion: The Dilemmas of Heroism
11: Psychology and Religion: What Is the Heroic Individual?
“If there is any science man really needs it is the one I teach, of how to occupy properly that place inc reaction that is assigned to man, and how to learn from it what one must be in order to be a man.” – Immanuel Kant
“If we can imagine an unrepressed man—a man strong enough to live and therefore strong enough to die, and therefore what no man has ever been, an individual– such a man [would have] … overcome guilt and anxiety… In such a man would be fulfilled on earth the mystic hope of Christianity, the ressurection of the body in a form, as Luther said, free from death and filth… With such a transfigured body the human soul can be reconciled, and the human ego become once more what it was designed to be in the first place, a body-ego and the surface of a body… The human ego would have to become strong enough to die; and strong enough to set aside guilt… [F]ull psychoanalytic consciousness would be strong enough to cancel the debt [of guilt] by deriving it from infantile fantasy.”
“Men can die without anxiety if they know that what they love is protected from misery and oblivion [by the new utopian society],”
“The fallacy in all this sterile utopianism is that fear of death is not the only motive of life; heoric transcendence, victory ofver evil for mankind as a whole, for unborn generations, consecration of one’s existence to higher meanings — these motives are just as vital and they are what give the hunman animal his nobility even in the face of his animal fears.”
“Man must reach out for support to a dream, a metaphysic of hope that sustains him and makes his life worthwhile. To talk about hope is to give the right to focus to the problem.”
“The most that any of us can seem to do is to fashion something–an object or ourselves— and drop it into the confusion make an offering of it, so to speak, to the life force.”
