The Denial Of Death - Human Posthuman
“CHALLENGING”“POWERFUL”“MAGNIFICENT”. . one of the most challenging books of the d e c a d e . . . ”— Anatole Broyard, The N ew York Times“A magnificent psychophilosophical synthesis which ranksamong the truly important books of the year. ProfessorBecker writes with power and brilliant insight . . . movesunflinchingly toward a masterful articulation of the limita tions of psychoanalysis and of reason itself in helping mantranscend his conflicting fears of both death and life . . .his book w ill be acknowledged as a major work.”— Publishers W eekly. . to read it is to know the delight inherent in the un folding of a mind grasping at new possibilities and forminga new synthesis. The D enial of Death is a great book—one of the few great books of the 20th or any other cen tury. . . . ”— Albuquerque Journal Book Review. . a splendidly written book by an erudite and fluentprofessor. . . . He manifests astonishing insight into thetheories of Sigmund Freud, Otto Rank, Soren Kierkegaard,Carl Jung, Erich Fromm, and other giants. . . . Becker haswritten a powerful b o o k ,. . . ”— Best Sellers“ . . . a brilliant, passionate synthesis of the human scienceswhich resurrects and revitalizes . . . the ideas of psychophilosophical geniuses. . . . The Denial of Death fusesthem clearly, beautifully, with amazing concision, into anorganic body of theory which attempts nothing less than toexplain the possibilities of man’s meaningful, sane sur vival. . . . ”— Minneapolis Tribune. . m agnificent. . . not only the culmination but the tri umph of Becker’s attempt to create a meaningful 'scienceof man . . . a moving, important and necessary work thatspeaks not only to the social scientists and theologians butto all of us finite creatures.”— Commonweal
“BRILLIANT”“ORIGINAL”“PROFOUND”" . . . a brave work of electrifying intelligence and passion,optimistic and revolutionary, destined to en d u re. .— N ew York Times Book Review. . a brilliant and desperately needed synthesis of themost important disciplines in man’s life. It puts togetherwhat others have torn in pieces and rendered useless. It isone of those rare masterpieces that will stimulate yourthoughts, your intellectual curiosity, and last, but not least,your soul. . . . ”— Elisabeth Kiibler-Ross, M .D., author of On Death andD ying. . balanced, suggestive, original. . . . Gradually andthoughtfully— and with considerable erudition and verve—he introduces his readers to the intricacies (and occasionalconfusions) of psychoanalytic thinking, as well as to awhole philo§ophical literature. .— Washington Post Book W orld“ An original, creative contribution to a synthesis of thisgeneration’s extensive explorations in psychology and theology.”— The Boston Herald American“ Fascination and brilliance pervade this work . . . one ofthe most interesting and certainly the most creative bookdevoted to the study of views on death . . . courageous.9 — The Minnesota Daily“ A profound synthesis of theological and psychologicalinsights about man’s nature and his incessant efforts to es cape the burden of life— and death. . . . It is hard to over estimate the importance of this book; Becker succeedsbrilliantly in what he sets out to do, and the effort wasnecessary.”— The Chicago Sun-Times
THE D E N IA LOF D E A T H
Books by ER N EST B EC K E RAngel in Armor (paper)Escape from EvilThe Denial of Death (cloth and paper)The Structure of Evil (paper)All available from TH E F R E E PRESS,A Division of Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc.
THE DENI ALOF DEATHErnest BeckerTHE FR E E PRESSA Division of Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc.NEW YORKCollier Macmillan PublishersLONDON
Copyright 1973 by The Free PressA Division of Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc.AU rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproducedor transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic ormechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by anyinformation storage and retrieval system, without permissionin writing from the Publisher.The Free PressA Division of Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc.866 Third Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10022Collier Macmillan Canada, Ltd.First Free Press Paperback Edition 1975Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 73-1860Printed in the United States of Americahardbound printing number9 104 5 6 78paperback printing number910Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication DataBecker, Ernest.The denial of death.Includes bibliographical references.1. Death. 2. Kierkegaard, S ren Aabye, 18131855. 3. Courage* I. Title. l DNIH: 1. Death.BF789.E B395d 1973]BDW4.B36128’ .573-1860ISBN 0-02-902310-6 pbk
To the memory of my beloved parents, whounwittingly gave me—among many otherthings—the most paradoxical gift of all:a confusion about heroism.
Non ridere, non lugere, neque detestari, sedintelligere. (Not to laugh, not to lament, not tocurse, but to understand.)— S p in o z a
Contentso ne:ch apterP A R T I:tw o :ch apterch apterix1THE DEPTH PSYCHOLOGYOF H E R O I S M9The Terror of Death11The Recasting of Some BasicPsychoanalytic Ideas25fo ur:Human Character as a Vital Lie47f iv e :The Psychoanalyst Kierkegaard67The Problem of Freuds Character,Noch Einmal93ch apter th r ee:ch apterPrefaceIntroduction: Human Nature and theHeroicch apters ix :P A R T II:THEF A IL U R E S OFH ERO ISM125ch apterseven :The Spell Cast by Persons—The Nexus of Unfreedomch aptere ig h t :Otto Rank and the Closure ofPsychoanalysis on Kierkegaard159The Present Outcome of Psychoanalysis176A General View of Mental Illness208ch apterch aptern in e :ten:PA R T III:ch apter e l e v e nR E T R O SP E C T ANDCO N CLUSIO N : THED IL E M M A S OF H E R O ISM:127253Psychology and Religion: What Is theHeroic IndividualP255References286Index305
Preface. . . f or the time being 1 gave up writing— there isalready too m uch truth in the world— an over production which apparently cannot be consumed!— O tto R ank1The prospect of death, Dr. Johnson said, wonderfully concentratesthe mind. The main thesis of this book is that it does much morethan that: the idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animallike nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity—activity de signed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denyingin some way that it is the final destiny for man. The noted anthro pologist A. M. Hocart once argued that primitives were not botheredby the fear of death; that a sagacious sampling of anthropologicalevidence would show that death was, more often than not, ac companied by rejoicing and festivities; that death seemed to be anoccasion for celebration rather than fear—much like the traditionalIrish wake. Hocart wanted to dispel the notion that (compared tomodern man) primitives were childish and frightened by reality;anthropologists have now largely accomplished this rehabilitationof the primitive. But this argument leaves untouched the fact thatthe fear of death is indeed a universal in the human condition. Tobe sure, primitives often celebrate death—as Hocart and others haveshown—because they believe that death is the ultimate promotion,the final ritual elevation to a higher form of life, to the enjoymentof eternity in some form. Most modem Westerners have troublebelieving this any more, which is what makes the fear of death soprominent a part of our psychological make-up.In these pages I try to show that the fear of death is a universalthat unites data from several disciplines of the human sciences, andmakes wonderfully clear and intelligible human actions that wehave buried under mountains of fact, and obscured with endlessix
XTHEDENIALOFDEATHback-and-forth arguments about the “true” human motives. Theman of knowledge in our time is bowed down under a burden henever imagined he would ever have: the overproduction of truththat cannot be consumed. For centuries man lived in the belief thattruth was slim and elusive and that once he found it the troublesof mankind would be over. And here we are in the closing decadesof the 20th century, choking on truth. There has been so muchbrilliant writing, so many genial discoveries, so vast an extensionand elaboration of these discoveries—yet the mind is silent as theworld spins on its age-old demonic career. I remember reading how,at the famous St. Louis World Exposition in 1904, the speaker atthe prestigious science meeting was having trouble speaking againstthe noise of the new weapons that were being demonstrated nearby.He said something condescending and tolerant about this need lessly disruptive play, as though the future belonged to science andnot to militarism. World War I showed everyone the priority ofthings on this planet, which party was playing idle games andwhich wasn’t. This year the order of priority was again graphicallyshown by a world arms budget of 204 billion dollars, at a time whenhuman living conditions on the planet were worse than ever.Why, then, the reader may ask, add still another weighty tome toa useless overproduction? Well, there are personal reasons, of course:habit, drivenness, dogged hopefulness. And there is Eros, the urgeto the unification of experience, to form, to greater meaningfulness.One of the reasons, I believe, that knowledge is in a state of uselessoverproduction is that it is strewn all over the place, spoken in athousand competitive voices. Its insignificant fragments are mag nified all out of proportion, while its major and world-historicalinsights lie around begging for attention. There is no throbbing,vital center. Norman O. Brown observed that the great world needsmore Eros and less strife, and the intellectual world needs it just asmuch. There has to be revealed the harmony that unites many dif ferent positions, so that the “sterile and ignorant polemics” can beabated.2I have written this book fundamentally as a study in harmoniza tion of the Babel of views on man and on the human condition, inthe belief that the time is ripe for a synthesis that covers the bestthought in many fields, from the human sciences to religion. I have
1Prefacexitried to avoid moving against and negating any point of view, nomatter how personally antipathetic to me, if it seems to have in it acore of truthfulness. I have had the growing realization over thepast few years that the problem of mans knowledge is not to opposeand to demolish opposing views, but to include them in a largertheoretical structure. One of the ironies of the creative process isthat it partly cripples itself in order to function. I mean that, usually,in order to turn out a piece of work the author has to exaggeratethe emphasis of it, to oppose it in a forcefully competitive way toother versions of truth; and he gets carried away by his own exag geration, as his distinctive image is built on it. But each honestthinker who is basically an empiricist has to have some truth in hisposition, no matter how extremely he has formulated it. The prob lem is to find the truth underneath the exaggeration, to cut awaythe excess elaboration or distortion and include that truth where itfits.A second reason for my writing this book is that I have had morethan my share of problems with this fitting-together of valid truthsin the past dozen years. I have been trying to come to grips withthe ideas of Freud and his interpreters and heirs, with what mightbe the distillation of modem psychology—and now I think I havefinally succeeded. In this sense this book is a bid for the peace ofmy scholarly soul, an offering for intellectual absolution; I feel thatit is my first mature work.One of the main things I try to do in this book is to present asumming-up of psychology after Freud by tying the whole develop ment of psychology back to the still-towering Kierkegaard. I amthus arguing for a merger of psychology and mythico-religious per spective. I base this argument in large part on the work of OttoRank, and I have made a major attempt to transcribe the relevanceof his magnificent edifice of thought. This coming-to-grips withRanks work is long overdue; and if I have succeeded in it, it prob ably comprises the main value of the book.Rank is so prominent in these pages that perhaps a few words ofintroduction about him would be helpful here. Frederick Peris onceobserved that Ranks book Art and Artist was “beyond praise.”3 Iremember being so struck by this judgment that I went immediatelyto the book: I couldn’t very well imagine how anything scientific
THEDENIALOFDEATHcould be “beyond praise.” Even the work of Freud himself seemedto me to be praiseworthy, that is, somehow expectable as a productof the human mind. But Peris was right: Rank was—as the youngpeople say—“something else.” You cannot merely praise much of hiswork because in its stunning brilliance it is often fantastic, gratui tous, superlative; the insights seem like a gift, beyond what is neces sary. I suppose part of the reason—in addition to his genius—wasthat Ranks thought always spanned several fields of knowledge;when he talked about, say, anthropological data and you expectedanthropological insight, you got something else, something more.Living as we do in an era of hyperspecialization we have lost theexpectation of this kind of delight; the experts give us manageablethrills—if they thrill us at all.One thing that I hope my confrontation of Rank will do is to sendthe reader directly to his books. There is no substitute for readingRank. My personal copies of his books are marked in the coverswith an uncommon abundance of notes, underlinings, double ex clamation points; he is a mine for years of insights and pondering.My treatment of Rank is merely an outline of his thought: itsfoundations, many of its basic insights, and its overall implications.This will be the pale Rank, not the staggeringly rich one of hisbooks. Also, Ira ProgofFs outline presentation and appraisal of Rankis so correct, so finely balanced in judgment, that it can hardly beimproved upon as a brief appreciation.4 Rank is very diffuse, veryhard to read, so rich that he is almost inaccessible to the generalreader. He was painfully aware of this and for a time hoped thatAnais Nin would rewrite his books for him so that they would havea chance to have the effect they should have had. What I give inthese pages is my own version of Rank, filled out in my own way, asort of brief “translation” of his system in the hope of making itaccessible as a whole. In this book I cover only his individual psy chology; in another book I will sketch his schema for a psychologyof history.There are several ways of looking at Rank. Some see him as abrilliant coworker of Freud, a member of the early circle of psycho analysis who helped give it broader currency by bringing to it hisown vast erudition, who showed how psychoanalysis could il luminate cultural history, myth, and legend—as, for example, in his
PrefaceMrlyxiiiwork on The Myth of the Birth of the Hero and The Incest-Motif* They would go on to say that because Rank was neverAnalyzed, his repressions gradually got the better of him, and heturned away from the stable and creative life he had close to Freud;In his later years his personal instability gradually overcame him,he died prematurely in frustration and loneliness. Others seeRank as an overeager disciple of Freud, who tried prematurely tobe original and in so doing even exaggerated psychoanalytic reductionism. This judgment is based almost solely on his 1924 book TheTrauma of Birth and usually stops there. Still others see Rank as abrilliant member of Freud’s close circle, an eager favorite of Freud,whose university education was suggested and financially helpedby Freud and who repaid psychoanalysis with insights into manyfields: cultural history, childhood development, the psychology ofart, literary criticism, primitive thought, and so on. In short, a sortof many-faceted but not-too-well-organized or self-controlled boywonder—an intellectually superior Theodor Reik, so to speak.But all these ways of summing up Rank are wrong, and we knowthat they derive largely from the mythology of the circle of psycho analysts themselves. They never forgave Rank for turning away fromFreud and so diminishing their own immortality-symbol (to useRank's way of understanding their bitterness and pettiness). Ad mittedly, Rank's Trauma of Birth gave his detractors an easy handleon him, a justified reason for disparaging his stature; it was anexaggerated and ill-fated book that poisoned his public image, eventhough he himself reconsidered it and went so far beyond it. Notbeing merely a coworker of Freud, a broad-ranging servant of psy choanalysis, Rank had his own, unique, and perfectiy thought-outsystem of ideas. He knew where he wanted to begin, what body ofdata he had to pass through, and where it all pointed. He knewthese things specifically as regards psychoanalysis itself, which hewanted to transcend and did; he knew it roughly, as regards thephilosophical implications of his own system of thought, but he wasnot given the time to work this out, as his life was cut short. Hewas certainly as complete a system-maker as were Adler and Jung;his system of thought is at least as brilliant as theirs, if not more soin some ways. We respect Adler for the solidity of his judgment;the directness of his insight, his uncompromising humanism; weand
XivTHEDENIALOFDEATHadmire Jung for the courage and openness with which he embracedboth science and religion; but even more than these two, Rank’ssystem has implications for the deepest and broadest developmentof the social sciences, implications that have only begun to betapped.Paul Roazen, writing about “The Legend of Freud,”5 aptly ob served that “any writer whose mistakes have taken this long tocorrect is . . . quite a figure in intellectual history.” Yet the wholematter is very curious, because Adler, Jung, and Rank very earlycorrected most of Freud s basic mistakes. The question for the his torian is, rather, what there was in the nature of the psychoanalyticmovement, the ideas themselves, the public and the scholarly mindthat kept these corrections so ignored or so separated from the mainmovement of cumulative scientific thought.Even a book of broad scope has to be very selective of the truthsit picks out of the mountain of truth that is stifling us. Manythinkers of importance are mentioned only in passing: the readermay wonder, for example, why I lean so much on Rank and hardlymention Jung in a book that has as a major aim the closure of psy choanalysis on religion. One reason is that Jung is so prominent andhas so many effective interpreters, while Rank is hardly known andhas had hardly anyone to speak for him. Another reason is that al though Rank’s thought is difficult, it is always right on the centralproblems, Jung’s is not, and a good part of it wanders into needlessesotericism; the result is that he often obscures on the one handwhat he reveals on the other. I can’t see that all his tomes onalchemy add one bit to the weight of his psychoanalytic insight.A good many phrasings of insight into human nature I owe toexchanges with Marie Becker, whose fineness and realism on thesematters are most rare. I want to thank (with the customary dis claimers) Paul Roazen for his kindness in passing Chapter Sixthrough the net of his great knowledge of Freud. Robert N. Bellahread the entire manuscript, and I am very grateful for his generalcriticisms and specific suggestions; those that I was able to act ondefinitely improved the book; as for the others, I fear that theypose the larger and longer-range task of changing myself.
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CHAPTERONEIntroduction: Muman Natureand the MeroieIn times such as ours there is a great pressure to come up with con cepts that help men understand their dilemma; there is an urgetoward vital ideas, toward a simplification of needless intellectualcomplexity. Sometimes this makes for big lies that resolve tensionsand make it easy for action to move forward with just t
Books by ERNEST BECKER Angel in Armor (paper) Escape from Evil The Denial of Death (cloth and paper) The Structure of Evil (paper) All available from THE FREE PRESS,
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Chính Văn.- Còn đức Thế tôn thì tuệ giác cực kỳ trong sạch 8: hiện hành bất nhị 9, đạt đến vô tướng 10, đứng vào chỗ đứng của các đức Thế tôn 11, thể hiện tính bình đẳng của các Ngài, đến chỗ không còn chướng ngại 12, giáo pháp không thể khuynh đảo, tâm thức không bị cản trở, cái được
The film is meant to stir conversation — and confrontation of denial. From the Filmmakers Llewellyn Smith Producer/Director, American Denial Christine Herbes-Sommers Producer, American Denial Kelly Thomson Producer, American Denial. DISCUSSION GUIDE 3 . res
Denial – I did not do it! We all deny- it is a safety mechanism Denial is not a risk factor that impacts recidivism Denial does not mean guilty Denial does not mean they will do it again Denial means- We safety plan! More on this in a minute . COPYRIGHT I N-AJSOP 06. 2021 What to do first? 1. Ensure safety for all 2. Notify FCM/LCPA 3 .
