Reviews for The Denial of Death

The average rating for The Denial of Death based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2007-04-03 00:00:00 Joey Dif I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying. I don't want to live in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live in my apartment. 'Woody Allen. Becker's main thesis in this book is that the most fundamental problem of mankind, sitting at his very core, is his fear of death. Being the only animal that is conscious of his inevitable mortality, his life's project is to deny or repress this fear, and hence his need for some kind of a heroism. Every grandiosity, good or evil, is intended to make him transcend death and become immortal. To prove his thesis, Becker resorts to psychoanalysis. The depth and breadth of his understanding of psychoanalysis is truly amazing for someone who doesn't call himself a psychologist. He wants to put psychoanalysis on a different foundation from which Freud put it on: The primary repression is not sexuality, as Freud said, but our awareness of death. To convince you of this fundamental change, Becker treats you to a rather thorough review of psychoanalysis in order to rearrange it. If you don't like or don't understand psychoanalysis, don't read this book. If you have a love/hate relationship with it (so deeply beautiful, poetic, and philosophical, and yet, so ad-hoc and unscientific), this book will show you more of psychoanalysis's insight and explanatory powers, and its absurdities. It's not having a morbid subject that makes this book depressing; it's its reliance on psychoanalysis. A discipline whose aim, as Becker puts it, is to show that man lives by lying to himself about himself, leaves you depressed, cynical, and pessimistic. Becker relies extensively on Otto Rank (a psychoanalyst with a religious bent who was one of the most trusted and intellectually potent members of Freud's inner circle until he broke away) and the Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard (whom Becker labels as a post-Freudian psychoanalyst even before Freud came along). It shouldn't come as a surprise then that the solution that Becker suggests towards the end of book for ridding man of his vital lie is what he calls a fusion of psychology and religion: The only way that man can face his fate, deal with the inherent misery of his condition, and achieve his heroism, is to give himself to something outside the physical - call it God or whatever you want. A rather disappointing solution, even though he is not talking about any traditional religion. How can we cure ourselves of our vital lie with an illusion? You can rewrite Freud's The Future of an Illusion based on Becker's version of psychoanalysis for a different explanation of why man invented God. Religion can't be of any solace to a mankind who knows his situation vis-à-vis reality. Man, as Becker so chillingly puts it, "has no doubts; there is nothing you can say to sway him, to give him hope or trust. He is a miserable animal whose body decays, who will die, who will pass into dust and oblivion, disappear not only forever in this world but in all possible dimensions of the universe, whose life serves no conceivable purpose, who may as well not have been born." Or, as Camus says in The Fall: "Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful." In the end, the only practical solution might be what most people do (but not everyone can do) and what Kierkegaard called tranquilizing with triviality. Numb yourself with the banalities of life to forget the insignificance of your existence. Go to school, get a job, marry, pay mortgage, raise children... Fret over every little thing you can think of: your promotion at work, the car you drive, the cavities in your teeth, finding love, getting laid, your children's college tuition, the annoying last five pounds that are defying your diet program... Act like any of these actually mattered.

Review # 2 was written on 2010-01-20 00:00:00 Ria Venter [image error]