Becker, Ernest (1973). The Denial of Death. New York: Free Press.

Upon reading Professor Ernest Becker’s book, the Denial of Death, I had an urge to write a book review of it. But how does one do justice to a book that essentially provided thorough review and critique of psychoanalysis, from Freud to Adler, Jung, Fromm, Horney, Rank, and other notable psychoanalysts? No, it is not possible to just do a mere review of this book. What I am going to do is begin wherever I can and write my thoughts on the book.

Let me begin by talking about his understanding of the human personality. He seems to believe that each human child, generally, during his first three years on planet earth has experienced his body and society long enough to have adapted to them. Something in the human child, what it is, we do not know, but whatever it is, it is intelligent adapts to the human environment.

Upon birth in the human body, life in it attempts to adapt to the exigencies of life in that specific body and society. Alfred Adler, who I thought was a better psychoanalyst than Sigmund Freud, and Otto Rank said that the human child experiences life in body as traumatic, depowering, and confusing.

In body the child feels powerless and helpless. He must depend on his parents, especially his mother to survive. Adler said that the human child feels inferior and compensates with pursuit of imaginary sense of powerfulness and superiority. Herein begins neurosis.

The neurotic, who is every human child in degrees, attempts to make sense of his depowering and senseless world. Neurosis is less poignant in healthy, normal children but exaggerated in neurotic children for those inherited a more problematic body that makes them feel living in body extremely problematic, hence they struggle for impossible power to make them feel efficacious.

Becker takes an existential approach to the formation of the self; he is well read on Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Soren Kierkegaard, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Frederic Nietzsche, Karl Jasper, Martin Heidegger, Rollo May, Reginald D. Laing, Abraham Maslow and the other acclaimed existential philosophers, psychologists, and writers.

The human child, from his empirical, phenomenological experience, posits a sense of self, the self-concept during his first five years on earth. The self-concept has a self-image. Once you posit a self-concept something in you, what we do not know, translates it to a self-image, a self in pictorial form. Each of us has a self-concept and a self-self-image.

Each human child, if you prefer to go the behaviorist path (see BF. Skinner, Watson, Pavlov, and the other psychologists who would like to believe that behavior is learned and not innate), from the moment of his birth in the human body (perhaps before he was even born, while in his mother’s womb), behaves in such a manner, made possible by his body and social milieu, that he adapts to his world.

Personality is generally defined as the individual’s habitual pattern of behaving in his effort to adapt to his physical and social world.

By the time a child begins school at age six, generally, a pattern of behavior is discernable in him. For our present purposes, every human child learns a pattern of behaving, a pattern that everything in his physical and social life positively reinforces as what enables him to survive given his body and society (I have a biosocial approach to psychology).

Look inside you. What do you see? You see that you have a sense of self. To be a human being is to have a sense of self, a self apart from other selves. Each of us has a separated self-concept, self-image, and personality.

Where did that sense of self come from? I do not know, and you probably do not know; what I do know is that I do not recall having a sense of self until between age three and five; I suspect that the same applies to all people.

Building on psychoanalysis, Becker would like us to accept that the sense of self we have is made up in this lifetime, that it does not preexist the human birth, what Otto Rank called the birth of tragedy; the exigencies of our situation, the nature of our bodies and its problems and social upbringing dispose us to, in George Kelly’s terms, construct self-concepts. The self-concept, the self-image, the human personality is formulation by each child on how he plans to live in this world.

Because the self-concept is not innate and real it is defended; defense makes it seem real in the defending individual’s eyes.

Psychoanalysts talked about ego defense mechanisms; they are repression, suppression, denial, displacement, projection, rationalization, sublimation, reaction-formation, minimization, fantasy, avoidance, fear, anger, pride, shame, guilt and so on (if you do not understand them, please google them, and read them up); we employ them to defend our self-constructs.

The human child, and, later, the human adult posits a self-concept that for some reasons he thinks would enable him to adapt to the exigencies of his world and then uses the ego defenses to defend them; if he defends them, they seem real to him, even though they were merely conjured out from his living in body and society.

Becker brilliantly points out that what we call our character, personality is made up ideas of who we wish to be that we employ the ego defense mechanisms to defend. He then added existential philosophy to his analysis.

If you recall from reading, say, Jean Paul Sartre or Albert Camus, you know that existentialist thinkers posit that we live utterly meaningless and pointless existence. We are absurd animals.

A CURSORY LOOK AT ORIENTAL RELIGIONS

Is it true that if we let go of our false, neurotic and or psychotic selves and the defenses that maintain them, we would confront existential void and panic?

Question: who is confronting that void? Who is experiencing that dread, that fear and anxiety and depression from having lost the self that existentialists talk a lot about?

Who, Dr. Becker, experiences all the gory states that you, a wordsmith (he won the Pulitzer award for his book, the denial of death), that you so excellently talked about? You are an excellent writer, there is no doubt about that, but what you did not answer is who is the self that feels fear of nothingness. If there is no self, nothingness would not scare one.

Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Zen, and other Oriental religions encourage people to give up their conscious selves, their sense of who they are, for those are, as Becker noted, false. What western existentialists dread, nothingness, oriental religionists welcome!

Orientals practice meditation to get rid of the neurotic and psychotic false self. They say that if we can accept the inner void that we are afraid of that we would know who is doing the fearing.

Atman, a part of Brahman, a son of God, separated from Brahman, God and went to sleep and dreams that he is Ahankara, individuated ego in body; in truth he is jivatman, a part of God and in God is eternal, permanent, and changeless.

The son of God deludes his self with his ego self-concept, self-image, and human personality. He deludes his self with the belief that he lives in body, space, and time. If he has the courage to let go of these illusions, he will not die out, but, instead, he will awaken from the dream of forgetting his real self, Atman and pretending to be ahankara, ego.

Thus, instead of the dread of nothingness that existentialists tell us await us when we let go of our neurotic and psychotic selves, when we let go of our conscious ego selves, Hinduism tell us that we shall first emerge in a place of light forms (astral world) and ultimately experience formless Bramaloca, heaven, the state of one shared self, God and all his sons in a formless self.

Oriental religions ask us to give up our false, separated egos and our attachment to bodies, space and time and promise us a spiritual world of light forms (astral world) and formless world (heaven).

Are Oriental religions correct? If I said yes and you have not experienced union with God, who is telling who lies? One should only accept what one has experienced.

Let me just say that the existential nothingness that Sartre, Camus, and Jasper and Heidegger told us is not the only possible outcome of letting go of the false self.

The alternative of spiritual selves could be true? We ought to go find out whether they are true and do so through the scientific method, not through some religious superstitions and their razmataz belief structures.

I do not accept anything on faith and belief; I accept only what I can verify; I accept the scientific method (see Karl Popper on the scientific method).

NORMALCY, NEUROSIS AND PSYCHOSIS

I wish to be rich and work for it = normalcy

I wish to be rich but merely dream about it = neurosis

I wish to be fantastically wealthy but satisfy myself by having it in my mind only=psychosis

PERSONALITIES ARE LIES

Our characters, self-concepts, self-images, personalities are personas, masks, lies; they are masks we put on and present to each other as who we are but under the masks, we are something different. We are not what we think that we are; what we think that we are, are man-made, nonexistent selves that we collude with each other to have to prevent us from having the awareness of our nothingness.