a-s-d's Full Review: Ernest Becker - The Denial of Death
The terror of mortality and the avoidance of this reality is an unconscious and, until recently, largely unexamined element of human psychology and cultural meaning. This knowledge does not necessarily correspond to a belief in personal oblivion; but despite belief that "death is not the end" direct confrontation with death is avoided by many people - death is taboo. The psychologist Robert Kastenbaum noted this avoidance even in the field of psychology: "Number of editions of the "Annual Review of Psychology" before the first review of death-related topics: 27. Of the 1,128,000 words in the "Handbook of General Psychology", 166 are devoted to death-related topics. This is .0001% of the total coverage... No death mention occurs under such major sections as The Human Organism, Perception, Learning, Language, Thought and Intelligence or Personality." (Kastenbaum, “The Psychology of Death” 1992, p58).
According to psychologist and thanatologist Ernest Becker’s book "Denial of Death" (DoD) - written 20 years before Kastenbaum’s work - this denial of death is mainly informed by the symbolization of our childhood fears. These fears become any number of representations that mask their origins. Symbolization is a mystifying process: one thing - unconsciously - comes to stand for another thing, but we take the second thing as the true object and have no idea we have fooled ourselves. Those infantile fears become components of transference: they are disguised and projected upon the present, which means people do not understand what or why they really fear.
In DoD, Becker describes the existential anxieties that mask deeper psychological phenomena, undermining any conscious and subjective knowledge of what we fear. Part of this symbolizing process involves the "self" that forms and is formed to (unconsciously) deny physical weakness, decay, horror of creatureliness, and death. For Becker, fear of death is more than the loss of the symbolic self – it is a fear of death-in-life, or being reduced in self-esteem, in ones own sense of power and meaningfulness.
Our natural survival instincts and animal sense of separation anxiety joined with the symbolization of infantile fears and the childhood knowledge of mortality means that in seriously thinking about death we can feel terrified by it. This terror is characterized by the Becker as death anxiety.
Death anxiety encapsulates Becker's overall theory of how the awareness of death affects the psychology and culture of the living. For Becker, the unbearable terror of death that self-aware mortal beings would normally experience in understanding death is "managed by the construction and maintenance of cultural worldviews: humanly constructed beliefs about the nature of reality that infuse individuals with a sense that they are persons of value in a world of meaning, different than and superior to corporeal and mortal nature, and thus capable of transcending the natural boundaries of time and space, and in so doing, elude death" (Pyszczynski et al. In the Wake of 9/11: The Psychology of Terror 2003 p27).
But, Becker says, it is not enough to simply maintain a world-view - an individual must succeed within it also. The most obvious result of success is the feeling of self-esteem. Esteem is assigned to individuals as a result of success within the culture by attaining expected goals, structuring living around cultural values, upholding the prescribed world-view, and so forth. Each group member has a social memory and access to recording media (orally transmitted stories, writings and pictures, rites of passage, etc.) thus documenting and interpreting individual lives in a lasting way, allowing a group to praise or criticize the lives of individual members. Esteem provides an individual with a sense of success and value within a system of consensual meaning, which is essential to individual health and psychological well-being.
These group meanings are not experienced as ways of suppressing death anxiety, but have a mundane, real-life meaning for people who accept and live them. Because cultural meaning is very important for anxiety-reduction, investment in particular world-views can be great. As a result, group values are often asserted to the detriment of outsiders whose incommensurable world-views offer the threat of contradiction and critique. If a person's method of controlling and understanding existence is shown to be flawed, then a pointless life and meaningless death threatens the individual with anguish, powerlessness and finitude.
This is why cultural meanings and beliefs are defended by the members who sustain them. As Becker put it: "No wonder men go into a rage over fine points of belief: if your adversary wins the argument about truth, you die. Your immortality system has been shown to be fallible, your life becomes fallible." (Becker, "Escape From Evil" 1975, p64). The personal investment that individuals may make in their group's cultural values can be so intense that they are willing to sacrifice their lives to preserve the world-view that sustains their meaning in life. Deaths with self-sacrificial meanings can be quite ironic. The meaning which assuaged death-anxiety leads to an embrace of death, usually with the understanding that such a death in not final but leads to an afterlife and posthumous recognition; religious martyrs and military suicide missions serve as good examples.
If Becker has taught us anything by writing so extensively on transference, the ubiquity of defense mechanisms, "vital lies" and character armor, the normalcy of neurosis, and our innumerable illusions, it is that our conscious sense of what we see and feel is unreliable. Becker has demolished the reliability of subjectivity.
This should be a lesson to those who keep insisting that their observations and experience have proven their perceptions or convictions, that they are proof of anything other than their own fantasies. Becker's challenge is to discern what "reality" we could ever know once we realize how much that "reality" is ineluctably illusory, projection, transference, etc.
Winner of the Pulitzer prize in 1974 and the culmination of a life s work, The Denial of Death is Ernest Becker s brilliant and impassioned answer to ...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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