Becker wants you to know you're going to die. He wants you to realize how terrifying this fact is and that your awareness of it makes your existence uniquely and inescapably tragic among living beings. Becker is the man to show us the right direction, to teach us to acknowledge our condition and to live more authentically. Or so I hoped, as I read. But he just keeps reminding us of the tragedy. For Becker, human life is a sham no matter how we live it. If we think we face the tragedy of life and death with dignity, we delude ourselves because the only possible response to the terror is to repress it; all lives are expressions of that necessity, as he explains:"Neurosis is another word for the total problem of the human condition; it becomes a clinical word when the individual bogs down in the face of the problem--when his heroism is in doubt or becomes self defeating. Men are naturally neurotic and always have been, but at some times they have it easier than at others to mask their true condition." (198)Becker, a PhD. in Anthropology, strongly advocates psychoanalytic theory, specifically the ideas of Otto Rank, who revised Freud and integrated Kierkegaard into psychoanalysis. He believes that, thanks to psychoanalysis, we know much more than has ever been understood before about human psychology, and the ideas compiled in Denial of Death reveal previously unknown truths about ourselves. These pretensions are foreign to me and I find them very hard to believe. However, I have no problem believing that these ideas contain truths--understood differently for millennia, but understood nonetheless--and that they had never been articulated this way before, only because nothing like modern society had ever existed. They had simply never found expression in this unique context.The crux of the problem is that anthropology revolves around the assumption (which I share) that culture does not improve, that, contrary to our ethnocentric tendency, different cultures can only be understood in a relative way. And that goes for modern society and its component institutions like science as well as psychology and psychoanalytic theory. From Becker's inside, emic, perspective these institutions offer an unquestionable improvement over other ways of knowing ourselves. But to an ideal "outside", relative, etic observer, even these institutions can't be elevated in this way.Regrettably, Becker has forsaken any anthropological sensibilities he might have had and insists upon the universality of his ideas (and of psychoanalytic theory in general), completely neglecting the unique conditions of culture and modern human existence. It is clear that, to Becker, culture is only a peripheral concern to psychology's (his true disciplinary affinity) sweeping proclamations about what humans are: conscious beings born unaware of their mortal, animal, "creaturely" basis but absolutely terrified by their discovery of it: a tragic dilemma personified. That would be an apt subtitle to the book.This existential dilemma, though, is a product of a particular historical moment and a cultural context, as William Barrett (despite his flaws) is more than willing to admit in Irrational Man. It is not a discovery, as Becker would have it, but an experience of circumstances! And the modern experience (even in a clinical psychoanalytic setting) is, if anything, less typical of that of humans throughout history. Becker's analysis cannot be properly read as anything more than a systematization of aspects of a specific cultural experience.Becker makes a powerful argument that the inescapable backdrop of human experience is tragic. That backdrop of an inevitable, incomprehensible death may still be perceived in different ways, however: for example, if it is sufficiently "repressed" (in Becker's words), does it matter or not? Existentialists (i.e. Becker, with Kierkegaard) can't imagine that it doesn't. But if there were no modern society to hear the existentialists, would they make a meaningful sound? Certainly not. ( )

One of the more disappointing reads. I have been looking forward to reading this book for a few years. I finally get it and it is a pseudo-scientific work describing Otto Rank's "powerful work" on personality and man's fear of Death as the basis for everything we think feel and do. Full of sweeping generalizations which, in my reading, be-littles the individual. ( )

Tremendous influence on me in my college years. Highly recommended.

Superb. Explains how we are all animals responding to fear. Much of our behavior can be traced to our animal instincts. ( )

This book won the 1974 Pulitzer Prize. Becker's theme is that all our thinking patterns and all our social structures are designed to shield us from knowledge of death. The basic motivation for human behavior is the need to control our basic anxiety, to deny the terror of death. The most basic anxiety is not sexuality or aggression but the terror produced in an animal that has attained self-awareness and knows that it will die. Trapped in an existential nightmare, mankind has no choice but to make up illusions to distract us from the unthinkable truth.