DenialOfDeath

The Denial of Death (Earnest Becker)

  • Interesting found it too speculative in places.
  • Seemed to be speaking to very specific field in places (eg: why do I /should I care what Freud was like as a person?)
  • Places great faith (with out justification) in psychoanalysis.
  • The man of knowledge in our time has a burden he never imaged, the overproduction of truth that cannot be consumed. Use to believe that truth was slim and elusive and once we found it our troubles would be over. Now we are choking in truth.
  • Knowledge is in a state of useless overproduction. Insignificant fragments are magnified out of proportion, while major and historical insights lie around begging for attention.
  • The experts give us manageable thrills – if they thrill us at all.
  • Narcissism is what keeps men marching into point blank cannon fire in wars.
  • Civilized society is a hopeful belief and protest that science and and goods "make men count" for mare than any other animal. In this sense, everything that man does is religious and heroic and yet in danger of being fictitious and fallible.
  • The crisis of modern society is that the youth no longer feel heroic in the plan for action that culture has set up
  • Children have no knowledge of death until 3-5
  • From the child of 5 to myself is but a step, but from the newborn baby to the child of 5 is an appalling distance.
  • Nothing like the essence of man has been found.
  • Mans self-consciousness makes man a small god in nature, yet at the same time man is a worm and food for worms. This duality is a painful contradiction. Lower animal spared this contradiction. (Q: Are we spared other painful contradictions from our limited knowledge/being ?
  • We are gods with anuses
  • The basic insight of psychology for all time: Man is a union of opposites, of self-consciousness and physical body.
  • Most people tranquilize themselves in the trivial.
  • Man has an inner symbolic self which signifies certain freedom, but he is bound by a finite body which limits that freedom.
  • The self must be destroyed, brought down to nothing, in order for self-transcendence to begin. Then the self can begin to relate to powers beyond itself.
  • Man is the only organism in nature fated to puzzle out what it actually means to feel "right"
  • The most remarkable achievement in the Christian world picture: anyone can be a secure hero simply by taking a step back from the world into another dimension of things: heaven.
  • Nature conquers death not by creating eternal organisms but by making it possible for ephemeral ones to procreate.
  • As soon as a man lifts his nose from the ground and starts sniffing at eternal problems like life and death… he is in trouble. Most men spare themselves this trouble by keeping their minds on the small problems of their lives just as society maps these problems out for them.
  • All throughout history it is the "normal, average men" who, like locusts, have laid waste to the world in order to forget themselves.
  • Salpetrice mental hospital got cleared out at the time of the French Revolution. All the neurotics found a ready-made donor of self-transcending action and heroic identity.
  • The promise of Psychology was that it would usher in the era of happiness of man, by showing him how things worked, how one things causes another. Then all man had to do was take possession of these and his happiness would be assured.
  • All the analysis in the world doesn't allow a person to find out "who he is" or why he is here on earth, why he has to die, how he should live. It is when psychology pretends to do this (when it pretends to offer itself as full explanation for human unhappiness) that it becomes a fraud.
  • Religion is "just as good a psychology" as the psychology that pretended to replace it.
  • Modern man needs someone to turn to for spiritual dependence, as God is unfashionable in steps the therapist.
  • Claim: after the most exhaustive psychology quest, psychology gives way to theology
  • (DFW echos) It is one thing to image this (theological) cure, but it is quite another thing to "prescribe" it to modern man. How hollow it must ring in his ears.
  • Freud: All cultural devices are self-hypnotic contrivances - from cars to moon rockets - ways that a surely limited animal can fascinate himself in an attempt to transcend reality.
  • The most one can achieve is a certain relaxedness an openness to experience that makes him less of a driven burden on others.
  • When evolution gave man a self an inner symbolic world of experience, it split him in two, gave him added burden. This burden seems the price that had to be paid in order to attain more life, experience and self-consciousness.
  • The closing pages of this book are a realistic and regretful admission that the ego has to spread itself beyond the pleasures of the body in order for men to be men.

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