The Denial of Death

Currently reading.

Heroism as a response to death

Becker begins from the idea that heroism is central to human life but psychologically underappreciated. Within a theory organized around the fear of death, heroic sacrifice is initially puzzling: people sometimes willingly expose themselves to death for another person, a group, or an ideal.

His answer is that heroic systems let a mortal individual participate in something larger and more durable than the self. An ideal can supply significance and symbolic transcendence even when the ideal itself is misguided. Becker thinks modern society faces a crisis of heroism: the need for significance remains while shared and credible outlets for heroic striving have become weaker and more fragmented.

Becker’s treatment of Freud

I especially like Becker’s treatment of Freud. It is admiring without becoming uncritical. Becker preserves Freud’s major insight that respectable adult life rests heavily on repression, rationalization, dependency, and attempts to manage bodily impulses. His criticism is that Freud often identifies the wrong deepest mechanism: sexuality is frightening not merely because it is sexual, but because it reminds us that we are embodied animals—vulnerable, dependent, finite, decaying, and mortal.

This lets Becker reinterpret several Freudian ideas:

• Sexual repression becomes, at a deeper level, repression of creatureliness and mortality.
• Castration anxiety becomes fear of vulnerability, limitation, and death.
• The Oedipal struggle becomes partly a struggle against dependence and the child’s wish to become a self-sufficient source of power.
• Neurosis can be understood as a failed or overly restrictive symbolic-immortality project.

Becker also applies the analysis to Freud himself. Freud could expose other people’s immortality projects while remaining invested in his own: psychoanalysis, intellectual heroism, and the identity of the solitary truth-teller. This is less an accusation of hypocrisy than a demonstration that nobody—including the theorist of repression—stands outside the need for symbolic significance.

A useful summary: Freud discovered the continent, but Becker thinks he drew parts of the map incorrectly.