PTypes - Ernest Becker links

Amazon.com: The DENIAL OF DEATH: Books: Ernest Becker
Countless times Becker makes the point that the way most people live with these paradoxes is a "lie in the face of reality." That is, starting from childhood most people use all kinds of repressions to pretend that they aren't going to die. Much of society is based on symbolic systems for people to feel heroic, because when we achieve heroism we feel that we have transcended our mortality. Much of this heroism is in fact false, even disempowering, because for example most pointedly with entertainers and athletes we often in fact project our need for heroism onto them. In psychology this is called transference, which manifests itself in group psychology and other ways that Becker thoroughly covers.
http://www.amazon.com/
Tags: search for glory, idealized self, ego ideal

The Sinner and the Fool
Commenting on some themes in Ernest Becker's Denial of Death, Robert Roberts adds that the pride project in human life-the attempt to become our own first cause-is carried on by people who are riven with the knowledge that though they may be gods, transcendent above the rest of creation, they are also worms and food for worms. We live with "the dreadful contradiction lying drugged and groggy in our bosoms: the need to be heroes and the fact of being worms."
http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9410/plant.html

The Ernest Becker Foundation
Ernest Becker grasped the insight that a primary motive of mental life is the denial of death. The mechanism for this denial is the construction of a fictional, tragic-heroic self which is the center of our lies, delusions and immortality projects. - Ernest Becker Foundation Newsletter: April 2000.
Discussion (listserv) - Daniel Liechty, List Serve Editor.
http://faculty.washington.edu/nelgee/

Kagan notes on Ernest Becker's Birth and Death of Meaning
For a fairly current and extended interpretation and evaluation of Becker's work, see my Educating Heroes: The Implications of Ernest Becker's Depth Psychology of Heroism for Philosophy of Education
http://web.lemoyne.edu/~kagan/eb201h0.htm

Growing Up Rugged: Fritz Perls and Gestalt Therapy - Ernest Becker
The following talk -- which both summarizes Gestalt therapy and sets forth Becker's own existential perspectives -- was given at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, on November 13, 1970...
http://www.gestalt.org/becker.htm

Mental Health Net - PNI: Volume 2, Issue 4
THE LEGACY OF ERNEST BECKER: PART I - Ron Leifer, M.D.
Ernest Becker died on March 6, 1974 at the age of forty nine in Vancouver, British Columbia, an American intellectual in exile. He had been fired from three American universities and resigned in protest from one. Two months after he died, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction for "The Denial of Death" (Becker, 1973).
http://web.archive.org/web/20010620042220/
http://mentalhelp.net/pni/pni24c.htm

Mental Health Net - PNI: Volume 2, Issue 4
THE LEGACY OF ERNEST BECKER: PART II - Ron Leifer, M.D.
Ernest criticized the new empiricists for their narrow, trivial, meaningless pursuit of facts, separate from any consideration of values. He called them "number mumblers." The empiricists in turn, stung by Becker's criticisms, called him a fuzzy-minded bleeding heart, a poet, a philosopher, a speculator in ideas, a weaver of myths, a provocateur.
http://web.archive.org/web/20010820180617/
http://mentalhelp.net/pni/pni24d.htm

The nonduality of Life and death: A Buddhist view of repression
Becker builds on a perceptive remark by William James: "mankind's common instinct for reality...has always held the world to be essentially a theater for heroism." Our natural narcissism and need for self-esteem mean that each of us needs to feel that we are of special value, "first in the universe." Heroism is how we justify that need to count more than anyone or anything else.
http://ccbs.ntu.edu.tw/FULLTEXT/JR-PHIL/davloy.htm

Buddhism and Money:
According to Becker, "everything that man does in his symbolic world is an attempt to deny and overcome his grotesque fate. He literally drives himself into a blind obliviousness with social games, psychological tricks, personal preoccupations so far removed from the reality of his situation that they are forms of madness." Even our character-traits are an example of this, because they provide an automatic response to situations.
http://ccbs.ntu.edu.tw/FULLTEXT/JR-ENG/loy12.htm

Ronald Leifer, M.D.
"The Psychiatric Repression of Thomas Szasz: Its Social and Political Significance."
Becker wrote the first edition of The Birth and Death of Meaning, in which he attempted to integrate psychoanalytic and anthropological concepts of human personality development. Next, he wrote a potentially seminal book which, tragically, has been widely ignored by psychiatrists, The Revolution in Psychiatry. In this book, Becker adopts the eclectic spirit at Syracuse and the spirit of Szasz's critique of the medical model by initiating a project for the development of a nonmedical, interdisciplinary view of such alleged mental illnesses as schizophrenia and depression. I recommend this book highly to those interested in a fresh and non- reductionistic view of depression and schizophrenia.
http://www.szasz.com/leifer.html

The Birth Scene: Otto Rank Revival
Rank's original writings, be forewarned, are notoriously difficult. Rollo May (1950/1977) cautioned that Rank's terminology and dualistic mode of thought are "uncongenial" (p. 132), while Ernest Becker (1973) characterized Rank's work as a confusion of insights, so rich and diffuse that "he is almost inaccessible to the general reader" (p. xii).
http://www.birthpsychology.com/healing/review2.html

Bericht über das 1. Symposium zur Thanatologie
Becker argued, that these sophisticated human intellectual capacities created a unique problem for our species : because of our highly developed intelligence, we humans are forced to be aware, that we have to die some day, that the only truly inevitable thing in life is that life will end. The only thing we can really be sure of is that our most basic instinct for self-preservation and continued life will inevitably be thwarted, will inevitably be frustrated.
http://www.uni-mainz.de/Organisationen/thanatologie/Literatur/heft1.html

DEATH_GUI
"Reading Guide:Denial of Death, Ernest Becker."
2. Explain how narcissism is related to heroism. How does sibling rivalry illustrate this relationship, and express humanity's tragic destiny?
http://www.puc.edu/Faculty/Aubyn_Fulton/fulton/courses/personality/DEATH_GUI.htm

personality_syllabus_fall97
"Psychology of Personality: Fall 1999."
REQUIRED TEXTS:
A. The Freud Reader. Edited by Peter Gay. Norton, 1989.
B. Friedman & Schustack. Personality: Classic Theories & Modern Research. Allyn & Bacon, 1999.
C. Becker, Ernest. The Denial Of Death. Free Press, 1973.
D. Beck, A., Freeman, A. et. al. Cognitive Therapy of Personality Disorders. Guilford Press, 1990.
http://www.puc.edu/Faculty/Aubyn_Fulton/fulton/courses/personality/

JC Smith: The Quadrant of Collective Defense Mechanisms
"Sexuality, Death, and Repression"
Jung, Rank, and Becker are directly or indirectly critical of Freud in that they believe that he overemphasized the importance of sexuality and underemphasized the role that the fear of death plays in repression and neurosis. Becker even goes so far as to argue that this reverse emphasis stems from Freud's repression of his own fear of death.
http://web.archive.org/web/20010222025757/
http://flair.law.ubc.ca/jcsmith/logos/psyche/nfsoch09.html

Dr. Otto Rank: "Son" of Freud, Champion of Will, Philosopher of Helping
Introducing Otto Rank, psychologist, disciple and critic of Freud; feminist, pioneer of will therapy, brief therapy, object relations; philosopher of art, education, history and religion.
http://www.ottorank.com/

Otto Rank: Chronology and Biography
Rank (Rosenfeld) Otto (1884-1939), psychologist and psychoanalyst, first Secretary of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, member of Freud's Committee, or "Ring" of 7 and his closest associate (1906-1925).
http://web.archive.org/web/20030215142710/
http://www.ottorank.com/chronol.htm

Fame - 99.11 (Part Three)
The daughter of imminent psychoanalyst Erik Erikson discusses why he strove for fame.
Ernest Becker wrote, in The Denial of Death (1973),

AVOIDING THE VOID:
The Lack of Self in Psychotherapy and Buddhism by David R. Loy
Existential psychologists such as Ernest Becker and Irvin Yalom believe that our primary repression is not sexual wishes, as Freud believed, but the awareness that we are going to die.
http://ccbs.ntu.edu.tw/FULLTEXT/JR-ENG/loy8.htm

NYCH: Culturefront Online
Celebrity According to Woody By Glen O. Gabbard and Krin Gabbard
As Ernest Becker has written, the certainty of extinction leads people to invent various immortality strategies. Religion is one. The heroic quest is another. Humans yearn for cosmic significance, to “be somebody,” or to find heroes and heroines who will be remembered long after they are gone.
http://web.archive.org/web/20020208215958/
http://www.culturefront.org/culturefront/magazine/99/fall/article_4.html

Ernest Becker?
Has anyone read "Denial of Death"? If so, I'd love to hear from you! I'll be at the reunion - hope to see everyone there!
http://wcp.muohio.edu/alumni/wwwboard/messages/22.html

Denial of Death by Ernest Becker
[very short] Review and ordering information for the Denial of Death by Ernest Becker
http://www.selfknowledge.org/resources/bookreviews/denialofdeath.htm

becker
Post-Traumatic Culture and Ernest Becker
Post-Traumatic Culture follows Otto Rank and Ernest Becker, who maintain that we cope with the threat of annihilation and weakness by developing cultural systems that support a conviction of immortality and turn anxiety into a source of energizing heroic values.
http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~kfarrell/becker.htm

Web Version of Volume II Issue 2
The New Tort of Organ Conversion
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) won the Pulitzer Prize in 1974 for his "first mature work" The Denial of Death (New York: The Free Press 1973). Becker was a social psychologist and cultural anthropologist, but some see him as a prophet. The relevance of Ernest Becker to this paper will become clear after laying out his main hypotheses on human existence:
http://web.archive.org/web/20010820161102/
http://www.law.washington.edu/Docket/Docketv2i2/page2.html

Reading Ernest Becker: His Contribution to Spiritual, Pastoral and Psychosocial Counseling - Abstract by Daniel Liechty
During a short but productive literary and academic career, cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker (1924-1974) built on the Freudian model of personality structure. Increasingly dissatisfied with the 19th century model of biology which permeates the Freudian model, Becker moved toward a view of human psychological dynamics in which a necessary existential/symbolic reaction to death and mortality replaced sexual and aggressive instincts as the deepest level of mental, emotional and spiritual motivation. This article outlines Becker's view and offers tentative suggestions for its application in spiritual, pastoral and psychological counseling practice.
http://130.159.187.223/archive/journals/ajpc/v01n0298.htm#5reading

syllabus
"INDV 101: THE STRUCTURE OF MIND AND BEHAVIOR"
My specific theoretical orientation is an existential psychodynamic one, influenced heavily by the writings of Ernest Becker, who in turn was influenced by many earlier scholars, most notably, Sigmund Freud, Otto Rank, Soren Kierkegaard, and Norman Brown. This perspective proposes that a driving concern of humans is to conceive of themselves as significant and that cultures and individuals work hard to create and sustain belief systems that serve this need.
http://www.u.arizona.edu/ic/indv101/greenberg/syllabus.htm

Bill Wood's Words and Ideas Page
For ages, when philosophers talked about the core of man they referred to it as his 'essence,' something fixed in his nature, deep down, some special quality or substance. But nothing like it was ever found; man's peculiarity remained a dilemma. The reason it was never found, as Erich Fromm put it in an excellent discussion, was that there was no essence, that the essence of man is really his paradoxical nature, the fact that he is half animal and half symbolic...
http://www.billwood.com/welcome/words/#becker

lectset2
LECTURE SET 2: THE BIRTH AND DEATH OF MEANING
http://www.u.arizona.edu/ic/indv101/greenberg/lectset2.htm

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Winter 2000: Week 2 Lecture Notes
http://www.fmdc.calpoly.edu/libarts/nschultz/310/Lectures/Lectures02.html

Voodoo Pedagogics
Article on motorcycle riding schools uses the folllowing Becker qoute as an epigraph:
For man, maximum excitement is the confrontation of death and the skillful defiance of it . . .
http://web.archive.org/web/19991129010654/
http://207.168.125.101/index/features/Voodoo.htm

Other Voices - Contents
Quotes
On the one hand the creature is impelled by a powerful desire to identify with the cosmic process, to merge himself with the rest of nature. On the other hand he wants to be unique, to stand out as something different and apart.
http://www.quantumage.org/ovquotes.htm

Avant Net
Ernest Becker felt that evil finds its driving force in man's paradoxical nature: "in the flesh and doomed with it, out of the flesh and in the world of symbols and trying to continue on heavenly flight"
http://www.avant.net/edu/ordo.html

General Theory of Religion
"Ernest Becker in 'The Denial of Death' [2] makes a compelling contribution to our understanding and experience of henotheistic faith. Becker, whose book (and whose life) struggled with death as the central power with which we must deal, pointed out that our most heroic human projects are likely to be devoted to the effort to deny death its victory.
http://web.archive.org/web/20021127095942/
http://world.std.com/~awolpert/gtr342.html

!Death in Life, Life in Death
But the defenses we fashion against truth also bind us, they enslave us even further because they support the lie we have fashioned. So we strain and struggle even more, but the irony is that we do this straining uncritically, and, says Ernest Becker, we only increase our drivenness, and give to our struggle a second-hand quality because we are unconscious of our motives.
http://web.archive.org/web/20010725011454/
http://www.unitytemple.org/sermons/deathlif.htm

Immortality Hunger: Our Most Poignant Sin
Moreover, the sociologist and anthropologist, Ernest Becker, once suggested that much of human evil and destructiveness came from this "striving for cultural immortality." "Fear of death, .... and attempts to deny one's mortality:" in these, suggested Becker, are found the roots of that unrest which "still drives us up the slope"
http://web.archive.org/web/20011111221004/
http://www.eaglenet.com/rkelley/imm_hngr.htm

Alven Neiman / THE ONE AND THE MANY IN POLITICS AND EDUCATION
The anthropologist Ernest Becker, in his The Denial of Death discusses two ‘ontological motives’, two primordial urges that exist in creatures that know themselves to be created, i.e. dependent upon powers outside of themselves. On the one hand, every child, according to Becker, instinctively strives “…to be unique, to stand out as something different and apart.” On the other, each of us seems compelled, perhaps in response to the feeling of isolation evoked by our striving for uniqueness, to “…identify with the cosmic process, to merge oneself with the rest of nature.”
http://www.ed.uiuc.edu/EPS/PES-Yearbook/93_docs/NEIMAN.HTM

Ideals
Practical Moral Philosophy for Lawyers
Becker's early hope that psychology, even a distinctly spiritual psychology, would serve to create a new reality and "fashion a new, real world," was later found to be misplaced. [The Denial of Death, at 268-276]
http://www.wvu.edu/~lawfac/jelkins/fragments/ideals.html

Welcome to the Home Page of Stephen W. Martin
Author of Decomposing Modernity: Ernest Becker's Images of humanity at the end of an age.
A careful reading of the social philosophy of a 1960s cultural critic, noted for his Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Denial of Death, who both heralded the promise of modernity and represented a foretaste of its end.
http://www.uct.ac.za/depts/ricsa/about/staffpgs/s_martin.htm

Kierkegaard, Hitler, Stalin
In relation to Kierkegaard's thought, Ernest Becker's theory of scapegoating is interesting but seriously flawed. In The Denial of Death and Escape from Evil Becker tries unsuccessfully to force Kierkegaard's thought into the mold of his own theory.[17] He argues that the "mainspring of human behavior" is the fear of death, and he seeks to explain all human culture on this basis.
http://libnt2.lib.tcu.edu/staff/bellinger/stolaf.htm

Biospirituality as the Path to Fulfillment
Becker argues that a principle reason that people crave "success" is to gain a sense of immortality, which may occur in at least threeways. One may hope to achieve a kind of immortality by being remembered as a "valuable person" by one's family and community. Also, one may feel that "success" indicates that one is, or at least should be, favored by the Divine, leading to the death-denying conclusion that "surely someone as important as I will never permanently die." Finally, many cultures appear timeless and permanent, transcending time and the deaths of individuals. Living according to traditions gives one a sense that one's own life is part of an external process.
http://www.vegsource.com/biospirituality/essay.html

ATTITUDES TOWARD DEATH
The most important element in the development of attitudes toward death is the perception of what it is to be a person. Most people in the West today believe that the person is unique, what Ernest Becker refers to as "the ache of cosmic specialness."
http://www.uwo.ca/kings/academic_programs/centres/deathed/related-attitudes.html

History
http://web.archive.org/web/20000915160014/
http://www.bereavement.org/history.htm

Consciousness and Death
Certainly the fear of death has been one of the greatest driving forces in the history of thought and in the formation of the character of civilization, and yet it is under-acknowledged. The great book on the subject, The Denial of Death, by Ernest Becker (1973), deserves a reconsideration. Even as the psychoanalytic tradition seems to be on the wane, this book holds up remarkably well.
http://www.zynet.co.uk/imprint/Skeleton.htm

Esoteric Anthropology in Perennial Philosophy
Ernest Becker in his later works, especially The Denial of Death,[16] makes an extraordinarily powerful analysis which links our attachment to our cultural hero systems, i.e., our consensus realities, to our effort to mask the fear of dying experience by our threatened egos. He describes the dynamics of those gross obsessional neuroses which he believes constitute the totality of our character structures and cultures.
http://web.archive.org/web/20020208222312/
http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/gthursby/pub/devol.htm

Recovery
The power of denial is explicit in Ernest Becker's psychological analysis of the human condition entitled The Denial of Death (Becker, 1973, p179) where he writes: "We call the refusal of reality "normal" because it doesn't occasion any visible problems."
http://www.granby.net/~d_lag/addict.htm

Psychology of Religion - About.com
Becker and Transcendence
A paper discussing Ernest Becker with the title "Meaning beyond Heroic Illusions? --Transcendence in Everyday Life.
Becker: The Denial of Death
A lecture on Ernest Becker by Glenn Hughes, Ph.D. (1998).
http://psychology.about.com/cs/relig/index.htm

Salon: Irvin Yalom
A matter of life and death
We simply put it out of mind by immersing ourselves in what Becker calls "immortality projects," or by using other techniques to deny our creature-deaths, like the idea of a supreme "ultimate rescuer" and the idea of "specialness," that somehow you yourself are immune to natural biological law. This often translates into some kind of belief in the supernatural, a para-reality in us that is going to transcend reality as it is.
http://www.salon.com/weekly/yalom960805.html

SSU's Faculty Web Site [Convocation Speech]
When we appreciate how natural it is for man to strive to be a hero, how deeply it goes in his evolutionary and organismic constitution, how openly he shows it as a child, then it is all the more curious how ignorant most of us are, consciously, of what we really want and need . . . . in modern times the heroic seems too big for us, or we too small for it.
http://www.ssu.edu/Faculty/ConvocationSpeech.html

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