PTypes’ "Ernest Becker" links (page two)

reldec [the page cannot be found]
Religious language and self-deception
Ernest Becker, following Norman Brown, said that "the orientation of men has to be always… grounded in healthy repressions, and toward explicit immortal-ideologies, myths of heroic transcendence."
http://www.stanford.edu/~campano/reldec.htm

Birth, Death and Organic Energy by Dnaiel Miller, Ph.D.
His book does show how the attempt to deny the facts of death leads man into a denial of life as well. Nevertheless, Becker doesn't seem to find the acceptance of death to be a road that leads to the enhancement of life. His perceptions lead him to think that accepting death leads to an awareness of helplessness to which there is no solution.
http://primal-page.com/birth-death.htm

http://www.people.virginia.edu/~jdh6n/misra.html
Body, Psyche, and Culture: The Relationship Between Disgust and Morality.
Becker's thesis is that the fear of death and insignificance is the greatest fear haunting humans. Human culture and heroism are, in large measure, attempts to deny or repress the fear that, ultimately, human life is pointless and brief.
http://www.people.virginia.edu/~jdh6n/misra.html

JUDICIAL BEDDING PART II [the page cannot be found]
Last week I editorialized that folks should sue judges when they bounce on their beds uninvited. There I addressed jurisdiction. This week my focus is judicial pathology: That which compels judges to jump on folks' beds uninvited. Becker helps frame this discussion.
http://www.virginialaw.org/archives/jan00/24jan00.html

Chapter 1
The Complexity of Human Life
Ernest Becker won a Pulitzer for his book The Denial of Death. In this book he shows how the denial of our death has guided the growth of civilization and culture, how it causes war, how it has produced obsession over money, how it ruins our chances for health and fulfillment. The denial of death develops because on the deepest levels of our being we see ourselves, to put it crudely, as "the god who shits."
http://www.city-net.com/~alimhaq/text/metaxischapter1.htm

Salon: Death: A Reading List
"The Denial of Death," Ernest Becker. In this marvelously readable and magisterially persuasive reinterpretation of the work of Otto Rank, Becker argues that our repression of the knowledge of our own mortality is the fundamental problem of human psychology. You can disagree with him, but you must read him. --SR
http://www.salon.com/weekly/list960805.html

Creativity as a Response to the Knowledge of Death
Ernest Becker believes that there are three fundamental responses to the finality of death. The first, the most typical of our culture, is to deny the reality of death - to act as though it won't happen or that it is not important.
The second response is that of mental illness, to become so engaged with death that one refuses to "play the games of society."
The third response is heroism - to realize that since no one can do more than nature already has done -- cut life short -- then there is nothing to lose by being a hero, by living as fully as possible.
http://web.archive.org/web/20010825184223/
http://users.imag.net/~lon.death/creativity.html

White Noise 1
DeLillo has said that Ernest Becker's THE DENIAL OF DEATH was a book that influenced him at the time he wrote WHITE NOISE.
http://www.essays.cc/free_essays/b1/tec307.shtml

frontline: apocalypse!: join the discussion
I don't have any original thoughts to share on the subject but would like to recommend two sources of compelling insight into the phenomenon of "apocalyptic anxiety." Much can be learned about this unique form of anxiety from reading the works of Ernest Becker. - Richard Reid.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/apocalypse/talk/

Navasky's Naming Names
Ernest Becker has described the age-old dynamic of sacrificial scapegoating as "the sadistic formula par excellence: break the bones and spill the blood of the victim in service of some 'higher truth' that the sacrificers alone possess."
http://www.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/navasky-chap10.html

Born Toward Dying
In 1973, Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death contended that Freud had gotten it exactly backwards. It is not true, said Becker, that our fear of death is rooted in our denial of sex, but, rather, that our fear of sex is rooted in our denial of death.
http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0002/articles/neuhaus.html

Amazon.com: Excerpt from Building a Bridge to the 18th Century: How the Past Can Improve Our Future
Conventional wisdom tells us that going into denial is not healthful, even though it is obvious that doing so has many advantages. Ernest Becker explains some of them in his famous book The Denial of Death.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/
detail/-/0375401296/104-3835210-3892736?v=glance&vi=excerpt

On Culture
Actually, I tend to share Ernest Becker's attitude about all this. In his The Denial of Death, Becker said that humans have to distance themselves from nature in one way or another in order to cope with the implications of their "creatureliness."
http://www.neurognosis.com/tutcult.htm

Who Are The People Of The Lie
Ernest Becker, in his final work, Escape from Evil (Macmillan, 1965), pointed out the essential role of scapegoating in the genesis of human evil. He erred, I believe, in focusing exclusively on the fear of death as the sole motive for such scapegoating. Indeed, I think the fear of self-criticism is the more potent motive.
http://www.mlode.com/~ra/ra3/peopleofthelie.htm

Slave Funerals as Sites of Political Contestation
Suggesting that the terror of death provokes an anxiety which makes direct confrontation with mortality impossible, Ernest Becker has pointed out that ritualized representations of death tend to deny the substance of death. Funerals thus glorify life and sustain personal expectations of ongoing meaning and existence.
http://dave.burrell.net/slave.html

Building Community through Dialogue
Still, foolishly, some would say, the human animal continues to hope. Otto Rank interprets this quest for meaning as the human need for the crutches of illusion; Ernest Becker considers it the "vital lies" without which we would lack the strength to live.
http://www.usao.edu/~facshaferi/DIALOG02.HTML

Terror Management Theory [Page not found]
The early beginnings of Terror Management Theory stemed from the work of Ernest Becker (1962; 1969) who looked at human concern with anxiety, the importance of culture in human affairs, the human need for a meaningful conception of reality, the importance of self-esteem, and the role of unconscious motivation in human behaviour.
http://www.arts.uwaterloo.ca/~acheyne/courses/TMT2.html

Youthworker--Staff Relationships: The Will To Power
Ernest Becker, in his neo-Freudian analysis of human personality set forth in his book Denial of Death points out that all of us seek immortality by replicating ourselves in those who come after us.
http://www.youthspecialties.com/articles/topics/staff_relationships/will_power.php

PsychNews 2(3)
Understanding the prevalence and occurrence of contradiction is useful in breaking the "spell cast by persons, the nexus of unfreedom," as Ernest Becker (1973) described it. I list four examples exposing contradiction here in the form of letters of mine the editors of various publications refused to publish.
http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~expert/psychnews/2_3/pni2_3_4a.htm

Salon Newsreal | Why we need Clinton to resign
After surveying the anthropological literature, Ernest Becker suggests in "Escape From Evil" that the origin of hierarchy is people's desire for security in this life and immortality in the next.
http://www.salon.com/news/1998/09/04news2.html

San Francisco Examiner--Baylife 99
In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book "The Denial of Death," Ernest Becker proposed that the fear of death haunts humanity like nothing else. Yet in shrinking from the inevitable, he suggested, we cheat ourselves of what it means to be fully alive.
http://web.archive.org/web/20001118011900/
http://www.examiner.com/baylife/golden/0321gooddeath.shtml

Salon: Choose Death
We are distinguished from other living beings not so much by our ability to think or even, as Ernest Becker suggests, by our knowledge that we will die while wishing to live. No, it is our sweet, poignant and unique fate to alone have the ability to achieve genuine inner peace by choosing to accept what we know is unacceptable, reaching the outer limits of the creative tension between life and death, pain and bliss, love and fear.
http://www.salon.com/weekly/choose960805.html

Alternatives for Simple Living, Master Catalogue, Editorial Page
It is not freeing to feel addicted to stuff. Ernest Becker said it very well when he said, "We drink or drug ourselves into oblivion." Or we go shopping, which is the same thing. It is not freeing to have to always try to be accumulating more and more when we could be desiring less and less and then realizing you have to protect it, or clean it, or shine it, or store it, or these other things we don't like doing.
http://web.archive.org/web/20000119032008/
http://simpleliving.org/catalog/Editorial.html

Bircas HaTorah Profile
Being a true child of the "People of the Book", Asher Baruch acknowledges Ernest Becker's Denial of Death as defining his outlook prior to his discovery of Torah Judaism.
http://www.bircas.org/profile.asp

Broyard, Anatole: Intoxicated by My Illness and Other Writings on Life and Death
Part 5 includes essays on death and dying in literature and what these books, e.g., Robert Kastenbaum's Between Life and Death and David Hendin's Death as a Fact of Life and Ernest Becker's Denial of Death, have to offer us.
http://endeavor.med.nyu.edu/lit-med/lit-med-db/webdocs/webdescrips/broyard226-des-.html

About.htm
The Death Watch By Richard John Neuhaus
What we tell ourselves is a more rational and humane approach to suffering is, as Ernest Becker tried to teach us, driven by "the denial of death." Half suspecting that that is the case, people throw themselves more desperately into their private little immortality projects. Unable to bear the reality of death, we refuse to bear with the dying.
http://web.archive.org/web/19990203062717/
http://www.tca1.org/vol1/V1DeathWatch.htm

Matters of Life and Death
For those who are unfamiliar with this often forgotten theory, Ernest Becker's Pulitzer-prize winning book on Rank, The Denial of Death, is recommended.
http://www.healthpsych.com/Lifeanddeath.html

Humanities: Module 3
THE PATIENT EXAMINES THE DOCTOR
I would like my doctor to understand that beneath my surface cheerfulness, I feel what Ernest Becker called "the panic inherent in creation" and "the suction of infinity." When he says, "You have prostate cancer. It has gone beyond the prostate into the rind. I think it's probably in the lymph nodes. It may be in the tailbone." Then the panic inherent in creation immediately rises up before you.
http://www.ucihs.uci.edu/family/students/clerkship/vignettes_06.html

A Philosophy of Death-A Philosophy of Care
A "heavy" book that can help one think about the subject, a book that has become fairly well known since it won a Pulitzer Prize in 1974, is Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death.
http://web.archive.org/web/19990423062933/
http://www.hospice-cares.com/hands/books/phildeath.html

On death without dignity
He laments the loss of community participation in social rituals that can ease us into our dying and that can attach the dying person to the community of the living. He quotes Ernest Becker:'Primitive man invented gods to address the performance to, raising himself to the stars and bringing the stars down into the affairs of men'
http://www.globalideasbank.org/reinv/RIS-221.HTML

Book excerpt: Myth And Mortality 1
Modern philosophers like Freud and Schopenhauer and Heidegger, as well as Ernest Becker in THE DENIAL OF DEATH referred to earlier, have observed that deep down contemporary man does not really believe in his own death. "All men are mortal, but not I. All men will die, except me."
http://www.amadorbooks.com/books/xrpm&m1.htm

http://www.hkbu.edu.hk/~ppp/top/top26
ANGST AND THE PARADOX OF COURAGE
In The Concept of Anxiety (1844) Kierkegaard developed his idea of angst by analyzing the Christian idea of sin. Angst, he claimed, is a psychological state arising naturally out of the essential, ontological nature of man: our freedom gives us infinite potential for the future; yet our presence in time makes us finite and ignorant. In other words, angst arises out of the tension between the sensuousness of our body (rooted as it is in time) and the freedom of our soul (rooted as it is in eternity).
http://www.hkbu.edu.hk/~ppp/top/top26

White Noise
DeLillo told one interviewer that an influence for White Noise was Ernest Becker's Denial of Death.
http://perival.com/delillo/whitenoise.html

TIKKUN, March'99 - Soul and Society: Matthew Fox
Fear of death leads to fear of life (an insight on which Ernest Becker's posthumously-awarded Pulitzer Prize book, The Fear of Death, is based).
http://www.tikkun.org/magazine/index.cfm/action/tikkun/issue/tik9903/article/990323.html

CIN - The Ancient Enemy of Mankind, Fr. Stockert
Robert Coles of Harvard, Phlip Rieff, Christopher Lasch, Karl Menninger, Paul Tournier, Ernest Becker, W.K. Kilpatrick - each in his own way has virtually begged Christians to reconsider the swapping of the Christian heritage for that mess of pottage that now passes for modern psychology.
http://www.cin.org/ancenem.html

CRT Chapter 8
Cultural Perspectives on Trauma
Freud observed that the more terrifying the external threat, the stronger the allegiance to the group becomes; under extreme conditions, such as war, people may go so far as to sacrifice their own lives in order to assure survival of the group. Ernest Becker called the resulting deep sense of belonging the "taming of the terror."
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/ovc/publications/infores/crt/chap8.htm

http://deming.eng.clemson.edu/pub/tqmbbs/misc/behav.txt
Behaviorism and Functionalism
Ernest Becker, in The_Denial_of Death (l973), laments Freud's unfulfilled brilliance, his failure to get past or let go of his own framework and thereby carry his own uncanny insights to fruition.
http://deming.eng.clemson.edu/pub/tqmbbs/misc/behav.txt

THE POLITICS OF WHIM: A CRITIQUE OF THE "SITUATIONIST" VERSION OF MARXISM
The bulk of the Situationists' writings is, then, a critique of "our alienated social life" (p. 13), the "poverty of everyday life", the "penury amidst abundant consumer goods" (p. 50). Their analysis is, however, identical in essentials to that of Marx, Marcuse, Fromm, the whole Frankfurt School, Ernest Becker and the now myriad swarm of "alienationists".
http://www.libertarian.co.uk/lapubs/lapam/lapam009.pdf

HOW SHALL ISRAEL RISE? (Louis Rene Beres) September, 1997
What a mistake it is for Israel to elect leaders who cannot understand this complex idea: Israel's enemies wish to kill Jews because it will confer immunity from mortality. This idea of death as a zero-sum commodity is captured generically by Ernest Becker's paraphrase of Elias Canetti: "Each organism raises its head over a field of corpses, smiles into the sun, and declares life good." Shouldn't this idea be especially obvious to the Jewish People after enduring the largest mass murder in human history? Isn't it time that Israel elect leaders who can understand what Otto Rank says in his Will Therapy and Truth and Reality: "The death fear of the ego is lessened by the killing, the Sacrifice, of the other; through the death of the other one buys oneself free from the penalty of dying, of being killed."
http://www.freeman.org/m_online/sep97/beres1.htm

PsychNews 3(2)
From the earliest shaman to today's neurologist, doctors and their forebears have distracted us from the fear of death with prognostication and medication. Their job is often made easier when pain and illness produce regressive (childlike) behavior. When we regress we are more vulnerable to the magic of formulas and symbols. What makes us easy prey to regressive behavior is what Ernest Becker contends in his book _Denial of Death_ (1973) that our greatest fear is the certainty of our own death.
http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~expert/psychnews/3_2/pn3_2_4.htm

Guns and Minds
Rank’s fourth and last point concerns the primitive idea that, by stopping those who want to kill us, we can stop death itself. As long as we have gun-toting enemies at home or abroad, the magic keeps working.
http://www.ottorank.com/guns.htm

Jeffrey A. Schaler, Ph.D.
Review of DEATH: Philosophical Soundings by Herbert Fingarette.
Death is the only certain event in our futures, but few of us are comfortable thinking or talking about it. Perhaps the reason is that it reminds us how alone we really are--or fear we may become. I don't mean "lonely." Loneliness is longing for, whereas aloneness suggests an absence of all relationship. We fear death as a kind of exile, and exile, as Fingarette says, is "the primary form of condign punishment."
http://www.schaler.net/fifth/dyring.html

http://www.uufboulder.org/sermons/990404.htm
"Life Keeps Pulsing On"
Psychiatrist, Ernest Becker writes, "...depression or melancholia is a problem of courage; ... it develops in people who are afraid of life, who have given up any semblance of independent development and have been totally immersed in the acts and the aid of others. They have lived lives of systematic self-restriction: and the result is that the less you do the less you can do, the more helpless and dependent you become. The more you shrink back from the difficulties and the doings of life, the more you naturally come to feel inept, the lower is your self-evaluation." (p. 210, Denial of Death)
http://www.uufboulder.org/sermons/990404.htm

Coping with Loss: Denial
Sometimes, little by little our denial begins to break down as we let in the news. However, when it comes to death, many of us hold on to our denial, for months or even years. In Denial of Death, a Pulitzer Prize winning book, Ernest Becker wrote:

Death And Hell
Since, therefore, the children share flesh and blood, [Jesus] himself likewise shared the same things, so that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death [Heb. 2:14-15].
http://www.pastornet.net.au/jmm/adev/adev0018.htm

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