Ernest Becker

Dr. Ernest Becker (September 1924, Massachusetts - March 6, 1974, Vancouver, British Columbia) was a cultural anthropologist and interdisciplinary scientific thinker and writer.

Becker was born into a Jewish family in Massachusetts. After completing military service, in which he served in the infantry and helped to liberate a Nazi concentration camp, he attended Syracuse University in New York. Upon graduation he joined the US Embassy in Paris as an administrative officer. In his early 30s, he returned to Syracuse University to pursue graduate studies in cultural anthropology. He completed his Ph.D. in 1960.

Becker came to the recognition that psychological inquiry inevitably comes to a dead end beyond which belief systems must be invoked to satisfy the human psyche. The reach of such a perspective consequently encompasses science and religion, even to what Sam Keen suggests is Becker's greatest achievement, the creation of the science of evil. Because of his breadth of vision and avoidance of social science pigeonholes (given the independence of his thinking in the 1960s), Becker was an academic outcast in the last decade of his life. It was only with the award of the Pulitzer Prize in 1974 for his 1973 book, The Denial of Death (two months after his own death from cancer at the age of 49) that his enormous contributions began to be recognized. The second half of his magnum opus, Escape from Evil (1975) developed the social and cultural implications of the concepts explored in the earlier book and is an equally important and brilliant companion volume.

Over the past two decades, a trio of experimental social psychologists has amassed a large body of empirical evidence substantiating the universal motive of death denial as advanced by Becker. The highly topical and jargon-free account of that work is now in print In the Wake of 9/11: The Psychology of Terror by Pyszczynski, Solomon and Greenberg. (American Psychological Association Press, 2003).

Many scholars in many fields are studying, teaching, researching and writing about the works of Ernest Becker. A collection of essays by 28 specialists and generalists in some 26 disciplines, all influenced by Becker, is now published as Death and Denial: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Legacy of Ernest Becker, edited by Daniel Liechty. (Praeger, 2002). For a collection of Becker's most poignant writings, see The Ernest Becker Reader (UWP 2005) selected, edited and introduced by Daniel Liechty.

The Ernest Becker Foundation, [1], is devoted to multidisciplinary inquiries into human behavior, with a particular focus on violence, using Becker's Birth and Death of Meaning (1971), his Pulitzer Prize-winning Denial of Death and its companion Escape From Evil, to support research and application at the interfaces of science, the humanities, social action and religion.

All of the above information is from the EBF website and used by permission.

Becker also wrote the book The Birth and Death of Meaning which gets its title from the concept of man moving away from the simple minded ape into a world of symbols and illusions, and then deconstructing those illusions through his own evolving intellect.

Film: Flight From Death partially funded by the Ernest Becker Foundation http://www.flightfromdeath.com

See also

• Terror management theory
• Otto Rank

Publications

• Becker E (1973) The Denial of Death. Collier-Mac. ISBN 0-02-902310-6
• Becker E (1975) Escape from Evil. Free Press ISBN 0-02-902340-8
• Becker E (1971) The Birth and Death of Meaning. ISBN 0-02-902190-1
• Becker E (1964) Revolution in Psychiatry: The New Understanding of Man. The Free Press. ISBN 0-02-902510-9

Publications about Ernest Becker

• Liechty D (ed.) (2005) The Ernest Becker Reader. University of Washington Press. ISBN 0-295-98470-8
• Liechty D (ed.) (2002) Death and Denial: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Legacy of Ernest Becker. Praeger. ISBN 0-27-597420-0
• Liechty D (1995) Transference & Transcendence: Ernest Becker's Contribution to Psychotherapy. Aronson. ISBN 1-56-821434-0

External links

• Bibliography in Spanish
• Ernest Becker Listserv Archive
• The Ernest Becker Foundation

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