Ernest Becker

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

Life

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.

Work

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.

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.

The Denial of Death

The Denial of Death (ISBN 0-684-83240-2) is a psychology/philosophy work written by Ernest Becker and published in 1973. It was awarded the Pulitzer prize for general non-fiction in 1974, two months after the author's death. The book builds largely on the works of Søren Kierkegaard, Sigmund Freud, and one of Freud's colleagues, Otto Rank.

The basic premise of The Denial of Death is that human civilization is ultimately an elaborate, symbolic defense mechanism against the knowledge of our mortality, which in turn acts as the emotional and intellectual response to our basic survival mechanism. Becker argues that a basic duality in human life exists between the physical world of objects and a symbolic world of human meaning. Thus, since man has a dualistic nature consisting of a physical self and a symbolic self, man is able to transcend the dilemma of mortality through heroism, a concept involving his symbolic half. By embarking on what Becker refers to as an "immortality project" (or causa sui), in which he creates or becomes part of something which he feels will outlast him, man feels he has "become" heroic and, henceforth, part of something eternal; something that will never die, compared to his physical body that will die one day. This, in turn, gives man the feeling that his life has meaning; a purpose; significance in the grand scheme of things.

From this premise, mental illness is most insightfully extrapolated as a bogging down in one's hero system(s). When someone is experiencing depression, their causa sui (or heroism project) is failing, and they are being consistently reminded of their mortality and insignificance as a result. Schizophrenia is a step further than depression in which one's causa sui is falling apart, making it impossible to engender sufficient defense mechanisms against their mortality; henceforth, the schizophrenic has to create their own reality or "world" in which they are better heroes. Becker argues that the conflict between immortality projects which contradict each other (particularly in religion) is the wellspring for the destruction and misery in our world caused by wars, bigotry, genocide, racism, nationalism, and so forth, since an immortality project which contradicts others indirectly suggests that the others are wrong.

Another theme running throughout the book is that humanity's traditional "hero-systems" i.e. religion, are no longer convincing in the age of reason; science is attempting to solve the problem of man, something that Becker feels it can never do. The book states that we need new convincing "illusions" that enable us to feel heroic in the grand scheme of things, i.e. immortal. Becker, however, does not provide any definitive answer, mainly because he believes that there is no perfect solution. Instead, he hopes that gradual realization of man's innate motivations, namely death, can help to bring about a better world.

Legacy

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.

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

Major publications

Becker, Ernest. 1961.Zen: A Rational Critique. New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 1961.
Becker Ernest. [1962] 1971. The Birth and Death of Meaning. New York, NY: The Free Press. ISBN 0-02-902190-1
Becker Ernest. 1964. Revolution in Psychiatry: The New Understanding of Man. The Free Press. ISBN 0-02-902510-9
Becker, Ernest. 1967. Beyond Alienation: A Philosophy of Education for the Crisis of Democracy. New York: George Brazillier.
Becker, Ernest. 1968. The Structure of Evil: An Essay on the Unification of the Science of Man. New York: George Brazillier.
Becker, Ernest. 1969. Angel in Armor: A Post-Freudian Perspective on the Nature of Man. New York: The Free Press.
Becker, Ernest. 1971. The Lost Science of Man. New York: George Brazillier.
Becker Ernest. [1973] 1997. The Denial of Death. New York, NY: The Free Press.
Becker Ernest. 1975. Escape from Evil. New York, NY: The Free Press. ISBN 0-02-902340-8

References
ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

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 and Transcendence: Ernest Becker's Contribution to Psychotherapy. Aronson. ISBN 1-56-821434-0
Evans, Ron, The Creative Myth and the Cosmic Hero: Text and Context in Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death. New York, Peter Lang, 1992.
Kagan, Michael Alan. Educating Heroes: The Implications of Ernest Becker's Depth Psychology of Education for Philosophy of Education. Durango, CO: Hollowbrook Publishing, 1994.
Kenel, Sally A., Mortal Gods: Ernest Becker and Fundamental Theology. Lanham, MD:, University Press of America, 1988.
Martin, Stephen W. Decomposing Modernity: Ernest becker's Images of Humanity at the End of an Age. Lanham MD, University Press of America, 1997.
Pyszczynski, Tom, Sheldon Solomon, and Jeff Greenberg. 2002. In the Wake of 9/11: The Psychology of Terror. Washington DC: APA Press. ISBN 978-1557989543
Leifer, Ron. 1997. "The Legacy of Ernest Becker" Psychnews International 2(4) Part 1 Part 2 Retrieved June 11, 2008.

External links

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