Ernest Becker

Dr. Ernest Becker (September 27, 1924 - March 6, 1974) was an American cultural anthropologist and interdisciplinary scientific thinker and writer. He was posthumously awarded a Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction in 1974 for his The Denial of Death. The thesis of this work was that individuals live in terror of their own mortality and thus seek to find ways to deny it. Becker suggested that a significant function of culture is to provide successful ways to engage in death denial.

Life

Becker was born on September 27, 1924 into a Jewish family in Springfield, Massachusetts. As a young adult he served in the infantry in World War II; he was involving in the liberation of a Nazi concentration camp. He attended Syracuse University in New York state. After graduating he joined the U. S. Embassy in Paris as an administrative officer.

Although Becker enjoyed living in Paris, he did not wish to spend his life in the diplomatic field. He returned to Syracuse University in his early 30s to pursue graduate studies in cultural anthropology, choosing anthropology as his course of study "naively because the term literally means 'the study of man' (Leifer 1979). He completed his Ph. D. in 1960, writing a dissertation that examined the mechanisms of transference in Western psychotherapy and Japanese Zen. The published version of this work Zen: A Rational Critique (1961) was dedicated to his advisor, Douglas Haring, a Japanese specialist, who had greatly influenced Becker during his studies (Liechty n.d.).

Becker's first teaching position was at the Upstate Medical Center in Syracuse, where he taught anthropology in the psychiatry department. At that time, the critical views of Thomas Szasz, who had just published The Myth of Mental Illness (1961), regarding psychiatry had begun to be known. Szasz became Becker's strongest intellectual influence, creating opportunities for Becker to become knowledgeable about psychiatric theory and practice. Becker joined Szasz' circle, and although not always in agreement with Szasz he supported him when Szasz was censored and removed from teaching. This lost Becker his position in the psychiatry department, and he spent a year in Rome, Italy before returning to Syracuse to teach education and sociology in 1964. Becker continued to be outspoken, in favor of the Civil Rights Movement, and opposed to military and business research grants as he felt they undermined academic freedom (Liechty n.d.). Becker's contract was not renewed.

In 1965, Becker moved to the University of California at Berkeley under a one-year contract. Although his classes proved popular, his methods and critical view of the prevailing empirical approach to social science research made him unpopular with the administration, who did not renew his contract despite student protest. Rather than continue to teach only non-credit courses, Becker took a position at San Francisco State University, where he hoped his interdisciplinary approach would be more acceptable.

In 1969 he resigned his position at San Francisco State University when student revolts erupted and the National Guard were called in to maintain order. Becker found it inappropriate to have armed police at the door of his lecture on freedom (Liechty n.d.). Instead, he took a position at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The interdisciplinary department there suited Becker well, and he revised The Birth and Death of Meaning as well as writing his prize-winning The Denial of Death and Escape from Evil in his time there.

Unfortunately, though, it was cut short when Becker was diagnosed with colon cancer in 1972; he died on March 6, 1974, in Vancouver at the age of 49.

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 humankind's move away from the simple-minded ape into a world of symbols and illusions, and then deconstructing those illusions as human intellect developed.

The Denial of Death

Becker's The Denial of Death was published in 1973. He was awarded the Pulitzer prize for general non-fiction posthumously in 1974, two months after his author's death.

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 argued that a basic duality in human life exists between the physical world of objects and a symbolic world of human meaning. Thus, since human beings have a dualistic nature consisting of a physical self and a symbolic self, they are able to transcend the dilemma of mortality through heroism, a concept involving the symbolic half. By embarking on what Becker refers to as an "immortality project" (or causa sui), in which an individual creates or becomes part of something which he or she feels will outlast their time on earth, a person feels he or she has "become" heroic and, henceforth, part of something eternal; something that will never die, compared to the physical body that will die one day. This, in turn, gives human beings the feeling that their 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 argued 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, 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" such as religion, are no longer convincing in the age of reason; science is attempting to solve the human problem, something that Becker felt it can never do. Becker declared that we need new convincing "illusions" that enable us to feel heroic in the grand scheme of things, in other words immortal. However, Becker provided no definitive answer, mainly because he believed that no perfect solution exists. Instead, he hoped that gradual realization of innate human motivations, namely death, can help to bring about a better world.

Legacy

Many scholars in many fields have continued to study, teach, research, and write about the works of Ernest Becker. A collection of essays by 28 specialists and generalists in some 26 disciplines, all influenced by Becker, edited by Daniel Liechty was published in 2002 as Death and Denial: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Legacy of Ernest Becker.

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, as terrorism threatened many around the world, a trio of experimental social psychologists 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).

The Ernest Becker Foundation 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.

Quotes

For man, maximum excitement is the confrontation of death and the skillful defiance of it by watching others fed to it as he survives transfixed with rapture. Ernest Becker “The Logic of Scapegoating,” ch. 8, Escape from Evil (1975).

When we understand that man is the only animal who must create meaning, who must open a wedge into neutral nature, we already understand the essence of love. Love is the problem of an animal who must find life, create a dialogue with nature in order to experience his own being. Ernest Becker “A Brief Ontology of Love,” pt. 2, ch. 9, The Structure of Evil (1968).

It is the disguise of panic that makes [us] live in ugliness, and not the natural animal wallowing ... this means that evil itself is now amenable to critical analysis and, conceivably, to the sway of reason. Ernest Becker 1975 Escape from Evil.

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 0029023408

References
ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

Liechty, Daniel. (ed.) 2005. The Ernest Becker Reader. University of Washington Press. ISBN 0295984708
Liechty, Daniel. (ed.) 2002. Death and Denial: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Legacy of Ernest Becker. Praeger. ISBN 0275974200
Liechty, Daniel. 1995. Transference and Transcendence: Ernest Becker's Contribution to Psychotherapy. Aronson. ISBN 1568214340
Leichty, Daniel. n.d. Biographical Sketch Ernest Becker and the Science of Man. Retrieved June 11, 2008.
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 1557989540
Leifer, Ron. 1997. "The Legacy of Ernest Becker" Psychnews International 2(4) Part 1 Part 2 Retrieved June 11, 2008.
Leifer, Ron. 1979. "Biography of Ernest Becker" International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Volume 18. New York, NY: The Free Press.
Szasz, Thomas. [1961] 1984. The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct. Harper & Row. ISBN 978-0060911515

External links

Credits

New World Encyclopedia writers and editors rewrote and completed the Wikipedia article in accordance with New World Encyclopedia standards. This article abides by terms of the Creative Commons CC-by-sa 3.0 License (CC-by-sa), which may be used and disseminated with proper attribution. Credit is due under the terms of this license that can reference both the New World Encyclopedia contributors and the selfless volunteer contributors of the Wikimedia Foundation. To cite this article click here for a list of acceptable citing formats.The history of earlier contributions by wikipedians is accessible to researchers here:

The history of this article since it was imported to New World Encyclopedia:

History of "Ernest Becker"

Note: Some restrictions may apply to use of individual images which are separately licensed.