The Denial of Death

Becker continues his discussion of heroism. Specifically, he argues that ancient cultures and religions often presented the hero as someone who descended into the underworld of death and returned alive. This tendency reflects humanity’s own fear of death.

Next, Becker describes various psychological views about the fear of death, First, Becker describes the “healthy-minded” argument. It is a popular view from modern psychology that views fear of death as an unhealthy attitude that emerges from a bad upbringing from the mother (13-14). The second view Becker describes is the “morbidly-minded” argument. In this view, the fear of death is both natural and universal. Becker sides with this argument (15). Although death constantly concerns people on an instinctive level, on a conscious level people have to repress that fear.

Further, Becker argues that children grow up believing that reality is shaped by their desires. Their caretakers attend to them when they become upset, but when their caretakers deny their desires, the child may develop hostile emotions toward their caretakers. Due to the complicated fact that children are both helpless and feel that their emotions have power, children have what Becker calls a weak or “immature ego.” This means a “child doesn’t have the sure ability to organize his perceptions and his relationship to the world; he can’t control his own activity; and he doesn’t have sure command over the acts of others” (18). Because of this, children live under anxieties such as “terror of the world, the horror of one’s own wishes, the fear of vengeance by the parents, the disappearance of things, one’s lack of control over anything, really” (19-20). In this way, the fear of death itself becomes a “complex symbol” (22) associated with many different elements in a person’s life.

As children grow older, these fears centered around death are repressed under narcissism and moving “toward life” (21). Becker agrees with the argument that children who had better upbringings suffer less from the fear of death. However, he concludes it is because the benefits of a very good upbringing help the child to hide the fear of death. Some ways that people as adults cope with the fear of death is to try to map out their individual lives, to try not to stand out too much, and to become dependent on institutions or other people (23). Becker gives an example from the 17th-century French writer Michel Montagne, who describes how peasants in his time coped with problems of life and death. They found refuge in things like feuds, superstition, self-deprecation, and trying to control every aspect of their daily lives (24).

After describing theories around the fear of death, Becker turns to the question of why the world is such a threatening place for humans. Becker argues that there is “something peculiar” (25) about humans compared to other animals. Humans hold a “symbolic identity” that enables them to give themselves a complex identity and understand the world around them through cultural and imaginative means. However, humans are trapped in a “paradox” where they are both “out of nature and hopelessly in it,” while animals lack the consciousness and “symbolic identity” that humanity has (26). Drawing on writings by the 17th-century philosopher Blaise Pascal, Becker muses that the “full weight of the paradox” could literally drive a person insane (27).

Next, Becker turns to Freudian psychoanalysis. When the child becomes aware of their anus and the fact their body produces excrement, they are amused, but also excrement is a reminder of “decay and death” (31). In adults, what Becker calls “anality” (32) leads to humans becoming obsessed with denying the crude, physical nature of humanity through culture. Becker then draws on Freud’s Oedipal complex, which claimed that boys first focus their sexual desires on their mothers and want to fight their fathers. However, they fear their stronger fathers will overcome and castrate them. In psychoanalytical theory, the Oedipal complex leads a child to aspire to control their own life and fate, driving their narcissism (37).

Becker and other psychologists reinterpret the castration part of the Oedipal complex as involving not the father but the mother. Children are dependent on their parents, but they also want to become independent from them. For both girls and boys, the mother’s body, specifically its milk and menstrual blood, informs the child that they, too, are part of nature. The realization of a sexual difference between parent and child is also an important reminder about nature and how a child could have been born as the other sex or as another animal. These early experiences remind a person that they are “both a self and a body” (41). The self has no limits, but the body is finite. 

Sex itself can be a source of anxiety because it too reminds people of this binary. Through ideas like love and giving sex a special significance, people try to transcend this. However, Becker sees such attempts as ultimately futile since the body is incapable of providing itself with spiritual meaning. Further, people try to use sex in order to try to control the body. Becker sees this conflict as the reason why sex and sexuality have such a profound importance in psychology (44-45). At the same time, Becker asserts that this explains why societies are hostile to certain forms of sexuality: “Society wants to be the one to decide how people are to transcend death; it will tolerate the causa-sui project only if it fits into the standard social project” (46). So, adults surrender their bodies over to a certain degree of social control so that “it will no longer be a dangerous negation” (46).