The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker

Encounter , September 1970, pp. 33-44.
Ibid. , p. 41.
Ibid. , p. 40.
Ibid. , p. 41.
Harrington,
The Immortalist
.
Quoted in Jacques Choron,
Death and Western Thought
, p. 135.
Ibid. , pp. 135-136.
Ibid. , pp. 135-136.
Harrington,
The Immortalist
, p. 288.
See Rieff,
The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud
(New York: Harper and Row, 1966).
Quoted in Jessie Taft,
Otto Rank
, p. 139.
In private conversation.
Cf. J. Fagan and I. L. Shepherd, eds.,
Gestalt Therapy Now
(Palo Alto: Science and Behavior Books, 1970), pp. 237-38.
Cf. F. M. Alexander,
The Use of the Self; Its Conscious Direction in Relation to Diagnosis, Functioning, and the Control of Reaction
, with an Introduction by John Dewey (New York: Dutton, 1932); and G. D. Bowden,
F. M. Alexander and the Creative Advance of the Individual
(London: Fowler, 1965).
Rieff,
The Triumph of the Therapeutic
.
Fromm,
The Sane Society
(New York: Fawcett Books, 1955), p. 34.
Passmore,
The Perfectibility of Man
(London: Duckworth, 1970).
Tillich, “
The Importance of New Being for Christian Theology
,” in Man and the Transformation: Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks , vol. V, ed. by Joseph Campbell, translated by Ralph Manheim (New York: Pantheon Books, 1964), p. 172, also p. 164.
For other careful use of concepts and language about the meaning of immanentism see the important books by George P. Conger,
The Ideologies of Religion
(New York: Round Table Press, 1940); and Frank B. Dilley,
Metaphysics and Religious Language
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1964).
Langer,
Philosophy in a New Key
(New York: Mentor Books, 1942), P. 199.
Fromm, Man For Himself (New York: Fawcett Books, 1947), pp. 95 ff.
A. Koestler,
The Lotus and the Robot
(New York: Macmillan, 1960).
P. Tillich,
The Courage to Be
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952), pp. 177 ff.
See E. Jacques, “Death and the Mid-life Crisis,” pp. 148-149.
Cf. J. V. Neel, “
Lessons from a ‘Primitive’ People
,” Science , Vol. 170, No. 3960, Nov. 20, 1970, p. 821.
R. J. Lifton, in the Preface to
Revolutionary Immortality
(New York: Vintage Books, 1968). I take this to be the argument, too, of Peter Homans’ recent difficult book,
Theology After Freud
(Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970).

* In the following discussion I am obligedto repeat and sum upthings I have writtenelsewhere ( The Birth and Death of Meaning, Second Edition, NewYork: Free Press, 1971) in order to set the framework for the other chapters.

† Jones’s biography, for all the wealth of candid detail it reveals about Freud, is tailored to givean heroic image of him; it is now generally agreed that it ishardly the last word in objectivity about Freud the man. ErichFromm has shown this very pointedly in his Sigmund Freud’s Mission: An Analysis of His Personality and Influence (New York: Grove Press, 1959). Recently, Paul Roazen has re-examined the Jones archives, along with much other digging, to present a more roundedly “human” picture of Freud. See his important book Brother Animal, and compare especially Freud’s comments on Tausk (p. 140) to the quotation onAdler. We will introduce later more of Roazen’s perspective on Freud’s character. Another excellent human portrait of Freud is Helen Walker Puner’s brilliant critical biography: Freud, His Life and His Mind (London: The Grey Walls Press, 1949).

‡ Erich Fromm, in his important discussion of Freud’s character, also fixes on helplessness and dependency as the underside of Freud and so also confirms Jones. But Fromm seems to me to accent it too much as an ambivalent reflex of Freud’s childhood relationship to his mother, whereas I am seeing it more as a universal phenomenon reacting to Freud’s distinctive heroic ambition and burdens. See Fromm, Sigmund Freud’s Mission , Chapter 5.

* I am aware of the enormous literature on transference and the extensions, modifications, and debates raging around it; but it would go far beyond my purposes to attempt to reflect