The Denial of Death 1st Edition, Kindle Edition

A very challenging book to read, because I found layers of my own death denial being peeled away as I went through each chapter. And after you've seen your own denial mechanisms at work, you begin to recognize them in everyone else, and start to understand their daily behavior and motivations. Some of my favorite quotes:"When you get a person to look at the sun as it bakes down on the daily carnage taking place on earth, the ridiculous accidents, the utter fragility of life, the powerlessness of those he thought most powerful--what comfort can you give him from a psychotherapeutic point of view?""Man's very insides - his self - are foreign to him. He doesn't know who he is, why he was born, what he is doing on the planet, what he is supposed to do, what he can expect. His own existence is incomprehensible to him, a miracle just like the rest of creation, closer to him, right near his pounding heart, but for that reason all the more strange.""I think that taking life seriously means something such as this: that whatever man does on this planet has to be done in the lived truth of the terror of creation, of the grotesque, of the rumble of panic underneath everything. Otherwise it is false. Whatever is achieved must be achieved with the full exercise of passion, of vision, of pain, of fear, and of sorrow. How do we know ... that our part of the meaning of the universe might not be a rhythm in sorrow?""It can't be overstressed, one final time, that to see the world as it really is is devastating and terrifying. It achieves the very result that the child has painfully built his character over the years in order to avoid: it makes routine, automatic, secure, self-confident activity impossible. It makes thoughtless living in the world of men an impossibility. It places a trembling animal at the mercy of the entire cosmos and the problem of the meaning of it.""We might say that psychoanalysis revealed to us the complex penalties of denying the truth of man's condition, what we might call the costs of pretending not to be mad.""What is the ideal for mental health, then? A lived, compelling illusion that does not lie about life, death, and reality; one honest enough to follow its own commandments: I mean, not to kill, not to take the lives of others to justify itself.""The prison of one's character is painstakingly built to deny one thing and one thing alone: one's creatureliness. The creatureliness is the terror. Once admit that you are a defecating creature and you invite the primeval ocean of creature anxiety to flood over you. But it is more than creature anxiety, it is also man's anxiety, the anxiety that results from the human paradox that man is an animal who is conscious of his animal limitation. Anxiety is the result of the perception of the truth of one's condition. What does it mean to be a self conscious animal? The idea is ludicrous, if it is not monstrous. It means to know that one is food for worms. This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self expression - and with all this yet to die. It seems like a hoax...Culture is in its most intimate intent a heroic denial of creatureliness."

This book is monumental (I decided to read on Jordan Peterson’s suggestion), it goes to the core issues of human existence, nature’s indifferent cruelty, and the mechanisms we human employ to cope with all we cannot escape. Becker makes some stunning observations, one of the most dramatic of these that neurosis is - counter intuitively - a loss or or puncturing of the self protective delusions that keep non-neurotics (so called “normal people”, who are are characterized in the way Heidegger referred to Dasman, the “they”.). The neurotic (which I believe is to be equated person’s suffering from chronic anxiety) cannot desensitize themselves the hard truth, which is that life is an absurd and often pain-laden journey ending in the certain death, death being dreadful, we must deny it through suppression in order to live in relative serenity. Embrace the horror and be whole.The book is - at least as I read it - a grimly (but accurately) pessimistic one that hearkens back to Schopenhauer’s thought in many ways though as usual he escapes mention. Sex, to our dismay, doesn’t work. Nothing, not even psychotherapy, can really relieve the human of the sad facts of temporal existence. Only by finding a higher transcendent “place” (or maybe a faith, in anything so long as not in nothing, even art will do), a ”religion” amidst the cold science, can one ever hope to find reconciliation between the drive for actual “heroic” individuation (Eros, the making of oneself) and the drive to merge one’s being with fellow humans (agape, love)...this forces the human into an almost impossible ontological dilemma.....I must say I never really got the prescription for a solution here.I am left with many more questions than answers, but at least I think this is a big WIN for all of us insulted neurotics out there who’ve been unfairly chastised for making mountains of of molehills...Becker (backed up by a his A Team, Freud, Kierkegaard, Otto Rank, Jung, William James, more) makes it clear that no, rather is more an ironic inversion; you need to be somehow crazy NOT to be crazy...to not take your Soma everyday is to suffer. (Aldous Huxley reference, not in book but germane.)There’s a soundbite from Freud here which lingers in the mind, paraphrasing, he says Freud quipped that curing the neurotic is only to bring him into the misery of every day reality. Then he cured. Nice huh?Bottom line: ordinary life is not going to get you salvation in the end. Nature is heartless and then we die feeling robbed. You therefore will need to find a religion or equivalent of it in some form, if not a theological one than at least a philosophy or pursuit to rest one’s self upon, stoicism, or Vendanta or Allah or Christ or Yahweh or Zen enlightenment or even blues guitar I suppose but something like that is indispensable. I guess a good family life could work...but how common is that?This book is a deep deep dive. Be sure your O2 tanks are full before you plunge in.

Impossível manter os mesmos sistemas de crenças e valores depois de ler e refletir muito sobre o tema. Para mim, é o tipo de livro que não importa quanto tempo se gastou lendo, mas sim quanto tempo se utilizou refletindo sobre o que foi lido. 0 X 10 é uma boa relação de partida.

Es mi libro favorito, es un libro super interesante, con una teoria super clara, para los amantes del psicoanalisis, seguidores de las teorias filosoficas existencialistas.

Ein Buch, das uns darüber nachdenken lässt, wer wir wirklich sind und was wir auf dieser Erde tun.

como casi todos los libros bien documentados y que reflejan una profunda investigación, este libro tiene perlas de conocimiento y reflexión de mucho valor.

Quality and thickness of paper could have been far better, not suitable to carry while traveling page may tear off easily if not handled carefully.:-Content wise a very dense subject handled with layman in mind couldn't have been better or simpler. This book gives far bigger horizon to subjectivity and it's duality of it's existence. Not a typical "proverbial" existential manuscript in any way. Ties down the whole organic nature of which we as a species are an part of it, branched out radically to even contemplate our real place. One of my most re read books over the period of three years. An accidental discovery