The Denial of Death: Man's Necessary Delusion

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Term Paper: The Denial of Death: Man's Necessary Delusion Part 1: Analysis Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death is a significant work due to the way in which it provides an existential framework to post-Freudian psychoanalytic findings, making the striking, yet morose claim that the underlying motivation of human life is the terror of our impending death, and consequently all of our human constructs, such as personality, heroism, and civilization, are subconscious defense mechanisms against this reality. Perhaps one of the most crucial claims in the book is that made on p. 53, in which Becker states: "…the basic anxiety of man is about being-in-the-world, as well as anxiety of being-in-the-world. That is. Both fear of death and fear of life, of experience and individuation. Man is reluctant to move out into the overwhelmingness of his world, the real dangers of it (Becker, p. 53)…." Becker describes the world itself as a "nightmarish" and "demonic" environment that is essentially terrifying to our human consciousness, and in order to maintain our ability to function in our lives without this relative horror and despair, we build psychological defenses such as feelings of self worth and power, as if we control our life and death, though in effect we are actually hiding from life itself, or the true nature of reality. Though this declaration of morbid, subconscious self delusion as the primary mechanism of human survival is rather depressing, I believe that Becker supports this claim with effective and well developed psychological and philosophical conclusions, and in support of his position I believe that there is significant support of his hypotheses within many of the texts covered in this course, such as Aurelius, Nietzsche, and Sartre, whether or not they had even realized this themselves. In order to fully
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