Denial of Death – Freud
In his book “Denial of Death”, Ernest Becker invests a lot of thought into analyzing and critiquing the conclusions of Sigmund Freud. Since his work brought about a revolution in the study and practice of Psychiatry (and, arguably, Philosophy), Becker spends time deconstructing and translating Freud’s work so that it appears to support his own observations about the fear of death.
Before I go any further, I want to provide definitions for a few of Freud’s terms and theories:
Id - The impulsive side of a person that is primarily concerned with selfish pleasure.
Ego – The side of a person that is perceptual, intellectual and cognitive. For the sake of oversimplification, this is the “brain” of the person.
Super-Ego – The morality and spirituality of a person. This includes ideals and goals.
Anal Phase – The second stage in childhood psychosexual development. This phase generally spans from 15 months to 3-years of age and is marked by an increased childhood awareness of the anus and fecal matter. This is generally the point when a child learns to control their bowel movements and is potty-trained.
Oedipus complex – In Freud’s own words: “I found in myself a constant love for my mother, and jealousy of my father. I now consider this to be a universal event in childhood,” He used the Oedipus conflict to conclude that humans desire incest and that we actively repress that desire.
Becker relates Freud’s study of Anality to the universal human fear of death:
Anality and its problems arise in childhood because it is then that the child already makes the alarming discovery that his body is strange and fallible and has a definite ascendancy over him by its demands and needs…
…Strangest and most degrading of all is the discovery that the body has, located in the lower rear and out of sight, a hole from which stinking smells emerge and even more, a stinking substance—most disagreeable to everyone else and eventually even to the child himself…
…his main task in life becomes the denial of what the anus represents: that in fact, he is nothing but body so far as nature is concerned. Nature’s values are bodily values, human values are mental values, and though they take the loftiest flights they are built upon excrement, impossible without it, always brought back to it. As Montaigne put it, on the highest throne in the world man sits on his arse. Usually this epigram makes people laugh because it seems to reclaim the world from artificial pride and snobbery and to bring things back to egalitarian values. But if we push the observation even further and say men sit not only on their arse, but over a warm and fuming pile of their own excrement—the joke is no longer funny…
…The anus and its incomprehensible, repulsive product represents not only physical determinism and boundness, but the fate as well of all that is physical: decay and death.
Becker, p 31
Becker also related Freud’s Oedipus Complex to the fear of death:
Take the Oedipus complex. In his early work Freud had said that this complex was the central dynamic in the psychic life. In his view, the boy child had innate drives of sexuality and he even wanted to possess his mother. At the same time, he knew that his father was his competitor, and he held in check a murderous aggressiveness toward him. The reason he held it in check was that he knew the father was physically stronger than he and that the result of an open fight would be the father’s victory and the castration of the son. Hence the horror of blood, of mutilation, of the female genitals that seemed to have been mutilated; they testified that castration was a fact.
Becker, p 34
While Becker seems dependent on Freud’s work to substantiate his own observations, he appears to have believed that he was able to divide the dishonesty of Freud’s work from the universal truth of death anxiety:
The horror in the child’s perceptions seemed too contrived, too pat, too much designed to fit into Freud’s own addiction to sexual explanations and biological reductionism…
In his later years, Freud evidently came to realize…that the thing that really bothers the child is the nature of his world, not so much his own inner drives.
-Becker, p38, 52
While Becker’s observations seem to be, at first glance, a conveniently selective survey of Freud’s work, Freud himself made a similar observation regarding the fear of death:
I therefore maintain that the fear of death is to be regarded as an analogue of the fear of castration, and that the situation to which the ego reacts is the state of being forsaken or deserted by the protecting superego—by the powers of destiny—which puts an end to security against every danger.
- Sigmund Freud, The Problem of Anxiety, p 67
It seems that while Freud depended on sexual explanations, he may have still valued the fear of death as a more overarching and universal motivator in human life. Still, a large portion of “Denial of Death” seems wasted by focusing on the work of a man who directed the world’s attention significantly more towards issues of sexual repression than our universal fear of death. Perhaps the mention of Freud’s name alone grants Becker access into the minds of those whose worldview has its foundation in the theories of Sigmund Freud (amongst others). If Freud’s conclusions are seen as inherently empirical, it begs the question: why?
From this point in the book, Becker turns his attention to one who predates Freud: the Danish philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard. I’ll pick up with his observations on Kierkegaard in the next post.
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