Book Analysis: The Denial Of Death

Choosing to Hide from Reality

In the book The Denial of Death Ernest Becker writes “the idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is the mainspring of human activity – activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for man” (Becker XVII). One thing that every human being on this earth has in common is that death is imminent. This fear of death produces terror and is explained through terror management theory. Terror management theory addresses the conflict of both the desire of living and also the inevitable fear of death. After analysis of the terror management theory the unconscious fear of death leads humans to mask their terror

by the denial of their own fate (Arndt and Greenberg).
Psychologists Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, and Sheldon Solomon created terror management theory after the writings of Ernest Becker.

In the Handbook of Theories of Social Psychology Jeff Greenberg and Jamie Arndt specifies that terror management theory was conceived from three of Ernest Becker’s books: The Birth and Death of Meaning, The Denial of Death, and Escape from Evil. This theory was introduced in the 1980’s and was met with much skepticism at the time. The basic understanding of terror management theory is the role of the unconscious fear of death in just about everything we humans do. In the beginning it was broken down into two basic parts. First, we as humans are animals and as animals we have the instinct to stay alive. Second, because we are humans we also have cognitive abilities to understand that death is inevitable and we do not know when or where but it could come at any time for any number of reasons. Over time these two basic ideas have driven the terror management theory to what it is today by different psychologists who have been researching the topic. (Arndt and

Greenberg)
Becker explains in The Denial of Death the ultimate paradox we live in with the constant biological need of self-preservation due to the fear of death. Everything we do as humans has the underlying biological instinct of protecting yourself from death. If we felt the anxiety of death constantly we would drive ourselves psychotic and our brains know that, which is why we suppress the anxiety that the idea of our own death brings. We start of as children, being sheltered from the fear of death by our parents, only to grow the anxiety after our experiences during our individual development. The child goes to associate the feeling of being loved and protected by their parents which acts as though an anti terror mechanism the child is feeling. As the child grows older they start to learn these fears and learn to acknowledge the fact that their parents are not able to protect them from everything. These fears have a great impact on how we deal with the feeling of security, which leads to the terror management theory. When we feel security and love we have higher self-esteem but when we are missing those elements our terror anxiety rises. (Becker)(Arndt and Greenberg)
Although Becker seems to make the argument that the denial of death is an ongoing trait of all human beings from the beginning of time, in his book The Denial of Death, he states the views of anthropologist A.A. Hocart. Hocart claims there is evidence of primitives that did not fear death but conversely death was a joyous festivity. It is also thought of that they celebrated death because it was the next step into the next world. Although we may never find out the primitives’ actual thoughts and feelings towards death and anxiety caused by the thought of death this shows that they seemed to celebrate the idea of death and to the contrary of Becker’s argument did not seem to fear death. (Becker)
A way terror management theory relates to our daily lives is through our self-esteem. According to terror management theory, there is a direct correlation between high self-esteem and low anxiety towards death. In the text Death, Society, and Human Experience Kastenbaum expresses when individuals are made aware of their own unavoidable death they often change the subject to different cultural worldviews. Becker also mentions the suffering of schizophrenics. The reason to their own suffering is the inability to compartmentalize the denial of death which dauntingly brings their death anxiety at an all time high which would in turn, going along with terror management theory, lower their self-esteem. In the book Becker describes man as not being able to recognize how small his life ultimately is until he understands the bigger meaning of life. (Kastenbaum)(Becker)
After analysis of terror management theory, to recap, the main idea is to recognize that humans need to feel good about themselves as in their own self-esteem.

This need is driven by an underlying fear of death. The studies of terror management theory have brought light onto the study of death in social psychology. It helps us understand our unconscious fear of death that contributes to our different attitudes in life and every day decision-making. More so overall, terror management theory has helped us broaden the comprehension of the idea of death in humans and our unconscious motivations and our behaviors due to those exact motivations in our minds. (Arndt and

Greenberg)
Terror management theory is an open-ended theory that keeps developing as more and more people study how humans perceive death. The more research that is done the more we are able to comprehend how we all internalize the fact of our own mortality. As Becker has communicated through The Denial of Death we all have an underlying anxiety of death that we all try to suppress by either with our own self-esteem or looking at the world as a bigger picture than ourselves. We all have the biological drive to stay alive due to our anxiety of death. Becker clearly explains the relationship of fear of death and the need to live in The Denial of Death. Understanding Becker’s theory of terror it becomes clear that this anxiety of death does exist and it is a primary force for our biological need for self-preservation. (Becker) (Arndt and Greenberg)