The Birth and Death of Meaning by Ernest Becker

The Ernest Becker Foundation is devoted to multidisciplinary inquiries into human behavior, with a particular focus on contributing to the reduction of violence in human society, using Becker's basic ideas to support research and application at the interfaces of science, the humanities, social action and religion. Although the manuscript's second half was left unfinished at the time of his death, it was completed from what manuscript existed as well as from notes on the unfinished chapter. Escape From Evil (1975) was intended as a significant extension of the line of reasoning begun in Denial of Death, developing the social and cultural implications of the concepts explored in the earlier book. It was only with the award of the Pulitzer Prize in 1974 for his 1973 book, The Denial of Death (two months after his own death from cancer at the age of 49) that he gained wider recognition. Much of the evil in the world, he believed, was a consequence of this need to deny death.īecause of his breadth of vision and avoidance of social science specialization, Becker was an academic outcast in the last decade of his life.

Becker came to believe that a person's character is essentially formed around the process of denying his own mortality, that this denial is necessary for the person to function in the world, and that this character-armor prevents genuine self-knowledge. Brown, Erich Fromm, and especially Otto Rank.

The reach of such a perspective consequently encompasses science and religion, even to what Sam Keen suggests is Becker's greatest achievement, the creation of the 'science of evil.' In formulating his theories Becker drew on the work of Søren Kierkegaard, Sigmund Freud, Wilhelm Reich, Norman O. After Syracuse, he became a professor at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, BC (Canada).īecker came to the recognition that psychological inquiry inevitably comes to a dead end beyond which belief systems must be invoked to satisfy the human psyche. The first of his nine books, Zen, A Rational Critique (1961) was based on his doctoral dissertation.

In his early 30s, he returned to Syracuse University to pursue graduate studies in cultural anthropology. Upon graduation he joined the US Embassy in Paris as an administrative officer.

After completing military service, in which he served in the infantry and helped to liberate a Nazi concentration camp, he attended Syracuse University in New York. Ernest Becker was a cultural anthropologist and interdisciplinary scientific thinker and writer.īecker was born in Springfield, Massachusetts to Jewish immigrant parents.

The Birth and Death of Meaning by Ernest Becker