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Literature review |
Death and Denial: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Legacy of Ernest Becker
Westport CT: Praeger Publishers, 2002
By Daniel Liechty, ed.
Brief synopsis:
This book draws together original contributions from a wide spectrum of scholars and professionals. Each of the twenty five chapters interacts with Ernest Becker's theory of Generative Death Anxiety (GDA) from the perspective of the writers' specialized expertise, cumulatively demonstrating the utility of GDA as an interdisciplinary organizing principle for the humanities and social sciences.
Excerpt (from the Introduction):
The theory of Generative Death Anxiety (GDA) suggests that at the deepest level, human behavior is motivated by the unavoidable need to shield oneself from consciousness of human mortality. … Whether pictured as friend or enemy, as he great leveler or as the fruit of sin and divine abandonment, human beings have never been without reminders that death is a problem quite unlike any other. … it is [the] clash between the living, instinctual will to survive and the knowledge that we will not survive, that forms the unique contours of the human psychological condition. … GDA theory suggests that while the original reaction of the human psyche in relation to its awareness of death is to deny and repress it, this move itself is predicated on the ability to view death/mortality and life/immortality as a complex symbol. This produces a generative effect in which the move to deny and repress awareness of death and mortality is commonly expressed in an urge toward creativity and accumulation—to make one's mark on the world and thus conquer death and insignificance on the symbolic level. The nexus of desire-motivation-action in every human endeavor … is tinged in various degree by the need to suppress the fact of mortality from immediate conscious awareness, and insist, as it were, that we are anything but fleeting, perishable, transient, insignificant specks of nothing in the universe...
Becker was driven in his work by one fundamental question, "What makes people act the way they do?" … in every field of the humanities and social sciences, there are those who have been influenced by Becker's ideas, convinced that [in GDA} Becker had produced a theory of major importance. Because Becker pursued his ideas across disciplinary boundaries, he almost inadvertently produced a sweeping and scholarly synthesis of anthropological, sociological, psychiatric, psychoanalytic and theological material… these essays [are] demonstrative evidence of the synthetic power of the theory of Generative Death Anxiety.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction: Generative Death Anxiety—An Organizing Principle for the Social Sciences and Humanities—Daniel Liechty
Part I: Psychological Reflections
A Perilous Leap From Becker's Theorizing to Empirical Science: Terror Management Theory and Research—Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski and Sheldon Solomon
Inflicting Evil as an Alternative to the Dread of Dying: An Independent Test of Generative Death Anxiety—C. Fred Alford
Forgiveness: From Heroic Illusion to Human Homecoming—Steen Halling
Cognition Creates Character: Neurotic Styles—Daniel Goleman
Waging War Against Death—Gavin de Becker
Part II: Psychotherapeutic Reflections
Death Anxiety and the Psychotherapeutic Process—James B. McCarthy
Three Forms of Death Anxiety—Robert Langs
The Paradoxical Self: An Expansive View of Death Anxiety—Kirk J. Schneider
The Hero and the Addict: Reflections on the Apprehension of Death—Jeffrey Kauffman
Death Anxiety and the Treatment of Children in Poverty—Claude Barbre
Part III: Social Scientific Reflections
The Transcendent Dimension in Social Science—James A. Aho
The Industrial Organization of Anxiety—Kirby Farrell
Mortality Anxiety: An Existential Understanding for Medical Education and Practice—Neil Elgee
Ernest Becker's Anti-Idealist Theory of Communication: Death, Drama and Purgation—W.Thomas Duncanson
Our Existential Vulnerability to Toxic Leaders—Jean Lipman-Blumen
Part IV: Philosophical Reflections
Ernest Becker and Emmanuel Levinas: Surprising Convergences—Richard Colledge
Interrogated by the Mortal: Kenneth Burke and Ernest Becker—C. Allen Carter
What Does a Body Know? Analysis of Violence in Ernest Becker and Julia Kristeva—Martha Reineke
Denial of Death and the Dissolution of the Modern Self—Walter Truett Anderson
The Denial of No-Self: A Buddhist Perspective—David R. Loy
Part V: Religious Reflections
The Enemy as Enemy of God: Psycho-Spiritual Processes in the Ritual Transformation of the Enemy—Sam Keen
Transference as Religious Solution to the Terror of Death—Jerry S. Piven
Religion as Creative Illusion: Feuerbach and Becker—Van A. Harvey
Reality Check: Mortality Awareness and Christian Anthropology—Sally Kennel
The Religious Hero and the Escape from Evil: A Feminist Challenge to Ernest Becker's Religious Mystification—Merlyn E. Mowrey
