Ernest Becker
American cultural anthropologist (1924 to 1974) who wrote The Denial of Death.
At a glance
Main ideas
Denial of death, Character armour, Meaning and illusion …
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The Birth and Death of Meaning, The Denial of Death, Escape from Evil
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Thomas Szasz and The Denial of Death
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- Becker was a cultural anthropologist whose book The Denial of Death won the Pulitzer Prize two months after he died.
- He argued that human character and culture are built around denying our own mortality.
- His teaching career was turbulent: he was fired from Syracuse for supporting Thomas Szasz on academic freedom, and later left Berkeley and San Francisco State.
- He spent his last years at Simon Fraser University.
Why it matters
- His idea that fear of death drives culture led to terror management theory and still shapes thinking about meaning and mortality.
Key facts
- Born
- 27 Sep 1924, Springfield, Massachusetts1
- Died
- 6 Mar 1974, Burnaby, British Columbia, of colon cancer, aged 491
- War
- Served in the infantry in World War II and helped liberate a Nazi concentration camp1
- Education
- Syracuse University; PhD in cultural anthropology (1960)1
- Career
- Upstate Medical College, Syracuse; UC Berkeley from 1965; San Francisco State from 1967 to 1969; Simon Fraser University from 19691
- Award
- Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction (1974) for The Denial of Death2
- Books
- Nine1
Main ideas
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Denial of death1
Character forms around denying one's own mortality, and much evil follows from it.
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Character armour1
The denial is needed to function but masks real self-knowledge.
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Meaning and illusion1
Humans move from apes to a world of symbols and illusions, then deconstruct them.
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Beyond psychology1
Psychology leads to a threshold beyond which belief systems are needed.
Books to start with
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Connections
Links
Sources
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