The Denial of Death

In this chapter, Becker focuses on the work and life of Freud. Quoting Freud’s friend and student Carl Jung, Becker notes that Freud was fixated on sex as an explanation for human psychology. This was to the extent that Freud viewed everything spiritual and unknowable about humanity as stemming from sexual repression. Becker even states that Freud’s own shield against death was his “most intense belief that his authentic talent, his most private and cherished self-image and mission for that talent, was that of a truth-teller on the unspeakables of the human condition” (95).

Becker views Freud as being correct about humanity’s “creatureliness” (96). Where Becker disagrees is that he sees consciousness of death, not sexuality, as the main cause of self-repression in people. Freud only wrote of a “death instinct,” where people instinctively desire to die and resolve that desire through the urge to kill others (98). Becker dismisses this idea. He reflects that while psychiatry could not “scientifically cure the terror of life and death,” it could at least cure “the problems of sex” (100).

Freud himself seemed to address death in two ways. The first was with what Becker describes as “magical games” (103) with the idea of his own death, such as believing he would die in February 1918 and being afraid that his parents would still be alive when he died and grieve for him.