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A review by phillip25
The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker
3.0
This book was so long. It felt like it'd never end. Lots of unnecessary latin - like nearly all works.
convoluted.
I couldn't understand all that was said - maybe my fault - lots of tangent which meant nothing to me.
However what I did learn was fine.
What I took from this:
• though processing the world as a small god (apparently), we are but food for worms. this realization is discovered young in anality.
• anxiety of death is what drives man
• anxiety of death is reinforced by the world being:
1. terrifying (pain, destruction, suffering of the world is indifferent to you)
2. awesomeness (so amazing, and grand that we fail to recognize it, and if we were to take in the totality of the world we'd psychological implode).
3. mystery (its intrinsic ability to not be understood, showing the finite ability of man)
• to avoid this anxiety we use transference object, immorality projects (causa sui project) both achieved as heroism.
• culture is the collective vice for avoiding it (the automatic/immediate man distracts himself from such)
• all have a fantasy of immorality (pg.120) but deep down understand one must die
• psychotherapy will not be able to give what everyone expects of it, religion is gone and the modern man fears death all the more. psychotherapy fails to be a new religion as religion is a lived experience and not just intellectual concepts. there is a false belief that paradise will come from self-knowledge.
• the failures of Freud
• guilt comes from unused life, issued by the fear of life in the jonah complex.
learnt alot about old ideas about our psychology, that i had only briefly heard on YouTube. so not a full waste of time. though, most went in one ear and out the other. I think it had many tangents to flow and be coherent. lots of stuff that i've been told has been empirically disproven.
convoluted.
I couldn't understand all that was said - maybe my fault - lots of tangent which meant nothing to me.
However what I did learn was fine.
What I took from this:
• though processing the world as a small god (apparently), we are but food for worms. this realization is discovered young in anality.
• anxiety of death is what drives man
• anxiety of death is reinforced by the world being:
1. terrifying (pain, destruction, suffering of the world is indifferent to you)
2. awesomeness (so amazing, and grand that we fail to recognize it, and if we were to take in the totality of the world we'd psychological implode).
3. mystery (its intrinsic ability to not be understood, showing the finite ability of man)
• to avoid this anxiety we use transference object, immorality projects (causa sui project) both achieved as heroism.
• culture is the collective vice for avoiding it (the automatic/immediate man distracts himself from such)
• all have a fantasy of immorality (pg.120) but deep down understand one must die
• psychotherapy will not be able to give what everyone expects of it, religion is gone and the modern man fears death all the more. psychotherapy fails to be a new religion as religion is a lived experience and not just intellectual concepts. there is a false belief that paradise will come from self-knowledge.
• the failures of Freud
• guilt comes from unused life, issued by the fear of life in the jonah complex.
learnt alot about old ideas about our psychology, that i had only briefly heard on YouTube. so not a full waste of time. though, most went in one ear and out the other. I think it had many tangents to flow and be coherent. lots of stuff that i've been told has been empirically disproven.