The Denial of Death - Ernest Becker

Ch. 2. The Terror of Death

Chapter two begins with an introduction to another feature of the human psyche. One that complements organismic narcissism and the heroic pursuit: the terror of death.

“Of all the things that move man, one of the principal ones is his terror of death.” (11)

Induced in identical fashion to the desire for heroics, the terror of death also results from organismic narcissism’s invasion into consciousness. The organism’s unconscious yearning to exist manifests fear against the end of its existence.

We can look at the terror of death and the desire for heroics as two sides of one coin. A yin and yang relationship in which one cannot exist without the other. The terror of death reinforces the desire for heroics, the conscious creature’s attempt to quench that unquenchable fear. The desire for heroics, in turn, amplifies the terror of death. The bigger the craving for absolute meaning, the bigger the fear of losing the opportunity to attain it.

“Zilboorg points out that this fear is actually an expression of the instinct of self-preservation, which functions as a constant drive to maintain life and to master the dangers that threaten life… In other words, the fear of death must be present behind all our normal functioning, in order for the organism to be armed toward self-preservation. But the fear of death cannot be present constantly in one’s mental functioning, else the program could not function.” (16)

We are reminded that the terror of death is a driving force of life, but only in manageable doses. As we will see in upcoming chapters, the balance between the terror of death and the desire for heroics must be maintained for optimal cognitive functioning (again, yin-and-yang).

Before we advance our analysis, I need to point out the two sides that argue over the nature of this terror.

The Healthy-Minded argument states that the mind is naturally free of the terror of death and that only “those who have bad early experiences will be most morbidly fixated on the anxiety of death.” (14)

The Morbidly-Minded argument states that the terror of death is “natural and is present in everyone, that it is the basic fear that influences all others, a fear from which no one is immune, no matter how disguised it may be.” (15)

As for our author:

“I frankly side with this second school— in fact, this whole book is a network of arguments based on the universality of the fear of death, or “terror” as I prefer to call it, in order to convey how all-consuming it is when we look it full in the face.” (15)

We find ourselves at another crossroad. Do we accept the terror of death as a fundamental fear in all conscious beings?

Let us begin with the Healthy-Minded argument. Do only those with traumatizing experiences fear death? If so, how can we justify the threshold of fear that qualifies it as the terror of death? Those who have had near-death experiences are reminded of their mortality, which may or may not lead to morbid anxiety. What about those who are simply able to imagine their end and unable to cope with the realization of their finitude?

These questions lead me to believe that the Healthy- and Morbidly-Minded arguments are not antitheses, but a continuation of conviction on the existence of organismic narcissism. If we are to believe that the desire to perpetuate life is innate at the organismic level, the same mechanisms shy the organism away from peril.

As I understand it, organismic narcissism and the terror of death are one and the same in our unconscious, only to be compartmentalized separately in the realm of consciousness. Therefore, to accept organismic narcissism and the urge to heroics as central to the experience of being is also to accept the terror of death as natural and universal.

Does that conclusion align with our everyday experience?

“And so we can understand what seems like an impossible paradox: the ever-present fear of death in the normal biological functioning of our instinct of self-preservation, as well as our utter obliviousness to this fear in our conscious life.” (17)

To Becker, the average consciousness is not engaged in a constant struggle with its mortal status. He believes this is because most of us have repressed the terror of death at an early age.

Before we continue, note that Becker himself admits to the infallibility of citing repression:

“But its disappearance doesn’t mean that the fear was never there. The argument of those who believe in the universality of the innate terror of death rests its case mostly on what we know about how effective repression is. The argument can probably never be cleanly decided: if you claim that a concept is not present because it is repressed, you can’t lose; it is not a fair game, intellectually, because you always hold the trump card. This type of argument makes psychoanalysis seem unscientific to many people, the fact that its proponents can claim that someone denies one of their concepts because he represses his consciousness of its truth.” (20)

With the much-needed disclaimer out of the way, let us try to imagine how a child’s brain might experience the terror of death and why it may resort to repressing it.

“The child is too weak to take responsibility for all this destructive feeling, and he can’t control the magical execution of his desires. This is what we mean by an immature ego: the child doesn’t have the sure ability to organize his perceptions and his relationship to the world; he can’t control his own activity; and he doesn’t have sure command over the acts of others. He thus has no real control over the magical cause-and-effect that he senses, either inside himself or outside in nature and in others: his destructive wishes could explode, his parents’ wishes likewise. The forces of nature are confused, externally and internally; and for a weak ego this fact makes for quantities of exaggerated potential power and added terror. The result is that the child— at least some of the time— lives with an inner sense of chaos that other animals are immune to.” (18-19)

Lots to unpack here. A good starting point would be to remind ourselves that children/babies are conscious animals. Because most of us do not have detailed memories of our natal years, it is difficult to empathize with their experience. However inexact our attempt may be, let us try to imagine what it is like to be a conscious baby.

First, the immature ego cannot make sense of its experiences. Finding himself in an unfamiliar universe with phenomena too complex to grasp, the baby is yet to develop perceptive milestones such as object permanence and conservation. From his perspective, faces and objects magically appear and disappear, in and out of existence. It is a terrifying experience, in which absence equates nonexistence and emotional attachments unpredictably sever and mend in a never-ending loop. Imagine that every time your parents disappear out of sight you’re convinced they are gone forever. How could you not be affected by the trauma of inability to conserve the significance you’ve imbued to entities beyond your control?

In contrast, there are also times when the baby notices his influence over others, such as the ability to summon his parents with a cry or the bottle with a gurgle. Such events suggest his actions to possess causal potential, the “magical” power over his environment.

The immature ego is further confused by its relationship to the physical body. Unaware of the concept of bone and muscle development, the baby does not comprehend why he can move certain parts of the body but not others. If he is able to move one part of his body at will, why shouldn’t he possess just as much control over every other part? Unfortunately, the ability to open and close a fist does not guarantee the ability to walk—another round of mixed signals for the ego to digest.

The immature ego’s inability to make sense of its perceptions and imprecise control over its physical residence juxtaposes with its “magical” environmental influence. Their combined realization and simultaneous experience are what produce “quantities of exaggerated potential power and added terror.”

“In their tortured interiors radiate complex symbols of many inadmissible realities— terror of the world, the horror of one’s own wishes, the fear of vengeance by the parents, the disappearance of things, one’s lack of control over anything, really. It is too much for any animal to take, but the child has to take it, and so he wakes up screaming with almost punctual regularity during the period when his weak ego is in the process of consolidating things.” (19-20)

This explains why consciousness would choose to repress the terror of our baby years. It is simply too much for the immature ego to handle. In this sense, repression becomes an act of functional organismic narcissism.

“But even more important is how repression works: it is not simply a negative force opposing life energies; it lives on life energies and uses them creatively… On the most elemental level the organism works actively against its own fragility by seeking to expand and perpetuate itself in living experience; instead of shrinking, it moves toward more life. Also it does one thing at a time, avoiding needless distractions from all-absorbing activity; in this way, it would seem, fear of death can be carefully ignored or actually absorbed in the life-expanding processes.” (21)

Repressing the terror of death allows the ego to focus on living and mattering. Actually, it may be more accurate to say that repression prevents the ego from wallowing in said terror. The heroic pursuit sounds much more palatable as a default operating system, after all.

However, the process isn’t irreversible. The robustness of repression is dependent upon our early development.

“The child who is well nourished and loved develops, as we said, a sense of magical omnipotence, a sense of his own indestructibility, a feeling of proven power and secure support. He can imagine himself, deep down, to be eternal. We might say that his repression of the idea of his own death is made easy for him because he is fortified against it in his very narcissistic vitality.” (22)

Extending the quote above, we can also imagine a scenario where children who are neglected and abused are more exposed to the terror of death as they have not received enough affection and security to stave it off, unable to occupy the mind with heroics.  

But what happens, exactly, when repression fails?

Just as how our awareness of the desire for heroic pursuit varies across individuals, the terror of death also exists on a spectrum of presence and effect on our cognitive functionality. Expectedly so, as our developmental processes are not binary, either.

Some are able to accept and reflect upon their mortality without embodying the terror, developing philosophies that dictate our approach to life and death. At the extremes, Nihilism upholds death as an absolute force that confiscates meaning from life, whereas the you-only-live-once mindset takes advantage of death’s absoluteness to imbue absolute meaning into life. The majority of people likely stand in between these two extremes, subscribing to a personalized ratio of beliefs during their respective heroic journey.

In contrast, those who drown in the terror of death are petrified of their own cosmic insignificance. Their heroic pursuit abandoned out of meaninglessness. The theoretical mechanisms behind such experiences are detailed in later chapters, through which I was surprised to learn that to be dominated by the terror of death or to be completely oblivious to it can both lead to disastrous outcomes.

“On the one hand, we see a human animal who is partly dead to the world, who is most “dignified” when he shows a certain obliviousness to his fate, when he allows himself to be driven through life; who is most “free” when he lives in secure dependency on power around him, when he is least in possession of himself. On the other hand, we get an image of a human animal who is overly sensitive to the world, who cannot shut it out, who is thrown back on his own meagre powers, and who seems least free to move and act, least in possession of himself, and most undignified. Whichever image we choose to identify with depends in large part upon ourselves. Let us then explore and develop these images further to see what they reveal to us.” (24)

The remainder of Ch. 2 annotations:

“Man has elevated animal courage into a cult.” (12)

“I don’t believe that the complex symbol of death is ever absent, no matter how much vitality and inner sustainment a person has. Even more, if we say that these powers make repression easy and natural, we are only saying the half of it. Actually, they get their very power from repression. Psychiatrists argue that the fear of death varies in intensity depending on the developmental process, and I think that one important reason for this variability is that the fear is transmuted in that process… when the awareness dawns that has always been blotted out by frenetic, ready-made activity, we see the transmutation of repression redistilled, so to speak, and the fear of death emerges in pure essence. This is why people have psychotic breaks when repression no longer works, when the forward momentum of activity is no longer possible.” (22-23)