Ernest Becker
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Dr. Ernest Becker (September 27, 1924, Massachusetts - March 6, 1974, Vancouver, British Columbia) was a cultural anthropologist and interdisciplinary scientific thinker and writer.
Becker was born in Springfield, Massachusetts to Jewish immigrant parents. After completing military service, in which he served in the infantry and helped to liberate a Nazi concentration camp, he attended Syracuse University in New York. Upon graduation he joined the US Embassy in Paris as an administrative officer. In his early 30s, he returned to Syracuse University to pursue graduate studies in cultural anthropology. He completed his Ph.D. in 1960. The first of his nine books, Zen, A Rational Critique (1961)was based on his doctoral dissertation. After Syracuse, he became a professor at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, BC (Canada).
Becker came to the recognition that psychological inquiry inevitably comes to a dead end beyond which belief systems must be invoked to satisfy the human psyche. The reach of such a perspective consequently encompasses science and religion, even to what Sam Keen suggests is Becker's greatest achievement, the creation of the "science of evil." In formulating his theories drew on the work of Soren Kierkegaard, Sigmund Freud, Otto Rank (especially), Wilhelm Reich, Norman O Brown and Erich Fromm. Becker came to believe that a person's character is essentially formed around the process of denying his own mortality, that this denial is necessary for the person to function in the world, and that this character-armor prevents genuine self-knowledge. Much of the evil in the world, he believed, was a consequence of this need to deny death.
Because of his breadth of vision and avoidance of social science specialization, Becker was an academic outcast in the last decade of his life. It was only with the award of the Pulitzer Prize in 1974 for his 1973 book, The Denial of Death (two months after his own death from cancer at the age of 49) that he gained wider recognition. The second half of his magnum opus, Escape from Evil (1975) developed the social and cultural implications of the concepts explored in the earlier book and is intended as the companion volume.
The Ernest Becker Foundation, [1], is devoted to multidisciplinary inquiries into human behavior, with a particular focus on violence, using Becker's Birth and Death of Meaning (1971), his Pulitzer Prize-winning Denial of Death and its companion Escape From Evil, to support research and application at the interfaces of science, the humanities, social action and religion.
Some of the above information is from the EBF website and used by permission.
Becker also wrote The Birth and Death of Meaning which gets its title from the concept of man moving away from the simple minded ape into a world of symbols and illusions, and then deconstructing those illusions through his own evolving intellect.
Film: Flight From Death partially funded by the Ernest Becker Foundation http://www.flightfromdeath.com
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[edit] Publications
- Becker E (1973) The Denial of Death. Collier-Mac. ISBN 0-02-902310-6
- Becker E (1975) Escape from Evil. Free Press ISBN 0-02-902340-8
- Becker E (1971) The Birth and Death of Meaning. ISBN 0-02-902190-1
- Becker E (1964) Revolution in Psychiatry: The New Understanding of Man. The Free Press. ISBN 0-02-902510-9
- Becker, E (1967) Beyond Alienation. New York: George Braziller.
- Becker, E (1969) Angel in Armor. New York: George Braziller.
- Becker, Ernest (1968). The structure of evil; an essay on the unification of the science of man. New York: G. Braziller.
[edit] Publications about Ernest Becker
- Liechty D (ed.) (2005) The Ernest Becker Reader. University of Washington Press. ISBN 0-295-98470-8
- Liechty D (ed.) (2002) Death and Denial: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Legacy of Ernest Becker. Praeger. ISBN 0-27-597420-0
- Liechty D (1995) Transference & Transcendence: Ernest Becker's Contribution to Psychotherapy. Aronson. ISBN 1-56-821434-0
- Streeter J (2009) Human Nature, Human Evil, and Religion: Ernest Becker and Christian Theology. University Press of America. ISBN 978-0-7618-4357-3
[edit] External links
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