Ernest Becker
Ernest Becker
Ernest Beckerwas a Jewish-American cultural anthropologist and writer. He is noted for his 1974 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Denial of Death...
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth27 September 1924
Ernest Becker quotes about
sports men feds
For man, maximum excitement is the confrontation of death and the skillful defiance of it by watching others fed to it as he survives transfixed with rapture.
animal herd led man
It is not so much that man is a herd animal, said Freud, but that he is a horde animal led by a chief.
men mad cost
We might say that psychoanalysis revealed to us the complex penalties of denying the truth of man's condition, what we might call the costs of pretending not to be mad.
guilt slavery kind
Relationship is thus always slavery of a kind, which leaves a residue of guilt.
fall existential denial-of-death
Obviously, all religions fall far short of their own ideals.
love animal order
Love is the problem of an animal who must find life, create a dialogue with nature in order to experience his own being.
analysis existentialism problem
the best existential analysis of the human condition leads directly into the problems of God and faith
creativity
The road to creativity passes...
responsibility guilt burden
Better guilt than the terrible burden of freedom and responsibility.
anus
We are gods with anuses.
sorry war men
One of the main reasons that it is so easy to march men off to war is that each of them feels sorry for the man next to him who will die.
fun men play
To live is to play at the meaning of life...The upshot of this . . . is that it teaches us once and for all that childlike foolishness is the calling of mature men.
betrayal real depressed-person
Why would a person prefer the accusations of guilt, unworthiness, ineptitude - even dishonor and betrayal- to real possibility? This may not seem to be the choice, but it is: complete self effacement, surrender to the "others", disavowal of any personal dignity and freedom-on the one hand; and freedom and independence, movement away from the others, extrication of oneself from the binding links of family and social duties-on the other hand. This is the choice that the depressed person actually faces.
keys creative world
The key to the creative type is that he is separated out of the common pool of shared meanings. There is something in his life experience that makes him take in the world as a problem; as a result he has to make personal sense out of it.