The premise of this book is captivating, and I read it almost immediately after seeing Dr. Zimbardo on the Daily Show, where I learned of it. The first 2/3rds of this book are fascinating, particularly the account of the Stanford Prison Experiment and subsequent experiments regarding the human capacity for evil. I greatly admire Zimbardo, but the book is not what I expected.

The first 66% of the book is psychological, and it seems to me that the last 33% is more historical and political. I started to lose interest during the analysis of Abu Ghraib because it was just repeating the concepts we had learned earlier in the book, and was no longer new and intriguing. The book was just way too long, period, to cover the same themes – deindividuization, dehumanization, etc., etc. I wanted more from this book than it delivered, but it was still worth reading.

For those willing to consider the bad as well as the good aspects of human nature, a must-read..

Facing Death Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross devoted her life to death and dying and achieved worldwide fame in the process. Through her strong commitment to the subject, she has done much to de-stigmatize dying and to draw attention to the treatment of the terminally ill.

Her story is a remarkable one. Born in Zurich in 1926 as a 2-pound triplet, she studied medicine in defiance of her parents’ wishes and struggled for recognition as a psychiatrist in the United States. In 1969 she achieved international fame through her work with terminally ill patients in Chicago and her book ‘On Death and Dying’. This initial success was followed by countless workshops and lecture tours around the world and the establishment of a healing center in Virginia, which was destroyed by arsonists in 1994. Since that time, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross suffered a series of strokes and lived secluded in the desert outside Phoenix, Arizona.

This remarkably intimate film was made when Kübler-Ross awaited her own death – on the verge of the transition she researched so passionately. Conversations with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in Arizona form the core of the film. She looks back on her life, describes her childhood and her work, and explains how she herself faces aging and impending death. Interviews with her sisters, friends, and colleagues, as well as extensive archival material provide a comprehensive look into the life and work of this extraordinary woman.

I say genuinely that I’m sorry that Perls couldn’t be here tonight. I think it’s awful that we almost always commemorate people after they’ve died. I remember a French movie where a widower is going to get married to a very young girl, and he says, “The only one who will be missing, alas, will be my poor departed wife, who loved weddings so much.” Nonetheless, what I want to do tonight is give you a two-part overview of Perls and Gestalt therapy. One of them is an appreciation of Perls, a view of Gestalt therapy. The second is what I think are the shortcomings of Perls and Gestalt therapy generally — all therapy, really.

Much like what he would later write in The Denial of Death, psychotherapy paradoxically leads patients to uncovering their vital lies and yet for what purpose? If everyone must necessarily live under the illusion of certain half-truths then what good is uncovering them? Thus, the shortcoming of all therapy.

Becker in Birth and Death of Meaning goes into great depth of child psychology, how the child progressively takes on certain distortions of truth to survive.

As Perls would probably put it, mind is not the center of the person, but the center of the dishonesty that the person has about himself. In order to come of age, in order to become an adult, the child has to distort his awareness of the world and become somewhat dishonest about himself. He becomes dispossessed of his own senses; he is fragmented within himself by the mechanisms of defense; he is cut off from reality; and he doesn’t see the real world as it is because he has a certain stake in seeing it in a somewhat distorted way.

So, the child, in order to maintain and build a sense of self-worth in what is fundamentally a tyrannical world, adopts these deceits. You see, the child has no power; if he doesn’t do what you say, you will correct him for it. So he’s living in a world of Stalins, really, and anything he does wrong he’s “corrected” for. He’s living in a world of giants; when you’re a child you live in a forest of knees

The child takes on the lies that society and his guardians place upon him. The artificial rules such as don’t track mud into the kitchen as well as important guidelines such as don’t play with fire. To the child, this is all seemingly arbitrary and simply is forced to believe. This conditioning isn’t just in the head, but it’s also in the body. Our body “holds” our neuroses in our very posture and structure. Thus, for Perls, it isn’t enough to just show the mental causation for one’s problems, but you also have to work on the body.

I think people are unconsciously always rooted in external powers, what we call transference in psychiatry. Transference is the reliance on somebody else, on an outside source of power, in some way. And the interesting thing about Gestalt is that it seems to gloss over this fact. Perls actually seems to assume that people can stand on their own feet, if they’re given the possibility to do so. I think people can stand on their own feet to a much greater extent than they do, there’s no question about that. The question is, how much they ever can. And it seems to me a certain dishonesty when you tell people that they can be absolutely self-reliant when actually they cannot ever be quite self-reliant.

Sartre spoke about the “bad faith” of the individual who tries to become his own God, causa sui. This term, causa sui (self-cause), is also used by Becker often about how people try to deny their mortality by being their own cause. Of course, the truth of the matter is that we’re finite beings with only partial knowledge of the world, if even that. Becker throws a wrench into Perl’s philosophy because man cannot stand on his own two feet by himself because he is not a fully defined person. He never can be. To be human is to be undefined, incomplete. Always open, always changing.

But when you go into therapy expecting that you are going to be saved, that you’re going to be reborn, you want to have a new life of joy and plenitude, I think you’d better beware. Because the one thing that therapy does for you is to peel away the lie of your social defenses. Your smiling lie. Your bank balance lie. Your manipulative fie. Your look-at-me, I’m-so-lovely lie. All of the lies that you surround yourselves with, your social lies, your corporation lies, your look-at-me, I’ve-got-a-big-new-car lie, all of the lies of your life. What therapy does is to take that away from you. As Freud points out, “We cure the neurotic of his symptoms only to introduce him to the common misery of life.”

As we said before, theraphy can remove those layers of lies and bring the truth to consciousness. But what truth is that? As Nietzsche would say, we accept lies such as causation, material being, and so on not because they’re true necessarily but because they’re necessary to live.

In this sense, I believe there’s a great affinity between Buddhism, Sartre, Nietzsche, and Becker. All of them study the interior of man, his subjectivity and the grave problems when consciousness confronts reality as it truly is.

Source: Growing Up Rugged

I created this site because of the lack of a central location to for Ernest Becker resources. It’s extremely unfortunate for readers to finish The Denial of Death and then have no place to go to learn more and discuss. I hope this website does something to fill that void.

The organization of this site is split into two navigation bars. The first is at the top with links to the Ernest Becker Biography, Contact page, and so on. Additionally, there are Becker specific pages available on the right hand menu such as Ernest Becker’s Books.

This blog is also subscribed to the unofficial Ernest Becker listserv/group discussion. It’s automatically posting new conversations each hour from the listserv thereby providing a public archive for everyone.

Enjoy!