Ernest Becker - Beliefs

Beliefs

In the 1960s, Becker and Thomas Szasz were part of a challenge to the pretensions of psychiatry as a science and the mental health system as a successful humanitarian enterprise. Their writings, along with articles in the journal The Radical Therapist, were given the umbrella label anti-psychiatry. This critical literature, with an associated activist movement, "emphasized the hegemony of medical model psychiatry, its spurious sources of authority, its mystification of human problems, and the more oppressive practices of the mental health system, such as involuntary hospitalisation, drugging, and electroshock".

Becker came to the position 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 Becker drew on the work of Søren Kierkegaard, Sigmund Freud, Wilhelm Reich, Norman O. Brown, Erich Fromm, Hegel, and especially Otto Rank. Becker came to believe that individuals' characters are essentially formed around the process of denying their own mortality, that this denial is necessary for us 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.

Becker also wrote The Birth and Death of Meaning, which gets its title from the concept of humankind moving away from the simple-minded ape into a world of symbols and illusions, and then deconstructing those illusions through our own evolving intellect.