Ernest Becker

1925 - 1974

    Ernest Becker was the son of Eastern European Jews who immigrated to the USA at the turn of the century. When he was 18 he joined the army and served as a second-line infantry battalion that liberated a Nazi concentration camp. After the war, he lived in Paris working as an intelligence attaché for the State Department, but he got bored of it quickly. After a long period of reflection, he decided he wanted to devote his life to understanding himself, the human condition and the meaning of life. He chose anthropology, because the term means “the study of man.” Ernest’s passion for knowledge was his dominant quality. He asked everyone whose intellect he respected for a list of the books which had most influenced their thinking. When he heard of an author he had not read, he headed immediately for the library, checked out a pile of books and retired to his office for a marathon of reading and note-taking which did not end until he had digested the ideas of the newly discovered author.

    Becker’s strongest intellectual influence was Dr. Thomas Szasa (best known for his critique of psychiatry). Szasa was a professor at Syracuse University. Becker attended all of Szasz’s lectures, seminars, and clinics, and became part of a small circle of intellectuals who gathered around Szasz for fascinating discussion of psychoanalytic theory, the sociology of psychiatry, and the history of ideas. From Szasa, Becker learned to become a skilled psychiatric diagnostician and theoretician. In 1961 Szasz published The Myth of Mental Illness. It suggested a non-medical approach to mental illness which he called “problems in living.” Szasz encouraged Becker to see patients at the local psychiatric hospital and develop his own ideas. Few social scientists in academic psychiatry have been blessed with such an authorized opportunity. It was there that he came up with the ideas for the book Birth and Death of Meaning his first attempt to reconcile the fundamental human contradiction between mind and body. It is Becker's answer to his perennial question: “Who am I?”

    Becker believed that to understand oneself one must accept the body, accept that humans are animals, who are born and die in a dualistic world of physical objects and evaluated meaning, and who fear the death of meaning more than the death of the body itself. True self-knowledge, Becker believed, required understanding of how self and society are woven out of the structures of meaning. Ernest believed that the most worthwhile intellectual questions of human nature, human destiny, and the meaning of life. They are the identity questions of adolescents: “Who am I and what is my relation to the cosmos? What is the meaning and purpose of my life and how should I live it. He believed that cosmic questions are the manifestations of a natural curiosity about the world. Society fears fundamental questioning and represses it. They feel it is dangerous because it could spread a contagion of doubt that would undermine blind loyalty to social authority. Ernest did not want to be an ideologue for society. He encouraged free critical thinking in his students, and as a result, made many enemies among the faculty and administration.

References

Former link, http://faculty.washington.edu/neglee/halling.html, (2006)

Former link, http://faculty.washington.edu/neglee/, (2006)

Written By: Jacob Wischmeier