A four-part sketch of Ernest Becker and his work
A four-part sketch of Ernest Becker and his work
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Part One: Biographical Sketch
What makes people act the way they do? This was the absorbing question of Ernest Becker's intellectual life. He was determined to pursue this question wherever it led him. Because he refused to allow his search to be confined to the boundaries of any one discipline, his academic career, cut short by cancer, was scattered and stormy. From the time when he completed his Ph.D. in 1960 until his death in 1974, he produced a steady stream of books and journal articles of rare and unusual depth in which he outlined his "Science of Man." His works brim with insights for spiritual, pastoral and psychological counseling.
Becker was born into a Jewish family in Massachusetts in September of 1924.(1) 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. A recent cache of personal correspondence between Becker and his close friend (the now renowned medical anthropologist) Philip Singer, written in the period between 1952 and 1956, is presently being analyzed and will help to fill in the gaps in our knowledge about Becker's activities in Europe and America during that period. Although he valued the experience of living in Paris, he became bored with this work and the prospects of life in the diplomatic corps. Therefore, in his early 30s, he returned to Syracuse University to pursue graduate studies in cultural anthropology. He was attracted to this field because of its interdisciplinary and cross-cultural approach to the study of human beings. His interest soon centered on philosophical anthropology and this remained his consuming passion. Although a simplification, it is useful to think of his intellectual career as a quest to come to terms with what is enduring in the philosophical anthropology of Freud and Marx.
At Syracuse, Becker studied under the Japanese specialist Douglas Haring. He wrote a Ph.D. thesis which examined the mechanisms of transference in Japanese Zen, Chinese thought reform and Western psychotherapy. The published version of this work, Zen: A Rational Critique (1961), was dedicated to Douglas Haring.(2) Obviously Becker valued Haring's teaching style and intellectual influence greatly.
Becker received the Ph.D. in the spring of 1960 and was hired to teach anthropology in the Department of Psychiatry at the Upstate Medical Center in Syracuse. Becker there developed a close relationship with psychiatrist Thomas Szasz. Thomas Szasz was already making known his criticism of the medical model of psychiatry and the authoritarianism inherent in that model.(3) Because of his own antiauthoritarian leanings, Becker was drawn to Szasz and his circle and regularly participated in their discussion group. At the same time, Becker took part in the various lectures and symposia which were available at the school and became acquainted with the clinical aspects of psychiatry from the inside.
During this time, Becker published various articles in psychiatric journals, advocating a transactional view of mental illness. He also published two more books which reflected his lectures to psychiatric interns at the center. In both of these books, The Birth and Death of Meaning (1962) and The Revolution in Psychiatry (1964), Becker argued for a broadly transactional understanding of mental illness which was in direct conflict with the medical model. Although these books demonstrate a wide scholarly knowledge of various social science disciplines, they were by no means universally appreciated within the field of psychiatry.
The views of Thomas Szasz were rightly understood as a direct attack on the current practices of psychiatry and thus he became embroiled in conflict with some very entrenched interests within the field. This was especially heated because the works of Szasz and his circle were being used to publicly criticize the practice of involuntary commitment of mental patients. By November of 1962, Szasz was disciplined by the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene and was effectively stripped of his teaching duties within the state medical school. This produced a division within the Department of Psychiatry between those who supported Szasz and those who did not. Although Becker had his differences with Szasz, he viewed the censoring as an encroachment on academic freedom and supported Szasz. This was a brave move for an untenured instructor within the department and Becker paid for it dearly. Along with several others, Becker was dismissed from the school. Becker soon left for a year of writing and reflection in Italy. He would spend the rest of the decade as a gypsy scholar, moving from job to job and department to department nearly every academic year.
Following a year in Rome, Becker returned to spend the 1964 academic year in Syracuse; not, however, at the medical school but in the education and sociology departments at Syracuse University. By this time, the student movements which would characterize the late 1960s were beginning to be felt at Syracuse.
Becker never identified himself with the youth and was suspicious of the later Dionysian excesses associated with psychedelic drug taking. However, he was openly in favor of the civil rights movement, was against the war in Vietnam and was very critical of many of the same authoritarian educational practices as were the students. He was vocal especially about the dangers to academic independence and freedom posed by the common practice of the universities to seek and rely on military and business sources for research contracts. This struck at the heart of the financial aspect of science research and Becker's contract at Syracuse was terminated after one year.
In 1965 Becker moved to the sociology department at the University of California at Berkeley on a similar one-year contract. The following year he received another one-year contract at the same school in the anthropology department. Becker was an innovative teacher and his lectures were always crowded by hundreds of students. Becker's teaching reflected his way of thinking. It was broadly interdisciplinary, innovative and eager to apply theoretical formulations to current problems of concern. It was also very theatrical. To illustrate a theoretical point on existential human choice and its relation to madness, Becker drew on Shakespeare's "King Lear." More than that, however, Becker came to the lecture dressed for the part and used props and stage lighting to deliver his Lear!
The very aspects of Becker's thought and teaching which roused the excitement of intellectual adventure and discovery among his students did not necessarily endear him to other members of the faculty. His willingness to employ literary sources and even theological sources, coupled with his constant criticism of narrowly empirical approaches to the social sciences, led many academicians to view Becker as soft and unscientific. Berkeley did not renew his contract.
The students, however, let their voices be heard in the matter. More than 2,000 students signed a petition demanding that Becker be retained. When this failed, they voted to have his salary as a "Visiting Scholar" be paid from student funds. The administration expressed willingness to use these funds to have Becker remain as an "educational consultant," but were unwilling to allow students to hire their own professors.(4) Becker's courses, under this arrangement, would be non-credit courses only. Becker decided to take an offer to teach social psychology at San Francisco State University. San Francisco State was definitely a step "down" from UC Berkeley. Yet Becker had high hopes for this institution. Its president, S.I. Hayakawa, was one of the key originators of the interdisciplinary science of General Semantics. Surely at an institution under his leadership, a broad "generalist" social scientist like Becker could expect a supportive administration. Unfortunately, it was not to be. For in the very year (1967-68) that Becker joined the faculty there, the student revolts literally erupted like a volcano on that campus. Hayakawa, supported by then state Governor Ronald Reagan, called in the National Guard to maintain order. Becker did not feel he could stay and teach freedom with armed police outside of the lecture hall.
In 1969, he resigned from his position and moved to Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. There he joined an interdisciplinary department which combined sociology, anthropology and political science. This was the ideal place for a man like Ernest Becker. It was there that he not only published a thoroughly revised edition of The Birth and Death of Meaning but also wrote his masterpiece, The Denial of Death and its sequel, Escape From Evil, as well as a remarkable essay on loneliness. The Denial of Death was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in the category of non-fiction. His last work, as it would turn out, was published posthumously. For in late 1972, Becker was diagnosed as having colon cancer. He died, at the age of 49, in March of 1974.(5)
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As part of the evolutionary genesis of species, human beings share the physical and even emotional traits of their animal cousins. However, human behavior is in most areas quite different from other primate behavior. It is the uniqueness of human behavior that intrigued and fascinated Ernest Becker. Drawing on a broad range of investigations and writings, Becker pointed toward human language as that which qualitatively sets human thought and behavior apart from other primate behavior.
We do not have concrete knowledge of when language developed among that peculiar ape species from which human beings have descended. Nor are we able to adjudicate decisively between the various theories for how this development took place. But we are sure of the fact that with the development of language, human self consciousness was made possible, replacing instinctual stimulus-response behavior. This is what is, in essence, distinctive about human behavior and human existence.
Becker dwelled at length on this development.(6) He repeatedly suggested, in a way that somewhat reifies the evolutionary process, that this development of individual self consciousness in one species is a great experimental leap forward by the evolutionary process itself. This development of self consciousness in one species Becker presents as the first really great revolution in evolution; that is, where something qualitatively new came into existence.(7)
The history of the human species is a story describing the steady outworking of this great evolutionary experiment in self consciousness, an experiment that gave to human beings the real possibility of rising above the constrictions of nature itself. But the very gift of human subjectivity contained within it its own special constrictions. While the development of language and symbolic expression allowed for conscious cooperative efforts among human beings far beyond that of any other species, this also created in human beings a peculiar kind of socialization into group behavior.
The subjectivity and sense of self which each individual achieved is dictated directly by the cultural symbol system into which that individual is born.(8) Each person gains a sense of well being by automatic and uncritical performance within that cultural symbol system. In short, by our upbringing and entrance into the social environment, we are symbolically "reinstinctivized" within a particular world view.(9) The individual sense of self, of nature, of morality, are all imparted in a reflexive and uncritical manner by the human environment. It is as if the evolutionary process raised the human individual up from the other animals, only to quickly and quietly tuck him right back down again, as solidly and firmly as before.
But the complete story is not yet told. By critically examining human behavior through the rational methods of science, human beings have been able to discover the mechanisms by which they have been symbolically reinstinctivized. This, in Ernest Becker's view, is the radical importance of Freud's psychoanalytic idea of the Oedipus complex. Although Becker was critical of Freud's narrowly sexual interpretation of that concept, he saw the discovery and elucidation of the Oedipus complex as one of the very major achievements of Freud and of psychoanalysis.
Becker understood the Oedipus complex to be a kind of short hand expression for the early conditioning process which each child undergoes.(10) It is the mechanism by which the child gains a cultural world view, a sense of self worth and a sense of morality. As was seen, however, because this is imparted to the child before the child has any idea of what is happening and at a time when the child is in an overwhelmingly inferior position in relation to its environment, the resulting sense of self and of the world is bought at the price of independent thought and action. The child must gain its sense of power vicariously from others. Rather than becoming truly powerful and independent, then, the person is tied emotionally to whatever model of power was presented during the conditioning process.
According to Becker, the human species stands on the edge of a possible major revolution in the evolutionary process. Freud and psychoanalysis made this mechanism of reinstinctivization known to us. It is now an object for our conscious reflection and no longer something buried deep within the gulf of the unconscious mind. Having become an object for conscious reflection, it is at least thinkable that the process can be at least somewhat altered, opening up completely new possibilities for human freedom.
In Becker's view, the lion's share of the evil which forms the narrative of human history stems directly from the unconscious and uncritical allegiance to the symbolic meaning systems which the various cultures and societies have developed. Human beings gain their sense of safety and worth by blindly following the internalized modes of power and authority which were presented by parents, family, social group and nation during the socialization process. Rather than becoming a center of rational free choice, the individual blindly fights to protect those internalized models of power on which his life has come to depend.(11)
Helping individuals to gain understanding of what they have uncritically accepted during the socialization process, and therefore allowing at least for the possibility of renewal and change, which is essentially an educational job, is the task of psychoanalysis at its best. But psychoanalysis is too time consuming and too easily derailed to be the basis for a social movement or for species transcendence. In Becker's view, that is the task of education. This forms the background for his philosophy of education.
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Part Three: Educational Philosophy
Becker presented his philosophy of education in a chapter contribution entitled "Personality Development in the Modern World: Beyond Freud and Marx," and in his book Beyond Alienation: A Philosophy of Education for the Crisis of Democracy (1967). Becker protested against the overly departmentalized system of education found especially in the major research universities. He saw this as a direct effect of each discipline seeking to maintain and extend its own power within the system. It was not a result of studied attempts to enhance the education of people. An overall and integrated approach to knowledge had been sacrificed because of this strict separation between departments and disciplines. Lacking a centering focus for education, teachers and researchers in each discipline continued to plod along, churning out ever narrower research results, but with no attempt to integrate knowledge and aid in the progress of society at large. Becker suggested that the centering focus for an integrated and synthetic approach to education would be the concept of alienation.
Becker aimed to provide through this integrated approach to education a unified and critical world view from which people could work to solve the basic problems of human adaptation in a changing social environment.(12) Understanding that it is difficult to arrive at agreement on desired political and social problems in the abstract, Becker suggested that the problem be approached from the other side. That is, agreement could be reached on what is undesirable for human life. That would be the working definition of alienation.(13) Alienation would be that which works against the fullest promotion of human freedom and the fullest possible development and expression of human talents.
Each discipline would have its contribution to make to a general theory of alienation. A general theory of alienation would elucidate how the freedom and responsible choice of each person is constricted by the man-made arrangements of society. It does not have to define the "good" in terms of results, for society is constantly changing and we cannot know in advance what the good will be. By explaining what is not good, by teaching students to recognize the causes of alienation, direction is given to education which would best allow people to adapt to changing social conditions.
While at Syracuse, Becker tried to gather an informal group of academics together representing as wide a disciplinary spectrum as possible for discussion of this integrated curriculum. He could find only very few who were willing to participate. The most steadfast of these was the Protestant Chaplain of the University.(14) Although the vision of achieving an integrated curriculum expired when Becker left Syracuse, the category of alienation continued to appear and be developed in his writings as a way of summarizing that which is undeveloped in human creativity and potential. Besides that he remained friends and a steady letter writing partner with this chaplain, Harvey Bates.(15) This deepened Becker's interest in viewing alienation from the perspective of theology. Becker was especially impressed with the formulations of theologian Paul Tillich and in the coming years Becker also gained an abiding interest in Judaism, the religion of his ethnic origins.(16)
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Part Four: The Science of Man
What makes people act the way they do? For Ernest Becker, this was the foundational question for a "Science of Man(kind)." Any source, coming from any direction, which aided in answering this question, was in Becker's view of interest for the social scientist. His formulations changed in the years of his academic research and writing. But this question remained the focus for his investigations. The various chapters of this essay will be an elucidation of several aspects of Becker's proposed science of mankind, concentrating especially on those aspects of that science which are most relevant to spiritual, pastoral and psychological counselors. To better place Becker's ideas in perspective, a brief outline of his conception of human science might be helpful.
Becker strongly felt that the social sciences had made a terrible mistake in trying to model themselves after the natural sciences. He felt that there were definite differences between the human and natural sciences which made this both inappropriate and self defeating. In the first place, Becker reacted very strongly against the kind of narrow empiricism which had come to dominate research in the social sciences. In allowing itself to be concerned with smaller and smaller problems just to be able to perform a "controlled" experiment, the social sciences were forsaking their true calling to be a source of criticism of existing social relations.(17) When that critical edge is removed, the research simply becomes another source for commodity promotion. Becker rejected the notion that eventually all of the small, empirical studies would add up to a "true knowledge" about human behavior, especially since it was always the human element which this kind of research tried to factor out.
Secondly, Becker did not think that human behavior was precisely measurable.
This was not due to the inadequacy of the tools for measurement but because of the nature of the subject itself. Because of this, there could also be no precise predictions in human behavior. For both of these assume a closed system, and human behavior is an open system.(18)
Finally, Becker rejected the idea that an abstract and universal science of individual personality could ever be constructed. Since individual personality as an emotionally charged symbol system is formed within a cultural context and incorporates the symbols of that culture, the study of personality development would always have to be culturally specific.(19)
Becker's vision of a science of human behavior drew specifically on the Enlightenment ideal of a science which would provide a rational basis for determining human goals and providing the means for achieving those goals. In other words, it would be an ideal-real (or utopian) science which did not assume that what humans are empirically determines what humans might become. It would be the study of the relationship between ends and means, a study of why we fall short of our highest ideals and what we can do to remove the barriers to achievement of our highest ideals. This would be the expressed purpose of all areas of the study of human institutions and the effects of these institutions on the individual. Becker saw that human beings impose meaning structures on their experience through the categories of symbols which are given them by their culture. These symbolic meaning systems enable the person to act, but at the same time place constrictions on possible actions.(20) An ideal-real social science, therefore, would assist in gaining understanding of these symbolic meaning systems and at the same time point towards a means of transcending these symbolic systems of meaning to create human freedom.
This science would be especially important for a democratic society, for it would seek to place the tools for shaping human possibilities in the hands of individuals themselves. In Becker's view, this kind of science could never be "value neutral," as the natural sciences seek to be. The separation of fact and value simply has no place in a science which seeks to empower human beings. A true science of human behavior would, in Becker's view, "avoid moving against and negating any point of view... if it seems to have in it a core of truthfulness."(21) That is to say that there is nothing "outside" of the field of the study of human behavior if it is grounded in real human experience and interpretation of that experience.
This is not to say that all interpretations must be taken at face value. To the contrary, Becker always distinguished between the experience itself and the interpretation of that experience. But he was always aware of the ways in which interpretations tend to devalue and negate real experience in the reductionist mode of "this is nothing but..." It was the "nothing but..." of this equation that Becker would not accept. The reductionist mode inevitably obscured something, refused to see something, made equivalencies where close attention to the differences would be more instructive. This was the basis of Becker's on-going argument with psychoanalytic theory, which, while pointing towards something undeniably important in understanding human behavior, exemplified the reductionist mode par excellence.
Psychoanalysis originally saw itself as an integrative science of human behavior. But psychoanalysis concerns itself centrally with individual behavior. As a social scientist, Becker understood that all individual behavior was rooted in a concrete social and cultural context. His understanding and criticism of the psychoanalytic approach, therefore, was that it was too narrow. While pure psychoanalysis pretended to offer a science of human behavior, its first myopia, that is, where it needed extension, stemmed from this focus on the individual. Individual behavior, as the post-Freudians saw, must be understood as an attempted reaction to a social context. Female "hysteria," for example, could not be approached as an individually isolated event. It carried with it the weight of the place of the female in 19th century society - the cultural restrictions upon the creative and intelligent female of that time, the avenues for cultural adaptation and the reactions of the contemporary creative and intelligent female to those avenues of adaptation. This same approach to "mental illness" must be extended through historical periods in order to gain a fuller understanding of human behavior, both adaptive and maladaptive. In short, Becker insisted that a science of human behavior must be seen first and foremost as a science of man (i.e., the individual) within society (within the cultural Umwelt of the times.) We come to an understanding of human behavior and human potential only by seeing how concrete people adapted themselves to the social and cultural restrictions within which they have had to live.(22)
Once mental illness is understood not primarily as a dysfunction of the individual but rather seen in terms of the society and culture within which the person lives, a thorough questioning and criticism of the medical model of mental illness is soon to follow. Becker did not dispute that in a minority of cases real, organic dysfunction did occur in mental functioning for which a medically-based psychiatry and psychology was necessary. But he strongly questioned the treatment of all mental disorders based on a medical model. He was especially critical of the continuing predominance of the medical model within psychoanalysis.
His thorough questioning of the medical model for treatment of mental illness was the main reason that he received a number of scathing and dismissive reviews for his books in various publications.(23) It was also the reason he was dismissed from teaching psychiatric interns and residents at Syracuse. Having spent more than a century distinguishing and separating itself from philosophy and the religious "care of souls," it is easy to understand that psychiatry and psychology was not eager to be called back to those roots.
In Becker's writings, there is a recognizable progression in his understanding of the content of this science of mankind, some of which we will look at in more depth later. In his earliest writings, he used the concept of self-esteem maintenance as the unifying core for investigation and understanding.(24) How does a person maintain self esteem in specific historical and cultural circumstances? What happens when the person is unable to maintain a sense of self esteem? What forces of society foster and inhibit the person's ability to maintain a sense of self esteem? Later this core idea was expanded by the concept of alienation, which was the underside of self esteem.(25) Becker used the concept of alienation to describe degrees of unfulfillment of human potential and proposed a theory of education based on the investigation and elucidation of alienation in society.
Throughout this phase of his work, Becker continued in the optimistic mode of the Enlightenment thinker in assuming that at root human striving was neutral or even good; that human beings would pursue noble goals if these were available within the social context. This included even the "negative" aspects of human striving, such as aggression. Becker felt that because human nature was essentially malleable, a moral commitment to the perfectibility of human nature was essential to a social science aimed at the improvement of the individual and society.
In his final works, he came to doubt that human nature is good. In these writings, which Becker considered to be his mature work, the concept of self-esteem maintenance was expanded into positive hero striving. Likewise the underside, alienation, was replaced by the frightened need to deny one's own mortality.(26) This shift is significant. For while alienation is essentially a social problem which can be overcome, mortality is an ontological fact of human existence which cannot be overcome. The root cause of human behavior and human evil is the attempt to deny, through striving for heroism, what cannot finally be denied. He was forced to the conclusion that people aggress and kill not simply to protect themselves and their loved ones, or simply because of hatred and rage which form due to the alienating structures of society. People aggress and kill for the pure organismic enjoyment of the act. Although Becker retained his hope for improvement of the human condition, he was significantly sobered by this understanding of human evil.
Ernest Becker, therefore, represents a truly "postliberal" thinker. Drawn to the study of human behavior by his commitment to improving individual and social life, he was finally forced to conclude that the inevitability of progress in human history was open to great doubt, and that furthermore, there is a worm at the core of human nature, a frantic struggle within the breast of human beings, which would require not simply a social scientific response, but a spiritual and theological response as well.
- This introduction was prepared by Daniel Liechty.
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Endnotes
1. The main biographical source for Ernest Becker is the article by Ronald Leifer, "Becker, Ernest," in The Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences Vol. 18, (New York: Macmillan/Free Press, 1976).
2. Cf. the dedication page in Becker, 1961d, which reads, "To Douglas G. Haring ...the teacher imparts the spirit."
3. Thomas Szasz had published The Myth of Mental Illness (New York: Dell Publishing) in 1961 and this was soon followed in 1963 by Law, Liberty and Psychiatry (New York: The Macmillan Co.) Both of these volumes reflect very directly Szasz's unconventional views on mental illness.
4. Cf. the news article "A Class Hires a Scholar" in the March 10, 1967 issue of Time Magazine, p. 58.
5. Cf. Sam Keen, "A Day of Loving Combat," Psychology Today, April 1974, p. 71.
6. Becker, 1962f, p. 21f.
7. Becker, 1968a.
8. Becker, 1962f, pp. 73ff.
9. Becker, 1968a, p. 136.
10. Becker, 1962f, pp. 57ff.
11. Becker, 1973, pp. 127ff.
12. Becker, 1967, pp. 279ff.
13. Ibid., pp. 87ff.
14. Becker, 1977.
15. Ibid.
16. Becker makes numerous references to Tillich's work in Becker, 1964b; Becker, 1967; Becker, 1968b; Becker, 1972b; Becker, 1973. He speaks of his Jewishness in Becker, 1974a and in Becker, 1977.
17. Becker, 1964; Becker, 1971.
18. Becker, 1971.
19. op cit., note 12.
20. Becker, 1968a, pp. 135f.
21. Becker, 1973, p. xi.
22. Cf. the Appendix to this study.
23. A particularly virulent example is the review by Melford E. Spiro in American Anthropologist, 65 (1963), pp. 985-987.
24. Becker, 1962f, pp. 73ff.
25. Becker, 1967.
26. Becker, 1973. Newsletter
