Denial of Death: Ernest Becker’s Developmental Stages
Becker’s possible interpretations of Freud and Lacan’s Developmental Stages
This is a existential, philosophical analysis of how the American anthropologist and author Ernest Becker would view Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan’s psychological developmental stages through his book, Denial of Death. In short, Becker believes that behind all theories and explanations of human behavior lies the main driving principle, the fear of death. I love anything philosophical and psychological, so I found Becker’s final principle to be extremely convincing and profound, and for this assignment I wanted to contrast and compare his views towards some of the big leagues: Freud and Lacan.
It is explicitly evident from the title alone, ‘The Denial of Death’, that Ernest Becker stands on the side of the existentialist in terms of philosophy and human psychology. Becker believes that behind all theories and explanations of human behavior lies the main driving principle, the fear of death. This fear of death is explained to be omnipresent but constantly repressed by the human subject for them to remain stable enough to successfully function in life and society. Unlike other organisms, humans, while not completely void of, function largely outside of strict instinctual influence in terms of their actions. Becker describes the situation humans find themselves in when compared with the rest of nature in the statement, “man has a symbolic identity that brings him sharply outside of the rest of nature… He is a symbolic self, a creature with a name, a life history” (Becker 26). Humans are creators with a mind that flares out to great expansive lengths to contemplate higher dimensions and quantum entanglement, yet we are trapped inside a breathing, excreting body that constantly overpowers the former with its priority over functioning. This settles the human creature into a position of extreme anxiety. Humans are trapped in this “dualism”; aware that they are unique individually in nature and society, but also, destined to concede to the fate shared by all things of nature’s creation, expiration and death. Becker describes one’s life in totality as being composed of the various attempts one has made, successful and unsuccessful, to cope with either end of this dualism. These attempts of coping with the human condition are assigned the label of “heroism”. Evidence to the true weight of this dualism of the human condition, Becker believes, is most clearly found in the immature child, in the notion that “they cannot handle either end of it” (Becker 28). The child cannot form a confident social identity because they are inept at “manipulating symbolic categories of words, thoughts, times, or names”, as well as its inability to function as an animal, as it is unable to search for food, procreate, or work. With a general scope of Becker’s position on the child and the human condition now established, in this paper I would like to examine popular developmental stages of the child in psychoanalytic theory, such as Lacan’s Mirror Stage and Freud’s Oedipus Complex, under the lens of Becker’s existentialist view.
As Becker directly accesses Freud’s Oedipus Complex, as well as Freud as a subject himself, under close scrutiny in his book already, there is no need for me to regurgitate all he has already said so beautifully, so I will give my interpretation of an overview here. While giving Freud the respect he deserves as one of the fathers of psychoanalysis, Becker sets the tone for his impressions of Freud’s early concepts with the line: “Freud often tended to understand human motives in what can be called a ‘primitive way’” (Becker 34). Freud believed his Oedipus complex was the central dynamic to the psychic life of the subject. The complex describes the situation of a son having innate drives of sexuality in general, as well as specifically towards his mother. Continued, the son views his father as a competitor and holds inward a murderous aggression towards his rival for fear of being killed or possibly castrated by him. Freud pins this as man’s origin for all his guilt; deep down it is connected with the “primal crime” of patricide, incest, and castration of the body (Becker 35). Becker interprets Freud’s description of the present fear of blood, castration, and guilt in man as true, however not from the source Freud believed, but in the fact that it all reflects the horror of the basic human condition (Becker 35). This reformulation of the Oedipus Complex continues with Becker constructing the complex into a ‘project’. Becker adopts Norman O. Brown’s, an American sociologist, interpretation which describes the project as one that reflects the “basic problem of the child’s life” (Becker 36). The child’s problem exists in the choice to rely on outside powers, such as the sustaining mother up to this point, to decide his fate, or his own powers generated from his center, the physical body. To stand out in nature as the symbolic creature that he is, the child’s desire is to “conquer death by becoming the father of himself, the sustainer of his own life” (Becker 36). However, this project of infantile narcissism to muster power from one’s own source is destined for doom, as all attempts of conquering the nature of the body are. As explained in the introduction of this paper, these desperations to be the controller, master of one’s own world are all attempts in the flight from death and the human condition.
“The Mirror stage is carried out through the ability of a child, no older than six months, to recognize his own image in a mirror, something Lacan considers an essential moment in the act of intelligence”
Unlike Freud, Jacques Lacan is not of mention inside Becker’s book. This is not to say that his concepts and formulations are of no worth to Becker, on the contrary, some of the conclusions Lacan reaches in his concept of the Mirror Stage are so close to being within Becker’s existentialist view, but alas, Lacan stayed true to his Freudian influence. I believe Becker would find agreement in all the processes detailed in Lacan’s Mirror stage but would have to find conflict in the initial causes and effects he examines. The Mirror stage is carried out through the ability of a child, no older than six months, to recognize his own image in a mirror, something Lacan considers “an essential moment in the act of intelligence” (Lacan 75). This recognition is the child’s initial “identification” of themselves, therefore leading to a “primordial form” of the ego, or I (Lacan 76). Thus, having the ego now formed, the child then posits contemplations forward, in anticipation of their reflection that they too will become coordinated/stronger in the future, and backward, in retrospection before the development of their ego which is connotated as disorganized/uncoordinated, in time. In Lacan’s own words he explains the process as “a temporal dialectic that decisively projects the individual’s formation into history: The mirror stage is a drama whose intended internal pressure pushes precipitously from insufficiency to anticipation” (Lacan 78). Becker would thoroughly agree with Lacan that “the function of the Mirror Stage turns out… to establish a relationship between an organism and its reality” but would have to disagree that this relationship consists of “primordial jealousy” and “anticipation of the maturation of his powers” (Lacan 78). Becker would emphasize that this relationship is held together by “an organic inadequacy of his natural reality” (Lacan 77). That the “relationship to nature altered by a certain dehiscence at the very heart of the organism” is not directly pertaining to infantile motor control, but that the child is coming to terms with how their body exemplifies the human condition (Lacan 78). The organic inadequacy and dehiscence that lies in the heart of the organism is the human condition. The child can already travel temporally mentally back and forth to ponder hypotheticals, but it is still doomed to the uncoordinated body it inhabits. Lacan was borderline existentialist throughout this essay, as one could conclude from his multiple references to the “paranoiac knowledge” about man that is revealed in relevance to this stage (Lacan 78,79). However, he refuted his insights about “destructive and even death instincts” towards the Mirror Stage on the basis that “this philosophy grasps that negativity only within the limits of a self-sufficiency of consciousness…” (Lacan 80). But that is preciously where the child is at during/after the Mirror Stage. The child has departed from the position of other animals in its acquisition of the ego; outside of strict instinctual drives, the realization of the human condition and its position in nature is brought forward.
In conclusion:
I believe some audiences could view Becker’s take on human related concepts to also fall under the label of “primitive”, but like Freud, they would have to admit that there are some obscure truths hidden to it. In our examination it is apparent that both developmental stages, as well as Becker’s possible interpretation of each, primarily pinpoints its implications and significance to the human body, with the brain’s processes running in the background. What I believe Becker would explain is that each of these processes showcases the human organism coming to terms with embodying both a symbolic and animal identity. The child, as it is yet to adapt a proper “heroism” or path to deny this dualism, is where examination is most obvious in the effects this fate has on the human. The body represents a reminder not for soon to come powers, a potential locus to have sexual endeavors with one’s mother, but of a supercomputer attached to a body that poops itself to death.
Works Cited
1. Becker, Ernest. The Denial of Death. Souvenir Press, 2020.
2. Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. General Press, 2021.
3. Lacan, Jacques. “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the / as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience.” Écrits: A Selection, 2001, pp. 16–23., https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203995839-7.