Ernest Becker

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Ernest Becker bigraphy, stories - Psychologists

Ernest Becker : biography

September 27, 1924 – March 6, 1974

Ernest Becker (September 27, 1924 – March 6, 1974) was a cultural anthropologist and interdisciplinary scientific thinker and writer. He is noted for his 1974 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Denial of Death.

Publications about Ernest Becker

  • Liechty D (ed.) (2005) The Ernest Becker Reader. University of Washington Press. ISBN 0-295-98470-8
  • Liechty D (ed.) (2002) Death and Denial: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Legacy of Ernest Becker. Praeger. ISBN 0-275-97420-0
  • Liechty D (1995) Transference & Transcendence: Ernest Becker’s Contribution to Psychotherapy. Aronson. ISBN 1-56821-434-0
  • Streeter J (2009) Human Nature, Human Evil, and Religion: Ernest Becker and Christian Theology. University Press of America. ISBN 978-0-7618-4357-3

Academic career

After graduating from Syracuse University in 1960, Becker began his career as a teaching professor and writer. Becker taught at Syracuse University for a few years before eventually being fired in 1963 for siding with his mentor Thomas Szasz in the psychotherapy disputes. In 1965, Becker acquired a position at the University of California, Berkeley in the anthropology program. However, trouble again arose between him and the administration, leading to his departure from the university. At the time, thousands of students petitioned to keep Becker at the school and offered to pay his salary, but the petition did not succeed in retaining Becker. In 1967, he taught at San Francisco State’s Department of Psychology until January 1969 when he resigned in protest against the administration’s stringent policies against the student demonstrations.

In 1969, Becker began a professorship at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, where he would spend the remaining years of his academic life. During the next five years, he wrote his 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning work, The Denial of Death. Additionally, he wrote the second edition to The Birth and Death of Meaning, and Escape from Evil. In November 1972, Ernest Becker was diagnosed with cancer.

Becker was an academic outcast in the last decade of his life. Referring to his insistence on the importance symbolism plays in the human animal, he wrote "I have tried to correct… bias by showing how deep theatrical "superficialities" really go".p.xiv. Becker, Ernest (1962) The Birth and Death of Meaning: A Perspective in Psychiatry and Anthropology. New York: The Free Press of Glencoe It was only with the award of the Pulitzer Prize in 1974 (two months after his death from cancer at the age of 49) for his 1973 book, The Denial of Death, that he gained wider recognition. Escape From Evil (1975) was intended as a significant extension of the line of reasoning begun in Denial of Death, developing the social and cultural implications of the concepts explored in the earlier book. Although the manuscript’s second half was left unfinished at the time of his death, it was completed from what manuscript existed as well as from notes on the unfinished chapter.

Death

Becker died on March 6, 1974 from colon cancer in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada. After his death, the Ernest Becker Foundation was foundedErnest Becker Foundation website http://www.ernestbecker.org to devote to multidisciplinary inquiries into human behavior, with a particular focus on contributing to the reduction of violence in human society, using Becker’s basic ideas to support research and application at the interfaces of science, the humanities, social action and religion. Flight From Death (2006) is a documentary film directed by Patrick Shen, based on Becker’s work, and partially funded by the Ernest Becker Foundation.Film’s official website http://www.flightfromdeath.com

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".