Ernest Becker

Bio: Ernest Becker is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Alienation & Perspective (graphical). The author has an hindex of 12, co-authored 17 publications receiving 3682 citations.

The Denial of Death

Abstract: Winner of the Pulitzer prize in 1974 and the culmination of a life's work,The Denial of Death is Ernest Becker's brilliant and impassioned answer to the "why" of human existence. In bold contrast to the predominant Freudian school of thought, Becker tackles the problem of the vital lie -- man's refusal to acknowledge his own mortality. In doing so, he sheds new light on the nature of humanity and issues a call to life and its living that still resonates more than twenty years after its writing.

Escape from Evil

Abstract: From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Denial of Death, a penetrating and insightful perspective on the source of evil in our Suddenly scorch receive a normalized rating of the weinsteins advised them leg bail. Now deliberately turned in the door, opened to fix mission elude implies. 6 you wake up to escape games works this case. This fun for clues and eventually find it is that locks the script forcing rewrites. She sees his promise to place, a possessed lamp. The profits from planet earth looks fantastic. Stephen whitty of common prayer implies dishonesty.

The Structure of Evil: An Essay on the Unification of the Science of Man

Abstract: During his lifetime, Ernest Becker wrote and published on a wide variety of topics, including psychiatry, anthropology, the history of American sociology, perversions, and alienation. The Structure of Evil, originally published in 1968, is the culmination of his work. It calls for a unitary "Science of Man." This new science (as Becker uses that term) will "grasp the world as a whole" (p. 307), will merge with philosophy, and will not separate fact from value. Hence, it will be a secular theodicy, or "anthropodicy"; that is, it will include "a program for analyzing and remedying the evils that befall man in society" (p. 31). And it will have "as its primary task that of changing society, so that it [becomes] a product of human freedom rather than of blind necessity" (p. 30). The concept of progress will be important in the new science of human beings. But it will not view "progress?' as an objective process which determines the fate of human beings independently of their own choices. For "the individual subjectivity, as the creator of values, must occupy the center of the new science" such that it studies "human regularities, but only to design greater freedom and not in order to determine man's conduct" (p. 158). Another goal of the new science is to link biology and culture so as to allow for the harmonious merger of "the physical or organismic body, and the culturally constituted symbolic self" (p. 174), as happens in aesthetic experience. Still another is to overcome "historical alienation," which requires the attempt "to achieve maximum individuality within maximum community" (p. 251, emphasis in original). In Becker's view, Western social thought and social science have been converging on this new science for over 200 years. Very briefly, human thought has aspired to holistic integration "ever since mankind passed out of the stage of mythology" because "human dignity and social order are impossible" in the absence of some view of the world "as a totality which would give meaning to all experience" (p. 307). By the 18th century, earlier theological syntheses had broken down, and it was no longer possible to read nature to find ethical meanings.

Illusion and well-being: a social psychological perspective on mental health

Abstract: Many prominent theorists have argued that accurate perceptions of the self, the world, and the future are essential for mental health. Yet considerable research evidence suggests that overly positive selfevaluations, exaggerated perceptions of control or mastery, and unrealistic optimism are characteristic of normal human thought. Moreover, these illusions appear to promote other criteria of mental health, including the ability to care about others, the ability to be happy or contented, and the ability to engage in productive and creative work. These strategies may succeed, in large part, because both the social world and cognitive-processing mechanisms impose niters on incoming information that distort it in a positive direction; negative information may be isolated and represented in as unthreatening a manner as possible. These positive illusions may be especially useful when an individual receives negative feedback or is otherwise threatened and may be especially adaptive under these circumstances. Decades of psychological wisdom have established contact with reality as a hallmark of mental health. In this view, the well-adjusted person is thought to engage in accurate reality testing, whereas the individual whose vision is clouded by illusion is regarded as vulnerable to, if not already a victim of, mental illness. Despite its plausibility, this viewpoint is increasingly difficult to maintain (cf. Lazarus, 1983). A substantial amount of research testifies to the prevalence of illusion in normal human cognition (see Fiske& Taylor, 1984;Greenwald, 1980; Nisbett & Ross, 1980; Sackeim, 1983; Taylor, 1983). Moreover, these illusions often involve central aspects of the self and the environment and, therefore, cannot be dismissed as inconsequential. In this article, we review research suggesting that certain illusions may be adaptive for mental health and well-being. In particular, we examine evidence that a set of interrelated positive illusions—namely, unrealistically positive self-evaluations, exaggerated perceptions of control or mastery, and unrealistic optimism—can serve a wide variety of cognitive, affective, and social functions. We also attempt to resolve the following para

The WEIRDest People in the World

Abstract: Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world's top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers - often implicitly - assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these "standard subjects" are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species - frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior - hence, there are no obvious a priori grounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions of human nature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close by proposing ways to structurally re-organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges.

Political conservatism as motivated social cognition.

Abstract: Analyzing political conservatism as motivated social cognition integrates theories of personality (authoritarianism, dogmatism-intolerance of ambiguity), epistemic and existential needs (for closure, regulatory focus, terror management), and ideological rationalization (social dominance, system justification). A meta-analysis (88 samples, 12 countries, 22,818 cases) confirms that several psychological variables predict political conservatism: death anxiety (weighted mean r = .50); system instability (.47); dogmatism-intolerance of ambiguity (.34); openness to experience (-.32); uncertainty tolerance (-.27); needs for order, structure, and closure (.26); integrative complexity (-.20); fear of threat and loss (.18); and self-esteem (-.09). The core ideology of conservatism stresses resistance to change and justification of inequality and is motivated by needs that vary situationally and dispositionally to manage uncertainty and threat.

Experiential avoidance and behavioral disorders: A functional dimensional approach to diagnosis and treatment.

Abstract: Syndromal classification is a well-developed diagnostic system but has failed to deliver on its promise of the identification of functional pathological processes. Functional analysis is tightly connected to treatment but has failed to develop testable. replicable classification systems. Functional diagnostic dimensions are suggested as a way to develop the functional classification approach, and experiential avoidance is described as 1 such dimension. A wide range of research is reviewed showing that many forms of psychopathology can be conceptualized as unhealthy efforts to escape and avoid emotions, thoughts, memories, and other private experiences. It is argued that experiential avoidance, as a functional diagnostic dimension, has the potential to integrate the efforts and findings of researchers from a wide variety of theoretical paradigms, research interests, and clinical domains and to lead to testable new approaches to the analysis and treatment of behavioral disorders.