Ernest Becker in Context

By Daniel Liechty, Ph.D.

 

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 anyone discipline, his academic career, cut short by cancer, was scattered and stormy. From the time 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 what he called a “Science of Man.” Although Becker himself was an academic theorist and not a clinician, his work brims with insights for therapists.

Ernest Becker has long been something of an enigma in the world of scholarship. His academic career endured for less than 15 years. For all but the final few years of that career, Becker led a rather nomadic academic life, existing on short-term contracts, often not knowing when one year ended where he would be for the coming year. Even as article after article and book after book appeared, he was continually denied contract renewal and any pathway to the academic tenure track. When finally he was offered a position that included some security, it was in a rather contentious and experimental interdisciplinary program that eventually spun apart. In any case, cancer soon intervened to cut Becker’s career short at the young age of 49 years.

As said above, the absorbing question Ernest Becker pursued in all of his research and writing was simply, What makes people act the way they do? Although Becker certainly did receive some significant accolades, even these were not unambiguous. When in 1967, for example, students at the University of California at Berkeley heard that Becker’s contract as a visiting lecturer would not be renewed by the administration, they voted to pay Becker’s salary out of student funds in order to retain him, being the first and only time this gesture of student support has been given. Unfortunately, the administration understood this gesture as an attempt by students to intervene in the hiring and firing process and the offer was roundly rejected. This strong gesture of student support for Becker’s teaching did nothing to endear him to the college administration. Just as he was dying, Becker’s book, The Denial of Death (1973), was award a Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction. While this award would certainly be more than a feather in the cap of any writer, in the academic world in which Becker worked, a Pulitzer Prize was generally viewed as a ‘literary’ award for writing, rather than an academic or scientific award in recognition of a major contribution to an academic field.

We might have expected that once the excitement of the Pulitzer died down (and this quickly, since there was no book tour promotion or follow up work) whatever reputation Ernest Becker had would ebb, and his work would join the hundreds of thousands of others on the shelves of academic libraries, at best to make brief appearances in the obscure footnotes of dissertations, or worse, to be culled out and discarded from the library collection altogether. This, however, has not been Becker’s fate. Sales of The Denial of Death have been steady and brisk enough to keep it continuously in print for the past three decades, even to be expanded in a recent printing with an able and informative introduction by public philosopher Sam Keen. At least two other of Becker’s ten books have also remained continuously in print since his death. Generous tributes to Becker’s influence have appeared in the writings and interviews of many very well-known serious authors, such as Annie Dillard, Anatole Broyard, Woody Allen, Robert Jay Lifton, Irvin Yalom, Sam Keen, Molly Ivans, Don DeLillo, Walker Percy and many others. The Denial of Death appears as one of Bill Clinton’s published list of most influential books. When journalists Roxanne J. Coady and Joy Johannessen (2007) asked a number of America’s best known writer to name “the book that changed my life,” Becker’s The Denial of Death was the only book other than The Bible to be named more than once.

In the academic world, as well, interest in Becker’s work has been steady and growing. In many ways, Ernest Becker was too far ahead of his time in his academic work, a main source of his difficulties in finding a welcoming academic home base. At a time when sociologists and even theologians were extolling the arrival of the ‘secular city’ and the demise of an integrated religious worldview, Ernest Becker anticipated current ‘post-secular’ social theory in law and philosophy by insisting that all cultural worldviews are essentially ‘sacred’ in character, and that the choice was not between the sacred and the secular, but rather between religio-cultural visions that exacted differing tolls on human freedom and community, and demanded differing sacrifices of scapegoats required to keep us from focusing on the inevitable mystifications of the system. Likewise, while working in an era in social science infatuated with imitating mathematics and physics, in which ever-narrowing statistical studies bought access to grant money to conduct research, prestigious journals to publish findings, and the academic rewards that follow, Ernest Becker anticipated the postmodern turn by continuing to call his fellows back to a socially-engaged and values-centered vision of social science he associated with the vision of the disciplinary founders. In addition, Becker’s insistence that first and foremost, human beings are animals, sharing completely in the evolutionary history of all animal species, while at the same time possessing a distinctly human psychology rooted not in a metaphysical realm but in the uniquely human awareness of death, he both anticipated and pointed beyond the subsequent interpretations of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology.

Although Becker’s work has been read and appreciated by some within the academy, the pace for this appreciation has increased in the past decade, aided by the founding of The Ernest Becker Foundation in Seattle, WA. Many of those, like myself, who had been reading Becker, were convinced that there was something of central importance in this work, and who were making initial efforts to apply these ideas to our disciplines, often felt alone and isolated. Repeatedly, we faced skeptical dissertation, grant funding, hiring and promotion committees, publishers and journal editors, who were completely unaware of Becker’s work, and too often were initially hostile to it when it was explained to them. It was not until the founding of the Ernest Becker Foundation, in 1993, that those with scholarly interest in Becker’s work began to feel a break in their sense of isolation. For the past decade, through the work of this foundation, a growing community of scholars, professionals, activists and serious readers working in many areas of the social sciences, the professions, the arts and humanities have been making contact with each other, learning from one another’s perspectives, and in the process have laid the foundation for appropriating Becker’s basic theory as the basis for fruitful interdisciplinary conversation and learning.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Ernest Becker was born in Massachusetts in September of 1924. Although the family practiced the Jewish faith, Becker himself reports that he was basically atheistic in his views for most of his early adult life. He served in the infantry during World War II and was part of a regiment that liberated a Nazi concentration camp. There Becker saw firsthand the underside of Western civilization.

After discharge from the military, Becker attended Syracuse University. Fluent in French, he took a position as an attaché in the Parisian embassy of the United States upon graduation, where he spent the middle years of the 1950s. We know from an exchange of letters written at this time between Becker in Paris, and his close friend Phillip Singer in England, that Becker began to feel restless with his work in the diplomatic corps, and he and Singer began to explore various ideas, including various ‘get rich quick’ schemes as import/export entrepreneurs in the area of Far Eastern religious artifacts. When these schemes fell through (apparently, in Becker’s view, because his own family did not see him as a settled and responsible person and refused to loan him the seed money he requested) Singer and Becker decided to return to the USA for graduate school. They chose anthropology because it seemed to them to be a field that posed the broadest questions possible about human behavior.

They both enrolled as graduate students in anthropology at Syracuse University, studying under Japanese specialist Douglas Haring. Phillip Singer went on to an illustrious and productive career in medical anthropology. Today some of the most creative work in African shamanistic medical practice and ritual is associated with Singer’s name.

Becker’s dissertation focused on Japanese Zen Buddhism, drawing parallels and distinctions between the student/master relationship in Zen training, Chinese thought reform and Western psychoanalysis. Becker also seemed destined for a career in medical anthropology, and upon receiving the Ph.D., he was hired to teach anthropology in the Department of Psychiatry at the Upstate Medical Center in Syracuse, at the time the most prestigious New York state medical teaching hospital outside of New York City. Here Becker had the promise of tenure and a fine future in medical anthropology, and soon gained a reputation as a skilled mental health diagnostician. In the following two years Becker published two books (his dissertation and a book based on his initial lecture series at the Center) and a number of journal articles, more than enough for tenure, all else being equal.

It was during this time, however, that Becker developed an admiring relationship with Thomas Szasz, an unconventional senior professor of psychiatry in the department. Szasz was already known in the field for his antiauthoritarianism and protests against the medical model of mental illness. Becker joined a circle of junior faculty formed to study Szasz’s ideas. Becker’s association with Szasz was very productive in terms of providing him with a stimulating, extra-medical perspective on mental disorders. Becker’s writings from this period reflect a broadly transactional view of mental illness, or what in current terms is called the ‘psychosocial’ view of mental illness and mental health. However, this association with Szasz also got Becker and others of the junior faculty into deeply troubled waters.

Thomas Szasz was and continues to be a genuine maverick in psychiatry. A radical civil libertarian, his two main books at the time, The Myth of Mental Illness (1961) and Law, Liberty and Psychiatry (1963) were direct attacks on some of the very basic assumptions of standard psychiatry, as well as the central pillar of psychiatry’s social power, the power of involuntary commitment in psychiatric institutions. Needless to say, Szasz ruffled feathers and created real enemies in the world of academic psychiatry (Upstate Medical Center’s program, for example, was largely dependent on involuntary commitment patients, both for state funding and subjects for teaching.)

In the second year of Becker’s time at Upstate, the administration attempted to remove Szasz from his teaching duties. This move against Szasz ultimately failed, because Szasz was tenured and therefore protected. But Becker and the junior faculty associated with Szasz were not tenured, and were fired when they rallied to Szasz’s support. Although Szasz undoubtedly influenced Becker strongly during this period of time, Becker was by no means simply an uncritical disciple of Szasz or exponent of Szasz’s views. His support of Szasz at the time was as much a principled stand in favor of general academic freedom as it was for Szasz personally. (Direct references to Szasz’s in Becker’s writings were relatively few even during this period, and disappeared altogether soon thereafter.) The school administration, however, was not looking for nuanced distinctions. Becker was summarily dismissed from his teaching post.

His dismissal from the Upstate Center began for Becker a long period as an academic nomad, living on grants and short term teaching contracts in undergraduate departments of education, sociology and psychology. All the while he persisted in producing nearly a book every year, along with various other writing. As a teacher, Becker was very engaging and theatrical. To make a point concerning the existential aspects of human choice, for example, Becker apparently took the amphitheater podium in full costume to perform a scene from Shakespeare’s King Lear. Although such flamboyance endeared Becker to students (more than 2000 Berkeley students signed protests of Becker’s dismissal in 1967, and they even voted to pay his salary out of student funds) it did not win him any particular favors with fellow faculty and college administration. More than once Becker ended a school year with no firm commitments at all for where he would be the following fall.

It was not until the 1969/1970 school year that Becker found himself in a tenure track position, in the newly-formed interdisciplinary department combining sociology, anthropology and political science at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. There Becker completed a second edition of The Birth and Death of Meaning (1972) and what would become his master work, The Denial of Death (1973). Also completed at this time were the notes and partial manuscript that would be published, posthumously, as Escape From Evil (1975). In late 1972, Becker was diagnosed with cancer, and he died in March 1974, at the age of 49 years.

CULTURAL PLURALISM AND POSTMODERN PSYCHOTHERAPY

Diagnostic psychology assumes there is behavior that can be identified as normal and behavior that deviates from this norm. Psychology found its roots in attempting to establish the laws of normal development, which leads to normal behavior, and through this to gain understanding of abnormal behavior. Although tolerance and a nonjudgmental attitude have been held in high regard for the practice of psychotherapy, it has been essential to the discipline to identify disorders in behavior and personality development. Therapy itself aims at moving the client or patient toward normal behavior. This is the classical paradigm for intrapsychic psychotherapeutic practice.

Recently psychotherapists and counselors, especially those who are really front-line workers in the delivery of psychotherapeutic services, have been raising serious questions concerning this paradigm (Gergen 1990, Gorman 1993, Jager 1991, Kitwood 1990, Kvale 1990, Mallick 1991, Roffey 1993, Saleeby 1994, Shotter 1990). Practitioners are becoming increasingly aware of the role culture plays in shaping assumptions about normal behavior. Inheritors of the psychotherapeutic tradition, these practitioners are recognizing that narrowly intrapsychic models are inadequate. In modem cities today, what might be considered normal or deviant behavior can change from neighborhood to neighborhood. For those living in environments of extreme pluralism, that which in the classical paradigm could be assumed as normal comes to be seen as itself a social and cultural construction. With no final court of appeal to decree what normal behavior is, practice within contexts of extreme cross-cultural pluralism has radically revised or even jettisoned much of the theory on which psychotherapy was based.

The living situation of extreme cross-cultural pluralism is the social context for a new way of thinking, a move from modernism to postmodernism. The postmodern turn has been identified in all of the human sciences. It is a many-faceted phenomenon and has had differing consequences in various disciplines. Science has traditionally privileged the position of the detached rational observer in research and epistemology. But because even the most sensitive and self-examined observer carries his or her own cultural norms as an integral part of the process of living, it is exactly this detached rational position that postmodernism has brought into question. Postmodernism is a move away from detached theory toward that of the participant observer engaged in a two-way process of learning (Rorty 1979). The dominant theme in postmodernism is what Gergen (1990) called a thoroughgoing perspectivism. This is another way of speaking about the context of pluralism. The observer is bound to his or her particular perspective, which itself is the by-product of language and social interchange, of communication and relationship.

Knowledge derives from communicative interaction, which in turn dictates the parameters of conceptualization. What in a given social context is recognized as reality is not simply a reflection of what is objectively there, but is an interpretation mediated through the communicative process. Viewed in this light, the use of language is the most powerful force of social control. Contrary to the child’s rhyme “sticks and stones ….” as Hartman (1991) states, “words create worlds.”

Although the postmodern transition was first articulated in the late 1970s, a number of important postmodern themes are found already in Ernest Becker’s earliest writings–for example, his presentation of mental vulnerabilities such as depression in terms of socialization, gaming, and “language competence” (Becker 1961b. 1962a,b, c, 1974b. 1990). Becker suggested that because the ego is formed in a specific social context, comprehensive understanding of mental vulnerabilities such as depression must extend beyond the intrapsychic to the entire range of social phenomena. Drawing on the work of Szasz (1961) and Goffman (1959), Becker viewed social interaction in terms of games. Each type of interaction has its own rules, or grammar, which maintains the significance of the interaction. Games of social interaction are staged dramas in which the person, the social performer, is provided with rituals to enhance self-esteem. Meaningful actions are those actions that serve to enhance self-esteem. But self-esteem is itself a symbolic linguistic construction. Self esteem is the person’s ability to view his or her actions within a meaningful narrative that makes sense. Therefore, a hermeneutical circle is formed by self-esteem, games (rules of communication and relationship) and meaningful narrative.

In Becker’s formulation, it is language that commands attention in meaningful action and spurs one on to further action. It is language that makes action meaningful for human beings, because of our need for symbolic cohesiveness. The correct command of language, in short, is how we maintain a sense of continuity in identity.

We are paralyzed to act unless there is a verbal prescription for the situation. Non-verbal situations do not commit our attention and hence do not call up action… when action bogs down meaning dies. For man, it suffices that verbal action bogs down in order for meaning to die…. if the individual can keep verbal referents going in a consistent scheme, action remains possible and life retains its meaning. [Becker 1962a. p. 31]

Becker viewed such vulnerabilities as depressive self-accusation and paranoid fantasies as attempts to keep the verbal action going and to place events in some kind of narrative of meaning. That there is truly no meaning in life is the one thing that human beings simply must avoid, and without some narrative of meaning (as logotherapy reminds us) life is just not possible. Even claims by philosophers and others that life has no final or metaphysical meaning are themselves assertions placed within some more chastened narrative of meaning. The person with depressive or paranoid vulnerabilities would rather see oneself at fault or as the target of evil than to have no narrative of meaning at all.

Becker suggested further that this hermeneutical circle applied to societies and cultures as well as to the individual. The narrative of meaning for an individual might center on family, career, religious belief and so on. A narrative of meaning for a nation such as ours might focus on the superiority of its constitutional government or economic system. A narrative of meaning for an entire culture might center on its mission in advancing world civilization or some other of what Lyotard (1984) called the “grand narrative.”

For the individual, mental vulnerabilities such as depression occur when there is a break in the person’s hermeneutical circle of meaning–for example, following the death of a close loved one who was central to that person’s narrative. Likewise, sociologists and anthropologists have identified a condition they call anomie, which may occur in a nation or culture after an event that places the taken-for-granted truth of its grand narrative into grave doubt–for example, when an isolated culture is suddenly attacked or intruded upon by more powerful outsiders.

It is not my intention here to suggest that Becker was a thoroughly postmodernist social theorist, nor even that he was steadfastly consistent in his views about the nature of mental Illness. The relative worth of Becker’s work does not rise or fall with how well he can be made to fit the current postmodernist paradigm. But it is worthy of note that Becker was most in touch with postmodernist themes in exactly those areas where the postmodern position intersects with clinical practice (Saleeby 1994). Perusal of his early essays might be a more readily comprehensible way into a postmodern understanding of mental health than slogging through the often obscure prose of self-consciously postmodern theorists. Furthermore, in following Becker’s work through to his mature work on the concept of denial of death, therapists and counselors will find a useful pathway forward within the postmodernist paradigm, rather than only the nihilistic dead ends that have characterized some postmodernist theory.

HUMAN EVOLUTIONARY ADVANCEMENT

As part of the evolutionary genesis of species, human beings share physical and emotional traits with their species cousins. However, human behavior is in specific areas quite different from other primate behavior. It is that which is unique in human behavior that most intrigued and fascinated Becker. Drawing on a broad range of investigations in human psychological, emotional and behavioral makeup, 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 primate species from which human beings descend. Nor are we able to adjudicate decisively between the various theories for how this development occurred. But we do know that with the development of language, human self-consciousness was made possible, and this, in turn, freed us up significantly from mechanical instinctual stimulus-response behavior. This freedom to reflect on and choose among responses is what, in essence, is distinctive about human behavior and human existence. Becker meditated at length on this development (Becker 1962d). 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 presented as the first really great revolution in mental evolution–that is, where something qualitatively new came into existence (Becker 1968a).

The grand narrative our culture tells of the human species describes a steady outworking of this great evolutionary experiment in self-consciousness, an experiment that gave to human beings the real possibility of rising above many of the constrictions of nature itself. But this 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, it also created in human beings a peculiar kind of socialization into group behavior. The subjectivity and sense of self that each individual achieves is dictated directly by the cultural symbol system into which that individual is born (Becker 1962d). 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 world, we are largely reinstinctivized within the symbolism of a particular worldview (Becker 1968a). The individual sense of self, of nature, of morality, is 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, human beings have been able to discover the mechanisms by which they have been symbolically reinstinctivized. This, in 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 the concept, he saw the elucidation of the Oedipus complex as one of the major achievements of Freud and psychoanalysis.

Becker understood the Oedipus complex as a kind of shorthand expression for the early conditioning process that each child undergoes (Becker 1962d). It is the mechanism by which the child, by bowing to superior power, gains a cultural worldview, a sense of self-worth, and a sense of morality. But 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 his or her environment, the resulting sense of self and of the world is bought at the price of independence of thought and action. The child must gain a sense of power vicariously from others. Rather than becoming truly powerful and independent the individual is tied psychologically and emotionally to whatever model of power was presented during this conditioning process.

As Becker saw it, the human species stands on the edge of a possible major revolution in the evolutionary process. Freud 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 could be somewhat altered, opening up completely new possibilities for human freedom.

In Becker’s view, the lion’s share of the evil that forms the narrative of human history stems directly from the unconscious and uncritical allegiance to the symbolic meaning systems of culture and society that human beings come to see as ‘reality’ and then to uncritically accept and defend during the socialization process. Human beings gain their sense of safety and worth by blindly following the internalized perceptions of power and authority that were presented by parents, family, social group, and nation during the socialization process. Rather than becoming a center of thoughtful free choice, the individual fights to protect those internalized models of power on which his life has come to depend (Becker 1973).

Helping individuals gain understanding of what they have uncritically accepted during the socialization process, thereby allowing for at least the possibility of renewal and change, is essentially an educational job. It 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 and for species transcendence. In Becker’s view, that is the task of public education. This forms the background for his philosophy of education.

EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY

Becker first presented his philosophy of education in a chapter contribution entitled “Personality Development in the Modem World: Beyond Freud and Marx” (1963) and then more at length 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 students. 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 continue to plod along, churning out ever narrower research results, but with no opportunities to integrate knowledge and aid in the progress of society at large.

Becker suggested that the 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 worldview from which people could work to solve the basic problems of human adaptation in a changing social environment (Becker 1967). 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, if we cannot find agreement on what human life should be about, at least agreement could be reached on what is undesirable for human life. That would be the working definition of alienation. Alienation is whatever works against the fullest promotion of promotion of freedom and the fullest possible development of human talents.

Each discipline has 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 ultimate results, for society is constantly changing and we cannot know in advance what the good will be or become. But by explaining what is not good, by teaching students to recognize the causes of alienation, direction is given to education that would best allow people to adapt to changing social conditions.

While at Syracuse, Becker tried to gather together an informal group of academics representing as wide a disciplinary spectrum as possible for discussion of this integrated curriculum. He could find very few who were willing to participate. The most steadfast of these was the Protestant chaplain of the university (Becker 1977). Although the vision of achieving an integrated curriculum expired when Becker left Syracuse, the category of alienation continued to appear and be developed in Becker’s writings as a way of summarizing what is undeveloped in human creativity and potential. Furthermore, for the next decade he remained friends and a steady letter writing partner with this chaplain, Harvey Bates. This deepened Becker’s interest in viewing alienation from the perspective of theology. Becker was especially impressed with the cultural criticism and intellectual exploration of theologian Paul Tillich (Becker 1964b, 1967, 1968b, 1972, and 1973.) In the coming years Becker also regained an abiding interest in Judaism, the religion of his formative years (Becker 1974a, 1977.)

THE SCIENCE OF MAN(KIND)

What makes people act the way they do? This became the fundamental question for what Becker conceived of as his broadly-based and interdisciplinary Science of Man[kind]. In his view, any data from any source that was arguably empirical (that is, based on disciplined observation of actual human thought and behavior) ought to be of interest to the social scientist. Although his own ideas grew and developed significantly over the short period of his academic career, it was this question that continued to be the focus of his investigations.

Becker strongly felt that the social sciences, motivated mainly by envy for the successes achieved by some of the hard sciences within the university system, had made a terrible mistake in trying to model themselves after the natural sciences. He insisted that there are distinct differences between the human and natural sciences that made this both inappropriate and self-defeating. In the first place, Becker reacted very strongly against the kind of narrow empiricism that 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 (Becker 1964b. 1971). When that critical edge is removed, the research simply becomes another example of 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 that this kind of research tried so hard to factor out (the very human element that Becker understood to be exactly the focus for study and reflection in the social sciences.)

Secondly, Becker did not think that human behavior was precisely measurable. This was due not to the inadequacy of the tools for measurement but to the nature of the subject itself. Because of this, there could also be no precise predictions in human behavior. This assumes a closed system, and human behavior is an open system (Becker 1971). While Becker was rather lonely in this view during his own time, it has become increasingly accepted as part of the interpretive turn in recent social science research (Rabinow and Sullivan 1987).

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 (Becker 1967).

Becker’s vision of a science of human behavior drew specifically on the Enlightenment ideal of a science that would provide some 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 that 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 that 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 (Becker 1968a). An ideal-real social science, therefore, would assist in gaining understanding of these symbolic meaning systems and at the same time point toward a means of transcending these symbolic systems of meaning in the creation of human freedom.

This type of social 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 that seeks to empower human beings. A true science of human behavior would “avoid moving against and negating any point of view . . . if it seems to have in it a core of truthfulness.” (Becker 1973, xi). There is nothing outside of the field of the study of human behavior if it is grounded in real human experience and disciplined 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 interpretation of that experience. But he was also 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 obscures something, refuses to see something, and makes equivalencies where close attention to the differences would be more instructive. This was the basis of Becker’s ongoing argument with psychoanalytic theory, which, while pointing toward something undeniably important in understanding human behavior, exemplified the pitfalls of the reductionist mode of interpretation par excellence.

Psychoanalysis originally saw itself as an integrative science of human behavior. But psychoanalysis concerned 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 criticism of the psychoanalytic approach, echoing similar criticism made by social workers and other applied social science professionals, was that it was too narrow. While classical psychoanalysis pretended to offer a science of human behavior, its first myopia, that is, where it needs to be freed from its self-imposed reductionism, stemmed from this exclusive focus on the individual. Individual behavior, as post-Freudians such as Erich Fromm saw, is best understood as reaction within a specific social context. Female hysteria, for example, could not be approached as an individually isolated event. It bore the restrictive weight of the female in nineteenth-century society–the cultural restrictions upon the creative and intelligent female of that time, the avenues for cultural adaptation and expression, and the reactions of contemporary creative and intelligent female to those restricted avenues of adaptation. It is a scream of protest as much or more than it is an individual ‘mental illness.’

This same approach to analyzing mental vulnerabilities must be extended through other 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 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 specific people adapted themselves to the social and cultural restrictions within which they have had to live. Once mental illness is understood not primarily as a dysfunction of the individual but rather is seen in the wider context of the person within the society and culture in 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 brain dysfunction did occur, causing disturbance in mental functioning, and for which a medically-based psychiatry was necessary. But he strongly questioned the treatment of all mental disorders based on this 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 he received a number of scathing and dismissive reviews for his books in various publications. It was also one 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, medical psychiatry 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. In his earliest writings, he used the concept of self-esteem maintenance as the unifying core for investigation and understanding (Becker 1962d). 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 (Becker 1967). 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 humanistic Enlightenment 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 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 later works, he began to have grave doubts that human nature is essentially good. In these writings, which Becker considered to be his mature work, the concept of self-esteem maintenance was expanded into a view of positive hero striving. Likewise, the underside of self-esteem, alienation, was replaced by the frightened need to deny one’s own mortality (Becker 1973). This shift is significant. For while alienation is essentially a social problem that can be overcome, mortality is an ontological fact of human existence that cannot be overcome. The root cause of human behavior and human evil is the attempt to deny, through striving for transcending heroism, what cannot finally be denied.

Becker was forced to the conclusion that people aggress and kill not only out of ‘rational’ motivations, such as to protect themselves and their loved ones against attackers, or from basic survival needs in environments of scarce resources, or even because of hatred and rage that form due to the alienating structures of society. No, people also aggress and kill for the pure organismic enjoyment of the act of killing–of standing triumphantly over the corpses of one’s victims, defiantly claiming symbolic mastery over death itself.

Although Becker retained his hope for improvement of the human condition, he was significantly sobered by this understanding of human evil to which his investigations had led him. Ernest Becker, therefore, represents a truly postliberal theorist. Drawn to the study of human behavior by his commitment to improving individual and social life, he was finally forced to conclude that the Enlightenment assumption about 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 itself, a frantic struggle (panic) within the breast of the human being, requiring not simply a social scientific response but a spiritual and theological response as well.

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