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By Daniel Liechty, Ph.D.
Ernest Becker died of cancer long before he had a chance to present a summation of his ideas in the round. Subsequent work to develop Becker’s ideas has moved in two distinct but complementary directions. One direction has come from people trained mainly in the humanities and the arts, while the other direction has come from people trained more specifically in the empirical methods of experimental social psychology. For purposes of this introductory lecture, we will use the rubric Generative Death Anxiety (GDA) to refer to the humanistic approach to Becker’s ideas, and Terror Management Theory (TMT) to refer to the more strictly experimental approach.
Each of these employs its own methods of validation for Becker’s ideas, appropriate to the fields of study from which each emerges. GDA employs the ‘thick’ approach to validation broadly used in humanistic studies. That is, the truth-value of a theory increases as the theory is demonstrated to have applicability across a wide range of disciplines. The assumed validity of the theory becomes ever stronger the wider this range is shown to be. TMT employs the approach to validation current in sciences based on laboratory investigation. That is, testable hypotheses are generated from a theory, which predict outcomes of the testing. As testing proceeds, the more predictions of outcomes a theory is able to produce, the stronger the theory is held to be.
As said above, these approaches are distinct but complementary. Each strengthens the other. Taken in isolation, humanistic validation is open to criticism as being too ‘soft and spongy’ for a scientific age. Many examples can be given, after all, of ideas and ‘theories’ that have been successfully ‘applied’ across all range of disciplines which have later turned out to be false (flat earth theory, as just one example), seriously limited, or narrowly culturally specific. Of the three great de-centering ideas of modernity (post-Newtonian physics, Darwin’s concept of evolution by natural selection, and Freud’s ideas about the dynamic human unconscious mind) it is Freud’s depth psychological theory that has fared least well in circles of science (though it has done very well in the wider culture, both learned and popular) exactly because it is most susceptible to the criticism of being ‘untestable’ its wide applicability notwithstanding. Ernest Becker’s ideas (which are a form of depth psychology generally deriving from Freud’s historical stream) had largely met the same fate in circles in which laboratory methods of investigation are considered the gold standard for establishing validity. TMT investigations have proven this otherwise. At the very least, TMT has placed Becker’s ideas at the top of “plausibility heap” in terms of competing perspectives among depth psychologies.
Likewise, Terror Management Theory taken in isolation has clear limitations for presenting Becker’s ideas outside of those circles in which laboratory methods of research are assumed most prominent (which is all but a fairly small slice of humanity, even in this scientific age.) TMT is primarily a theory within social psychology, fundamentally informed by Becker’s ideas, to be sure, but equally informed by the strictures of what passes for valid experimental research in that field. In short, TMT expresses some of Becker’s most important ideas, but presents them within a very narrow box. Significant segments of Becker’s ideas simply do not fit into that narrow box, and when read through TMT lenses, whatever is left hanging outside that box tends to get lopped off. Subsequently, that which remains in the box tends to come across to more humanistic-oriented folks as far more mechanically deterministic and reductionist than such people find engaging, and than that Becker would ever have wanted his ideas to be interpreted.
Furthermore, there is plenty of evidence from his own writings that Becker himself would have found TMT research interesting, but also plainly problematic. Becker reacted very strongly against the kind of narrow, manipulative methods that dominate research in the social sciences. The manipulative paradigm is consciously designed to reflect as closely as possible the research methods of the natural sciences, specifically of eliminating as much as possible the ‘human element’ from the research. Research results are considered tainted exactly to the extent that the ‘human element’ continues to enter into it. Yet in Becker’s own understanding of social science, it is exactly this ‘human element’ that ought to be the focus of study and reflection. Becker did not think that individual or collective human behavior and motivation 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, which is what all manipulative research strives for. Such research this assumes a closed system, and seeks to find the ‘mechanisms’ that control the system. Ernest Becker insisted more than anything else on the idea that human behavior is an open system, and that the manipulative paradigm for research was severely limited within social sciences.
TMT researchers are, for the most part, fully aware of the limitations of their research paradigm, and also regret the isolation that has occurred between humanities-oriented approaches and the more narrowly-focused social scientific-oriented approaches to understanding human motivation and behavior. Psychological therapists and counselors as much as any group stand astride these two perspectives. Ernest Becker’s work is one valuable arena for bringing these perspectives into active dialog, and for that reason along his ideas should be of interest to psychotherapists and counselors. We will start here by introducing GDA and then TMT as an overview to the rest of this course.
GENERATIVE DEATH ANXIETY
The gist of Becker’s mature theory was best outlined by public philosopher Sam Keen, in his introductory preface to the 1997 printing of Becker’s book, The Denial of Death. Keen summarized Becker’s theory as containing four main strands of emphasis. (cf. Liechty 2005)
The world is a terrifying place. Here is it important to recognize that Becker purposely situated his views as a corrective to overly-optimistic versions of evolutionary philosophies, in which increasing human perfection is our natural destiny. Becker pled humble ignorance on human destiny; we simply cannot know what aims the cosmic Life Force may have. But viewing our situation on this planet with jaundiced empiricism, we do know that we are inextricably bound up in a systemic food chain in which living organisms sustain themselves only by ingesting, digesting and creating fertilizer of other living organisms. For all but a very few of its organisms, this must be seen a nightmarish system of constant terror. Even for our own species, recent anthropological literature suggests that the transition from prey to predator took place only very recently in our evolutionary history. Accordingly, we may assume that the rumblings of a prey animal’s terror, as well as the exaggerated human fascination with power and weaponry that facilitated this recent transition from prey to predator, remain very present in the collective unconscious of our species. The undeniable awe and wonder in nature’s beauty aside, Becker insisted that there is real terror in the most basic structures of this world, terror that is echoed in the deepest recesses of our being. Even as we repeat our cultural narratives of conquest and comfort, we cannot mistake these narratives for empirical reality itself. We employ an array of culturally constructed ‘necessary fictions’ to aid us in the repression of our real anxiety of death and vulnerability, giving us as individuals and as societies a sense of purpose and forward movement. Yet such narratives are bound to conflict across cultures and this will have real consequences, including overt violence between people, we must keep on our mental horizons the narrative nature of our transcending Truths.
The basic motivation for human behavior is the need to control our basic anxiety, to deny the terror of death. The most basic anxiety is not sexual urgency or aggressiveness. It is the anxious terror produced in an animal that has attained self-awareness and knows that it will die.
Since the terror of death is so overwhelming we conspire to keep it unconscious. Death awareness and the anxiety it produces is not simply uncomfortable. It does not simply make us uneasy. It is so overwhelmingly threatening to the human psyche that it positively has to be repressed. The entire range of psychological defenses must be employed to keep this basic anxiety masked and disguised, and this need to repress death anxiety from consciousness may well have been, in fact, the stimulus at the origin of these psychological defense mechanisms. Individual and social character emerges from a dynamic unconscious, which must expend an enormous amount of energy in this positive repression of the terror of death from conscious awareness. The very definition of a successful culture is that it offers satisfactory, convincing and viable avenues for achieving triumphant sublimation of this basic anxiety in the form of cultural ‘heroics.’ The heroic drive is the varied and culturally-contoured drive to excellence, by which individuals ‘make their mark,’ prove their larger worth and value, and thereby earn self-esteem and symbolic immortality.
Our heroic projects, aimed at destroying evil, have the paradoxical effect of bringing more evil into the world. Because it remains unconscious and repressed, human beings will displace and scapegoat the terror of death almost willy-nilly. We are able to focus on almost any perceived threat, whether of people, political or economic ideology, race, religion, and blow it up psychologically into a life and death struggle against ultimate evil. In doing so, we lose the very faculties that allow us to place limits on the violence we are willing to employ against this perceived threat. This dynamic of spiraling violence, more than anything else, remains the underside of human social interaction at all levels, from personal interactions, to group interactions, to interactions between nation states.
While Becker’s theory of human behavioral motivation is not easily optimistic; if the ultimate human struggle is ultimately an unconscious fight against mortality itself, and therefore doomed to repeated defeat, it is hard to see how the spirals of violence can ever be eliminated from our behavior. On the other hand, if we are able to recognize the true nature of our struggles against evil, this may assist us in demythologizing the real threats posed by ‘evil empires’ and other perceived enemies, thus yielding at least some handle of rationality for setting controls and prior limits on our violence.
Becker returned again and again to similar problems of human behavior in his writings, each time exploring the problems from a different angle, and in conversation with a different set of authorial interlocutors. Becker was determined to approach his questions of human nature and human behavior from as broadly an ‘empirical’ perspective as possible. For Becker, this entailed a very conscious effort not to exclude from view any observational data on human reality, regardless of its source, including theological observations, observations rooted in literary sources, and other areas of the humanities. Becker’s work opens the doors of perception and interpretation of human reality in at least four interlocking levels.
The Personal Psychological Level. Freudian theory, as well as the more recent interpretations stemming from sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, presents the human unconscious as composed mainly of thwarted instinctual sexual and aggressive drives, which are in conflict with the norms and values of civil society. The socialization process is understood as the process by which the instinctually-driven individual finally capitulates to the behavioral demands of civil society, in recognition of the overwhelmingly inferior position of the individual in terms of raw physical power in relation to society. Defensively, the individual internalizes as his own the ‘socially acceptable’ values behaviors demanded by society and will eventually even accept such norms as freely chosen values. Yet a seething, defeated, defensive, selfish, reactive, ‘reptilian’ anti-social character remains buried inside the individual, somewhere under the surface of civility. It occasionally reappears in various measures in response to particular circumstances and provocations.
Becker understood personal psychological development in broadly contrasting, post-Freudian terms. While he acknowledged the concept of a dynamic unconscious, he considerably downplayed the role of instinctual drives. The content of the dynamic unconscious largely consists of symbolic distortions of childhood perceptions of the actions of parents and other caregivers. Following Alfred Adler, Otto Rank and others, Becker focused attentiveness to original ego-weakness and ego-inferiority in the context of the infant’s relationship with caregivers, and the vicissitudes of the separation/individuation process. Becker pictured the individual child as naturally social with continuing needs for security, closeness and affection. Spurred originally by the anxiety of physical separation from caregivers, the child is increasingly motivated by the need to maintain self-esteem. As the child grows and matures, it learns to expand its repertoire of maintaining its sense of security, closeness and affection, which becomes increasingly less body-based and increasingly more based on symbolic-action, initially in the caregiver relationship, but finally extended to symbolic meanings connected with the larger society.
Thus Becker wrote not of a psychosexual Oedipal Complex, but rather of a relational/existential Oedipal Transition. The Oedipal Transition is a time in which the child must learns to seek and be satisfied with continued parental approval on a psychological and symbolic level, rather than on a direct physiological level. This process of socialization a culturally specific, but describes in very broad terms that which takes place in all cultures, the process of transforming the child from being primarily biological actor into a person who is primarily social actor. The process is mainly transactional rather than instinctual. The end result is that the individual learns to maintain a sense of personal self-esteem in the psychological, symbolic arena.
This process only occurs as the symbolic Self of the individual assumes ever more effective control of its own physical body. Thus one byproduct of this process is the emerging experience of a dualism of body and symbolic Self. The body becomes an object in the sphere of the ego or symbolic Self. The growing ability to delay reaction to bodily stimuli is the mechanism by which the symbolic Self comes to increasingly know itself and stretch toward further individuation. This experienced dualism of body and symbolic Self increases as the growing child begins to confront the fact of mortality and the related anxiety this produces. Quite early the child suspects that hope for continued existence on the physical level is finally doomed to failure, and in this realization the psyche is pushed toward constructions of psychological, symbolic (rather than physical) conquering of death.
Chronologically, therefore, the first anxiety is the anxiety of physical separation from the caregiver. As the child’s ability to abstract and symbolize develops, this first anxiety is displaced by the existential anxiety of mortality awareness. From that point at which the child is able to understand that caregiver separation (object loss) = inability to thrive = death, it can be assumed that death anxiety has establishing itself as basic to the anxieties of abandonment. The experienced dualism of body and symbolic Self, along with the concomitant urge to conquer death symbolically, emerge during the Oedipal Transition, and largely define the problem of living itself, characterized psychologically by ego expansion on the one hand and safe anxiety avoidance on the other.
The Social Psychological Level. As implied above, in Becker’s theory of Generative Death Anxiety, there is a smoothly integrated and logically compelling movement from the personal psychological to the social psychological levels. It is at the social psychological level that the need for continued individual self-esteem maintenance is carried into the social arena. There are several linking concepts between the sphere of the personal and social spheres, but the most important is Becker’s category of the immortality project. Spurred by the need to repress awareness of mortality from consciousness, human beings spend enormous amounts of psychic energy creating symbols of immortality, the psychological mechanisms for taming of the terror of finitude, with which people identify themselves and through which people vicariously participate in a sense of immortality at the symbolic level. Viable cultures provide what Becker called an immortality ideology, a narrative of symbolic power that adequately satisfies the human need for security and protection. In a smoothly functioning society, the myriad individual immortality projects fit neatly into the overriding cultural immortality ideology, thus allowing each individual the sense that he or she is an important and valued actor in an historical drama of transcending significance. When this happens smoothly, the anxiety-allaying function of the social immortality ideology is mutually confirmed by at the level of individual and collective experience.
Because the symbolic Self is largely linguistically (that is, socially) constructed, the grammar by which the symbolic Self maintains its sense of worth and value moves logically and compellingly into the social arena by way of the developed theory of role and status. There is a public logic, a dominant socially constructed dominant ethos, which may differ from the private logic of individuals making up that particular public. Psychological and social ‘character,’ whether functional or dysfunctional, reflect rather directly the individual and group strategies for encompassing the gap between public and private logic, balancing both the social need to maintain the sanctity of public logic and the individual need to maintain maximum self-esteem. Here the importance of Becker’s expanded category of transference can be seen. As individuals, we are finite, mortal, weak animals. Given the choice between accepting this reality or giving oneself over to illusions of greatness and importance which a leader imparts to followers, the mass of human beings will choose illusion over reality, lies over truth, fiction over fact. Transference describes the nature of the bond between leader and follower, between individual and group behavior. It is a bond rooted in the regressive, individual submission to ‘power,’ in the individual need to feel awe and protection by symbolic icons of power and thus deny and avoid recognition of finitude. People do not simply find themselves passively ‘engulfed’ by such feelings toward symbolic icons of power. People actively and all-but-consciously seek such symbolic icons of powers toward which they might submit themselves, even when, perhaps in our time especially when, this is done under the ideological cover of seeking independence, individuation, self-actualization, self-fulfillment and autonomy.
The individual Oedipal Project is the life-long quest to establish independent sources for grounding ego expansion. It is finally a striving for a self-grounded ego. Yet very few are able to establish their own meanings (private logic as opposed to public logic) in an absolute sense and no one is able to sustain such personal meaning without interruption over time without socially available structures of plausibility. Therefore most people all of the time, and all people some of the time, must draw upon the established categories of culture (public logic) for a personal sense of worth and forward movement. Life is a constant movement between establishing personal meaning and seeking confirmation of that meaning from the group. The most prominent features of social life can best be understood as public striving for symbolic immortality. They are attempts to symbolically establish human worth, dignity, meaning and significance, thus to allay the anxious, gnawing, unconscious suspicion that, in the face of the reality of mortality, individual and species human life is but fleeting, perishable, transient, insignificant and meaningless.
The Political Level. Though not an activist, Becker held generally progressive views for his time—he was an early voice against the Vietnam War and thought very highly of the Civil Rights movement. Yet Becker was, like Reinhold Niebuhr, no unambiguous friend to the conventional dichotomous politics of Left or Right, Liberal or Conservative, Democrat or Republican. He understood that all political movements gain power by fostering transference reactions among their target constituencies; all political movements engage to one extent or another in mesmerizing sleight of hand, since none can actually produce the implied utopia of its immortality ideology. On the other hand, some political movements are less prone to deception and exact a lesser pound of flesh than others.
Becker drew directly from his philosophical anthropology to construct we might call an ideal/real theory of democracy, which he defined briefly as a state in which each person strives to achieve maximum individuality within maximum community. In critical service of this ideal is the quest to provide a synthesis of knowledge leading to better solutions to the recurring problems of community, social morality, and an ordered but free society. Becker was cognizant of the fact that as buffers against anxiety, human beings will always be prone to following those leaders whose projected image is perceived as an adequate transference object. After all, a fully ‘socialized’ adult human is any society is exactly one who accepts authority in place of trial and error learning, and subsequently distrusts his or her own independent judgments if such judgments conflict with established authorities. Yet as Becker saw it, modern liberal democracy at its best has been an experiment to see if this aspect of socialization could be seriously ameliorated. Modern democracy is nothing less than a radical social experiment, especially when viewed against the backdrop of European monarchies and aristocracies, systems in which it was anything but self-evident that all people are created equal. It is an experiment to test whether a conceptual construct, self-governing human freedom, can itself function as a transference object adequate to hold a free and diverse people together in unity. Contrary to what many history books teach, however, this was not accomplished once for all in 1776 or 1792, but is an ongoing experiment, subject to strong obstructing social forces. This experiment is of itself an heroic immortality ideology, in which the State itself encourages (especially in the form of protection of minority rights ensconced in the Bill of Rights) participation in multiple interlinking spheres of transcendent meaning that specifically undercut aggrandizement of the State. The common heroism is only the heroism of participation in the democratic experiment itself. Ideally, this sense of personal and social heroism allows a diverse and multicultural population a high degree of mutual respect, recognizing each other as free and equal citizens, seeking to curb the pursuit of naked self-interest at the expense of the commonweal. Much of the social malaise which many people feel in America today stems from the fact that, as a nation, we have largely lost the sense of personal and social heroism we once enjoyed as our right as participants in this noble political experiment. We now run in all directions seeking that sense of heroism, which is already ours by heritage as citizens, even while our democracy itself falters.
In the ideal/real democracy, leaders emerge from the people, and leadership changes often enough that there is minimal opportunity for the establishment of oligarchy or demagoguery. People learn to trust their own independent judgments, and, through its system of public education, this is fostered and encouraged by the State itself. The State itself, both by strategic intervention, and by strategically keeping out of the way, becomes a mechanism for encouraging progressive social change.
This use of State power for what is actually the abolition of a powerful State is indeed a fragile experiment, easily be driven off course. In America this experiment has been significantly derailed by an assumption that took hold in the late 19th century, by which for practical purposes the political system of liberal democracy and the economic system of free market capitalism were totally identified. This significantly narrowed the scope of hero-worthy pursuits supported by the public logic of the society, focusing social power on one main social project, material accumulation and consumption. The relative merit of all social institutions, as is confirmed by even a cursory look at the debates surrounding (as one example) current educational policy, is then judged by how well it contributes to this one social project.
Becker suggested that a unified educational curriculum might be the way to get our democratic experiment back on track. Recognizing the impossibility of defining the Good to the satisfaction of all, Becker counseled that at least we might find agreement in defining what is bad for human beings. The Bad would be anything that stands in the way of full human development, of achieving maximum individuality within maximum community. Becker here introduced the category of alienation as a short-hand for the Bad. He proposed that we examine the possibility of using the concept of an ‘alienation curriculum’ as a unifying force for education and learning. A general theory of alienation is an explanation for the evil in the world that is caused by human made arrangements. It points a finger at those evils, which could be ameliorated by human effort. Becker sometimes called this larger social scientific project anthropodicy and sometimes referred to it as a Unified Science of Man(kind), a dynamic, inductive description of human values which evolves and is revised in response to the concerns of each generation as new aspects of human alienation are recognized.
In service of a revival of what he took to be the true spirit of liberal democracy, Becker suggested that a unified theory of alienation could become the single unifying principle for our whole curriculum and the foundation for a genuine synthesis of knowledge. Education would seek to show students the history of alienation in one’s personal life development, how alienation arises as a result of the law of individual development. It would seek to show the history of alienation in society, how alienation arises as a result of the workings of society and the evolution of society in history. And finally, it would seek to show the total problem of alienation under the conditions of existence, how evil arises as a result of the condition of life itself, which is finitude and mortality.
Becker characterized the educational system in the ideal/real democracy as a Great Conversation carried on by a community of scientist-scholar-investigators. This was also his basic description of an ideal social existence in the ideal/real democratic state, in which the expansion of maximum individuality within maximum community would itself serve as the socio-cultural immortality project—the only kind of immortality project that by its nature will not displace freedom with servitude in the process of achieving its actualization.
The Religious and Spiritual Level. Becker is one of only a few social scientists who took great care to foster a perspective in which the theological knowledge and religious or spiritual aspect of human experience is given a place of full integrity beside other fields of knowledge and experience. Becker neither bracketed out such knowledge and experience, nor treated it reductively. On the other hand, he did not privilege it either. He listened to what was being said in this area for what it could contribute to a more well-rounded view of human nature and behavioral motivation.
One of the central points Becker made in this regard is that because all personal and cultural immortality projects, strategies and ideologies (collectively the stuff of culture) function to allay the terror of mortality, finitude, insignificance and nothingness, in a very real sense even secular societies are religious to the core. Culture helps us confront the mysteries of life and death, of mortality and immortality, and makes it deeply religious or sacred. Any legitimate distinction between the secular and sacred at the social level quickly collapses at the psychological level. Religious faith in the broadest sense is the inevitable human response to mortality awareness.
Becker followed especially Soren Kierkegaard and Paul Tillich in his formulations. The concept of a Creator God is our ultimate transference object. The concept of a Creator God offers real hope of transcendence over the terror of mortality. A Creator God gives human life significance, meaning and value in a world of suffering and pain, a world in which death finally rules. In this world, any sense of significance, meaning and value, of transcendence over the terror of mortality comes as a free gift of the Creator God and can only be accepted as an act of faith.
Wittingly or unwittingly, Becker stepped directly into the thick of postmodern theological debate. For the very Creator God who is able to act as the ultimate transference object as Becker outlined it—who bestows human freedom but does not aggress against human freedom in reciprocal expectation—is an ideal/real aesthetic construction. This construction of the Creator God always stands ahead of human history, calling humanity toward new achievements of maximum individuality within maximum community. This God cannot be calcified in descriptions of divine nature and attributes, nor ever be fully known. No ‘graven image’ can be made of this God. As soon as an individual or community claims to know this God, to speak for this God, they have created an idol, a human-made God, which will sooner or later displace human freedom with alienating subservience.
Because cultural immortality ideologies function to protect us from mortality, from that which we perceive in ourselves as ultimate powerlessness, human beings have always been drawn to images of power, the possibility of victory over our ultimate powerlessness. Becker’s theory accounts for the dark side of human spiritual experience-the ongoing fascination we have with violence; the attraction to blood rituals of sacrifice; worship of symbols of wealth; the need religious for reverence and servitude; and attraction to the awesomeness (the horror!) of raw, amoral power. This dark side of human religious experience persists and flourishes in conditions of modernity, long after its ‘irrational’ nature has been well exposed.
Human spirituality is presented in Becker’s theory in a very real sense as the age-old struggle with idolatry. God, as ultimate transference object, cannot be materialized, cannot be possessed, cannot even be with us (against them) in history; rather God stands ahead of us as an aesthetic ideal/real conceptual construction. God requires above all else endurance of anxiety on faith. Those gods which can be materialized, possessed, known exhaustively, located in time and space, offering power for anxiety-free living are exposed as idols. Only too late we learn that servitude to such gods entails sacrifice and displacement of human freedom and creative expansion. The drama of human spirituality, the sense of true heroism it offers, is contained in the possibility that in each day and in each moment, we may choose the security of idols or the adventure of faith.
Although this introductory presentation of Ernest Becker’s ideas is necessarily sketchy, the positive value of his central theory of Generative Death Anxiety as an organizing principle in the social sciences and humanities is clear. It accounts for much of human motivation and behavior in at least four large fields of experience, and does so in a way that treats each field autonomously and with integrity, neither ignoring any field of experience, nor reducing or collapsing all fields into one. Furthermore, as we will see shortly, Terror Management Theory has been able to test important aspects of Becker’s ideas using established, sophisticated, empirical methods and the results have been demonstrated to be reliable, predictable and repeatable across a spectrum of research teams, age groups and nationalities. While such research cannot prove absolutely the truth of Becker’s ideas, they have shown that among a field of alternative theories, Becker’s theories best account for the demonstrated research results.
Becker’s own work warns of the potential dangers inherent to any ideological grand narrative statement of human knowledge. This is certainly not being advocated here. Yet even as a pendulum reaches its apex in one direction, its forces are being gathered for a return swing in the opposite direction. We have already seen the apex of a trend in knowledge construction emphasizing the distinctive, difference, the deconstruction and tribalization of knowledge, and we already see the forces gathering for a swing back toward an integration of knowledge. Too much of this returning trend appears to be more than willing to embrace various forms of exactly those ideological grand narratives, along with the inherent dangers contained within them. My hope in presenting this anthology is for wider recognition that in Becker’s ideas of Generative Death Anxiety, we may find a way forward, toward a respectful, unified, interdisciplinary integration of knowledge, which does not simply steamroll over distinction and difference.
TERROR MANAGEMENT THEORY
Terror Management Theory (TMT) is a school of research and teaching in academic social psychology, which grew out of an intense encounter with Ernest Becker’s writings on the part of a trio of young graduate students in the early 1980s. Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pyszczynski were friends and colleagues in the social psychology program at the University of Kansas (Solomon, Greenberg and Pyszczynski 1998; Greenberg, Pyszczynski and Solomon 2002). Becker’s writings were not on the reading list of their social psychology program, and they describe their initial exposure to Becker’s writings soon after graduation as accidental, as writings they stumbled across in the course of preparing lectures for undergraduate courses they were now teaching in the respective universities in which they have made their careers. As their initial attempts to introduce Becker’s ideas at professional meetings in their field was roundly rejected, they soon realized that if these ideas were to get any hearing at all among their colleagues, they would have to state the ideas in terms of testable hypotheses and be able to bolster their presentations with the kind of experimental evidence corresponding to the research methods and standards of their discipline.
Drawing most specifically on Becker’s last three books (The Birth and Death of Meaning 2d edition, The Denial of Death, and the posthumously published Escape From Evil) the trio put their training in experimental social psychology to work, boiling Becker’s ideas down to the basic notion that
people function with psychological equanimity, despite their knowledge of the fragility of existence and ultimate fate, by believing they are valued and enduring contributors to a meaningful and permanent reality. Thus, a great deal of human behavior is posited to be directed toward sustaining faith in this worldview and one’s status as a valuable contributor to this meaningful reality. [Greenberg, Pyszczynski and Solomon 2002 p. 5]
Here we see that main one of Becker’s important ideas that is foundational for TMT work is the role of society and culture in providing for people the stage, as well as (continuing the dramatic metaphor) the script book for proper social interaction and that furthermore, this provides a definite death-anxiety-allaying function in human life. The first part of this statement is shared by an established stream of thought within social psychology, namely the Symbolic Interaction school. TMT charts its new ground with its focus on the death-anxiety-allaying function that the social scripts and properly-transacted social roles of culture provide. It is from this fundamental theory about culture that TMT work began to take off.
If in fact (so reasoned the trio) the social framework of culture does provide this essential death-anxiety-allaying function, subtle reminders of death ought to create some measurable attitudinal changes in people. This led to a central TMT concept of worldview defense, the statistically significant correlation between subjects aroused by death reminders (what came to call the ‘mortality salience condition’ in TMT literature) to demonstrate increased clinging to and willingness to defend the norms and values of their society and culture, as compared with similarly situated control groups not placed in the mortality-salient condition.
An early experiment that pointed in this direction concerned the amount of bond set for a hypothetical case of sexual solicitation by Phoenix municipal judges. It was predicted that if social norms (here represented by respect for the law) does indeed provide a death-anxiety-allaying function, then judges in the mortality salient condition reviewing a case will be much more offended and angered by a lawbreaker, and moved to defend the sanctity of the law against the lawbreaker, than would a judge reviewing the same case who is not in the mortality salient condition, and that this difference could be measured by the respective size of the bond set by the judges.
As narrated by Jeff Greenberg in the documentary film Flight From Death–The Quest For Immortality (Shen 2003), the group divided their subjects into the active and control groups factoring in all relevant variables to make the division as random as possible. Then each group was given a series of questionnaires to fill out, identical with the exception that certain items concerning death and funeral arrangements were inserted into questionnaires the active group as the means to solicit the mortality-salient condition. Then the subjects were given the case to review and asked to set the bond for the arrested prostitute. The predictions of a statistically significant difference in the bond amount between the active and control group was validated, and to such an extent that it was startling even to the researchers. The control group set a bond averaging $50, while the mortality salient group set a bond averaging $455–nearly ten times as high.
From this beginning, TMT research has extended into two decades of an extremely broad and sophisticated program of research using control-group and blind procedural methods, carried on by the trio, their students, now their students’ students, and many other experimental social psychologists drawn to the work by the demonstrated power of the results. Now having accumulated some 200 published experiments and counting, the methods of creating the mortality salient condition have mushroomed to include both conscious and subliminal techniques, and results of many kinds have been replicated across the range of age and socioeconomic strata, and in at least six different countries. Its focus on the death-anxiety-allaying function of culture has extended into investigations of the correlations between mortality salience and media portrayals of war and violence, into attitudes of racism, nationalism, cultural chauvinism and preference for authoritarianism, as well as into attitudes of love and relationships, sex and physical embodiment.
Terror Management Theory gained considerable attention aftermath the attacks on the USA in 2001. It was soon recognized that TMT offered at least one of the most coherent frameworks within which to understand and interpret both the actions of the attackers themselves, as well as the varied reactions of the people of the United States that resulted. A book outlining their research and the framework for interpretation of these event it provides, entitled In the Wake of 9/11: The Psychology of Terror (Pyszczynski, Solomon and Greenburg 2003) was issued by the prestigious American Psychological Association, and reports on this work in relation to current events has continued apace in the popular press as well as in the professional journals. TMT has unquestionably established itself as one of the leading schools of thought in academic social psychology, and has once again placed the work of Ernest Becker ‘on the map’ of academic respectability.
17 THESES SUMMARIZING ERNEST BECKER’S INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
References
Greenberg, J., Pyszczynski, T. and Solomon, S. ( 2002). A perilous leap from Becker’s theorizing to empirical science: Terror management theory and research. In Liechty, D. (ed.) Death and Denial: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Legacy of Ernest Becker (pp. 3-16). Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers.
Liechty, D. (2005). Introduction. In Liechty, D. (ed.) The Ernest Becker reader (pp. 11-23). Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press.
Pyszczynski, T., Solomon, S. and Greenberg, J. (2003). In the wake of 9/11: The psychology of terror. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Shen, P. (2003). Flight From Death–The Quest For Immortality. Documentary film directed by Patrick Shen. RealityFilms. Transcendental Media. www.flightfromdeath.com
Solomon, S., Greenberg, J. and Pyszczynski, T. (1998) Tales from the crypt: On the role of death in life. Zygon: The Journal of Religion and Science, 33, 9-44.