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The question of what man does with his life cannot be totally answered without also responding to the question of how he approaches death. This is not in the sense of how, for example, a terminally ill patient accepts and copes with his impending fatality, but in the sense of how each of us accepts the knowledge that all men die and that, in the long run, everything reverts to nothingness. Becker's Denial of Death is a long-awaited study and analysis of several psychoanalytic views of the human condiiton. As an analysis of the human condition, including all points on the being-nonbeing continuum, and as a synthesis of the latter with psychology, with its stress on the normal-abnormal aspects within that continuum, the book seems concerned not with death per se but with its effect on man's approach to life.
Becker provides a reinterpretation of various fundamental psychoanalytic concepts in the light of his essentially Rankian theses. He suggests that much of man's life is geared toward the satisfaction of an organismic narcissism and a powerful need for self-esteem. “Heroism” and heroics, in Becker's conceptualization, are reinterpreted as man's elementary attempts to make himself count for more than any other animal. The motivation for this drive for self-evaluation is not encouraged by narcissism alone.
Becker posits that death, representing (and being) an ever-present pointer