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This book attempts to provide a comprehensive answer to the questions of what human normalcy is and what the basic problem of human pathology is. The approach is existential in style as well as in content: mental functioning consists of a constant, all-pervasive struggle with the fear of death.
The author, an anthropologist in Canada, suggests that the best and only answer is Rank's mystico-religious response. Neuroses, perversions, and psychoses are the attempted solutions to the insoluble problem of the contradiction between the living soul and the decaying body. The fear of death, according to Becker, is at the root of all those anxieties and conflicts to which Freud attributed—erroneously, in Becker's opinion—great significance for the course of human development. Becker believes that Rank achieved an explanation for the problems that Kierkegaard 'the psychoanalyst' (according to Becker) had initiated. Rank recognized that cultural life, social revolution, science, and Freud's psychoanalysis are illusions and poor substitutes for the 'absolute transcendence'.
Becker's references to psychoanalysis, apart from a few superficial and misunderstood quotations, are of the prestructural era, corresponding to the date of Rank's departure from psychoanalysis. He