ernest becker the birth and death of meaning

There’s certainly room for criticism of Becker’s theory, I myself didn’t buy into every idea he put forth. Instead, the Becker delivers an open-ended and honest examination of his subject of passionate interest: the research and philosophies that taken together represent what he considers a wholistic science of human nature. The Birth and Death of Meaning simply doesn’t read like a calculated anatomy of human society with razor sharp insight, and it doesn’t really pay to read it like it is.

Not that the fish in the aquarium being the butt of the joke represent the laughability of this book’s subject matter, they don’t. The simple answer is yes, this was incredibly fun to read, but less as in the fun you’d have on a lovely first date and more like the kind you’d have making dumb jokes about fishes at an aquarium with friends. Hopefully one of the things this review can offer is a meaningful explanation of what the hell this book exactly is for anyone interested in it. The book’s content very much threw me for a curve ball I had zero clue going into it that I’d be getting a crash course on Freud. If that sounds like a bewildering discussion to read about, that’s because it is. To summarize this book’s content as concisely as possible: what The Birth and Death of Meaning delivers is a discussion of human nature through the lens of psychoanalysis that eventually explores the importance of existentialism to the social sciences. That’s mostly I think because it’s not easy to tell what the hell this book is about. I thought I knew what I was getting into when I started reading this book (I didn’t).

Ernest becker the birth and death of meaning