2025 Readings 18

 Last night I finished Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death. I had been thinking about reading it for a while, and watching Woody Allen reference in Annie Hall (I forgot that scene, although not the theme behind the scene) recently doubtless inspired me to finally take the plunge. I don't know if I got out of it what I could have gotten out of it, but I still really enjoyed it. It features a smug Freudianism and assurance of shared understanding that made perfect sense in the early 1970s but which doesn't translate as well to the mid-2020s.The book devoted an extraordinary amount of time to a background discussion of Freud, which cleared up some of my misconceptions, and especially Otto Rank, who I knew almost nothing about it. I finished up Becker's book definitely wanting to dig into Freuds Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego and Otto Rank's Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development. Oddly, one of my critique's of Becker's book is that I thought, in the end, that his discussion of the denial of death got lost in the wealth of background information on Freud.