Since the EBF’s inception, Daniel Liechty (Associate Professor of the School of Social Work at Illinois State University) has been reviewing books which touch on Becker’s ideas in his column “Of Recent Interest.” All of these reviews, including those written by guest reviewers, are available here.
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Thomas Patrick Donovan's "Into the Face of Death" |
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Thursday, 24 March 2011 14:17 |
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Of Recent Interest… is a Pacifica Graduate Institute doctoral dissertation written by Thomas Patrick Donovan, Into the Face of Death: 9/11, the Destabilization of America’s Creation Myth, and Theories of Death Denial. Dr. Donovan reports that he hopes his work contribute to the field of depth psychology, by emphasizing the “powerful, originary, and psyche-shaping force” contained in death anxiety, and this concept provides a “vital bridge” between individual and collective psychology.
Donovan draws substantially on both Otto Rank and Ernest Becker, whose work he sees as providing “profound insights into the complex, tragic beauty of human endeavor and life on earth.” The history of cultures strongly suggests that culture itself is constituted by “ meaning-making myths” that provide “implicit psycho-social scaffolding that structures and organizes societies” for the function of meaning and anxiety control. Based on that premise, Donovan examines events surrounding 9/11 as a “dramatic window” for recognizing fundamental mythic structures undergirding the American way of life, and what occurs when such structures are threatened.
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Firestone and Catlett's "Beyond Death Anxiety" |
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Monday, 21 March 2011 12:02 |
Of Recent Interest… is the new book by Robert W. Firestone and Joyce Catlett, Beyond Death Anxiety: Achieving Life-Affirming Death Awareness (Springer, 2009.) This book fruitfully serves those looking to apply Ernest Becker’s ideas psychotherapeutically, in individual counseling or in group therapy. A capstone to Robert Firestone’s 50 years of work in psychotherapy, psychoanalysis and psychiatry and to the numerous books written by these authors, Firestone and Catlett show how to apply the themes and implications of the ideas of Ernest Becker in everyday life. Their basic premise is that accepting death is part of developing an affirming and meaningful experience of life. Contributing to the credibility of their presentation is the wealth of clinical evidence and personal experience Firestone and Catlett incorporate. This work is a synthesis based on both clinical studies and extensive anecdotal evidence from a group project involving 150 people who for four decades closely shared their lives and their psychological development. The authors present many examples in which these people express their psychotherapeutic work on managing death anxiety and challenging and changing the defenses of denial, fantasy, and addiction reified by death anxiety.
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Ron Leifer's "Vinegar into Honey" |
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Wednesday, 22 December 2010 13:38 |
Of Recent Interest… is Ron Leifer’s book Vinegar Into Honey: Seven Steps to Understanding
and Transforming Anger, Aggression and Violence (Snow Lion Publications, 2008). Ron Leifer, MD., is a psychiatrist with nearly 50 years of practice experience. A colleague and close friend of Ernest Becker in their early professional careers, Leifer has taken key ideas he and Becker kicked around during that time and refined them over the years in the crucible of clinical work. During the recent decade, Leifer has been putting his mature work into a series of books that yield his own unique perspective, at the same time reflecting in various ways the ongoing discussions he enjoyed with Becker and other young professionals of their group. As one who has studied Ernest Becker’s writings very closely, and without at all taking the spotlight off of Dr. Leifer’s work itself, I conclude it is in Leifer’s work that we come the closest to what Becker’s views would have evolved toward in the area of clinical psychotherapy had he had more years to live.
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Eugene Webb's "Worldview and Mind" |
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Wednesday, 22 December 2010 13:32 |
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Of Recent Interest… is Eugene Webb’s new book, Worldview and Mind: Religious Thought and Psychological Development (U of Missouri Press, 2009). Eugene Webb is well known to readers of this newsletter as an early supporter of the Ernest Becker Foundation, and a frequent speaker at EBF conferences. Webb pioneered a position as an expert on religion within the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. His professional example of injecting the perspective of comparative religions into the education of those studying international politics is one that, as world events are increasingly demonstrating, ought to influence the curricula of all top-tier schools of diplomacy and negotiation. Now professor emeritus, this fine book clearly shows that Webb has remained on the cutting
edge of current theory and discussion.
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Kaufman's "Guided By the Faith of Christ" |
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Thursday, 09 September 2010 11:24 |
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Of Recent Interest… is the book Guided by the Faith of Christ (Vegetarian Associates Press 2008) by Stephen R. Kaufman. Subtitled “Seeking to Stop Violence and Scapegoating,” Kaufman has written a very important and accessible book, one of the very few books available that draw heavily on both Ernest Becker and Rene Girard, and read each through the eyes of the other. Back in the early days of the Ernest Becker Foundation, there was quite a bit of interest in pinpointing the many spots of overlap between the ideas of Becker and Girard. That effort rather faltered as other emphases and priorities bubbled to the top of the agenda. However, I for one have always thought that there was a goldmine of reward for bringing these two sources into dialogue, and Kaufman’s book is certainly evidence of that assumption.
Kaufman situates his book in the context of violent crisis. We have just come through the most violent and bloody century human history has ever seen. Two world wars, the Holocaust, Korea, Vietnam and countless other wars and terrorist acts later, it is hard to even imagine anymore that liberal progressives of the 1890s were celebrating the permanent end of armed conflict! Kaufman’s goal in this book, through Becker and Girard on one hand and the Bible on the other, why this is so. Why has humanity found itself in such a grip of violence and war, and what if anything can we do about it?
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