How did you see Becker’s ideas playing out in the daily life of doctors and patients?

The biggest thing is denial of death, just as Becker’s Pulitzer prize-winning book is named. That unconscious motivation is usually unspoken. In the practice of medicine I rarely inquired directly into my patients’ belief systems, but I would often get a glimpse into their religious understanding, so their ways of thinking could surface without being specifically asked for. In taking the patient’s history, being open to insights into their belief systems, getting to know their humanity and inhumanity, those were always important things. I found practically all my patients to be of great interest and I enjoyed working with them and trying to help them with the problems that they brought to me.

Death is sometimes viewed as a “failure” on the part of the doctors, or the medical field in general. Did you ever feel this way, or sense that other doctors felt similarly?

Well, preventing death was sort of the motto [laughs]. And so talking about or considering death didn’t have the same amount of acceptance in those times, as I’m quite confident is taking place now. For example, in the management of pain you have to worry about making people more vulnerable to dying because of overdosing and that sort of thing. So that is very much is on doctors’ minds now, and is much different than before.

You discovered Becker in the middle of your career. Can you talk about what effect this had on you and your approach to your practice?

It had a big effect and it did enable me to introduce that kind of thing into my practice. More and more in those later years I revealed to my patients my interest in Becker’s work. Can I say that there is a big flock of my patients who read Denial of Death? I can’t say that; I don’t think that happened. I can’t say that I caused a lot of people to become rabid Beckerites like I am. But the seed is there and they ask me how the Foundation is doing and that sort of thing.

What do you think needs to happen within the medical field in order for Western medicine to improve its ability to have dialogues around mortality?

That’s a good thing for us to work on; I don’t have a quick answer for that. But, I believe that having the scientific justification was and is virtually miraculous. When Terror Management Theory came into the picture, the whole game changed because now we had data. As I read intellectual history from the 17th and 18th centuries up to today, there has been a wonderful progression and synthesis of information and understanding. Becker’s thesis in his earlier work, especially The Birth and Death of Meaning (2nd Ed.), inspired those terror management folks to put it all together and test it. And that’s ongoing, of course. Before I started the Becker Foundation, I didn’t know there existed such a thing as experimental social science.

I keep hoping and encouraging people to give thought to it, to be cognizant of the existence of denial in their own belief systems and understanding. It’s painful and it hurts, but there are lots of good things that happen when people are kind to everybody regardless of beliefs…

When exactly did you discover Terror Management Theory?

Oh, it was almost the same year, 1993, almost simultaneously if I remember correctly. A very close doctor friend of mine was very skeptical of my Becker fascination, in fact he thought I was nuts. But he was a New York Times reader, and he saw this article about Beckerian experiments in the Times. He made the mistake of telling me about it [laughs]. So I was in touch with Jeff Greenberg, the co-creator of Terror Management Theory, right away. And it was Jeff who told me to get in touch with Sheldon Solomon, another co-creator, because Sheldon is a spokesperson. So that all happened around that 1993 time. And then my friend said maybe I was onto something after all!

Do you think Becker should be taught in medical school?

Well…yes. The problem is that it is so concerned with religion. It gets very touchy. But to me, denial of death is what religions offer. It can be their calling card! They help people deny death. But we don’t ever put that in print; we don’t even talk about it. So to put that into a situation where you do an experiment to show that this is happening can have trouble registering with people who have a locked-in faith.

It’s such a hot potato; it’s so hard for people to hold on to and I don’t have an easy answer, but I keep hoping and encouraging people to give thought to it, to be cognizant of the existence of denial in their own belief systems and understanding. It’s painful and it hurts, but there are lots of good things that happen when people are kind to everybody regardless of beliefs, so that kind of thinking should be an important part of everybody’s understanding. So I think going about it gently is the best I can do anyway.

What is your personal relationship with your own mortality?

For me, love, wonder, laughter, smile, irony are the only tools that I have. I can’t do confrontation, or the pretense that I know better than you, that sort of thing. So for me it has to be love, wonder, laughter, humor, smiles. In my article “Laughing at Death,” I write about using humor to disarm fundamentalism. Humor can sometimes really get underneath and allow people to examine their belief systems without having their defenses up. By the way, at the end of my article, which itself lacks laughs, I say that for anyone who is interested to have a pictorial version of my talk that does have laughs, using cartoons, I would come to them. I have yet to have even one personal call me to come and it has been up on our site for 10 years! [laughs]. But I still answer the phone, and occasionally even the iPhone, and I am only 92, until April.