Ernest Becker / Victor Frankl

Ernest Becker / Victor Frankl

Comparison and Contrast: The role of anxiety in Viktor Frankl's book Man's Search for Meaning and Ernest Becker's book the Denial of Death

Both Ernest Becker and Viktor Frankl conceptualized human beings, in modernity, as existing in a state of constant anxiety. For both authors, finding meaning in life was the solution to remedying this sense of disquiet, or at least the negative effects anxiety could have upon the human psyche. Frankl believed that finding a greater sense of purpose in life was the key to mental health. That is why he called his therapy, logotherapy, and saw psychoanalysis as a philosophical as well as a counseling instrument. He believed locating one's own individual quest as part of a larger social quest to better the world as well as to improve the self was the solution to making sense of an environment that was often fraught with misery and despair. The need to find meaning in life was hard-wired into the human cognitive framework, and if frustrated, human beings could never realize their potential and find a sense of satisfaction in existence.

Frankl's theories were spawned from his experiences in concentration camps during World War II. He was forced to critically reevaluate his faith, based upon what he had seen his fellow human beings perpetuate against their own kind. His therapy, he wrote, considered human beings as entities "whose main concern consists in fulfilling a meaning and in actualizing values, rather than in the mere gratification and satisfaction of drives and instincts" (Frankl125). Animals could not feel anxiety, dread, compassion, and concern in the same altruistic manner human beings could -- the reason for all ideology, religious and political, was to satisfy a quest for meaning, and if these older hermeneutical frameworks could no longer provide meaning, then it was the therapist's duty to help the client find new ways of making sense of the world that were more satisfying.

Ernest Becker focused not on a dread of the evil capabilities of humankind, but on the dread all human beings face at the end of life (Williams, 2007). Rather than accept death, human beings seek a solution, Becker suggested, for making the purposeless nature of life seem purposeful, so that all life was not seen as a way of merely marking time until death. Becker had a much darker view of life than Frankl. His pessimism is reflected in the fact that, instead of focusing on the solution offered by therapy, Becker focused more upon the Denial of Death, or the cognitive fallacies and imaginative techniques human beings deploy to avoid death, such as idealizing another person, or trying to find something that they alone can uniquely excel at as a hero, even if this heroic ability is at something mundane. "The real world is simply too terrible to admit; it tells man that he is a small, trembling animal who will decay and die. Illusion changes all this, makes man seem important, vital to the universe, immortal in some way" (Becker 133).