This paper compares and contrasts the role of anxiety in Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning and Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death. Both thinkers viewed anxiety as a fundamental condition of modern human existence, yet they diverged significantly in their proposed remedies. Frankl, drawing on his experiences in Nazi concentration camps, argued that authentic meaning — not distraction or false purpose — is the antidote to existential dread. Becker, by contrast, offered a darker account, contending that human beings rely on illusions and heroic self-narratives to deny mortality. The paper examines these contrasting frameworks and their implications for how individuals and therapists might approach mental health and the search for purpose.
The paper demonstrates the point-by-point comparative method: rather than treating each author in a separate block, it weaves their positions together around shared themes (the source of anxiety, the role of meaning, the value of illusion). This structure keeps the contrast visible at every stage and prevents the essay from reading as two disconnected summaries.
The essay opens by establishing the common ground both thinkers share — anxiety as the baseline human condition — before diverging into each author's distinctive framework. The middle paragraphs alternate between Frankl's logotherapeutic optimism and Becker's darker mortality-centered pessimism. A final synthesizing paragraph draws the two positions into direct contrast around the question of whether illusion or authentic striving better serves human well-being.
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 mitigating 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 that 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 or find a sense of satisfaction in existence.
Frankl's theories were shaped by his experiences in Nazi concentration camps during World War II. He was forced to critically reevaluate his faith based upon what he had witnessed 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" (Frankl 125). 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 that 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, Becker suggested, human beings seek a way to make the seemingly purposeless nature of life appear purposeful, so that all of life is not seen as merely marking time until death. Becker held a far darker view of life than Frankl. His pessimism is reflected in his emphasis on the Denial of Death — the cognitive fallacies and imaginative techniques human beings deploy to avoid confronting mortality. These techniques include idealizing another person or striving to find something at which one can uniquely excel, adopting a heroic role even if that role involves something mundane. As Becker wrote: "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).
For Becker, the distractions did provide a relief, however false; but for Frankl, the source of a good life was a positive rather than a negative sense of anxiety. Where Becker mapped the psychic mechanisms by which human beings flee from the awareness of death, Frankl argued for turning toward that awareness and allowing it to sharpen one's commitment to an authentic purpose. Together, these two thinkers offer complementary rather than simply opposing perspectives: Becker illuminates the depth and tenacity of humanity's existential terror, while Frankl charts a path through it.
Frankl, Viktor E. (1997). Man's Search for Meaning. New York: Pocket.
Becker, Ernest. (1973). Denial of Death. New York: The Free Press.
Williams, Clifford. (2007). "The Denial of Death." Trinity College: Philosophy. Retrieved 5 Nov 2007 at
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