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The Denial of Death by  Ernest Becker 

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The irony of man’s condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive.

In The Denial of Death, American cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker argues that most human action is taken to ignore or avoid the inevitability of death. The 1974 Pulitzer Prize-winning book builds on the works of Otto Rank, Søren Kierkegaard, Sigmund Freud, and Norman O. Brown. It discusses the psychological and philosophical implications of how people and cultures have reacted to the concept of death.