A Blog Post by Jady Koch

Annie Hall and The Denial of Death

The recent posts about Woody Allen and Lucian Freud reminded me of a scene in Annie Hall where, shortly after explaining that “I feel that life is divided into the horrible and the miserable,” Alvy recommends Ernest Becker’s book The Denial of Death to Annie. Written in 1973, it is Becker’s evaluation of human psychology from a Freudian and post-Freudian perspective. In it, he argues that Freud’s (in)famous argument that people are fundamentally libidinal—that is driven by sexual desire—was descriptively accurate but specifically misguided; the real motivation behind people’s subconscious maladies lies not in the hyper-sexual realm but rather in the existential reality of their own mortality.

As he states in the opening pages: "The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity—activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for man (ix)."

While it is intellectually fashionable to argue that people are fundamentally different than they were 2000 years ago, or even 200 years ago, one can’t help but notice parallels between Becker’s psychological analysis of this primal fear and the very thing that St. Paul believes that the Gospel addresses. In 1 Cor. 15:55 he states: "O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?"

Read the whole post here.

This is a piece by my friend Jady Koch who is in Germany working on a PhD at Humboldt. He has an incredible insight and you will hear from him in the future. - DOB