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Ernest Becker

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The Denial of Death Paperback – May 8, 1997

by Ernest Becker (Author)

4.5 2,845 ratings

in Medical General Psychology

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Pulitzer PrizeWinner, 1974

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Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, The Denial of Death explores how people and cultures around the world have reacted to the concept of death from celebrated cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1974 and the culmination of a life’s work, The Denial of Death is Ernest Becker’s brilliant and impassioned answer to the “why” of human existence. In bold contrast to the predominant Freudian school of thought, Becker tackles the problem of the vital lie—man’s refusal to acknowledge his own mortality. In doing so, he sheds new light on the nature of humanity and issues a call to life and its living that still resonates decades after its writing.

Print length

336 pages
Language

English
Publication date

May 8, 1997
Dimensions

5.5 x 1.1 x 8.38 inches
ISBN-10

0684832402
ISBN-13

978-0684832401
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Editorial Reviews

Review

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, M.D. Author of On Death And Dying It puts together what others have torn to pieces and rendered useless. It is one of those rare masterpieces that will stimulate your thoughts, your intellectual curiosity, and last but not least, your soul...

New York Times Book Review ...a brave work of electrifying intelligence and passion, optimistic and revolutionary, destined to endure...

Albuquerque Journal Book Review ...to read it is to know the delight inherent in the unfolding of a mind grasping at new possibilities and forming a new synthesis. The Denial of Death is a great book -- one of the few great books of the 20th or any other century.

The Chicago Sun-Times It is hard to overestimate the importance of this book; Becker succeeds brilliantly in what he sets out to do, and the effort was necessary.

About the Author

After receiving a PhD in cultural anthropology from Syracuse University, Dr. Ernest Becker (1924–1974) taught at the University of California at Berkeley, San Francisco State College, and Simon Fraser University, Canada. He is survived by his wife, Marie, and a foundation that bears his name—The Ernest Becker Foundation.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Denial of Death Foreword
The first words Ernest Becker said to me when I walked into his hospital room were: “You are catching me in extremis. This is a test of everything I’ve written about death. And I’ve got a chance to show how one dies, the attitude one takes. Whether one does it in a dignified, manly way; what kinds of thoughts one surrounds it with; how one accepts his death.”

When The Denial of Death arrived at Psychology Today in late 1973 and was placed on my desk for consideration it took me less than an hour to decide that I wanted to interview Ernest Becker. On December 6th, I called his home in Vancouver to see if he would do a conversation for the magazine. His wife, Marie, told me he had just been taken to the hospital and was in the terminal stage of cancer and was not expected to live for more than a week Unexpectedly, she called the next day to say that Ernest would like to do the conversation if I could get there while he still had strength and clarity. So I went to Vancouver with speed and trembling, knowing that the only thing more presumptuous than intruding into the private world of the dying would be to refuse his invitation.

Although we had never met, Ernest and I fell immediately into deep conversation. The nearness of his death and the severe limits of his energy stripped away the impulse to chatter. We talked about death in the face of death; about evil in the presence of cancer. At the end of the day Ernest had no more energy, so there was no more time. We lingered awkwardly for a few minutes, because saying “goodbye” for the last time is hard and we both knew he would not live to see our conversation in print. A paper cup of medicinal sherry on the night stand, mercifully, provided us a ritual for ending. We drank the wine together and I left.

That day a quarter of a century ago was a pivotal event in shaping my relationship to the mystery of my death and, therefore, my life. I will carry for a lifetime the images of Ernest’s courage, his clarity purchased at the cost of enduring pain, and the manner in which his passion for ideas held death at bay for a season. It is a privilege to have witnessed such a man in the heroic agony of his dying.

In the years since his death, Becker has been widely recognized as one of the great spiritual cartographers of our age and a wise physician of the soul. Gradually, reluctantly, we are beginning to acknowledge that the bitter medicine he prescribes—contemplation of the horror of our inevitable death—is, paradoxically, the tincture that adds sweetness to mortality.

Becker’s philosophy as it emerges in Denial of Death and Escape from Evil is a braid woven from four strands.

The first strand. The world is terrifying. To say the least, Becker’s account of nature has little in common with Walt Disney. Mother Nature is a brutal bitch, red in tooth and claw, who destroys what she creates. We live, he says, in a creation in which the routine activity for organisms is “tearing others apart with teeth of all types—biting, grinding flesh, plant stalks, bones between molars, pushing the pulp greedily down the gullet with delight, incorporating its essence into one’s own organization, and then excreting with foul stench and gasses the residue.”

The second strand. The basic motivation for human behavior is our biological need to control our basic anxiety, to deny the terror of death. Human beings are naturally anxious because we are ultimately helpless and abandoned in a world where we are fated to die. “This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression—and with all this yet to die.”

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and Ernest Becker were strange allies in fomenting the cultural revolution that brought death and dying out of the closet. At the same time that Kubler-Ross gave us permission to practice the art of dying gracefully, Becker taught us that awe, fear, and ontological anxiety were natural accompaniments to our contemplation of the fact of death.

The third strand. Since the terror of death is so overwhelming we conspire to keep it unconscious. “The vital lie of character” is the first line of defense that protects us from the painful awareness of our helplessness. Every child borrows power from adults and creates a personality by introjecting the qualities of the godlike being. If I am like my all-powerful father I will not die. So long as we stay obediently within the defense mechanisms of our personality, what Wilhelm Reich called “character armor” we feel safe and are able to pretend that the world is manageable. But the price we pay is high. We repress our bodies to purchase a soul that time cannot destroy; we sacrifice pleasure to buy immortality; we encapsulate ourselves to avoid death. And life escapes us while we huddle within the defended fortress of character.

Society provides the second line of defense against our natural impotence by creating a hero system that allows us to believe that we transcend death by participating in something of lasting worth. We achieve ersatz immortality by sacrificing ourselves to conquer an empire, to build a temple, to write a book, to establish a family, to accumulate a fortune, to further progress and prosperity, to create an information-society and global free market. Since the main task of human life is to become heroic and transcend death, every culture must provide its members with an intricate symbolic system that is covertly religious. This means that ideological conflicts between cultures are essentially battles between immortality projects, holy wars.

One of Becker’s lasting contributions to social psychology has been to help us understand that corporations and nations may be driven by unconscious motives that have little to do with their stated goals. Making a killing in business or on the battlefield frequently has less to do with economic need or political reality than with the need for assuring ourselves that we have achieved something of lasting worth. Consider, for instance, the recent war in Vietnam in which the United States was driven not by any realistic economic or political interest but by the overwhelming need to defeat “atheistic communism.”

The fourth strand. Our heroic projects that are aimed at destroying evil have the paradoxical effect of bringing more evil into the world. Human conflicts are life and death struggles—my gods against your gods, my immortality project against your immortality project. The root of humanly caused evil is not man’s animal nature, not territorial aggression, or innate selfishness, but our need to gain self-esteem, deny our mortality, and achieve a heroic self-image. Our desire for the best is the cause of the worst. We want to clean up the world, make it perfect, keep it safe for democracy or communism, purify it of the enemies of god, eliminate evil, establish an alabaster city undimmed by human tears, or a thousand year Reich.

Perhaps Becker’s greatest achievement has been to create a science of evil. He has given us a new way to understand how we create surplus evil—warfare, ethnic cleansing, genocide. From the beginning of time, humans have dealt with what Carl Jung called their shadow side—feelings of inferiority, self-hate, guilt, hostility—by projecting it onto an enemy. It has remained for Becker to make crystal clear the way in which warfare is a social ritual for purification of the world in which the enemy is assigned the role of being dirty, dangerous, and atheistic. Dachau, Capetown and Mi Lai, Bosnia, Rwanda, give grim testimony to the universal need for a scapegoat—a Jew, a nigger, a dirty communist, a Muslim, a Tutsi. Warfare is a death potlatch in which we sacrifice our brave boys to destroy the cowardly enemies of righteousness. And, the more blood the better, because the bigger the body-count the greater the sacrifice for the sacred cause, the side of destiny, the divine plan.

Becker’s radical conclusion that it is our altruistic motives that turn the world into a charnel house—our desire to merge with a larger whole, to dedicate our lives to a higher cause, to serve cosmic powers—poses a disturbing and revolutionary question to every individual and nation. At what cost do we purchase the assurance that we are heroic? No doubt, one of the reasons Becker has never found a mass audience is because he shames us with the knowledge of how easily we will shed blood to purchase the assurance of our own righteousness. He reveals how our need to deny our nakedness and be arrayed in glory keeps us from acknowledging that the emperor has no clothes.

After such a grim diagnosis of the human condition it is not surprising that Becker offers only a palliative prescription. Expect no miracle cure, no future apotheosis of man, no enlightened future, no triumph of reason.

Becker sketches two possible styles of nondestructive heroism.

The best we can hope for society at large is that the mass of unconscious individuals might develop a moral equivalent to war. The science of man has shown us that society will always be composed of passive subjects, powerful leaders, and enemies upon whom we project our guilt and self-hatred. This knowledge may allow us to develop an “objective hatred” in which the hate object is not a human scapegoat but something impersonal like poverty, disease, oppression, or natural disasters. By making our inevitable hatred intelligent and informed we may be able to turn our destructive energy to a creative use.

For the exceptional individual there is the ancient philosophical path of wisdom. Becker, like Socrates, advises us to practice dying. Cultivating awareness of our death leads to disillusionment, loss of character armor, and a conscious choice to abide in the face of terror. The existential hero who follows this way of self-analysis differs from the average person in knowing that he/she is obsessed. Instead of hiding within the illusions of character, he sees his impotence and vulnerability. The disillusioned hero rejects the standardized heroics of mass culture in favor of cosmic heroism in which there is real joy in throwing off the chains of uncritical, self-defeating dependency and discovering new possibilities of choice and action and new forms of courage and endurance. Living with the voluntary consciousness of death, the heroic individual can choose to despair or to make a Kierkegaardian leap and trust in the “sacrosanct vitality of the cosmos,” in the unknown god of life whose mysterious purpose is expressed in the overwhelming drama of cosmic evolution.

There are signs—the acceptance of Becker’s work being one—that some individuals are awakening from the long, dark night of tribalism and nationalism and developing what Tillich called a transmoral conscience, an ethic that is universal rather than ethnic. Our task for the future is exploring what it means for each individual to be a member of earth’s household, a commonwealth of kindred beings. Whether we will use our freedom to encapsulate ourselves in narrow, tribal, paranoid personalities and create more bloody Utopias or to form compassionate communities of the abandoned is still to be decided. So long as human beings possess a measure of freedom, all hopes for the future must be stated in the subjunctive—we may, we might, we could. No prediction by any expert can tell us whether we will prosper or perish. We may choose to increase or decrease the dominion of evil. The script for tomorrow is not yet written.

In the end, Becker leaves us with a hope that is terribly fragile and wonderfully potent. “It is,” he says, “the disguise of panic that makes us live in ugliness, and not the natural animal wallowing. And this means that evil itself is amenable to critical analysis and, conceivably, to the sway of reason.” If, in some distant future, reason conquers our habit of self-destructive heroics and we are able to lessen the quantity of evil we spawn, it will be in some large measure because Ernest Becker helped us understand the relationship between the denial of death and the dominion of evil.

Those interested in the ways Becker’s work is being used and continued by philosophers, social scientists, psychologists, and theologians may visit The Ernest Becker Foundation’s website: www.ernestbecker.org.

Sam Keen

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Free Press; First Free Press Paperbacks Edition (May 8, 1997)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 336 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0684832402
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0684832401
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 9.6 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 1.1 x 8.38 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #279 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1 in Medical General Psychology
- #1 in Sociology of Death (Books)
- #3 in Grief & Bereavement

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After receiving a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from Syracuse University, Dr. Ernest Becker (1924-1974) taught at the University of California at Berkeley, San Francisco State College, and Simon Fraser University, Canada. He is survived by his wife, Marie, and a foundation that bears his name--The Ernest Becker Foundation.

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Tania

A Monumental Book.

Reviewed in the United States on April 20, 2024

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Becker's Pulitzer Prize-winning work addresses the fundamental drive of the human condition, delving into societal institutions, pathologies, and irrational behaviors. In his exploration, Becker presents a profound psychological argument for the pan-cultural religious impetus compelling individuals to merge with a beyond while also seeking individual distinction. He astutely illustrates the illusory nature of seemingly secular cultures, shedding light on the structural similarities they share with outgrown religious beliefs. Embedded within his argument is the rejection of truth as a highly valued principle in statecraft, compelling readers to reconsider their perception of societal realities. Through a three-part exploration, Becker skillfully navigates the complex human dilemma, offering a detailed outline of the problem, common solutions, and an incisive analysis of society through this framework.

The fundamental struggle faced by humans, according to Becker, stems from a unique dichotomy that only humans grapple with. This symbolic identity places individuals in an existential dilemma; they are both capable of comprehending abstract concepts, such as infinity and atoms, yet they must confront the objectively meaningless nature of their lives and the prospect of their eventual demise. Becker suggests that one aspect of the fear of life lies in the overwhelming awe, fear, and incomprehensibility that comes with existence. In confronting the complexity of one's own existence, there arises a fear of being insignificant, leading to a struggle to find meaning in an incomprehensible world. These dual fears of life and death contribute to the heroic urges that Becker describes, urging individuals to strive for transcendence and create their own sense of significance even in the face of potential meaninglessness.

One of the qualities of Man that fascinated Becker was how we have an instinctive sense to "be good." But what is goodness? The twin urges of Agape and Eros are a reflection of Man's pursuit of transcendence and individual significance. Agape is the reflex against the impermanence from death, seeking meaning through merging with an ultimate beyond. On the other hand, Eros is the reflex against the insignificance from life, striving for uniqueness and importance. This concept explains the dual motivations behind human behavior and the innate drive to create distinctions between Good and Evil in order to carve out meaning in the world. Both Agape and Eros enable us to navigate the complexities of existence by providing a sense of direction and cultivating individual greatness. However, there's a profound tension in this process as these twin urges can often be antagonistic to each other.

In Becker’s view, character defenses, represented by identity and narrative, assist in giving individuals the sense of control and unique identity essential for functioning in the world. Becker also discusses the use of transference objects as a way for individuals to find grounding and direction in the complexities of life. These objects provide a source of identification and direction, helping individuals navigate the overwhelming awe, wonder, and fear that existence often brings. Both character defenses and transference objects serve as coping mechanisms to grapple with the terrifying dilemma of human existence.

Becker’s view on how cultural elements play a role in our lives is insightful and intriguing. He discusses the concept of leaders as transference objects, emphasizing how the crowd's fascination with leaders highlights the hypnosis of power and the desire to merge with omnipotence. Beyond leaders, he delves into the idea of lovers as transference objects, explaining how romantic interests take on the role of encapsulating power, immortality, and the designator of good and evil. In both these cases, Becker demonstrates how cultural elements serve as symbolic structures fulfilling the innate human urge for heroism through Agape and Eros. This comprehensive analysis provides a deeper understanding of how individuals seek meaning and significance within cultural dynamics.

Becker’s analysis of the effectiveness and benefits of religion highlights how it directly addresses the problem of transference by expanding awe and terror to the cosmos where they belong. It provides a framework that takes the problem of self-justification and removes it from the objects near at hand, allowing individuals to lean on powers that truly support and do not oppose them. However, the failures of modernity as outlined by Becker point out that globalization and analytical ability have rendered people cynical, depriving them of the ability to have faith. The diversity in ideology poses a threat to heroism, and it becomes disheartening to see 'authorities who are equally unimpeachable hold opposite views.'

Becker's comparison of cultural heroes and societal outcasts sheds light on the existential dichotomy faced by those who venture into the realm of creativity. His contention that artists and societal outcasts are only separated by a small degree of "talent" implies that creativity and madness share a connectedness. Conferring cultural heroes with creative genius, Becker's analysis illustrates how the innovators who attempt to furnish an entirely new meaning to creation and history shoulder the weight of justifying previous and potential alternative meanings alone. As a result, the burden of fabricating one's own religion, as argued by Becker, leads to a hypervigilant state, facing the fear that no beyond can prevent creatives from exhausting every bit of themselves in the artistic process.

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Valentin

Timeless wisdom

Reviewed in the United States on March 25, 2009

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The following sums up the central theme of this Pulitzer Prize-winner:

"For now, it is enough to invoke Marcia Lee Anderson's complete scientific formula: `Stripped of subtle complications [i.e., of all the character defenses - repression, denial, misconceptions of reality], who could regard the sun except with fear?'"(p.66)

Hereafter I'll quote extensively, as opposed to paraphrasing, in order to make it as beneficial for the interested individual as I can.

Ernest chose a title that he knew would resonate with the public: The Denial of Death. But the book should have been called `The Denial of Life', because people not only repress their inevitable demise, but even more so their lives. The book is centered on the philosophy that every person starting in childhood creates an imaginary world where, to put it simply, everything is better and the people are nicer, so not to perceive the intricately problematic reality. Ernest aptly summarized prominent thinkers and students of human nature of the past 150 years, including Soren Kierkegaard, Otto Rank, Norman Brown, and Sigmund Freud. One might rightfully say that some of the latter men's conclusions were repudiated by modern thought. However, their fundamental findings - such as Freud's narcissist, Kierkegaard's `introvert', or Rank's artist - on characters of man are timeless. Details, tactics, and strategies of how to approach the very complex study of human nature change, but the nature itself doesn't. As much as I wish to discuss this book at length, I won't do it for lack of space. I'll succinctly outline the work of one philosopher, who is one of the most astute men in history, and briefly summarize two others, Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank.

The 19th-century Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard analyzed man's inner characters. Even though more than 150 years have elapsed, his ingenuous analysis can readily be applied to our modern society.

The immediate man - the modern inauthentic or insincere man - is someone who blindly follows the trends of society to the dot. Someone who unthinkingly implements what society says is "right." "He recognizes himself only by his dress,...he recognizes that he has a self only by externals." (p.74) He converts frivolous patterns to make them his identity. He often distorts his own personality in order to "fit into the group". His opinion means nothing even to himself, hence he imitates others to superficially look "normal."

The introvert, the one "who tries to cultivate his interiority...he is a little more concerned with what it means to be a person", he who "enjoys solitude and withdraws periodically to reflect." (p.82) He enjoys reading and thinking about the deepness of life, human relations, and the universe in general. But Ernest wrote that introvert "is not an immediate man, but not a real man either, even though he gives the appearance of it." (p.83)

And finally "the one who asserts himself out of defiance of his own weakness, who tries to be a god unto himself, the master of his fate, a self-created man." (p. 84) But "the ugly side of this Promethianism is that it, too, is thoughtless, and empty-headed immersion in the delight of technics with no thought to goals or meaning." (p.85)

The aforementioned personalities are not what Ernest considered "real" men. Ernest, by interpreting Kierkegaard, regarded "the true individual, the self-realized soul, the 'real man,' is the one who has transcended himself." (p.86) (When he talks about self-transcendence throughout the book the text understandably becomes abstract.) He is the one who has admitted that his essential character has been a big lie, created to protect the self from the difficult reality of life. In order to psychologically survive such a realization one has to surrender oneself to the Ultimate Power of Creation, or so Ernest recommends.

The book also talks at length about Freud, "perhaps the greatest psychologist who ever lived." (p.256), the man who was "like a Biblical prophet, who spoke a truth that no one wants to hear...whose pessimism [was] grounded in reality, in scientific truth." (p.94) He was a cynic who did not deceive himself about the man's "basic creatureliness," his inner animal. He was hated by many for unveiling that the fundamental nature of every man is weak and self-deceptive. He was the mentor of Otto Rank, who was a brilliant psychoanalyst. Eventually Freud severed his relationship with Rank due to irreconcilable disagreements.

It seems that Becker worshipped Rank religiously. When Rank was 21, he impressed Freud so much with his intellect and insight that Freud made him a part of his inner-circle of confidants. Rank's most monumental work was his `Art and Artist'. In it Rank contemplated the creative type of man, who is the one whose "experience makes him take in the world as a problem...but when you no longer accept the collective solution to the problem of existence, then you must fashion your own...The work of art is...the ideal answer..."

And now I'll briefly express my disagreement with Becker's ultimate cure for man's despondent predicament of "real" life. I certainly am not as knowledgeable as Becker and my opinion towards life will definitely change during the years, but now let's not be "the modern mechanical men in Russia, the near-billion sheeplike followers in China, and the brutalized and ignorant populations of almost every continent." (p.281) Even though Becker didn't advocate any particular religion, "finding god" unavoidably decays one's mind and leads him to Christianity, Islam, etc. The fact that can't be refuted is that religion in general, Christianity in particular, has been the most efficient and cruel oppressor of intellect for millennia. And, because it has also been the most potent restraint upon progress, one would only shrink and limit his horizons by adhering to it. And what I deem especially interesting about Ernest's prescription for a god is that it was a way to battle one's fear and dejection. Fear, that indelible and prevalent emotion of men in any culture was relied on by religion to compel men to follow man-made Biblical laws. I'm not an advocate of atheism. But I'm a proponent of full and interesting life, something that religion takes away by promising to arrange an eternal afterlife.

Notwithstanding some of the Becker's conclusions that I don't agree with, this book is the best work on human nature that I know of; somewhat superior to `On Human Nature' by Edward Wilson. I must warn though that having read it thoroughly will not only alter your outlook on life and your relationships with your peers, but it will also make you sadder...but wiser.

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mi libro favorito

Reviewed in Mexico on June 6, 2023

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Es mi libro favorito, es un libro super interesante, con una teoria super clara, para los amantes del psicoanalisis, seguidores de las teorias filosoficas existencialistas.

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ruthy73

Change

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 31, 2024

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This book put to bed my need to buy more stuff

Nasser Alhamdi

Nice

Reviewed in Germany on August 30, 2023

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Nice

Tumul

book which compels you to re read again and again

Reviewed in India on July 31, 2022

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Quality and thickness of paper could have been far better, not suitable to carry while traveling page may tear off easily if not handled carefully.
:-Content wise a very dense subject handled with layman in mind couldn't have been better or simpler. This book gives far bigger horizon to subjectivity and it's duality of it's existence. Not a typical "proverbial" existential manuscript in any way. Ties down the whole organic nature of which we as a species are an part of it, branched out radically to even contemplate our real place.
One of my most re read books over the period of three years. An accidental discovery

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Ibrizida

Livro excelente!!!

Reviewed in Brazil on November 30, 2017

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Excelente resumo da evolução da psicanálise até a década de 1970. Aprendi muito com esse livro,recomendo vivamente a sua leitura!!!!

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