Customer Reviews

Broken Connection (Touchstone Books)

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In ancient times, mythological systems and religious authorities told us what to think about death. How do we think about death in the modern secular world? The pre-eminent psychologist Robert Jay Lifton thinks that is one of the most important questions facing us today. This book looks at the question of death in the big picture. In the first part of the book, he traces individual development, and shows how the idea of death develops with the individual. In part two, he looks at the relationship of death to various emotions and to psychological disorders. In part three, he looks at the global picture, discussing what it means to live in a world with nuclear arms; here he cites from his extensive personal research with the survivors of Hiroshima. As Lifton argues, "We must open ourselves to the full impact of death in order to rediscover and reinterpret the movement and sequence of life" (p. 52). Indeed, contrary to what one might expect, this is a deeply optimistic and profoundly hopeful book.

Lifton is one of the more thought provoking writers of our time. I first read Nazi Doctors some years ago and have been a fan of his ever since. Broken Connections does not disappoint.

I find it interesting to look at a book like this from some point of view that is obsessed with modern situations that had yet to be contrived in 1979, when the book was written, and the upchuck of tremendous repudiations for a history that produces me as an antidote to forthcoming bastards of the same nature. A social system with an interest in a book on psychology is not solving the problem of dying by throwing a medical surge at the problem.

Way back in 1979, Robert Jay Lifton wrote The Broken Connection. Dr. Becker wrote a much more complex book called Denial of Death (1973). A mock Kindle allowed me to read the first chapter of Denial of Death, which praises the work of Otto Rank. In the Index of The Broken Connection, Ernest Becker is listed for being mentioned eight times by Robert Jay Lifton. Otto Rank is listed for being mentioned eleven times, including some of the same sentences, like:

But Borkenau's insistence
upon the centrality of
imagery of death
and immortality
for historical experience
places him in the admirable
company of Rank, Ernest Becker,
and N. O. Brown. (Lifton, p. 286, n.)

A financial system attempts to transcend death by admitting that in the long run we are all dead. Churches have taught people to be generous with ten percent of their income to promote the general welfare. A society which could pool risk by diverting a small portion of the excess products it produces, like supporting farmers by providing school lunches or even breakfasts for students, can be run on the marginal thinking of Lifton:

A powerful recent example
is that of the life of
Mao Tse-tung and the
Communist Revolution
in China. We have noted
the special intensity
and thoroughness with which
traditional Chinese cultivated,
by means of family line,
the biological (or biosocial) mode.
The great shift of the mid-
and late twentieth century
has been from family to revolution.
"Revolutionary immortality"
becomes a special blend
of the basic modes. (pp. 287-288).

Modern thought will never be able to escape from its assumption that people are pre-revolutionary, as in the time when Kant formed his ideas about perception based on a pre-existing understanding of a unity. The completed infinity we hope for is seeking the kind of thought reform that will even transform nature. According to Lifton:

Nature itself is seen
as transformed--
making possible an
embrace of an altered
natural mode--on behalf
of the revolution. (p. 288).

The financial system plays a minor role in the marginal thinking of most people because thinking about the future of currencies in markets that go up, down, or sideways has become the hedge millionaires and billionaires can trade. Martin Heidegger never said:

Only credit default swaps can save us now.

The definitive book about the effect of death on human culture is Becker's Denial of Death. This meandering tome pales in comparison.