Immediately, Ernest Becker lays out the main thesis of The Fear of Death, which is that “the idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else” (ix). Death is such a powerful concept that it is actually the main driver of human activity. Becker writes that the anthropologist A. M. Hocart argued that “primitives” (ix) instead seemed to celebrate death with their rituals. However, Becker counters that it still seems that “the fear of death is a universal in the human condition” (ix). The tendency of certain societies to celebrate death comes from a kind of negation of that fear, in the belief that there is an afterlife or some kind of positive transformation following death.

Becker lays out two major goals in writing The Fear of Death. The first is to try to combine together various views on the human condition, even ones he disagrees with. The second is to summarize modern psychology since Freud (xi). In particular, Becker wants to engage with the work of psychologist Otto Rank, who “had his own, unique, and perfectly thought-out system of ideas” (xiii).