Tolle Lege!.

This prize winning book from 1973 has immense value today because it captures how very smart people explained the world in those days and it is amazing we ever got out of the self referential tautological cave that was being created to explain who we are. There is nothing more dangerous than using just intuition and strong arguments without empirical data to reach your conclusions. That's what this author does.

He ties existential and psychoanalytical thought and the necessity for beliefs in God in to a worldview. He will tell us that it is our repression and our denial that end up giving us our neurosis. He does not use the psychoanalytical system developed by Freud because he makes our neurosis more than just dependent on sexual repressions, but nevertheless his system ends with 'castration', 'transference', and other such psychoanalytical belief systems. (That's why I feel comfortable characterizing his system as self-referential tautological. He's creating a system, some what like mathematics, by assuming truths within the system and using the system to justify the system. There's no way to refute the system unless one steps out of the system. That is to say, there is now way to show the system is incoherent within the system itself and there are things within the system which can neither be shown true or false).

He's just taking a pseudoscience and working within the system and uses the same techniques to develop his similar system of pseudoscience but he's going to call it post-Freudian. He will conclude things such as the schizophrenic and psychotic are 'neurotic' principally because they see the true reality better, the reality of the absurdity of life, the fact that we live with the certainty of death, and the inadequacy of life, the inability to live with the freedom we our given.

He will go into a whole host of reasons why we are inadequate. He'll even explain how LGBTQ people are perverted because fetishes created while growing up has led to that extreme denial of themselves (probably something to do with their lack of character).

The author emphasizes that character, culture and values determine who we become. Those who lack any of those three end up with 'neurosis', because under his psycho-dynamic system we know everyone is neurotic to some degree because one who denies his own repression must be neurotic and out of touch with reality. (There is a beautiful tautology within his belief system).

Unfortunately, to understand the 1970s one must understand how smart people did embrace the kind of thinking presented in this book. It's amazing that we as a society got out of that psychoanalytical trap. Now days, neurosis is not used as a category in the DSM for a reason.

I can highly recommend this book since it gives such an interesting window that psychoanalysis mistakenly provided to human understanding in 1973. It clearly gives a great peak into how psychiatry got off the rails. I would highly recommend reading "Shrinks: The Untold Story of Psychiatry" before attempting this pseudo-scientific book. "Shrinks" documents how psychiatry got so far off the rails and how it found itself by becoming a real science by including the empirical. This book, "Denial of Death", marks the start of the beginning from which a new era for human understanding began to finally find itself and jettison junk like this book contains.