Although Ernest Becker’s academic background was in cultural anthropology, The Denial of Death is in many ways a response to the psychological works of the pioneering Austrian psychologists Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank, as well as the philosophy of the 19th-century Danish philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard. In particular, Becker taps heavily into Freudian psychoanalysis.

According to Freud’s theories, the decisive experience in every child’s life is when they notice a difference between their own genitals and those of the opposite-sex parent. For girls, they experience “penis envy,” an anxiety they feel when they realize that their bodies are very different from their father’s. On the other hand, boys undergo the “Oedipus complex.” Desiring their mothers, boys begin to resent their fathers and fear that their fathers will castrate them, making their bodies appear like those of women. Although much of Freud’s theory has been challenged and rejected in the decades since, one important and influential conclusion emerging out of Freud’s theory is that neuroses are universal. In other words, psychologically speaking, there is no such thing as completely “normal.”

Becker draws just as heavily from the work of Freud’s one-time disciple, Otto Rank.