He was hired in to be part of the Education faculty, and only later moved to the interdisciplinary Department of Political Science, Sociology and Anthropology (PSA). One thing that I was not aware of was that Becker made a significant move within the university after two years. He also has a strong and natural sense of the “place” of SFU in the wider Vancouver cultural scene that would be very difficult for a non-native to pick up on simply through written texts or even interviews – for example, the relationship between SFU and nearby University of British Columbia. He has relatively easy access to the departmental and university archives, and to those colleagues of Becker who still live in the area. Martin is an especially good guide for this topic, because he knows the inner workings, the atmosphere and culture, of Simon Fraser University (he is on the psychology faculty there himself). Thus even before his final trilogy of books for which he is best known, Becker already was known among his colleagues as a clearly prolific writer and creative thinker. He had recently published one of his major works, The Structure of Evil, and two books of collected essays, Angels in Armor and The Lost Science of Man. Even after Becker found his stable place in a faculty position at SFU, we see hints of this tension in some of the remarks Martin includes here from Becker’s fellow faculty.īecker arrived in Vancouver in September of 1969. It is probably true that in many ways the very flair and edginess that made Becker such a sought-after figure on the lecture circuit also made him a risky element when selecting a day-to-day colleague who would fit in nicely with other faculty members and find satisfaction in committee work and grading endless piles of undergraduate papers. But this initial time through Martin’s narrative, what I picked up on most strongly was Becker’s confusion, frustration, wounded pride and finally also a prominent streak of professional resentment at the fact that he was considered to be a “hot commodity” on the academic lecture circuit, invited for special lectures and presentation on a regular basis, but was then passed over repeatedly when it came time to fill solid, tenure-track positions in the respective faculties. Naturally, other readers would focus on elements different from myself, and maybe even I would be struck by something different if I read this again in a few years. Martin enhances these basic facts with interview material such that we really start to get a “feel for the man” who was struggling through the issues of family background, creating his own way in the world, and the rocky issues Becker faced in trying to get his academic career off the ground. The basic facts of Becker’s life during those years have been covered before, by Ron Leifer in his entry on Becker in the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, and by me in the opening chapter of my book, Transference and Transcendence, which is also the basis for the summary that appears on the EBF website. Here Martin relies heavily on established sources, but adds to our understanding of these sources through personal interviews with people who knew Becker during those years, especially psychiatrist Ron Leifer, Becker’s wife Marie Becker-Pos, and also a small group of personal friends and acquaintances who socialized with the Beckers in a non-professional capacity. The opening pages of the article present the background for Becker’s intellectual development in the years prior to the invitation to join the faculty at Simon Fraser. This will be viewed for many years to come as a very important contribution to Becker scholarship, and is thus far the definitive narrative for those final years of Becker’s life. Of Recent Interest… is the major article published this month in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology, written by Jack Martin, “Ernest Becker at Simon Fraser University (1969-1974),” (JHP 54(1), pp.
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