Yes, some will claim they lack this fear, but Becker attributes this to a successful repression: “[From Zilboorg:] A man will say, of course, that he knows he will die some day...and he does not care to bother about it—but this is a purely intellectual, verbal admission. The affect of fear is repressed.”
If you claim that a concept is not present because it is repressed, you can’t lose; it is not a fair game, intellectually, because you always hold the trump card. This type of argument makes psychoanalysis seem unscientific to many people, the fact that its proponents can claim that someone denies one of their concepts because he represses his consciousness of its truth.
But repression is not a magical word for winning arguments. It is a real phenomenon, and we have been able to study many of its workings. This study gives it legitimacy as a scientific concept and makes it a more-or-less dependable ally in our argument. For one thing, there is a growing body of research trying to get at the consciousness of death denied by repression that uses psychological tests such as measuring galvanic skin responses; it strongly suggests that underneath the most bland exterior lurks the universal anxiety, the “worm at the core.”
Heads I win, tails you lose.
Good point. I’ll relay the author’s own counter-