Freud Believed That Artists Likely Would Be Neurotic if They Were Not Practicing Their Art
AN URGE MORE VITAL THAN Sexual activity
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March 24, 1985
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ACTS OF Volition The Life and Work of Otto Rank. By E. James Lieberman. Illustrated. 485 pp. New York: The Free Press. $24.95.
''THE new hero, notwithstanding unknown, is the one who can live and love in spite of our mal du si ecle ,'' Otto Rank told Ana"is Nin when she consulted him for psychotherapy during the 1930's, hoping to solve her difficulties in writing novels. Rank's announcement, with its emphasis on the heroic rather than the normal and on sickness in the civilization rather than in the individual, was a far cry from the tendency in classical psychoanalysis to equate health with adjustment to social norms. Rank was one of the virtually radical thinkers amongst the early on Freudians and the most boldly romantic. He was similar the Emerson of psychoanalysis, though as a author he lacked Emerson'south aphoristic style. His thou theme has a distinctly Emersonian flavor: Rejecting the determinism implicit in Freud'south theories, Rank insisted that each individual is an idiosyncratic existence beyond the reach of diagnostic categories, an artist of the self brimming with will, gratuitous to shape his or her own fate.
Therefore it seems just appropriate when Due east. James Lieberman, a Washington, D.C., psychiatrist, tells the states in this new biography that in 1924, just before Rank's relations with Freud began to collapse over growing theoretical differences, he left Vienna for an extended stay in America. Perchance he already sensed that his unorthodox views would exist better received in the New World. In 1926 Rank broke with Freud for adept, ending 2 decades of close association, and for the residuum of his life he divided his practice and educational activity between Paris and New York.
Later on Rank'southward untimely death in 1939 - he was 55 years former - his reputation dwindled, and it has remained in a state of decline until recently. Since the orthodox Freudians dominated psychotherapy, Rank'south work was scorned and neglected. Equally a result, little has been written most his life besides a memoir past Jessie Taft, who was his patient for a time, and so his colleague, shut friend and American translator. Published in 1958, the memoir has been out of print for many years.
Now we accept Dr. Lieberman'south long, thoroughly documented book, the start major biography of Rank. It is a biography with a mission, ane could about say with a vengeance, since the author is not only out to rescue Rank from undeserved obscurity, he is likewise deeply indignant about the manner Rank was treated by his former colleagues after the rupture with Freud. According to Dr. Lieberman, the leading British annotator Ernest Jones, who was to become Freud's official biographer, publicly attributed Rank'southward difference from strict Freudian doctrine to manic depressive psychosis. In 1929, after Rank read a newspaper at a national briefing, A. A. Brill, president of both the American Psychoanalytic Association and the New York Psychoanalytic Society, walked to the podium and said, ''I feel that all the stuff to which Dr. Rank treated us this morn is only an indication of his own present maladjustment.''
What was it that stirred these distinguished students of human nature to such hostile behavior? For one thing, destroying each other's reputations seems to exist a pop pastime among psychoanalysts. In tracing Rank from Vienna and Freud's early circle to his subsequently years of wandering between Paris and New York, in exile from the psychoanalytic mainstream, Dr. Lieberman turns up backbiting, rumor-mongering, lying, possible plagiarisms, downright meanness and Machiavellian political strategems - all skilful past the founders of psychoanalysis.
The direction Rank'southward betrayment took was especially galling to the Freudians, who idea themselves men of science. During an age when psychoanalysis aspired to become a scientific theory rooted in biological instincts - a dream to which some analytic schools still cling - he proposed that psychology as well every bit psychotherapy be based on the arts. Nor was this but a metaphor. The paradigmatic figure at the middle of Rank'south theories, besides as his practice of therapy, was the creative person in the human activity of cosmos. His concept of free will was at lesser an esthetic platonic.
In a afterwards edition of his first published book, a psychoanalytic essay on the artist as a personality type, Rank explained that ''the word 'artist' is used here in a sense equally comprehensive as Freud's use of the term 'sexuality.' '' The remark quietly stands psychoanalytic theory on its head. Freud believed that the pathways of sexual want led from biology to graphic symbol and behavior. The traditional psychoanalytic approach tried to explain the artist and his works in terms of sublimated instinctual conflicts taking the grade of forbidden fantasies in disguise and inspired escapes from regressive breakdown. Rank, still, came to regard all this equally a species of reductive determinism. He oftentimes asserted in his about important works, ''Will Therapy,'' ''Truth and Reality'' and ''Art and Artist,'' that the impulse to create was even more than elemental and far-reaching than the sexual urge. The theme connects Rank to another prophet of that era - D. H. Lawrence, who attacked psychoanalysis in his ''Fantasia of the Unconscious'' (abook Rank admired) for making sexual practice too pervasive. Lawrence, like Rank, insisted that creativity was the more primordial impulse in human being evolution.
If the will to create - and ultimately Rank meant the cosmos of one's own personality - is a more basic force than the sexual instinct, so the problem of neurosis and its treatment appear in an altogether different lite than they do in psychoanalytic theory. In this way Rank was led to his most radical contribution to psychotherapy. Instead of taking neurotic character to be a grade of illness, he concluded that information technology is shaped from misguided force and inventiveness. Rank linked the neurotic and the artist, claiming that they are similarly driven by an intense longing for immortality, a want to transcend the anxiety of the human status. Only whereas the artist ultimately accepts his solitude, anxiety and mortality through giving his longings expression in an external medium, the neurotic tries to overcome incertitude and anxiety past perpetually manipulating himself in an attempt to make his life perfect and predictable - which is an unfinishable, crippling enterprise. Neurotic suffering is artistic cosmos gone wrong, turned against the cocky, a kind of negative cosmos. People come into therapy like aspiring artists who are wasting their talents producing symptoms. The psychotherapist is less a medical or scientific good than a critic of poorly made selves, ones that have become fragmented, stereotyped and monotonous.
Rank, as Dr. Lieberman portrays him, appears to accept been an industrious, reticent man, physically unattractive, capable of a tranquility rebelliousness and insistent self-determination, suffering periodically from bouts of depression. There is a thinness about this portrait that probably has as much to do with the biographer's mode every bit with Rank himself. It is certainly not due to a lack of information: we are given a wealth of detail apropos Rank's habits and activities equally well as the people and events surrounding him. Yet we never feel much in contact with his emotional life - his passions, angers, sorrows. The same thing is true about the other characters in the cast. Dr. Lieberman's sentences tend toward the apartment and factual, heightened at present and then by adjectival crescendos, and his characters are either heroes or villains, more explained than revealed.
Just the meaning drama in Rank's life is the interior ane that springs from the workings of his mind, the strangeness of his intellectual development, the power and originality of his ideas. Fortunately, these are the areas in which Dr. Lieberman is at his best. He does an excellent chore of setting along clearly the development of Rank's thought in relation to his life and his milieu. It is non an easy chore. Rank's ideas were and then profound, and so ineffable, then far alee of his time that one has the impression he could never find the language in which to express them. In his writings, overwhelmingly bright and sometimes well-nigh unreadable, different realms of discourse swirl and collide - Schopenhauer's and Nietzsche's philosophies of the will, the psychoanalytic unconscious, the biological science of sex, anthropology and sociology, metaphysics, art history and religion, all of it lurching toward transcendence.
THE issue is a collage that oftentimes leaves us with an uneasy feeling. Information technology makes us wish that Dr. Lieberman, in addition to explicating Rank's thought, had examined it from a more than disquisitional perspective too. Reading Rank, one stumbles constantly over new and dazzling insights. But what was he reaching for so strenuously? And how many of his patients could have reached with him? Manifestly Rank himself had the romantic artist'south hunger for the mythical or metaphysical implications of experience. Ana"is Nin, who was more than willing to effort for transcendence, wrote in her diary that Rank possessed ''the gift for elevating incident into destiny.'' She meant it as praise, but in the hands of a psychological theorist that sort of gift is a mixed blessing. When Rank directs his gaze at the individual, he does not appear to run across personal idiosyncrasies so much every bit some larger cultural meaning or universal essence culminating in a chiliad generalization. This is reminiscent of German Romantic philosophy and 19th-century American transcendentalism, where individualism is continually affirmed, yet individual differences ultimately dissolve into a cloud of cosmic unity.
In his own writings Rank virtually never presents a instance history to illustrate a theoretical point or provides whatever other bridge from his conceptual flights to the pragmatics of psychotherapeutic practice. If he was a close observer of individual human being nature in dealing with patients, in that location is no prove of information technology in his writings, and his books, after all, are what we have. By dissimilarity, Freud, despite his scientific leanings, gave us finely wrought portraits of the twists and turns, the far stretches of private character. Sticking more closely to the ''incidents,'' as Freud did, may convey the more telling sense of destiny.
Considering of his romanticism, Rank's vision of the neurotic is oft much larger than life. Instead of a person with a particular phobia or obsession, we get a figure akin to the 19th-century's thought of the suffering genius - alienated and more deeply conscious of reality than ordinary well-adapted mortals, struggling toward an ideal of the self with heroic if futile gestures. Can every patient ascent to the heights of such a diagnosis? Reflecting back on his primeval writings, Rank wanted to excuse his ''proneness to speculation, too much exaggeration, and a desire for perception of the whole'' on the grounds of youth. But if anything, his self-criticism applies even more accurately to his mature works.
Born in 1884, Rank was raised in Vienna's Jewish quarter. His parents were so oblivious to his talents and sensibility that they sent him to technical school to be trained as a machinist. Working in machine shops and similar jobs, the adolescent Rank spent his evenings reading Darwin, Kierkegaard, Stendhal, Dostoyevsky, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Ibsen. He imbibed the rich theater and concert life of Vienna, and tried his manus at poesy, plays and fiction.
Even more amazing is the tale of how Rank became a psychoanalyst. Discovering ''The Interpretation of Dreams'' when he was 20, he fix to work at in one case writing a psychoanalytic study of the artist, and within a few months delivered the manuscript to Freud. Extremely impressed, Freud invited Rank to become both the paid secretary and a contributing member of the Wednesday evening group that later turned into the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. By 1907 Rank's manuscript, ''Der Chiliad"unstler'' (''The Creative person''), was a published book, the first of many.
With Freud'south encouragement, Rank entered the University of Vienna and got a doctorate in philosophy and German language. Thus Rank became the first lay analyst in the group around Freud. For shut to two decades, Rank was a force in Freud's innermost circle, engaged in collaborating and sparring at various times with Adler, Federn, Stekel, Max Eitingon, Jung, Karl Abraham, Hanns Sachs and Ferenczi. From all reports, Rank was on more intimate terms with the master than any of the others. He worked with Freud closely in a multifariousness of roles - every bit secretary to the guild, editor of journals and books for the group'south publishing ventures, and prolific correspondent to the burgeoning psychoanalytic literature. Dr. Lieberman thinks that Freud saw Rank as his potential successor and that the end of their relationship was extremely hard for both.
When it did terminate in the 1920's, Rank had already given upwards the medical model of mental illness for what these days is sometimes called the ''growth'' model. In fact, equally Dr. Lieberman points out, his radical alternative to traditional analytic theory and practice is considerably more than congenial to our fourth dimension than information technology was to Rank's own. He was the first psychotherapist to decide that focusing attention on the present in therapy might be more useful than concentrating on the past, the offset to care for the patient'south resistance as a positive sign of increased autonomy, the first to regard feet equally an inevitable growing pain in accepting the human condition, the first to assert that psychotherapy ought to help patients work out their own ways of being good for you rather than adjust them to some given model of wellness. These conceptions accept plant a place in diverse schools of current therapeutic practice, including existential psychology, Gestalt therapy and to some extent contemporary ego psychology.
In contempo years Rank has finally come to exist seen as a precursor of modernism in psychotherapy. At that place has been a small but growing revival of involvement in his work, which began with Ernest Becker's commemoration of Rank'due south thought in ''The Denial of Death'' a dozen years ago. In 1982 the psychoanalyst Esther Menaker published her ''Otto Rank: A Rediscovered Legacy,'' which examines his theories from the perspective of recent shifts in psychoanalytic thinking and finds that he predictable Erik Erikson, Margaret Mahler, Heinz Kohut and Otto Kernberg, among others.
Rank died of a reaction to a sulfa drug in a New York infirmary on Oct. 31, 1939, a few weeks after Freud's expiry. The concluding discussion he was heard to speak from his deathbed was ''komisch,'' the German for comical, peculiar or strange. Perhaps this was the same ironical perspective that helped him survive his rise from the automobile shop to Freud's circle without condign big-headed, and enabled him to maintain his integrity and presence of mind when Jones and Brill diagnosed him in public every bit psychotically disturbed. ''Komisch'' is probably what Rank would have said in response to his posthumous fortunes, both the decline and now the revival.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1985/03/24/books/an-urge-more-vital-than-sex.html
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