Otto Rank, who will probably turn out in the end to have been the best mind that psychoanalysis contributed to intellectual history, defected from the company of Freudians about 1925 and, as far as the orthodox element was concerned, thereby became almost an unpsychoanalyst. His major ideas did not take root elsewhere, and today the informed layman or even practitioner ordinarily has only a very rudimentary awareness of them. Rank has been practically forgotten; when referred to in the histories and outlines of psychoanalysis, he is usually—but misleadingly—credited with the “birth trauma” theory, which is thereupon “refuted.” Of recent years, however, allusions to Rank have begun to increase in frequency, accuracy, and respectfulness; and some of his work has been re-issued. In 1958, an excellent first biography, Otto Rank, was published by the late Jessie Taft, a former translator and co-worker of Rank’s. Miss Taft had access to many previously unpublished letters and other documents, and her book is the first time Rank’s “side” of the controversy with Freud has been fully represented. Her account is the one I primarily follow here (although I have also made use of Ernest Jones’s three-volume biography of Freud).
Rank was born in Vienna in 1884, into a lower-middle-class Jewish family that had never been happy and was not destined to become so. His father drank, but seems to have afflicted his family more with indifference than brutality. Rank’s relationship with his mother, about which he was thereafter always reticent, seems to have been close but tinged with the familial hopelessness.
The stoicism which Rank was forced to cultivate was only to be relieved by his adolescent discovery of the delights of the theater, and, later, of the other arts. This new world led him to intellectual finds as well; and to the tragic philosophers Nietzsche and Schopenhauer: “I bathed as it were,” Rank wrote in his diary, quoted by Miss Taft, “in Nietzsche’s spirit and got a charmed, weather-proof, bulletproof skin, that should protect me in the meantime against external attacks.” Rank thenceforth spent most of his adolescence at study or at the theater, in order to avoid as much as he could the emotional disintegration of his family. At sixteen or seventeen, Rank and his brother threw off for good the authority of their father: “We finally fell out completely with him and did not even greet him any more. . . . From then on began an idyllic family life. Almost no word was spoken in the house, but if a voice ever became loud, it became very loud: i.e. it screamed. For everyone had a deep rage inside. . . .”
At length, however, Rank underwent a profound transformation: the “sublimation” of genius, a process which rests upon a creative negation of what is normally desirable. “The whole misery turned itself inside and smoldered there until a wind from I know not where kindled it to a bright flame that lit up my heart and brain.”
Although now compelled to work in a machine shop, Rank’s new found powers developed at a rapid pace. In 1904 he first came across Freud’s writings, and they struck him as a revelation. “Now I see everything clearly,” he wrote in his diaries. “The world process is no longer a riddle.” Rank was then completing his first book, Der Kunstler (“The Artist”), which remains untranslated—his preliminary analysis of creativity. As Miss Taft says, for Rank this was “The little manuscript that would prove to be the open sesame to a future of which he had never dared to dream.” Freud himself, whom Miss Taft goes on to quote, has related how Rank came under his ken two years later in 1906, at the age of twenty-one: “One day a young man who had passed through the technical training school introduced himself with a manuscript which showed very remarkable comprehension. We induced him to go through the Gymnasium and the University and to devote himself to the non-medical side of psychoanalytic investigation. The little society acquired in him a zealous and dependable secretary, and I gained in Otto Rank a faithful helper and co-worker.”
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This almost immediate and complete acceptance by Freud and the Vienna circle of analysts was the turning point of Rank’s life: under the benign patronage of Freud—“the ideal figure denied to him in childhood,” Miss Taft remarks—he had found an outlet for his immense potential. Ernest Jones believes that Freud rendered Rank financial assistance from time to time, and relates how Freud once paid for a vacation of Rank’s, bought him a type-writer, and attended a wedding with him. (“It is perhaps worth mentioning,” Jones adds, “because of its being one of the two weddings he [Freud] ever attended outside his immediate family.”1) Freud always entertained the highest opinion of Rank’s mind, and once fondly declared, according to Jones, that of all the Vienna group in 1911, only “little Rank” had any intellectual future.
Rank rewrote Der Kunstler with the help of Freud’s criticisms, and its publication in 1907 was well received. Rank’s next book, The Myth of the Birth of the Hero (1912), a study of “the myth as a dream of the masses of the people,” was almost overpowered by orthodox Freudianism—Freud himself contributing the basic theory of mythology as an expression of the “family romance.” The book is not really representative of Rank’s own ideas—which, however, appear here and there in what might be called repressed form.2
Until the war broke out, Rank functioned as a secretary to the Vienna circle and also handled most of the duties of a private secretary for Freud himself. “Rank was always willing,” Jones writes, “never complained of any burden put upon him, was a man of all work for turning himself to any task and he was extraordinarily resourceful. . . . Rank had also a keen eye for practical affairs and would assuredly have been very successful had he entered the world of finance. . . .”
In 1914, Rank was called to military service, for which he had not been over-enthusiastic (Freud, in a letter to Ferenczi, humorously describes him as “fighting like a lion against the fatherland”), but he was to become the editor of the official journal of the Austrian army. The Great War had the same evil effect upon him as upon the rest of his generation, yet in coming successfully through the fires, he discovered an ability to stand alone, and his former psychological (and intellectual) dependence on Freud lessened markedly. In Poland Rank found his first wife, Beata, and after the war brought her back to Vienna. On his return, he also for the first time began to practice psychotherapy. Jones remarks, “I never knew anyone to change so much.” Whereas before the war Rank had tended to be somewhat over-deferential, “much given to clicking of the heels and bowing,” afterwards he revealed “a vigor and other manifestations of his personality we never suspected.” As Freudian as anything could be, but left unanalyzed by both Jones and Miss Taft, is this anecdote from Jones:
I was very astonished at the remarkable change the war years had wrought in Rank. . . . Now in stalked a wiry, tough man, with a masterful air, whose first act was to deposit on the table a huge revolver. I asked him what he wanted with it, and he nonchalantly replied: “Für alle Falle.” [For any eventuality.]
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Rank now also assumed the responsibility of directing the international psychoanalytic publishing house in Vienna. “The general machinery of life had so run down in Austria after the war that there were indescribable difficulties in getting anything done. . .,” Jones writes. Rank struggled “heroically with the endless problems and accomplished superhuman feats in coping with them almost singlehanded.” But here began a series of frictions between Rank and Jones, who was then directing the English-language branch; they started as clashes of temperament but foreshadowed the theoretical disputes to come. Jung and Adler had already departed; Freud was already cancerous and nearing seventy, and rivalry over the succession inevitably emerged. Freud strove to pacify the internal quarrels of the movement. Rank and Ferenczi, at that time collaborating upon a book, were then the heirs apparent. (Only after their apostasies did Ernest Jones himself move into the forefront.) Rank’s privileged and powerful status as Freud’s secretary naturally aroused considerable animosity among the other psychoanalytic chiefs, some of whom were, in addition, indebted to his brilliance—and also feared it. Rank’s learning and original contributions were acknowledged by all in the movement. Jones himself writes of Rank’s “truly vast erudition. . . . One of the compliments I treasure in my life was when he asked me wherever I had found all that material in one of my non-medical essays; that the omniscient Rank should be impressed signified much.”
The alliance between Rank and Ferenczi was at first encouraged by Freud, who deemed it “very promising.” (Jones comments darkly, that “subsequent events were to show that ‘sinister’ would have been a more appropriate term.”) In 1923 Rank and Ferenczi published their joint work, The Development of Psychoanalysis, which differed not too greatly from the canon but urged the importance of the mother-relation and suggested that in therapy the “acting-out” of unconscious or repressed impulses should be stressed more than the theoretical reconstruction with the patient of his psychohistory from earliest childhood.
On the whole, Freud accepted this therapeutic revision. But the suspicions of the more orthodox—that heresy had been set in motion—were not unjustified. Tensions and uncertainties multiplied among the leading psychoanalytic theoreticians.
“It was into the midst of this emotional powder keg that Rank threw, without previous warning, his Trauma of Birth (1924),” Miss Taft recounts. Rank now boldly derived all anxiety—and as a consequence, the disposition to or actuality of neurosis—from the infant’s first shock at being separated from the mother. In the “to-all-appearances purely physical birth trauma with its prodigious psychical consequences for the whole development of mankind,” Rank wrote, “we are led to recognize . . . the ultimate biological basis of the psychical.” While the literal sense of this thesis was later abandoned by all, including Rank, the decisive battle of the mid-20’s was unfortunately—though also inevitably—fought over its literal truth or falsity. The latent and more profound implications of the theory were to emerge only gradually and considerably later, in Rank’s ignored last works.
Freud himself was initially most impressed by the new idea; while he had never taken the work of Jung or Adler very seriously, he now said of the “birth trauma” to Ferenczi, “I don’t know whether 66 or 33 per cent of it is true, but in any case it is the most important progress since the discovery of psychoanalysis.” As we shall see, Freud’s keen intuition for the “latent content” did not play him false, even though he was soon—and correctly enough—to reject the literal thesis. To Rank, Freud’s first remark was that “Anyone else would have used such a discovery to make himself independent.”
The effect both of the book (later to be diagnosed by Jones as “hypomanic”) and still more of Freud’s uncertainty in evaluating it, was to arouse consternation among the orthodoxy, particularly within the Berlin branch led by Abraham. Again Freud strove to find the middle line and patch up the deteriorating relations, still hoping to limit or overcome Rank’s heresies. In a circular letter to the high command, Freud suggested that, assuming the validity of Rank’s thesis, “Some instinct must be associated with the birth trauma which aims at restoring the previous existence. One might call it the instinctual need for happiness. . .” Again Freud’s intuition for the latent content was quite accurate. But Abraham, raising the specter of Jung, slowly forced the unwilling Freud toward condemning the new “scientific regression” (Abraham’s phrase).
Freud himself cooled toward the innovation as further implications emerged. “Clinically it followed,” Jones points out, “that all mental conflicts concerned the relation of the child to its mother, and that what might appear to be conflicts with the father, including the Oedipus complex, were but a mask for the essential ones concerning birth.” Psychoanalytic therapy, in this phase of Rank’s ideas, could only consist of getting the patient to “act out” the supposed original birth trauma, bringing about thereby an abreaction or psychological “rebirth.”
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Rank does not appear to have recognized the imminence of a new schism. Now in principle inevitable, it was delayed two years more. When Rank decided upon an American expedition, Freud wrote bitterly to Ferenczi: “I am deserted just when I have become invalid with decreased working strength and depressed mood. . . . I have survived the Committee that was to be my successor, perhaps I shall yet survive the International Psychoanalytic Association. I only hope that psychoanalysis will survive me. But taken altogether, it makes a sad ending to life.” Rank departed abruptly for America before the conclusion of the Salzburg Congress in 1924; at the banquet the next day, “satirical jokes about Otto and his trauma” were heard.
In New York, however, Rank scored a sensational triumph, which only aggravated the tension between himself and Vienna. Freud resorted to the ultimate weapon of the movement: counter-analysis. In a crucial letter to Rank, though employing it gently, he wrote: “I am often much concerned about you. The exclusion of the father in your theory seems to reveal too much the result of personal influences in your life which I think I recognize. . . . Leave open a way back.” With this letter Freud indeed pierced Rank’s “bullet-proof skin,” but his inner resources were other and greater than Freud supposed.
The letter, Miss Taft relates, became the “occasion for terrific conflict, as one can tell from Rank’s repeated efforts to frame an answer.” He knew that he had reached the point of no return. Now he had to choose between his risky theses or rejoining the orthodoxy—“the” father. In the final version of his reply to Freud, Rank met a number of criticisms concerning his technique, and reiterated unswervingly that his therapeutic experience demonstrated that the libido (or general impulse to bio-emotional satisfaction) was tied to the maternal and not the paternal relationship. “For the rest,” he continued grimly, “you know as well as I do that the accusation that an insight is derived from a complex means very little in general in the first place, and in the second, says nothing of the truth or value of this insight.” He spoke without love of Abraham and the other “noisy ranters,” by whom he was under constant attack. “If they want to remove me from my difficult positions to which, up to now, I am tied not by ambition but by duty, care and toil, they can attain it without any backstairs politics, if you think it desirable. . .” Whatever happened, he now suggested carelessly, “the psychoanalytic movement, as such, is a fiction.”
In effect, Rank had declared his willingness for the final break. Amazed and wounded, Freud replied: “I would never have believed that you could write in such a manner.” He repeated his “inability to understand how the magic formula of leading back all libido to the mother should produce such a therapeutic effect. . . . The whole subject is shrouded in darkness that I have, as yet, not succeeded in penetrating. Your book has brought it out and has done nothing to clarify it. There are ugly things in your letter. . . . An evil demon makes you say that this psychoanalytic movement is a fiction. . . . The very words of the enemy.” According to Jones, Ferenczi, who “had been at the edge of a precipice,” after reading Rank’s letter, “now drew himself back in an unmistakable fashion,” and assured Freud that he was finished with Rank. (Rank once told Miss Taft how, two years later, he had encountered Ferenczi in Pennsylvania Station: “He was my best friend, and he refused to speak to me.” Not many years later Ferenczi himself fell prey—in Jones’s interpretation—to “failing mental integration” and that insidious brother-hostility—i.e. began to differ again with Freud theoretically.)
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A startling chapter of the story was yet to come. Rank’s affection and respect for Freud were still very great, and the separation of the two men could not but cause him the “fear, conflict, illness and suffering” Miss Taft describes. Upon his returning to Vienna after this exchange of letters, Rank found himself “back in the old familiar situation, faced with the reality of Freud’s illness and need, the enormity of his own desertion in the eyes of former friends and of his own family as well.” (His wife, Beata, now a child analyst, retained the orthodox outlook.) This combination of pressures was, in fact, too much for him, and forced a temporary capitulation. En route to another American trip, he found that he could not get either physically or psychologically farther than Paris, and he returned to Vienna.
He was drawn into a series of “analytic conferences” with Freud, at the conclusion of which he wrote to the inner circle an abject letter of recantation and apology—Miss Taft describes it as “inconceivable.” The circumstances and tone of the letter parallel almost exactly the Marxist ritual of “self-criticism.” Rank declared: “From a state which I now recognize as neurotic, I have suddenly returned to myself.” He suggests that his “neurosis” was precipitated by “the crisis in the trauma occasioned by the dangerous illness of the Professor.” Rank traced the root of the “neurosis” to “the Oedipus and brother complexes,” as ideologically required. He hoped that his letter would “give the satisfaction which can afford the basis for the resumption of our group work in the not too distant future.” In a follow-up letter, he further agreed “to take back, limit, or modify whatever was premature, uncertain or dangerous” in his earlier views. Ernest Jones says, “naturally we all replied reassuring him of our understanding and sympathy.” This is not the view of Miss Taft, who characterizes their replies (without quoting any) as “patronizing . . . suspicious . . . offensive.”
Be that as it may, intellectual helotry was for Rank constitutionally unendurable. Once again he went to America; while here his therapeutic prowess so increased that there was no other psychoanalytic leader, Miss Taft asserts, “to whom Rank would not now feel superior in viewpoint and technique . . . how long then [could] he sustain the illusion that his own development is the result of a neurosis that can be cured?” In 1926, back in Vienna, he published the first volume of his Technik der Psychoanalyse (summarized in the first chapter of Will Therapy); the new book was full of heresies that were even worse than his earlier ones: the transition from his birth trauma thesis to the psychological and philosophic concepts of his major and final work had begun. As Ferenczi diagnosed the case, little knowing how the days of his own orthodoxy were numbered, it had now become clear, he said, that Rank “was unwilling to renounce any part of the theory in which he had deposited his neurosis.” In May, Rank departed from Vienna. He was thereafter considered a traitor, and Freud declared sternly, “Now that I have forgiven everything, I am through with him.”
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Although Rank’s major work was yet to come, nothing more that he did ever resulted in a comparable drama. His ideas diverged increasingly from the main intellectual currents of the 20’s and 30’s, and his followers were few and obscure. He could not compete with the Freudian ideology and its organization, nor did he try; Jung and other “traitors” had a much greater worldly success. Jones concludes his remarks on Rank with priggish insensibility, and an invidious comparison between Jung and Rank: “The outstanding difference between the two cases is of course that Jung was not afflicted by any of the mental trouble that wrecked Rank and so was able to pursue an unusually fruitful and productive life.”3 Comparing Rank to Adler, Freud’s own judgment was keener: Rank “will not have the same luck, since his theory contravenes the common sense of the laity who had been flattered” by Adler. Rank’s major ideas were in fact never accepted; and though most of his early therapeutic ideas—short analysis, acting out, the importance of the relation to the mother, and others (to be found mainly in his Will Therapy)—have now passed under various adaptations into the mainstream of psychotherapy, there no longer exists a specifically Rankian school.
Until 1934, Rank lived in Paris, where he wrote all his major works, except the last (Beyond Psychology). In Paris, he made the acquaintance of a number of artists and writers, including (I am told) Anais Nin and Henry Miller, although in regard to this phase of his life, and all subsequent ones, there is an especial dearth of biographical material which, hopefully, his friends and relatives may yet remedy. Rank made occasional brief trips to America where, thanks to the interest of Jessie Taft and her associates, he achieved—somewhat fortuitously—a considerable influence at the School for Social Work of the University of Pennsylvania. His therapeutic concepts thence became known throughout that profession, although there exists no necessary relation between his major ideas and social work. In 1935 Rank moved to New York. Having seen their daughter safely through Swarthmore, he and his wife arranged an amicable divorce in 1939, and shortly thereafter he married his secretary Estelle Buell. Only two months later he died, of “some kind of infection that no drug could reach.” The superstitious—whether psychoanalytically inclined or not—may deem the fact titillating that Freud himself had died in London only a month earlier.
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II
The real significance of the parting of ways between Rank and Freud was to be brought out only later, by the further development of Rank’s ideas and by the contradistinctive spectacle of orthodox Freudianism gradually painting itself into a professionalist corner from which it does not now even pretend to be able to give general ideological counsel. For at least orthodox psychoanalysis, the “end of ideology” came about thirty years ago; thereafter, its therapeutic scope and powers were necessarily relative to the ideology of the day. Thus, in psychoanalysis (and elsewhere, for that matter), the difference, if any, between successful adaptation to the Zeitgeist—alias the reality principle—and “health” or “happiness” has grown more and more inscrutable. Psychotherapeutic judgment now is ultimately dependent on the fact that any state which might otherwise be thought of as “health” or “happiness” must also be able to maintain itself in society or in the Zeitgeist; if it cannot, it will cease to be thought of as health or happiness and may even be redefined as a neurosis. The vast majority of patients and analysts must assume that the prevalent political judgment is “reality,” even though an insecurity remains, and one that is more or less dys-therapeutic. In a word, psychoanalysis too is the continuation of politics by other means.
In an ominous decade, the totalitarian 30’s, both Freud and Rank increasingly saw that the ultimate question for psychoanalysis was the nature of the uncertainty and distress of society rather than of isolated, “neurotic” individuals. In his last book, Beyond Psychology, Rank said: “Freud himself discredited the whole psychoanalytic movement when he concluded his lifework with the pessimistic realization that he had not been dealing with neurotic individuals, but with a morbid civilization.” Freud discredited, that is, the independence of or the ideological leadership of psychoanalysis. While it is certainly no discredit, nor is it impossible, to render aid to individuals, even within “a morbid civilization,” this service remains bound to the political chariot wheel, and it cannot be taken as having ideological influence or effect. The significance of Rank’s “birth trauma” theory was its relevance to this political problem—not to any therapeutic question; this significance was the “latent content” of the theory by which Freud had been struck.
No sequential or systematic exposition of Rank’s later works can be attempted here; my purpose is to extract the ideological core of Rank’s thought. Rank had declared that the Oedipus complex was a mask for the underlying complexes supposedly deposited by a traumatic birth; but as he gradually discovered, the latter was also a mask—an analogue rather—for a still more profound divergence that existed not only within the consciousness of both the patient and the analyst, but within civilization itself. Rank had biologized a psychological split, the emotional not the physical, separation from the mother, a separation, furthermore, not literally from the mother, but rather from a bio-emotional condition to which ratiocination was functionally, and necessarily, inimical.
Rank came to perceive that this separation did not normally take place at birth, nor even as Freud’s Oedipal theory supposed, in early childhood, but in fact occurred later—at those points in an individual’s development when, under the invidious pressure of “reality,” his projections or “illusions” were abandoned. Freud, in accordance with the prevailing rational-scientific ideology, had argued that the patient’s resigned understanding of his own bio-emotional renunciations constituted health, or the nearest possible approach to it. “Freud’s therapeutic method aims at making the individual merely conscious of his irrational self,” Rank wrote in Beyond Psychology, “thereby convincing him that it had been rightly suppressed and should now be rationally condemned.” That is to say, upon a non-rational renunciation was superimposed a rational one which, for Rank, only worsened the situation. He believed that, on the contrary, the subjective import of instinctual reunciation in the presence of “illusion” or faith, was quite different from its import as perceived or understood with the emotional resignation inherent in rationality. (But, paradoxically, it is also possible to speak of a faith in reason, i.e. that it must lead to more and more “freedom.” Rank saw, however, that this was not the case, and so he sometimes referred to the rational or “scientific illusion.”)
Rank argued, furthermore, that a good many of the supposed frustrations Freud attributed to childhood, or to the primitive ages of man, were, in actuality, non-existent, non-traumatic, or were analogues for the later adult frustrations, or of modern civilization itself. Rank’s own interpretation of the Oedipus legend exemplifies some of these differences between himself and Freud: “Far from trying to enforce the fourth commandment, as Freud would have it, the Greek legend of King Oedipus is meant to teach a lesson to the presumptuous intellectualism of the first Western thinkers, who tried to solve the riddle of human existence by philosophic speculation. The wise Oedipus, the clever solver of riddles, typifies the sophisticated intelligentsia of later Greece. . . . Not unlike Ibsen’s heroes, Oedipus too perishes as soon as he knows the truth about himself, as revealed by the historical self-analysis of his past, in true Freudian fashion.”
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Rank did not consider the “neurotic” as an exception to a generally prevailing standard of health, but thought rather that “the neurotic type of our time appears to be the caricature of our own over-rationalized psychology; that is to say, in him is reached the climax of rational self-control (control of the natural self) at the breaking-point where the irrational forces get the upper hand.” Thus, the basic anxiety, whether “normal” or “neurotic,” which at first Rank had misapprehended as a “birth trauma,” he later came to regard as the modern trauma; the loss of a shared faith, illusion, security, or value (whether or not called religious)—a loss more or less deep, and more or less repressed, which resulted in a universal anxiety or “neurosis.”
This basic anxiety, which Rank had pointed out to Freud, was alternatively interpreted by the latter (in The Problem of Anxiety) as due to the presence within an individual of repressed instincts which were experienced as a threat to his ego. (In complimenting Freud on this work, Jones wrote: “It is now clear that you were wise enough to do what none of us others could do; namely to learn something from it all by allowing Rank’s ideas to work on you in a stimulating and fruitful way. What a splendid reaction to a depressing difficulty—alle Ehre!”) Freud’s interpretation has in fact seemed to most analysts more convincing than Rank’s. But, as we have seen, it by-passes the real issue at stake, the political one: whether in civilization (as well as perforce in psychotherapy) the ubiquity of rational understanding (and its products) was the measure of health or freedom, or whether there was not between reason and health—or freedom—a pervasive contradiction. Freud took the degree of rationality as the criterion of health and accordingly defined what was not rational—religion, for example—as neurotic. But Rank reversed the imputation: he believed rather that the “scientific illusion” of rationality could itself be called a neurosis, if by that one was to understand an artificial or unnatural mode of consciousness and living. “For the most part what we call ‘irrational’ is just the natural,” he said in Beyond Psychology, “but our ‘rationale’ has become so unnatural that we see everything natural as irrational.” The capacity to create or sustain an “illusion”—whether in religion, art, or love—Rank viewed as the natural bio-emotional state of man, and it is this capacity which he took as his criterion of health. “Psychoanalysis,” he wrote, “despite its naturalistic terminology, does not accept human nature. . . .” It “betrays the final over-reaching of rational man beyond his legitimate control of nature to the very denial of the vital life-force itself. . . . The result of this confusion manifests itself in the paradox that the reality in which we live is determined by unreality which we believe to be real because it is rational.” Rank may have been thinking here of Hegel’s now nearly triumphant theorems: “The real is the rational, and the rational is the real,” and the even more ominous, “Pure Being and Nothing are the same.”
Rank did not always make clear that the presence of any form of illusion, in an individual or in a society, was not by itself an accurate index to the objective amount of bio-emotional satisfaction or frustration involved. Both for its own sake, and because it is also a threat to the illusion itself, bio-emotional frustration of whatever kind—including that necessarily involved in rationality—must be understood and controlled. For when any objective frustration or deprivation is carried too far, there may result (in an individual or society) a neurotic or nihilist breakdown, a “passion for the end”—of freedom itself. That this can and does happen is the main theme of Dostoevsky’s work: more profoundly than any other writer, he grasped the links between individual psyches and the general nihilist crisis of his time. As we know, the consequences Dostoevsky foresaw did indeed ensue. Freud, then as now often accused of excess pessimism, in reality—as he himself ruefully acknowledged late in his life—had somewhat underestimated man’s capacity for destruction.
In thinking that adaptation to ratio-centric civilization was both inevitable and at any rate not altogether unwholesome, Freud overlooked the full implications of a negative accumulation. He himself was identified psychologically and philosophically with the late 19th-century commitment to the “scientific illusion.” (Whatever else one might say about this period in history, however, a kind of balance still existed then between the elements of human nature which we shall be lucky to see again.) To Freud, the losses involved in such a commitment to rationalism seemed “the worst” that were possible, but he was badly mistaken. Freud did not foresee, nor for all his prowess did he comprehend when at last it occurred, the next turn of the historical screw, which, “beyond tragedy,” elicited the nihilist phase. There followed in a “hideous storme of terror” (John Webster) those cataclysms of hyper-rationality, the ruin of the German and the Marxist virtue. Both psychological disasters involved the hallucinatory identification of “the enemy” as the Jews or the capitalists—two groups which, in reality, were surrogates or analogues for freedom—the goal, end, or purpose of human life which totalitarianism now relinquished.
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To return now to the ideological meaning of the other psychotherapeutic questions at issue between Rank and Freud.
It becomes clear that their controversy over the relative importance for the child of his relationship with either the mother or father, did not refer to the actual parents so much as to their different psychological attitudes toward the ideology and virtues of the society; through them, society is first presented to the child. Oversimplifying a bit in order to complete this detail quickly, and assuming that the parents play the normal sexual roles, it is evident that the mother appears to the child in the relation of love—and stands for what the child already is, for his natural condition—while the father appears in the relation of virtue—and stands for what the child must become. (This latent opposition exists regardless of the society or the ideology—pagan, Roman, Christian, conservative, liberal, or Marxist.) Rank’s therapeutic emphasis upon the relation to the mother thus implied an encouragement to resist excess virtue (i.e. inhibition)—and even implied some doubt toward the community ideology represented by the father. Freud’s patriarchalism had just the reverse significance; the effect of the “Oedipus complex,” he believed, was to overwhelm with contumely, as incestuous or murderous, any resistance to “the” father—in reality, to the ratiocentric ideology. As Rank began to affirm that knowledge was not fundamentally curative, he came to see that the application of psychoanalysis itself was equivocal. Fundamentally, it was illusion that cured. “What the patient first of all can and must learn is to live at all,” he wrote, “and this seems to me possible only with illusions. Analysis prefers to use the term sublimation, but can only mean illusion, for the one is based on the other, at bottom the same . . . it finally comes to the question on what plane of illusion one lives.” The enigma was how far and in what way psychoanalytic knowledge could be used, not to remove illusions in the patient, but rather to sustain them. Rank believed that in orthodox analysis there was “a fundamental confusion of theory and therapy” and that, in fact, “analytic knowledge has gradually undermined analytic therapy.” He concluded that the patient’s increased knowledge during analysis at some point began to do more harm therapeutically than good, even if, or perhaps especially if, it were theoretically correct. The popular cognomen, “headshrinker,” thus contains a grain of justification (and so likewise does the suspicion that artists and other illusionists have often shown toward analysis).
Rank’s awareness of this double edge to psychoanalytic knowledge was doubtless also at the root of his concept of “short-analysis”—one of his minor technical deviations before the schism—which established at any rate a time limit to the amount of analytic knowledge or interpretation that could be conveyed. Rank was later to remark jokingly to a technical seminar, “I analyzed first according to Freud’s technique and then gradually developed a shorter one, a technique that is getting shorter and shorter, so that I am almost afraid that soon I won’t have to see the patient at all.” Similarly, he once remarked that for a time he had given up writing his books altogether: “There is already too much truth in the world.”
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Relevant here, and to Rank’s entire concept of rationalism, is the familiar exhortation of modern educationalists, that everyone must compulsively learn more and more, and that this must go on forever. In the course of criticizing “progressive” sex education, which Rank believed would “prove to be a grave interference with the individual’s personal freedom,” he wrote: “We cannot overlook the fact that the child does not want sexual education, just as he does not want any kind of education” [my italics]. Of course, we know that this is true, but we do not realize as well the sense in which this “childish” attitude is also justified. Naturally, the child is too unsophisticated to oppose his education with the epigram of Kierkegaard: “The supreme paradox of all thought is the effort to discover something that thought cannot think”—i.e. what he, the child, already has, au naturel, freedom, before it is replaced by virtue, by civilized inhibitions. In less articulate terms, however, this is, in fact, the protest that he does make.4
Within psychoanalysis, then, it was primarily Otto Rank who rediscovered the negation of human nature that exists latently within rational civilization, and which is, in one way or another, the burden of everything that we call great or profound in its art or thinking. As yet, no way has been found to make this heritage politically effective; it seems all too evident that unless this is done—and quickly—we will soon discover that what we had supposed to be the profound has been politically redefined as the silly, the meaningless, or the non-existent.
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1 Jones later asserts that “the two men never really came close to each other.” It is possible that this judgment was not uninfluenced by that “brother-hostility” of which, in his accounts of the later factional disputes, Jones is constantly accusing Rank.
2 A short article on Rank cannot begin to explore all aspects of his ideas. But Rank's mytho-graphical work, as well as his analyses of the psychology of artistic creation, are particularly outstanding: the latter are probably definitive.
3 Jones would naturally prefer Jung's shallow, optimistic, and inconsequential approach to any deeper awareness of the dilemmas within human nature deriving from the tragic sensibility which, among psychoanalysts, perhaps Freud and Rank alone shared, irrespective of theoretical differences (and which Jones and Freud did not share, despite their theoretical agreements). As one of his critics (Glover) has remarked, Jung's idea of the relation between reason and religion is that of a “mutual improvement association.” Real contradictions are replaced by a Cabbalistic and mystical farrago, which has little objective value, and above all, cannot serve as the foundation for an accurate political judgment.
4 The justification of education can only be the installation of a necessary virtue, which replaces “freedom.” It is the realistic assessment of this fact by “conservative” educators which arouses the hostility of “progressive” educators and other populists. Conservative realism, like that of Freud, is no doubt “old-fashioned” and corresponds psychologically to the 19th-century personality, to the pre-nihilist, pre-totalitarian phase of the rational development. Reason, or education, was then still supposed to minister to certain immutable (Christian or “humanist”) values. But then there followed generally the confusion of the rational virtue with “freedom” itself. Education reflected the world ideological delusion—on the one hand, virtue became “freedom” and on the other, freedom became “virtue.” In either case, there occurred the ambivalent contest between tyranny—that is, simple repression in the absence of value or faith—and anarchy—that is, the impossible and eventually ruinous rejection of all virtue. The homogenization of freedom and virtue is ultimately the same as the homogenization of “ends” and “means”—this, too, is the functional basis of what is now customary to call “mass society.” In totalitarian education, there is the monstrous effort to appropriate the individual's every waking moment; on the other hand, in American progressive education, education is parodied as “freedom” or “life.” Both of these perverse methodologies spring from the same origin.
