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Lecture Review |
Sheldon Solomon on "How Rank influenced Becker"
Reviewed by Robert Kramer, Ph.D.
"You cannot merely praise Otto Rank's work because in its stunning brilliance it is often fantastic, gratuitous, superlative," Ernest Becker writes in The Denial of Death. "The insights seem like a gift, beyond what is necessary." A return to Rank is vital, maintains Becker, to afford the human sciences a theory of creativity as compelling as Freud's theory of sexuality. "There is no substitute for reading Rank," according to Becker, "he is a mine for years of insights and pondering." But Rank remains very hard to read, "so rich," confesses Becker, "that he is almost inaccessible to the general public." What can we do to make Rank's message more accessible?
"One thing that I hope my confrontation of Rank will do," Becker once said in passing, "is to send the reader directly to his books." In his March 19 talk, "Just Say No: Humans Make the Unreal Real," long time EBF favorite, Sheldon Solomon, takes up Becker's challenge. If you can't spare ten years to mine the insights of Otto Rank, but are willing to spend an hour and a half to learn more about Rank, then order a copy of Sheldon's talk today! (A two-tape set is available from EBF for $10.)
In a miraculous feat of clarification and conciseness, Sheldon, as he has done for Becker's own work, offers the best brief introduction to Rank now available for the EBF community. Try Sheldon's light but scholarly touch before tackling the more comprehensive books on Rank by Esther Menaker and E. James Lieberman.
Sheldon admits that he considered Rank's writing, on first reading, to be "maniacal gibberish." An improvement came on second reading, when it merely seemed like "circular nonsense." Now, after a third go around, Sheldon has become hooked, and is even beginning empirical research with his colleagues to test Rank's theories: "it's utterly important stuff," Sheldon feels, "that I'm not yet in complete command of." Few of us are.
Not presented in a linear fashion, Rank's prose often winds around itself, like a double helix, as if to protect its author from the existential dilemmas it does so much to illuminate. Consider this tangled passage from Rank's Will Therapy, the main source of Becker's famous "dual fears" thesis:
The fear in birth, which we have designated as fear of life, seems to me actually the fear of having to live as an isolated individual, and not the reverse, the fear of loss of individuality (death fear). That would mean, however, that primary fear corresponds to a fear of separation from the whole, therefore a fear of individuation, on account of which I would like to call it fear of life, although it may appear later as fear of the loss of this dearly bought individuality as fear of death, of being dissolved again into the whole. Between these two fear possibilities, these poles of fear, the individual is thrown back and forth all his life....
Read it again! And once more. You'll need to marinate in Rank's paragraph for a while before its dazzling implications become clear. It does not seem possible, Rank seems to be saying, to eradicate the two "ultimate" anxieties, which appear to be an existential burden carried out of the womb by every new arrival on the planet. Sometimes it is "fear of life" - the fear of becoming and being oneself, separate and different from everyone else - that has the upper hand. At other times, it is "fear of death" - the fear of merging into the other, into the collective, and losing one's "dearly bought individuality" - that predominates. The eternal conflict between the wish for and fear of separation, and the wish for and fear of union, has no final solution. It must be solved and re-solved continuously throughout life, at every developmental stage, says Rank, "from birth, via childhood and puberty to maturity and downward through old age to death," which is simultaneously the final separation and the final union.
"It can only be a matter of balance between the two," says Rank, "which, however, is not attained once and for all but must be created anew and ever anew." I don't want to repeat the summaries of Sheldon's excellent talk already published in the February and April 1998 EBF Newsletters. As a public speaker, Sheldon uniquely combines high scholarship with comic touches in a way that makes Rank come alive. Had Rank, who identified with the puckish humor of Huck Finn, been in the audience on the day of Sheldon's lecture, he would have been charmed and delighted by Sheldon's light touch. Sheldon's lecture, supplemented by thoughtful responses on tape from Tom Pace and Eugene Webb, is now the essential short introduction to Rank for the EBF community. But there is more, much more, to Rank, the brooding genius lurking in the wings (as Irvin Yalom once described him), than can be captured in an hour and a half talk. For those who want to pursue Rank to another, more cosmic, level, let me share some musings I had as I listened to Sheldon.
No one, of course, has expressed the tension between the will to separate and the will to unite better than Ernest Becker, whose Denial of Death caught the essence of Rank with electrifying passion:
On the one hand, the creature is impelled by a powerful desire to identify with the cosmic forces, to merge himself with the rest of nature. On the other hand he wants to be unique, to stand out as something different and apart...
You can see that man wants the impossible: He wants to lose his isolation and keep it at the same time. He can't stand the sense of separateness, and yet he can't allow the complete suffocation of his vitality. He wants to expand by merging with the powerful beyond that transcends him, yet he wants while merging with it to remain individual and aloof....
Not a therapist, Becker (suggests Sheldon correctly) may have missed the more optimistic side of the clinical Rank, who spent two decades as a professional helper and healer. The life-long oscillation between the two "poles of fear" can be made more bearable, according to Rank, in a relationship with another person who accepts one's uniqueness and difference, and allows for the emergence of the creative impulse - without too much guilt or anxiety for separating from the other.
Like the double function of fear, the creative impulse itself seems to divide into two currents: "will and guilt," insists Rank in Truth and Reality, "are the two complementary sides of one and the same phenomenon." Let me say a little more about this strange Rankian paradox - will = guilt - a paradox that Sheldon touches upon in his rich observations on the need to create oneself, as a human being or as an artist, by first "saying No" to others or to social norms.
How can creating one's self or a work of art by first "saying No" lead to the pain and agony of guilt? Although a necessary part of growth, separation and individuation have an emotional price. Explains Rank in A Psychology of Difference, a recently published and very readable collection of his American lectures: "the more we individualize ourselves - that is, remove and isolate ourselves from others - the stronger is the formation of guilt-feeling which originates from this individualization, and which again in turn unites us emotionally with others." Unlike Freud, who never advanced a theory of relationship, Rank makes clear that relationship, interpersonal and societal, is at the heart of his thinking about creativity and at the center of his therapeutic practice.
Rank also explores the other side of guilt: The human being who has failed to separate and individuate also feels guilt-a kind of thrown-back responsibility- for remaining embedded in the other, submerged in the womb of the collective. This is guilt for self-betrayal: for refusing the burden of consciousness, of individuality, for denying the vital need for growth. Guilt, in short, for unlived life.
On the other hand, the human being who experiences and expresses the creative impulse to the fullest extent possible - the artist, scientist, entrepreneur, or philosopher - feels perhaps the deepest guilt for taking on the greatest burden, creating a whole world in one's own image, for rivaling the creative force of the Cosmos itself, for "negotiating," Rank says in Art and Artist, as a mere mortal "with the problem of the Beyond." Rank's view that creatively "negotiating" with the Cosmos leaves guilt in its wake is found nowhere else in the literature of the human sciences. In Truth and Reality, Rank writes, in part autobiographically:
The creative type must constantly make good his continuous will expression and will accomplish- ment and he pays for this guilt toward others and himself with work which he must give to the others and which justifies himself to himself. Therefore he is productive, he accomplishes something because he has real guilt to pay for, not imaginary guilt like the neurotic, who only behaves as if he were guilty but whose consciousness of guilt is only an expression of his will denial, not of creative accomplishment which makes one truly guilty.
By the act of creating, the artist, scientist, philosopher, or entrepreneur strives toward spiritual freedom, to make himself or herself independent of sex and death, of the will of nature - reaching, as Becker points out, toward the fantasy of causa-sui: pure independence. But the project to create oneself - to be one's own parent, so to speak - is confronted with the existential limits mandated by biology, since death and bodily destruction await us all, artist or neurotic, hero or coward. Rank never forgets the impossibility of the causa-sui project - even while exploring its dynamics as a spur to the creative urge and artistic illusion. Not a prophet of pain-free self-actualization, Rank analyzes the dialectic between freedom and fate, will and guilt, most acutely in his masterwork, Art and Artist:
Man's acceptance of his dependence on nature is more honest, while freedom-ideology, beyond a certain point, presumes the negation of that dependence and is therefore, also in a deeper sense, dishonest. This fundamental dishonesty towards nature then comes out as consciousness of guilt, which we see active in every process of art...the more strongly man feels his freedom and independence, the more intense on the other hand is the consciousness of guilt, which appears in the individual partly restrictive, partly creative...
If not too severe, guilt serves as a harmonizing factor between the "will to separate" and the "will to unite," linking I to Thou, reattaching part to whole, while simultaneously allowing the retention of one's difference. In A Psychology of Difference, Rank observes:
I think the guilt feeling occupies a special position among the emotions, as a boundary phenomenon between the pronounced painful affects that separate and the more pleasurable feelings that unite. It is related to the painful separating affects of anxiety and hate. But in its relation to gratitude and devotion, which may extend to self-sacrifice, it belongs to the strongest uniting feelings we know. As the guilt-feeling occupies the boundary line between the painful and pleasurable, between the severing and uniting feelings, it is also the most important representative of the relation between Inner and Outer, I and Thou, Self and the World.
Each therapeutic hour, according to Rank, is a partial "living and dying," a microcosmic experience of separation and union. If the individual can accept himself or herself in this fragment of time, without too much anxiety or guilt, then living more fully outside the allotted hour may also be possible. But the problem of human suffering, Rank says in Will Therapy, cannot be solved "in and by the individual himself, but only in relation to a second person, who justifies our will, makes it good, since he voluntarily submits himself to it" - in other words, accepts us as we are. The classical psychoanalytic technique does not do this, Rank maintains, since it interprets all expressions of will in the therapeutic hour as "resistance" to the authority of the therapist, who stands in the center of the analysis in spite of the analyst's so-called "passivity" or "neutrality."
The "whole psychoanalytic approach is centered around the therapist," Rank says in A Psychology of Difference - an idea that powerfully influenced Carl Rogers to abandon the Freudian approach. "Real therapy," says Rank, using a term that would later make Rogers famous," has to be centered around the client, his difficulties, his needs, his activities." The therapist is not to play the role of authority, according to Rank, but is an "assistant I" who provides a helping relationship in which the neurotic - an "artiste manque," a kind of "failed artist" - could affirm and re-discover his or her own positive will, become his or her own therapist, accept responsibility for his or her own individuality and difference, and say "Yes" to the often painful obligation of living as well as the dreaded obligation of dying. Compulsion can only be overcome creatively, through the "volitional affirmation of the obligatory" - that is, by deliberately saying "Yes"to the "Must," accepting the need to individuate as well as the need to merge, without becoming chained to one pole at the exclusion of the other.
Robert Kramer wrote the introduction and also selected and edited the lectures included in A Psychology of Difference, The American Lectures of Otto Rank, Princeton U. Press, 1996 -Ed