Otto Rank

OTTO RANK’S CRITIQUE OF PSYCHOANALYSIS
IN LIGHT OF
PHILOSOPHICAL HERMENEUTICS

A Dissertation

Presented to the Faculty ofThe California School of Professional Psychology at Alameda

In Partial Fulfillmentof the Requirements of the DegreeDoctor of Philosophy

By
Robert Kamin
JANUARY 2002

OTTO RANK’S CRITIQUE OF PSYCHOANALYSIS
IN LIGHT OF
PHILOSOPHICAL HERMENEUTICS

This dissertation, by Robert Kamin, has beenapproved by the committee members signedbelow who recommend that it be accepted

by the faculty of the California School ofProfessional Psychology at Alameda in partial

fulfillment of requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Dissertation Committee:

Philip Cushman, Ph.D. Chairperson

Stephen Blum, Ph.D.

Doreen Rothman, Ph.D.

Date

ABSTRACTOTTO RANK’S CRITIQUE OF PSYCHOANALYSISIN LIGHT OF PHILOSOPHICAL HERMENEUTICS ROBERT KAMIN California School of Professional Psychology at Alameda

Otto Rank’s most mature post-Freudian ideas are examined, focusing on Rank’s critique of psychoanalysis, and putting it in a broad historical context. Rank’s break from Freud is generally portrayed as disparaging to Rank, and Rank’s post-Freudian ideas are considered incomprehensible and unscientific by traditional psychoanalytic scholars. Even authors more sympathetic to Rank see his early post-Freudian ideas as precursors to modern object relations theory, but see his later concepts as a decline in scientific rigor. In this study, an alternative interpretation is offered, which sees Rank’s late ideas as strikingly similar to those of philosophical hermeneutics, as chiefly represented by Hans-Georg Gadamer. Viewed in this way, Rank can be seen as a harbinger of philosophical hermeneutics, which can serve as an alternative to the traditional natural science model invoked by psychoanalysis, psychology, and the human sciences.

The method used is an interpretive, hermeneutical approach, analyzing Rank’s final and unfinished work, Beyond Psychology, a multidisciplinary examination of psychology, collective ideologies, and culture. Rank contends that the primordial belief is that of a soul. He traces the development of spiritual concepts of immortality, from primitive societies to modern Western civilization, and the rise and fall of the modern self. Science gained prominence over religion and philosophy, but denied the values it fostered, while claiming to be objective. Psychoanalysis began as therapy used to help certain people with emotional difficulties, but became a universal theory of the self that disguised the prevailing ideology of the day–that of the bourgeois personality, and the values it represents. Rank concluded that psychoanalysis, in both its theoretical and practical aspects, greatly distorts what actually occurs. These ideas are very similar to those of Hans-Georg Gadamer, who also argues that the human sciences misunderstand their own self-concept. In light of these findings about Rank’s late concepts, his work in relation to Freud should be re-examined. By reminding researchers and therapists that they are representatives of the prevailing social order, Rank allows a conversation to take place among the advocates of opposing viewpoints.

DEDICATION

To the memory of my mother, Sylvia Kamin (1919-1981), a complex, but wonderful woman, who strongly encouraged me to pursue my graduate studies, even as she half-jokingly referred to psychotherapists as “a bunch of voyeurs,”and who inspired the artist in me to keep on making music. I miss her accompaniment, but it continues to move me.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This has been an amazing struggle. If I had known before I started, just what I was in for, I don’t know if I would have had the courage to persevere. I sensed long ago that Otto Rank has had something to teach me, but he is a “spirit-guide,”who has often stretched my intellect, seemingly beyond its capabilities. I hope I have done justice to his work.

I would like to thank the love of my life, Susan Poff, who inspires me by her example, and whose emotional support has sustained me in times when I didn’t know if I would make it. You have untiringly continued to point the way toward our “life after dissertation.” We’re almost there!

To my father, Isadore Kamin, I say, thank you! I know this has been difficult for you to watch, but now that it’s almost behind us, perhaps we can reflect on what some of this means in terms of our relationship, and begin to renew our “conversation,”professional and otherwise.

To my committee, who stuck by me, even when my own faith was dwindling, I cannot even begin to express what your help has meant to me. Your moral support has touched me, and I hope I can pass it along to others. You are great people, who make me proud to be “joining the flock.”Philip, you lifted me up, and introduced me to a still-living legend, Hans-Georg Gadamer, one of the few great thinkers whose vision is large enough to hear Otto Rank’s challenge. More importantly, you were willing to listen to me at a time when many others were running away. Thank you for giving me back my confidence. To Stephen, who quite literally convinced me not to drop out, and who was there to help guide me through some thorny ethical dilemmas, I will always be appreciative. And to Doreen, who despite her own hardships, never wavered in her support, I am eternally grateful, and wish you continued good health.

Table of Contents

Dedication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . iv Acknowledgments. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v I. PROBLEM FORMULATION. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 II. RESEARCH APPROACH . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 III. BEYOND PSYCHOLOGY: AN ELEVEN-POINT SUMMARY . . . . . . . . . . . . . .30

IV. DISCUSSION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93

V. REFERENCES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106

Chapter One
Problem Formulation

Background

The meeting, collaborating, and eventual parting of the ways of Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank comprise a dynamic relationship of profound importance in the history of psychoanalysis. Although there are many portrayals of their acrimonious separation, most are highly partisan, and lacking in critical reflectiveness. Mainstream Freudian accounts, as exemplified by that of Ernest Jones in the third volume of his The Life and Works of Sigmund Freud (1957, chap. 2), disparage Rank’s break from Freud as the unfortunate, but inevitable consequence of Rank’s “unscientific,” “neurotic,” or even “psychotic” tendencies. Alternatively, Rankian depictions glorify his parting as a necessary declaration of independence, so as to allow room for the full fluorescence of his creative genius. By and large, however, what the proponents of these opposing versions of the Freud-Rank split have failed to take into account is the broader social context that would put their respective positions in better historical perspective. When historians disregard their own prejudices and vested interests, they play them out in disguised ways instead, thus overlooking the significance of their own participation in the evolution of ideas.

Freud and Rank’s relationship and its many transformations strongly influenced their respective writings and the directions they took at various junctures. As products of father and (ultimately disowned) adopted son of the psychoanalytic movement, their works carry distinct ideological preunderstandings that cannot be bracketed away and thereby ignored. Similarly, any allegiances on the parts of those who read their texts are bound to prejudice the ways in which they interpret them. There is no neutral place from which we can examine this split. The best we can do is examine our own biases as we talk about its implications.

Otto Rank has been and continues to be an enigmatic and misunderstood figure. At first, under Freud’s guidance, he was dedicated to establishing psychoanalysis as an objective science: he fell prey to the lure of using natural science as an absolute standard for validating the truth of his research. Gradually however, Rank began to deviate from this model, even before he was fully aware of the change in direction that his work was taking.

This divergence was seen by Freud’s most zealous followers, even before Freud himself, as a threat to the status of psychoanalysis as a rigorous science. However, with the increased clarity of historical scholarship and an evolving hermeneutic tradition, Rank can be understood as having challenged the very appropriateness of natural science as a framework for psychoanalysis.

In his post-Freudian works, culminating in the posthumously published Beyond Psychology (1941/1958), Rank offered a new conception of psychotherapy, psychology, and the human sciences which attempted to take into consideration the sociohistorical context in which they are embedded.He variously used the phrases, “dynamic dualism,” “dynamic will causality,” and a “psychology of difference” to describe his corrective to the mechanistic determinism invoked by most of his contemporaries, as well as his predecessors, in their attempts to explain the world. These practitioners of the modern human sciences (e.g., Marx and Darwin; Freud, Adler, and Jung) had claimed that their theories represented sociological and psychological facts and universal laws that adequately reflected real life. However, in practice, Rank argued that these theories expressed ideologies by which their respective theorists sought to recreate life in terms of a specific social order.

Rank’s most mature post-Freudian ideas can be seen as similar to the philosophical hermeneutic approach. Philosophical hermeneutics was developed during Rank’s lifetime by Martin Heidegger (Being and Time, 1927/1962), and afterward, particularly with regard to the social sciences, by HansGeorg Gadamer (Truth and Method, 1960/1989), as a refinement and “turn” from the methodological hermeneutics of Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) and Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911), which in turn was evaluated as a deviation from mechanistic methods that modeled those of the natural sciences (for a history of philosophical hermeneutics, see chapter nine of Re-envisioning Psychology, Richardson, Fowers, and Guignon, 1999).

Just as from the philosophical hermeneutic perspective, Heidegger and Gadamer argued that the methodological hermeneuticists had a fundamental self-misunderstanding of their own research, so Rank asserted a similar distortion in understanding on the part of Freud and his followers. By bracketing away their own participation in their therapeutic practices, argued Rank, the Freudians, Adlerians, and Jungians had absolutized their theories; that is, they had detached themselves from the very lived experiences they were studying in order to examine them objectively. Rather than giving themselves an objective view of their patients, however, the therapist/researchers projected their own ideological prejudices onto their descriptions.

Gadamer (and as I have argued in chapter three, Rank) posited a far less detached view of the researcher’s relationship to that which is being researched than do those operating more fully under the spell of a natural science model. The former see this relationship between researchers and their traditions as being akin to that between players and their games, where the players’ identities get swept up in the games in which they participate. This is an alternative to the traditional, scientific view, in which neutral observers stand over determinate and unchanging, selftransparent objects in a detached way, in order to delineate objective truths about them.

This alternative approach invites open discussions among researchers as to the meanings of the subjectmatter of their research. Thus, not as a byproduct to this “conversation,” but in its very unfolding, potentially selftransforming values can be discovered by its participants. In this way, however, the values and prejudices (pre-understandings) of the researchers, as handed down through the traditions to which they belong, can no longer be treated as detached entities, separate from the researchers themselves. Rather, as part of their history, these traditions help shape the “freely chosen” decisions of their adherents, even before they can possibly be conscious of them.

Through a careful reading of Rank’s last book, Beyond Psychology (1941/1958), I have attempted to historically situate Rank in relation to philosophical hermeneutics. By doing this, I hope I have made more understandable Rank’s involvement with and separation from Freud, in terms of its significance for the history and practice of psychology, psychotherapy, and the human sciences. Rank and Freud

In 1905, Rank was introduced to Freud by Alfred Adler, Rank’s family doctor at the time.Inspired by Freud’s writings, Rank had written a manuscript, The Artist (1907/1980), which he presented to Freud. Freud was so impressed by this work that he helped him to publish it, making it the first official psychoanalytic text to be published by someone other than Freud. In 1906, Rank joined the psychoanalytic circle, becoming its youngest member. Freud encouraged Rank “to devote himself to the nonmedical side of psychoanalysis” (Freud, 1914/1957, p. 25), sponsoring his education at the Gymnasium and later, the University of Vienna. It was there that Rank wrote a doctoral dissertation in German literature on the Lohengrin legend. This was probably the first dissertation on psychoanalysis (Rank, 1930/1981, p. 9).

Rank was to become a favored member of the inner circle, prolific in his writings which centered for the most part on the cultural application of psychoanalysis. Freud, by sponsoring a cultural, rather than medical education for Rank, asserted his belief in lay analysis, and gave Rank a forum in which to bring an increased understanding of culture to psychoanalysis.

This was an understanding that Freud seemed to have greatly appreciated. Under his auspices, Rank became the first secretary of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, taking the official minutes of their Wednesday night meetings for many years. Ironically, however, by studying Rank’s work hermeneutically, I have come to believe that itwas Rank’s cultural perspective that eventually caused his rift with Freud. Within the Psychoanalytic Society, there grew a conflict between those who argued that the proper realm of psychoanalysis was science and medicine, and accordingly should be practiced by physicians; and those who saw history, culture, and the humanities as a more suitable framework, and believed it should be practiced by lay-persons, who had studied these disciplines.

In April of 1923, Rank learned via Freud’s personal physician, Felix Deutsch, even before Freud himself, that Freud had been diagnosed with cancer of the jaw and palate (Lieberman, 1985, p. 188). Although it turned out otherwise, at the time Freud’s medical condition was thought to be imminently terminal. Freud’s imminent death seemed to exacerbate greatly the rivalries within the group, creating power struggles over various issues. By making the subject of Freud’s mortality (and thus, the “worthiness”of potential successors) explicit, the belief that Freud was about to die shaped the tone and content of many of the debates.

In their correspondence with Freud, Jones and Abraham, in particular, began to question the scientific value of the contributions of Rank, who was a prime contender for the leadership of the movement (Lieberman, 1985, chap. 8). This came shortly after the publication of The Trauma of Birth (1924/1929), a work that may have reflected an unconscious challenge to Freud’s authority. Freud praised the book at first, but spurred on by criticisms from the others, he began to question its validity.

Rank had collaborated with Sandor Ferenczi in the writing of The Development of Psychoanalysis (1924/1925), a monograph that was published at about the same time as The Trauma of Birth (1924/1929), in December of 1923. Although challenging some established theory and introducing some new techniques, Freud had encouraged the two authors in the writing of this work. Now, however, in a more heated, competitive atmosphere, its value began to be questioned as well. This culminated with Ferenczi’s eventual rescinding of his contribution to the book, lest he be perceived as a heretic on a par with Rank.

In December of 1924, just when a break seemed inevitable, Rank had a crisis, leading to an apparent change of heart. After having left Vienna for Paris, he suddenly returned, appearing before Freud “completely contrite, in order to confess” (letter from Freud to Ferenczi of 12/21/24, quoted in Grosskurth, 1991, p. 165). Freud then began to see Rank for long daily sessions, or “analytic interviews” (letter from Rank to the Committee of 12/20/24, quoted in Grosskurth, p. 166). “It is not clear how formal a therapeutic relationship was then established between them” (Roazen, 1975, p. 407). The results of these interviews, however, were relayed almost immediately to the rest of the Committee.

Rank sent them a humbling letter of submission that Grosskurth believes was likely written in collaboration with Freud (Grosskurth, 1991, p. 165), and Lieberman suggests “was at least partly an act” (Lieberman, 1985, p. 250). It read in part:

Only after the recent events in Vienna, which you probably know, has my attitude and behavior towards the Professor become clear to me. Obviously certain things

had to happen before I could gain the insight, that my affective reactions toward

the Professor and you, insofar as you represent for me the brothers near to him,

stemmed from unconscious conflicts.

From a state which I now recognize as neurotic, I have suddenly returned to myself. Not only have I recognized the actual cause of the crisis in the trauma occasioned by the dangerous illness of the Professor, but I was able also to understand the type of reaction and its mechanism from my childhood and family historythe Oedipus and brother complexes. I was thus obliged to work out in reality conflicts which I would probably have been spared through an analysis, but which I believe I have now overcome through these painful experiences (Grosskurth, p. 166).

Although Rank asked that the other members of the Committee “understand my affective utterances against him as stemming from this state of mind and to forgive them as reactions not to be taken personally” (p. 166), however, he avoided any mention of either his theoretical or therapeutic differences. Some, including Freud, seemed to think that Rank would now modify his ideas, but Rank was never convinced to recant his “heretical” views. This angered Freud, who, twelve days after Rank had called on him for the last time on April 12, 1926, complained to Ferenczi that Rank “was unwilling to renounce any part of the theory in which his neurosis manifested itself” (p. 178). Critiques in Rank’s Time

Severe criticism of Rank during his lifetime was by no means limited to the inner circle. In 1930, in a speech to the First International Congress on Mental Hygiene, the eminent American psychoanalyst, A. A. Brill rebutted one of Rank’s arguments by referring to it as one which “only an idiot could imagine” (Lieberman, 1985, p. 291). He went on say that Rank was undergoing an “emotional upheaval that is responsible for his present confusion” (p. 292). That very evening, Brill, then president of the American Psychoanalytic Association, made a motion (seconded by Harry Stack Sullivan) to drop Rank as an honorary member (p. 293).

In a lecture delivered just eight months prior to Rank’s death (and published two months later as an article in Psychiatry [edited by Harry Stack Sullivan]), psychologist Erich Fromm, himself a defector from orthodox psychoanalysis, argued that “the basic trend of Rank’s philosophy is akin to Fascist philosophy” (Fromm, 1939, p. 237). He cited Rank’s relativistic position on truth, as well as his apparent willingness to allow neurotic victims to sacrifice themselves to their oppressors, as evidence of Rank’s authoritarianism.

Rank Today

Today, Rank is often acknowledged for earlier works such as The Myth of the Birth of the Hero (1909/1914) and The Incest Theme in Literature and Legend (1912/1992); his later work, however, starting with The Trauma of Birth (1924/1929), is either dismissed as wrong-headed, or at the least, wildly speculative, and his later work is simply ignored. For example, Daniel Jaffe ends his short section on Rank in the 1988 Annual of Psychoanalysis with the following paragraph:

Rank was evidently subject to manicdepressive illness. He wrote on the birth trauma during a hypomanic episode, and recanted when depressed, but later reasserted his thesis. For a far more comprehensive concept of the effects of the birth experience in constituting the prototype for subsequent danger situations, Freud (1926/1959b) developed the signal theory of anxiety, which still provides the criteria for measuring the validity of any psychodyamic theory. (1988, pp. 6162) This is not to say that positive critiques of Rank do not exist. Primarily due to his

legacy as the leader of what came to be called the “functional” school of social work (as opposed to the Freudian “diagnostic” school), authors such as Fay Karpf (1953), and in particular Jessie Taft (1958), have written glowing accounts of Rank’s achievements after his split from Freud. Recognizing “the prolongation of the struggle” to move away from Freud “as the natural outcome of an individual’s growth away from the parent stock” (1958, p. 98), Taft labeled the period following “his formal severance from Freud and psychoanalysis in 1926 [as] years of fulfilment” (p. 123). In still another context, Ira Progoff, in The Death and Rebirth of Psychology (1956), also gave a positive account of Rank’s postFreudian work. Patrick Mullahy, the Sullivanian, in his Oedipus: Myth and Complex (1948), while often quite critical of some of Rank’s later concepts, did offer a somewhat balanced view of his work. More recently, Esther Menaker, a student of both Jessie Taft and Anna Freud and a member of the board of the Psychoanalytic Review, wrote Otto Rank: A Rediscovered Legacy (1982). In this book, she placed Rank in the context of both modern psychological and social thought, calling his work “a missing link in the historical chain of the development of theory and practice within the psychoanalytic movement. E. James Lieberman, in Acts of Will: The Life and Work of Otto Rank (1985), provided the most authoritative and detailed accounting of Rank’s life and work to date. Irvin Yalom devoted much of his book, Existential Psychology (1980), to Rank’s controversial idea of the “will,”while the sociologist Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death (1973), a work which gleaned much from Rank, won the Pulitzer Prize. Becker’s posthumously published Escape from Evil (1975), also featured Rank’s work.

Peter Rudnytsky, an English professor who served as guest editor of the 1984 special issue of American Imago that celebrated the centennial of Rank’s birth, also wrote The Psychoanalytic Vocation: Rank, Winnicott, and the Legacy of Freud (1991). This book is unusual in that it examines Rank’s highly neglected writings between the years 1924 and 1927, praising them as having anticipated much of modern object relations. While Rudnytsky is correct in arguing that Rank’s ideas during this time anticipated much of current object relations theory, these ideas evolved quickly: Rank was in a great deal of intellectual flux. Rudnytsky himself acknowledges that he was simultaneously redirecting “his focus from the intrapsychic processes of libidinal development to the obstacles faced by the growing child in the interpersonal realm [italics added]” (Rudnytsky, 1991, p. 58).

Complementing his thoughts about “the psychical anchoring of . . . [anxiety] to the mother and the loss of this irreplaceable libidoobject so important for the ego” (Rank, 1927, p. 14), Rank constructed “a genetic psychology which embraces the relation of the ego to its milieu in its biological, psychological, and social relations [italics added]” (1927, p. 15). This emphasis is what Rank came to call the “ethical” dimension, or a “ThouPsychology” (1929, p. 4). It is at this point, however, that Rudnytsky finds that Rank’s work has become “stubbornly antiscientific” (Rudnytsky, 1991, p. 65), concluding that “the irrationalism of Rank’s final period must be deplored as a retreat from the quest for selfknowledge that prompted him to become a disciple of Freud” (p. 67).

In examining his works after 1927, Rudnytsky determines that “Rank embraces a radical philosophical relativism as an alternative to Freud’s biologism” (p. 64). Citing the article, “Beyond Psychoanalysis” (1929), he ridicules Rank for the following quote: ‘The psychical itself is only to be understood phenomenologically. One might say that in the psychical sphere there are no facts, but only interpretations of them’ (p. 3). “This claim,” suggested Rudnytsky, “aligns Rank with the extreme version of hermeneutics advocated by Donald Spence” (1991, p. 64).

Rather than demonstrating a point of ridicule, however, I will argue that Rudnytsky has inadvertantly stumbled on the very factor that puts Rank’s most mature concepts in their proper philosophical and historical framework. The interpretation that I will develop, is one that will provide the central organizing theme to Rank’s later work: Rank’s post-Freudian ideas can be seen as an early example of what today is referred to as the philosophical hermeneutic approach.Historical Context

The twentieth century has seen many attempts to understand what it means to be human, and even more importantly, to put these understandings into practice so as to benefit the common good. These have been undertakings with mixed results, ranging from glorious to disastrous, and encompassing much that is in between. In the social sciences, researchers from various disciplines as seemingly diverse as literary criticism, history, psychotherapy, and the humanities have debated their different ideas about the nature of being human, usually within, but sometimes across, disciplines. Not only have researchers and theoreticians often disagreed as to which of their conceptions might be more correct, the very frameworks that might make these discussions scientific have been open to question.

Historically, such dialogues have been guided by the cultural traditions of their discussants. Particularly in Western society, however, many of the traditional guidelines which had formerly served to orient their adherents in the conducting of everyday social practices have in modern times begun to fall away. What had been viewed as selfevident directives in the rules of human conduct to be followed unquestioningly, are no longer naively believed in or practiced. This has gone handinhand with an overall feeling of alienation, one of the chief difficulties of living in the modern age. In a highly mechanized industrial world, persons have lost the sense of familiarity and orientation, which in antiquity had allowed members of society to function and express themselves creatively in an unselfconscious manner.

In the social sciences, researchers of various disciplines, including both philosophy and psychotherapy, have tried to discuss their different understandings of what it means to be human in the modern age. During the last century, natural science, the paradigm used to acquire knowledge in the hard sciences (e.g. physics and astronomy), came to be used as a standard for conducting research in the social sciences and humanities as well. As an emerging tradition of research, however, what distinguished the natural science ideology from earlier ones was its presumption of “objectivity.” In its failure to include the sociohistorical context in which the research was being undertaken, it denied that the researcher was actually adhering to a particular pointofview with its inevitable prejudices. By failing to acknowledge that in fact, it was an ideology, the natural science approach came to confuse engaged moral actions guided by distinct vested interests for rationally motivated observations made from some neutral, ahistorical vantage point in an objective, detached manner. This led to what Charles Taylor (1995) has referred to as the “ontologizing of rational procedure” (p. 61). This is a situation wherein “the proper procedures of rational thought [are] read into the very constitution of the mind, [and] made part of its very structure” (p. 61). In other words, “rationality” came to be seen as a universal characteristic of a transhistorical self.

A Short History of Hermeneutics

Hermeneutics originated long before the modern era as an aid to the interpretation of sacred texts. It dealt with the textual puzzles and intermittent misunderstandings that would occur in trying to ascertain the correct meanings of these writings. In the nineteenth century, however, hermeneutics developed in a different direction. Beginning with the work of Friedrich Schleiermacher, it expanded in its scope to become what was thought to be a universal method by which to avoid the misunderstanding of all written words and spoken utterances. Toward the end of the century, Wilhelm Dilthey, inspired by the work of the Historical School (Leopold Ranke and Friedrich Droysen), made all of history itself the object of hermeneutic method. By liberating the interpretation of history from the dogma of traditions, Dilthey (Richardson et al., 1999, p. 201) believed he had succeeded in identifying the conditions which could make reliable knowledge in the human sciences possible.

With his book Being and Time, published in 1927, Martin Heidegger (1927/1962) began a critique of methodological hermeneuticists such as Schleiermacher and Dilthey, as well as his own teacher, phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, and their neglect of the historicity of the researcher. Because they believed they could conduct their searches for truth methodologically, Heidegger posed that their selfunderstandings had become distorted in ways that alienated them further from the very truths they were seeking to uncover.

As an extension of this critique, Gadamer (1960/1989), a former student of Heidegger’s, attempted to speak to issues related to alienation. One key issue was how to understand that which has become a strange and unfamiliar “other,” and thus, unintelligible. Gadamer emphasized the importance of viewing interpretive understandings in the light of how researchers apply them practically from their own perspectives. In philosophical hermeneutics, the hermeneutic circle of understanding represents the basic prejudicial, contextual structure of historical being. Rather than an autonomous act, our anticipation of meaning “proceeds from the commonality that binds us to the tradition” (Gadamer, 1960/1989, p. 293).

Psychoanalysis: Natural Science versus Humanities

There is a tension in Freud and psychoanalysis deriving from allegiances to two conflicting ideologies or worldviews. Within Freud’s lifetime, the rationalist tradition of the Enlightenment peaked and began its sputtering decline, and new conceptions began to emerge. From one perspective, Freud was the “natural scientist”: the archeologist who worked empirically, reconstructing entire civilizations based on the unearthing of the pieces that he managed to discover intact. This was the tradition of positivism, expounded by his early mentor Ernst Brucke, along with Hermann Helmholtz and others. These theorists “strove to reduce psychological processes to physiological laws, and physiological processes to physical and chemical laws” (Ellenberger, 1970, p. 431).

In accordance with the objectivistic, natural science view, Freud presented an account of the mind as a mental apparatus, governed by the rules of Newtonian physics. The mind is conceived as a machine which works as a closed system and contains forces, energies, and structures operating in a deterministic manner. He noted that “psychoanalysis is a part of the mental science of psychology [and that] psychology, too, is a natural science. What else can it be?” (1940/1964, p. 282) He further decreed that “the intellect and the mind are objects of scientific research in exactly the same way as any nonhuman things” (1933/1964, p. 159). Yet, in presenting an interpretive study of human actions, Freud gave voice to another perspective, focusing on the meanings that people construct in order to explain and give purpose to their behaviors. Thus, in the section of “The Question of Lay Analysis” in which he discussed the appropriate curriculum for a “college of psychoanalysis,” he described how, in addition to such subjects as biology and sexuality, “the history of civilization, mythology, the psychology of religion, and the science of literature” should be taught as well (1926/1959, p. 246).

To this day in the psychoanalytic literature, there are ardent discussions as to which of these two perspectives constitute the proper realm of psychoanalysis. Authors such as Robert Holt (1981) and Charles Brenner (1987) argued vehemently that it is a natural science that must be validated empirically. Another view, however, understands psychoanalysis as a hermeneutic discipline.

The philosophers Jurgen Habermas and Paul Ricoeur are generally regarded as having first brought the hermeneutic perspective into psychoanalysis (Mitchell, 1993, p. 73). Following their lead, Roy Schafer, who wrote about “actionlanguage” (1976) and “lifehistorical narration” (1983, 1992), and Donald Spence, who spoke of the importance of “narrative truth” over “historical truth” (1982), have also taken a hermeneutic view. Irwin Hoffman, who has labeled his approach, “social constructivism” (1983, 1987, 1991a, 1991b, 1992), focused “on the participation of the analyst in the analytic process” (Mitchell, 1993, p. 59), as does Donnel Stern (1997), who emphasized Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics over Habermas’s methodological version.Statement of the Problem

Previous studies of the Freud-Rank relationship and its dissolution have not adequately addressed its philosophical significance. They have failed to develop a robust historical account, situating Rank’s work in the intellectual currents of his time. I contend that Rank, in his most mature development, can best be understood in relationship to Gadamer and the philosophical hermeneuticists. By studying Rank contextually, I have explored an alternative, more productive interpretation of his break with Freud, thus allowing Rank’s post-Freudian writings to be viewed much differently than mainstream psychoanalytic accounts.

Description of the Study

Using a hermeneutic, interpretive approach, I have situated Otto Rank’s life and work historically, with particular emphasis on his role as researcher in the human sciences. I have historically situated Rank’s ideas, especially with regard to his relationship to Freud’s ideas and those of the methodological hermeneuticists (Dilthey and Schleiermacher). I have done so by studying some of Rank’s major writings and, in particular, his last and most visionary work, Beyond Psychology (1941/1958), the historical eras and cultural terrain in which they were embedded, and the philosophical and literary debates which they addressed. Areas of Inquiry

With regard to the human sciences, and more specifically, the practices of psychology, psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, I have examined and interpreted passages from Beyond Psychology (1941/1958), in order to provide tentative answers to the following questions, which represent three broad, interrelated categories: (a) Phenomenological description (epistemology vs. ontology); (b) Theory versus practice (What is their relationship to one another?, and what are their respective roles?); and (c) The relationship of researchers to their research.

1. How did Rank understand the nature and meaning of psychological research?

(a) What is the proper placing (appropriate context) of psychoanalysis?

(b) How do the human sciences and psychoanalysis understand themselves (i.e., how do they understand their own understandings of human behavior?

(d) In what ways is this similar to the dialogical nature of understanding described by Gadamer and Heidegger? How is it different?

(e) How is “truth” generally defined in the human sciences, and what are the ways of

validating or justifying truth in the human sciences?

(f) How does Rank alternatively define “truth,” and what criteria does he use for its justification?

(g) Can we converse meaningfully about these understandings?

2. How did Rank conceive of the relationship between theory and practice?

(a) What is the role of practice?

(b) What practices comprise a human science?

(d) How can theory be grounded in practices (lived experience)?

(e) What is the distortion in self-understanding that occurs when a universal method or theory is represented as “truth”?

3. How did Rank understand the relationship of researchers to their research?

(a) What is the relationship of researchers to their research?

(b) What stance should researchers take toward their traditions and those of others? Detached or engaged?

Chapter Two

Research Approach

While involved in this interpretive process, I was led to find the context in which Rank’s Beyond Psychology (1941/1958) appeared, and that could thus shed light on Rank’s statements. Some of my initial questions were altered, others added, and still others deleted.

Rather than enumerating a series of procedures, I see the hermeneutic task as one of articulating a fundamental mode of being that is already in progress: the art of understanding. By addressing certain common questions to the texts of the various authors, different (but potentially valid) viewpoints were elucidated. These common questions suggested deeper contexts, and therefore, a “fusion of horizons” that helped me better understand the common traditions of Gadamer and Rank, along with their differences. Instead of these hermeneutic circles being dissolved, some circles stimulated the establishment of other circles in a continuing dialogue of divergent and emerging meanings.

It must be recognized that attempting to understand Rank’s work, or that of any other social scientist, in its historical context is a complicated endeavor. I, the interpreter, also live within a particular time and place, and participate in local social practices. Thus, my viewpoint is neither objective nor unprejudiced. Hermeneuticists regard this as inevitable, constituting my facticity as a researcher: I can only stand on my own historical ground.

In this study, I considered the importance of language, culture and various social practices as necessarily limiting my understandings, but also as potentially opening up certain formerly discounted (or even unseen) possibilities. The traditional approach of the natural sciences creates a framework for research which prevents certain truths about the researcher and what he or she is studying from ever being discovered. By requiring researchers to obscure the historical contexts in which they are situated, it allows them to act unilaterally, untempered by the truth claims of their historical objects of study. Thus, researchers’ disguised ideologies may affect their research (with regard to both the questions they ask, and the answers they develop) in hidden, yet powerful ways.

Contrary to this view, hermeneuticists such as Heidegger, Gadamer, and Taylor have argued for a framework that seeks to make the preunderstandings of the researcher more explicit (and accordingly, allows the potentially alternative prejudices of that which he or she is studying to become more explicit as well). This mitigates the unconscious acting out of these prejudices (even though it can never completely eliminate their influence). In this way, a philosophical hermeneutic approach makes it more difficult for the selfjustifying actions of the researcher, and the interests of the social order he or she represents, to become the hidden agenda lying behind an ostensibly objective theory. By establishing a dialogue between interpreter and text, such an orientation allows further understandings of the subjectmatter common to both of their historical contexts to emerge spontaneously.

Hermeneutic Processes. Schleiermacher (Richardson et al., 1999, pp. 200-201) was the first to describe in writing how interpretation takes place within a “hermeneutic circle.”Parts (e.g., the words of a particular sentence) are interpreted according to the meaning of the whole (e.g., the complete sentence), the meaning of which is continually reshaped as meanings of the parts come to be understood. Thus, the researcher must move back and forth between the meanings of the parts and that of the whole, until eventually, “perfect understanding” is achieved, and the circle is dissolved.

By contrast, Heidegger, Gadamer, and (as I have argued in chapter three) Rank, all share a view of the hermeneutic circle that differs from this methodological one. Instead, they saw it as illustrating “the ontological structure of understanding.”This means that as an ongoing process of being, the researcher has already entered the circle, and in fact, can never exit it. Because he or she exists as a historically contextualized being, the circle can never be dissolved into static knowledge. The researcher, with his or her specific individual prejudices, is always in a dynamic interplay with his or her personal and familial traditions, as well as those historical traditions in which the text emerged.

I used the concept of the hermeneutic circle as a way of developing a dynamic, historical “conversation” among texts about a common subjectmatter. This process illustrates how I, too, as a prejudiced interpreter, have by necessity already entered the circle (i.e., I am a “player” of a “game” already in progress). In contrast to a method that can be applied at a specific point in time, and in turn, be discarded once perfect understanding has been achieved, this circle can never be dissolved, but rather, must continually be reworked. The process of understanding texts thus never ceases to be determined by anticipatory preunderstandings, whereby meanings are worked out in terms of the things themselves (i.e., the subjectmatter of the texts). By serving as a guide to this study, the hermeneutic circle provides a living example of what Gadamer and Rank believed to be our fundamental mode of being. In the final, Discussion chapter, Gadamer and Rank’s conceptions of dialogue (Gadamer’s “genuine conversation” and Rank’s “dynamic dualism”) will be contrasted with the “historical” methods of Freud, Schleiermacher, and Dilthey.

Choice of Text

Rank wrote the preface to his nearly completed and posthumously published work upon his arrival at Lake Tahoe, in June of 1939. Ironically, written just four and a half months before his sudden death, it appears to herald what he hoped would be a new beginning for him, a life that he planned to pursue on the West coast.Just three months earlier, he had told Jessie Taft that he intended to phase out his psychotherapy practice, so as to more fully engage in life.

This appears to be the final culmination of a change in philosophy that Rank traced back as far as 1921, soon after he had first begun to practice psychoanalysis (1935/1996, p. 261; 1938/1996, pp. 267-268). It was then that he conceived of differentiating the dynamics of therapy from the general theory of psychoanalysis, something that he more fully began to articulate in his collaboration with Ferenczi two years later (Ferenczi and Rank, 1924/1925). Ultimately, it was this “vitalistic point of view,” in contrast to Freud’s “deterministic” stance, that served to precipitate his break with Freud (Rank, 1941/1958, p. 47). In this most mature work, Rank now viewed psychotherapy itself “as a living process of personality development”: a piece of life which, in order to allow for the development of autonomy and creativity, “can never be based on a deterministic point of view” (p. 48).

In the preface, Rank explained how he had first conceived of the idea of this book about ten years earlier, around the time he wrote three major works. These books--Psychology and the Soul (1930/1998), Modern Education (1930/1932), and Art and Artist (1931/1932)–had each in a certain respect carried him beyond individual psychology, in that they dealt with the idea of collective ideologies and their influence upon human behavior. Rank described how in the course of writing Beyond Psychology, however, he had discovered that he had not gone far enough in the way he conceived ofthe phrase “beyond psychology.” It “meant not, as [he] first thought, a resorting to collective ideologies as the subject of social psychology; it actually meant the irrational basis of human nature which lies beyond any psychology, individual or collective” (1941/1958, p.

12).

Even before he had written these three major books, however, in April of 1928, Rank had given a lecture to the Boston Society of Psychiatry and Neurology entitled, “Beyond Psychoanalysis,” where he gave a critique of the “materialistic viewpoint” of psychoanalysis (1929, p. 1). Here he suggested that “for a full understanding [of the psychical], . . . a philosophical manner of reflection” must be placed alongside “the tendency to reduce everything to the biological” (p. 2). Rank went on to further develop these ideas in Truth and Reality (1929/1936), which as the theoretical accompaniment to his more practical work, Will Therapy, he labeled “a philosophy of the psychic” (Rank, 1929/1936, p. 1).

Clearly, the “beyond” theme was a large part of Rank’s most mature reflections from the late 20′s onward, and was certainly at least partly suggested to him by the title of a work by Freud. Freud wrote Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920/1955), a book in which he introduced some significant theoretical changes, in 1920. Nietzsche, however, who Rank claimed had “inaugurated” the “psychological age,” (1941/1958, p. 271), wrote Beyond Good and Evil in 1886. This book, which Nietzsche later described as “a critique of modernity” (1908/1979, p. 112), was a harbinger of post-modernist thinking that likely stimulated many of Rank’s ideas. In one famous passage, Nietzsche declared, “There are no moral phenomena at all, only a moral interpretation of phenomena”(1886/1973, p. 78). “The real problems of morality, he noted, “come into view only if we compare many moralities (p. 90). This is what Rank described in Beyond Psychology as Nietzsche’s “cultural group-psychology,”a“dynamic conception of cultural types”(1941/1958, p. 25) that brings hidden moral values to light.Importance and Limitations of the Study

The majority of critiques of Rank’s postFreudian works, beginning with those of the inner circle, were either dismissive or woefully inadequate in their understandings. Even the more positive reviews tend to misunderstand his most mature developments. By contrast, I have demonstrated that Rank can be placed in his proper historical and philosophical context by showing similarities between his arguments with Freud and those that the philosophical hermeneuticists (e.g., Martin Heidegger, HansGeorg Gadamer, and Charles Taylor) had with the methodological hermeneuticists (such as Wilhelm Dilthey and Friedrich Schleiermacher). This aligns Rank with Gadamer, in particular, who viewed his own practical philosophy as a corrective to the monological, absolute method typically employed by the social scientists of today.

This study can be helpful to current theorists and psychotherapists by making it easier to utilize Rank’s insights so as to enrich their research and clinical practices. In addition, it can provide further clues as to what necessitated the eventual FreudRank split. By putting their disputes into this larger perspective, this investigation has better highlighted something about the nature of Rank’s disagreements with Freud. In turn, it has illuminated the dissenting opinions of many of Freud’s other theoretical opponents, in his own time up until today. This study can also add something to recent debates about therapeutic issues related to transference-countertransference, asymmetry, and “true” and “false” meanings. The interpretations suggested by this study might also provide a much larger perspective from which to contribute to a key debate in the history of ideas as to the appropriate nature of truth in the human sciences.A brief highlighting of my prejudices

One of the main tenets of philosophical hermeneutics is that there can be no objective understandings. The only way the researcher can gain access to the subject matter in question is through his or her own prejudices, which constitute the clearing via which he or she views the world. These prejudices at the same time limit and enable the researcher’s understandings.Thus, rather than trying to extinguish my own biases, which are already influencing how I interpret Rank’s text, I have reflected on them consciously. By making my prejudices more explicit, I have tried to illustrate my relationship to the broader societal context–the clearing in which this alternative interpretation of Rank’s work is taking place. In this way, I can make myself more aware of the motivations lying behind my questions about Rank’s work, so as to situate them hermeneutically.

During my tenure as a psychology undergraduate student at Stanford University, I felt at odds with the mechanistic and lifeless curriculum that was shaped by the traditional prejudices of academic psychology. My own prejudices made me believe that the curriculum was inadequate to prepare me to learn about the richness of human being. As a musician, and the son of a musician (I also studied the flute and played in the orchestra there), I was especially drawn to the arts and culture, and thought them more germane to the study of psychology than what was being presented in my classes. I also taught nursery school through the department of education, and also found this much more relevant to my interests than anything I was learning inside my major.

It was in a psychology of religion course taught through the department of religious studies, not the psychology department, that I first learned of Rank, through Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death (1973). I was intrigued by Rank’s cross-disciplinary approach to psychology, which validated the cultural and religious values that had been given short shrift by my department. “One thing that I hope my confrontation of Rank will do,”wrote Becker in his preface, “is to send the reader directly back to his books. There is no substitute for reading Rank” (p. xii). Heeding his advice, I was launched on what I found to be an exceedingly challenging attempt to decipher Rank’s writings and the meaning of his larger philosophy.

As a secular Jewish man who has struggled with the question of his Jewish identity, I have resonated with some of Rank’s thoughts about Judaism, while finding myself provoked, and even angered, by others. This emotional response is a useful barometer of my relationship to this tradition, and not something to be eradicated in the interest of keeping my objectivity. Rank grappled with his identity as a secular Jew in a field that early on was dominated by Jews. Especially at the beginning of his interest in psychology and psychotherapy, he idealized the Jewish calling, believing that their special traditions had put them in a unique position to cure humanity’s neuroses (see Dennis Klein, 1981). Conversely, in Beyond Psychology (1941/1958), he made many critical comments about Judaism, some of which border on derision (e.g., “For the Jewish religion, being essentially pessimistic, is a philosophy of hate–and also anti-feministic. . . because it springs. . . from a deep-rooted self-hatred in the Jew”[p. 191]).

I work as a psychiatric counselor in the San Francisco Jail, and have felt the tremendous need for a rigorous cross-cultural approach which I can use to validate people’s cultural contexts rather than criminalizing them. I have appreciated Rank’s emphasis on creativity and positive cultural values in his treatment of human being, as opposed to viewing it as something that must be adjusted to mainstream values. By its very nature, I believe that my work in the jail is political, rather than objectively psychological, and I am actutely aware of the importance of separating the societal aims of adjustment from the therapeutic aims of helping individuals. I have argued with some of my colleagues that if we as counselors in the jail do not make such a distinction, we are no better than social engineers operating on captive subjects. Some of my peers are interested. Others seem to think that this concern is irrelevant, or borne of “political correctness.” These conversations point to political, as well as philosophical allegiances that can provide a further context for my questions about Rank’s work.

In the first chapter, I discussed how most of the interpretations surrounding Freud and Rank’s relationship and break are lacking in historical breadth. I also discussed how in the light of philosophical hermeneutics, a more robust interpretation could be made, and I posed questions accordingly. In this chapter, I explained how the study was conducted using an interpretive, hermeneutic approach. In the following chapter, I have outlined the ten main points of Beyond Psychology. In the final chapter, I will discuss implications this interpretation has for psychology, psychotherapy, the arts, and human sciences.

Chapter Three

Beyond Psychology: An Eleven-Point Summary

I have attempted to summarize the main ideas of Beyond Psychology by dividing it into eleven points. I focused on Rank’s critique of psychoanalysis’s understanding of itself; his overall critique of modern psychology and the human sciences; and his hints at an alternative approach, but tried to supply enough background material, as well, so as to make these more central ideas comprehensible. The eleven points are as follows:

1. The irrational roots of human behavior; 2. The supernatural meaning of human existence; 3. Primitive group-life and the magical worldview: a dynamic balancing of nature and spirit; 4. The first social organization: totemism and collective immortality; 5. The hero, the artist, and the commoner: creating the cultural world as a transmission of spiritual values;

6. Christianity and Western civilization: roots of the modern self; 7. The ideology of the French Revolution, and further historical developments; 8. Scientific psychology: disguised ideology of the bourgeois type; 9. How Freud, Adler, and Jung misunderstood their therapeutic ideologies as absolute theories of the self; 10. Feminine psychology and masculine ideology;11. A psychology of difference: Rank’s“algebra”of cultural practices.

I. The irrational roots of human behavior

Rank affirmed that psychology had failed in its attempt to explain human behavior mechanistically, in strictly rational terms. Whereas initially, modern psychology had aroused hopes of curing most, if not all of society’s ills through the systematic application of its rationalistic methods, these expectations were entirely unrealistic. Human being, like life itself, has an irrational basis, which can never be completely understood, grasped, or controlled–that is, it can never be rationalized. Motivated by the intense and perennial desire to reduce human suffering, so as to make life more bearable, psychology tried to deny that fact, but this therapeutic pursuit was thus doomed from the beginning. “My main thesis,”declared Rank, “.. . lays bare the irrational roots of human behavior which psychology tries to explain rationally in order to make it intelligible, that is, acceptable”(1941/1958, p. 11).

At first, acknowledged Rank, psychology had consoled certain types of

individuals in a particular time and place by giving them a new, more tolerable way of

understanding their conduct, thus allowing them to better accept themselves. Insofar as

this helped them to live their lives in a more productive manner, it had been useful, and

in this sense was therapeutic. This therapeutic effect was at best, temporary, however. In

attempting to portray itself as a universal theory of human behavior, psychology had

overextended itself.

Modern psychology. . . attempt[s] the impossible, namely to rationalize the

irrational. . . . [It] has been from the beginning an attempt to master life rationally

by interpreting it in terms of the current ideologies, that is, it has striven to re

create life in order to control it (pp. 13-14).

In its intellectual attempt to control life, it unwittingly placed itself in the service of the existing social order. By calling for the “normal”adjustment of those deviating from that order, noted Rank, it reflected the temporary values of the prevailing society, making them the absolute standards by which to measure all people, in all times and places. It rationalized life, leaving no allowance for natural change, instead viewing the natural growth and development of its own culture as irrational.

Our psychology as the climax of man’s self-rationalization is inadequate to explain

change because it can only justify the type representing the existing social order

of which it is an expression (p. 15).

Rank discounted each of the claims of the psychological theories of his day to be strictly rational: They offered neither universally valid formulas or standards that might insure future “good” behaviors, nor did they provide any all-purpose prescriptions for the elimination of “bad” ones. Rather than absolute depictions of reality, he had come to view these various theories as collective ideologies. These ideologies not only belonged to their own specific times and places, they represented particular mentalities and personalities that belonged to these changing environments. As such, they were highly biased, expressing the needs and desires of groups or classes that had emerged in a specific historical context. Thus, their popular appeal was emotional and not rational.

“Each of these ideologies,” notes Rank,”while claiming to have found the very truth, is actually only expressing the temporary needs and desires of one side of human nature”

(p. 23), thus privileging that side to the detriment of the other. Not only is this a great distortion of reality, he warns, its one-sidedness creates an imbalance, “thereby forcing the other frustrated side to assert itself alternately in violent reactions”(p. 23).

An alternative approach to that of the natural sciences that actually embraced this fundamental irrationality in human beings was therefore desperately needed.

If we can grasp this paradoxical fact and accept it as the basis of our own living,

then we shall be able to discover new values in place of the old ones which seem

to be crumbling before our very eyes–vital human values, not mere psychological

interpretations predetermined by our preferred ideologies. (p. 14)

Social practices are always, at least in part, novel, spontaneous, and unpredictable, subject to momentous and unforseen developments beyond anyone’s control. In the unfolding of these practices, Rank observed how historically different cultures and their various personalities have co-emerged and developed–an almost endless source of creativity. Alternatively, however, they have conflicted, at times, antagonizing, and even clashing violently against one another. In fact, he lamented, when it has come to the shaping of major human developments, the latter course of events has been far more typical:

Whether we like to admit it or not, the fact remains that so far in history the most radical, that is, vital changes have been brought about through war and revolution, through an active change of order, according to which the people changed, or rather, were forced to change. (p. 18) These divergent outcomes, together with all the infinite variations in between,

constitute the history of cultural practices, in all of their complex interactions and counteractions, within and among civilizations, as they shape and are shaped by the worlds they bring forth. Neither rationally and unilaterally enacted by detached, autonomous agents, nor irrationally driven by blind impulses, human behavior emerges as a dynamic interplay of both rational and irrational elements. Although relatively stable patterns of behavior often develop in different groups, and even civilizations, at particular points in time, Rank emphasized that both human conduct and the standards for evaluating it are ultimately situational, and thus, constantly in flux. The meaning of this behavior, he hypothesized, cannot be determined mechanistically by reducing it, either to the deliberate intentions of an autonomous human subject, or to the objectively observed effects of an independent environment.

Not only is human behavior intrinsically irrational, maintained Rank, people find it difficult, if not impossible, to tolerate this aspect of their behavior. This led to modern psychology’s attempt to explain human conduct in rational terms–a therapeutic interpretation which although self-justifying, and initially consoling, had begun to run its course, and was now growing increasingly ineffective. Thus, he set the groundwork for a critique–not only against modern psychological research, education, and therapy, as chiefly represented (in his mind) by Freudian psychoanalysis, and its two main offshoots prior to his own, Alfred Adler’s individual psychology and Carl Jung’s analytical psychology–but against the rationalistic methods of the social sciences as a whole. These approaches, claimed Rank, invoke a “causal ideology, which actually sets us apart from our past by disposing of it–‘historically’”(p. 65). This is wishful thinking, however, that overvalues the power of the intellect. Borne out of fear of the irrational, it overvalues the power of the intellect, denying the fact that the only way people can dispose of their pasts is by living them out in the present, where history ultimately disposes (quite literally) of the people. This so-called rational understanding gave people a better sense of control by overvaluing the power of their intellect. At least for a time, this allowed them to better tolerate their behavior, and in this sense was therapeutic. Ultimately, however, it was merely a rational veneer, an illusion beneath which there still remained the reality of our basic existential predicament.

We still have to learn, it seems, that life, in order to maintain itself, must revolt

every so often against man’s ceaseless attempts to master its irrational forces with

his mind. No matter in what terms this presumptuous aim is attempted, sooner or

later a reaction sets in, be it in the form of intellectual scepticism and pessimism-

through which, for example, the Greeks perished–or in the actual rebellion of our

frustrated human nature. (p. 18)

The meaning of human conduct cannot be discerned by reducing it to any fixed or abstract theoretical interpretations of the mind. Attempting to do so produces rationalizations rather than explanations for this conduct, not onlyindividually, but socially, as well. Thus, Rank explains how although at first, in response to what he had perceived as “acrisis in psychology”(p. 11), he had thought that the “beyond”in“beyond psychology”meant “a resorting to collective ideologies as the subject of social psychology,” and believed that this would properly equip him to explain human behavior, he later learned that collective ideologies, too, were “generally conceived of in the same rational terms. . . . In fact these ideologies more than anything else seem to carry the whole rationalization which man needs in order to live irrationally”(pp. 11-12). He was thus led to extend the meaning of “beyond,”so as not merely to be equated with the social. “It actually meant the irrational basis of human nature which lies beyond any psychology, individual or collective”(p. 12). “Ihave realized more and more that, because of the inherent nature of the human being, man has always lived beyond psychology, in other words, irrationally”(p. 14).

In June of 1939, as Rank, close to finishing Beyond Psychology, penned the preface to his final work, he noted unhappily that this basic irrationality had been substantiated by “our present socio-political crisis”(p. 11), which, he lamented, “make[s] this, my undertaking, so much more timely and perhaps intelligible”(p. 11). The political ideologies of his day, while portrayed by their proponents as rational, in practice, were proving otherwise. The world was veering close to total destruction, making it increasingly clearer that people were once again living irrationally.

I have no panacea to offer, nor any solution to our human problems which seem to

me to be part of man’s life on this earth. We are born in pain, we die in pain and

we should accept life-pain as unavoidable,–indeed a necessary part of earthly

existence, not merely the price we have to pay for pleasure. (1958, p. 16)

Despite this seemingly stark and sobering conclusion to his “life work,”however, which, in this preface, he summarily announced was “completed”(p. 16), Rank’s overall tone in Beyond Psychology was not one of despair or resignation; he took neither a nihilistic nor a relativistic stance toward culture. His awareness of the inextinguishability of the irrational element in human nature–the fact that it can never be completely translated into purely rational terms–did not lead, that is, to his abandonment of the pursuit of bettering human conditions.

For although he had become convinced of the necessity of life-pain, cautioning that there was no simple therapeutic cure for the human condition, Rank believed that, at least under certain circumstances, people could reach a new level of understanding. By allowing himself to more fully experience the irrational element that people were already living unconsciously, rather than resorting to preconceived interpretations that preemptively classified it, he struggled to articulate something transcendent that had given his life new spiritual meaning. This was an epiphany beyond mere intellectual understanding–one that had apparently come with the acceptance of the human plight, implying a willingness to relinquish the need for absolute understanding or control in terms of any preconceived ideology. On the contrary, he maintained that by re-framing questions about human existence to include an acknowledgment of its basic irrationality, new possibilities could emerge that might otherwise remain unrecognized.

The only remedy is an acceptance of the fundamental irrationality of the human being and life in general, an acceptance which means not merely a recognition or even admittance of our basic “primitivity,”in the sophisticated vein of our typical intellectuals, but a real allowance for its dynamic functioning in human behavior, which would not be lifelike without it. When such a constructive and dynamic expression of the irrational together with the rational life is not permitted, it breaks through in violent distortions which manifest themselves individually as neurosis and culturally as various forms of revolutionary movements which succeed because they are irrational and not in spite of it. (p. 289)

II. The supernatural meaning of human existence

Although Rank did not consider human behavior to be purely rational or predictable, neither did he believe it to be random or meaningless, the mere bi-product of blind biological forces. On the contrary, he noted that from earliest recorded times, human practices have emerged from the need to maintain spiritual values, and as such, were highly patterned and meaningful.

Man, no matter under how primitive conditions, never did live on a purely biological, that is, on a simple natural basis. The most primitive people known to us show strange and complicated modes of living which become intelligible only from their supernatural meaning. (p. 62)By “supernatural,”Rank was referring to “the really human element, in

contradistinction to the biological life which is natural (homo naturalis).”This is “basically identical with what we call ‘culture,’”the world that human beings create in every civilization in order to sustain themselves spiritually. This world includes “not only all spiritual values of mankind, from the early soul belief to religion, philosophy and its latest offspring psychology, but also social institutions. These too were originally built up to maintain man’s supernatural plan of living, that is, were meant to guarantee his selfperpetuation as a social type”(p. 63).

Through the transmission of spiritual values, cultural traditions emerged which perpetuate a self–not the biological self, which by virtue of its mortality ultimately must perish, but the spiritual self, which is believed to live eternally. Thus, the most primitive supernatural world views centered on the denial of one simple existential fact–that human beings, as biological creatures, must die.

People, Rank argued, cannot bear the stark reality of their own mortality; at least inasmuch as it represents finality–their ceasing to exist. Neither can they accept, he hypothesized, many of the other biological facts of life, in particular, having been born of mortal origins; that is, from their mothers. These are inevitable reminders of death. Another key phenomenon unacceptable to human beings was the causal connection between the male’s participation in sexual intercourse and the procreation of a child. Even when people grew less naive, and could no longer deny these obvious biological facts, their cultural worlds continued to provide the forum by whichthe spiritual essence of their most treasured traditions could be passed on to future generations.

Rank believed that people strove to transcend their finite biological existence by immortalizing themselves in some manner. He called thesource of this striving–that which motivated individuals to create and maintain livable symbols of immortality in the form of cultural practices of the social activities–the spiritual self, or soul. In order to sustain their denial of death, he affirmed that humankind in every era must renew their belief in immortality, by re-conceiving the world in supernatural terms that are viable for that era.

In the second chapter of Beyond Psychology,“The Double as Immortal Self,”Rank performs what he describes as an “autopsy”upon a “generalized literary motif,”taken from a film about the theme of the Double that he had seen as a student. He does this in order to explore how this popular theme has evolved in ancient myth and folklore, and on into more recent literary traditions. By doing this, he shows how various conceptions of soul-belief developed, thus getting at the common roots of the cultures that adhered to them.

Rank also describes how in examining the theme of the Double, he has tried to “confront. . . the dynamic personality of modern man with its remotest but still living ancestor, the spiritual self of primitive man”(p. 65). By doing this, he is trying to show how the normal method of historical analysis is inadequate. Rather than looking at primitive man as a disposable relic, as do the rational ideologies of the social sciences, thus enabling the researchers that utilize them to detach themselves from a past they no longer find meaningful, Rank proposes his alternative. “By making memory alive, that is, in being fully ourselves instead of thinking about it, we can acknowledge our spiritual needs without having to condemn them as primitive”(p. 65).

Therefore, Rank asserts, he introduces his material about primitive man’s spiritual self “not in an historical or explanatory sense but merely as illustrative of survivals in modern man, who, having created civilization and with it an over-civilized ego, disintegrates by splitting up the latter into two opposing selves”(p. 65). In other words, rather than trying to observe ancient traditions in a detached and scientific manner, he wants to convey what we still have in common, but can no longer be creatively expressed within the confines of modern civilization.

III. Primitive group-life and the magical worldview: a dynamic balancing of nature and spirit

The shadow as immortal double. Based on an extensive review of research into the myths, folklore, and literature of many of the various cultures of the world, Rank hypothesized that the shadow, a natural, concrete image of the physical self, was the human being’s most primitive representation of the immortal soul. “Numerous superstitions regarding one’s shadow or image still prevalent in all parts of our civilized world,”Rank theorized, “correspond to widespread tabus of primitives who see in this natural image of the self the human soul. . . . Primitive man considers the shadow his mysterious double, a spiritual yet real being”(1941/1958, p. 71).

Emerging as part of a magical worldview, the shadow was an alter-ego, or double. It was highly revered, as well as subject to strict proscriptions, or taboos, needing to be protected from enemies, who by magically “wounding” it, were able to kill the person to whom it belonged. Contrary to the “rational” beliefs of modern Western civilization, Rank proposed that in this earliest stage of culture, one symbol could carry two separate meanings simultaneously. Such was the case of the shadow, which stood for the soul of the dead and that of the living at the same time. “Accordingly, the shadow is protected from injury like the real self, the death of which, however, does not affect the shadow surviving it. Strangely enough,”remarked Rank, “the [shadow] seems to have been endowed not only with an independent life of its own but is considered the most vital element of the human being, the soul” (p. 72).

One reason that the shadow came to be identified with the immortal soul was its obvious resemblance to the physical image of the human being to whom it was attached. Rank believed that a more important factor, however, was its changing form, along with its regular pattern of going away and coming back, thus creating the illusion of repeatedly returning to life. According to widespread tradition, the sun had the power to re-animate the souls of the dead. Thus, the “observation of the human shadow disappearing with the fertilizing sun to reappear with its return made it a perfect symbol for the idea of an immortal soul”(p. 74).

The twin. In its next conception, twinship, the soul became more personified. The twins, who were thought to have reproduced themselves in the womb, came to exemplify the power of self-creation. Representing the appearance of the immortal and mortal selves together, the dyadic image of twinship became the basis for a supernatural conception of creation, designed to replace biological procreation, the acceptance of which would undermine the belief in immortality. The phenomenon of twinship was the self re-enacting creation independently: the self-creative principle.

Rank came to believe that “an early cult of twins was the decisive factor not only in the formation of religion but in the origin of all human civilization (p. 84). He considered this tradition to be a key development, inasmuch as it served

as the transitional link between the primitive conception of the Double as immortal self and its creative self-expression in works of art. For the twins through their unusual birth have evinced in a concrete manner the dualistic conception of the soul and thereby given proof of the immortality of certain individuals singled out by destiny. (p. 91)

IV. The first social organization: totemism and collective immortality

As the ability to maintain faith in simple concrete images such as the shadow began to diminish, humans were drawn together to participate in common activities that became the basis of cultic rituals. In this way, they replaced an individually experienced, physical immortality with a more abstract, yet still highly meaningful, collectively experienced one.

Primitive culture. . . is based on a will to permanency as expressed in the seasonal rituals which have to be performed exactly in the traditional manner handed down through generations. In liberating himself from this eternal cycle of seasonal revival, civilized man had to find another expression for his need of permanency, which is manifested in the different forms of creative achievement called culture.

(p. 87)

As perhaps the earliest example of this, Rank cites totemism, the earliest form of religion, in which the souls of the dead were believed to be re-born through the totem of the clan. Through this collective ideology, humans made themselves alike spiritually, voluntarily observing strict and complex rules of social organization that assured the

eternal survival of their soul. The first social organization–as contrasted with simple group life–we encounter in totemism, a highly complicated system, which, as the first form of religion (to uphold this supernatural world-view regarding man’s survival on earth and his eternal destiny), established a kind of collective immortality in the re-birth of the souls of the dead through the totem of the clan. With its strict clan organization and the sharply circumscribed function of its different members, the totemistic system clearly shows the origin of social organization in the spiritual needs of the individuals. (p. 102)

V. The hero, the artist, and the commoner: creating the cultural world as atransmission of spiritual values

Phase one: the myth of the birth of the hero, and the foundation of civilization. Culture is both rational and irrational: spiritual values (from the early soul belief to religion, philosophy and its latest offspring psychology) become rationalized, in the form of social institutions, so that they can be shared with the common individual. The spiritual self becomes a rational self that tends to forget its irrational heritage–it becomes over-rationalized.

In order not to become stagnant, heroic leaders must arise that rebel against the over-rationalized institutions. The hero lives beyond the collective ideologies of the prevailing social order, patterning his or her life according to mythical tradition. In this way, lost spiritual values are re-discovered for a new generation of humanity, who can then carry them forward through its everyday practices. As these practices become rationalized over time, there is a growing need for heroic leadership, which cannot be intellectualized in terms of any pre-conceived ideology. To attempt this is merely to rationalize the irrational, which will not allow us to benefit because it loses something vital. This process of going back to tradition provides the prototype for a new personality, thus inspiring the individual at her very core.The first class division that developed distinguished between the few elite beings who assured the community its immortality by leading the sacred rituals, and the rest of the group, who through their participation shared vicariously in the leaders’ magical powers. These elite beings, who were social deviates, became the first heroes. By living their lives according to mythological tradition, they served as collective symbols of immortality for the community, thus replacing each individual’s double.

In the Myth of the Birth of the Hero (1909/1914), Rank had gathered together myths from various cultures, from which he gleaned a standard prototypical pattern. In these traditions, the birth of the heroic type was depicted as an independent self-creation on the part of the hero, who through the aid of his twin was able to absorb his own immortal self. During a time of social crisis, a leader arises, who by shaping his or her life according to mythical tradition, transgresses contemporary cultural taboos. In this way, s/he destroys outworn values and re-discovers old spiritual values, sharing them with the culture at large, thus re-vitalizing it.

I believe that the heroic type emerged from the cult of twins and the self-creative tendency symbolized in the magic meaning of twinship. . . . This idea of the self-creative principle symbolized in twinship leads to the conception of the hero as the type who combines in one person the mortal and immortal self. The birth of the hero from the spirit of twinship can be detected in a tradition common to all civilized people, glorifying the extraordinary lives and deeds of their earlier national heroes. Since those legendary biographies were chiefly concerned with the supernatural origin of the hero, I deduced from them the pattern of “The Myth of the Birth of the Hero,”with typical almost standardized motifs (1941/1958, pp. 92-93). Rank found that “these‘success-stories,’glorifying the hero’sself-elevation–indeed,

self-creation” (pp. 96-97), were prominent in mythical traditions, and were an essential aspect of culture,

for the original hero was the one who dared live beyond the accepted “psychology”

or ideology of his time. In this sense he is the prototype of the rebellious man of

action who, through the revival of lost values which appear as new and irrational,

preserves the eternal values of humanity. (p. 14)

Rank traces “the development from the immortal double–which might be called the magic self–to the independent creative self immortalized in the hero”(p. 102). What makes this development so critical is the fact that it represents a critical change in soul-belief: what Rank has argued is the inspirational source of cultural world views. No longer is personal immortality thought to be magically assured through “the naive belief in an automatic survival of one’s own double”(p. 99). Humans beings–at least their leaders–must now be creative in order to guarantee their spiritual survival, and social institutions need to be established to provide the vehicle for this. Rather than being immortalized magically, merely by virtue ofthe physical existence of their doubles, they must now perform works that immortalize themselves symbolically. Thus, a society’s spiritual values are transmitted from hero to commoner through its institutions and practices, as maintained by the society’s members.

Eventually, however, the social self comes to be carried “inside”the individual. In “primitive group-life,”“no‘social self’as a type existed. . . because the group itself and group-life with its joint activities carried the social self outside the individual”(p. 102). Under the magical worldview, in other words, personal immortality could be maintained individually via the magic self, and their was no need for society to perform this function.

With the development of religion, as the first system of social organization, however, society became the vehicle by which spiritual values were expressed.

The common man gave up his personal immortality which he could no longer

maintain individually but could regain collectively through some kind of active or

passive participation. Such a social participation–the collective counterpart of psychological identification–not only is the essential feature of all religious creed and ritual but plays a most decisive role in all social development and the customs, conventions, laws expressing and maintaining it. (p. 104)

Phase two: a creative personality (artist or scientist) glorifies the hero’s life, humanizing this spiritual struggle by infusing it with his or her own personal struggle for self-realization. The creative personality (artist, writer, scientist) glorifies the life of the hero, humanizing this spiritual struggle by infusing it with his or her own struggle for self-realization. The artist/social theorist glorifies and perpetuates the hero’s exploits. By creating an ideological framework that exemplifies the hero’s life and values, s/he provides the commoner with a way through which s/he can vicariously experience these spiritual forces. Thus the artist promotes the spiritual values that have been re-discovered by the hero, furnishing an ideological framework that concretizes these values and allows the commoner to share in them.

The artist [Goethe] took the traditional folk-tale [Faust] and lifted it from its superstitious entanglements into a human struggle for self-immortalization through work, that is, self-realization. Similar revaluations in the history of famous literary subjects point to a social function of the artist who humanizes traditional folk-beliefs by animating them with his own spiritual struggle for immortality. . . . [T]he artist is able and permitted to present his creation in an acceptable form justifying the survival of the irrational in the midst of our over-rationalized civilization. (pp. 76-77) The artist gives the irrational elements form (s/he formulates a rational ideology

that allows traditional values to be transmitted from hero to commoner). Thisstill performs the same spiritual function as did those religious ceremonies: that of temporarily uniting the ‘commoner’with irrational life-forces from which the average man in his daily existence had to be protected by all sorts of strict tabus. (pp. 83-84)

“In giving them form, that is, rational expression, the artist enables the public to feel sufficiently removed from the irrational elements to dare vicariously to participate in them” (p. 83).

Phase three: emergence and creative perpetuation of the social self. The commoner absorbs the hero’s personality through participation in cultural practices (with their beliefs and institutions) that express the spiritual values that the hero is promoting. At first, this occurs through their actual participation in the cultic rituals of re-creation, whereby the commoner achieves “an enhancement of his own self as creator and as a self-created personality”(p. 114). Eventually, however, as an outgrowth of this participation, the social self emerged.

The average type shares the spiritual values of civilization only through a kind of vicarious participation, whereas the really creative type–be it hero, artist or scientist–falls a victim to his own creation for which he has to sacrifice himself in one way or another. In the eternal drama of self-sacrifice and re-birth, from the solemn custom of regicide to the gay spirit of the carnival, each individual could participate in this ritual of self-creation. A new kind of immortality through the medium of magic participation was epitomized in the social self as it emerges from what might be called a gradual democratization of immortality. (pp. 117-118) The common man regained his personal immortality collectively through social

participation–first, in cult and ritual; later, in social development (culture). As societies continued to develop, the common person began to share in the power and immortality of outstanding individuals. A notable example of this phenomenon was the social institution of kingship, which, Rank asserted, “became so important that it can be said actually to have made the history of mankind”(p. 104).

“In it I see the final development of what might be called socialized hero-worship. In this sense, the institution of kingship epitomizes the transition from the immortalized heroic type to the social self of the commoner”(p. 104).“Anew kind of immortality through the medium of magic participation was epitomized in the social self as it emerges from what might be called a gradual democratization of immortality”(p. 118).

From kingship their emerged an even more democratic institution, of paramount

importance in the development of Western civilization,the institution of marriage, which descended so to speak from the king to the people, every husband became a kind of king in his own right and his house became his castle. There he was master and ruler invested with the symbols of the magic power of a king “en miniature”(p. 119).

VI. Christianity and Western civilization: roots of the modern self

As one of his central themes, Rank made note that throughout history, an antagonistic interplay between the individual and collective elements of culture–microcosm and macrocosm–has continued to persist. In tandem with the perennial construction and perpetuation of group ideologies that guarantee the eternal survival of the collective interests of the community, human beings have striven to achieve and maintain a sense of personal immortality by individualizing their experiences, that is, by distinguishing themselves from the masses.

Man’s immortality, being naturally universal, that is, the survival of mankind on earth, has been individualized from time immemorial in order that he might maintain his belief in personal immortality. Since this always remains uncertain, man resorted to a collective immortality originally embracing small units, such as the clan or tribe, and eventually extending to the conception of a nation. Hence, nationalism already represents a form of individualized immortality as compared

to the survival of mankind in general. (1941/1958, p. 40)

Although frequently having destructive consequences, however, the conflictual relationship between these two aspects of culture can also help maintain a balance, preventing either side from becoming too extreme. At its most productive, their interconnection becomes synergistic, providing the atmosphere and stimulus for some of the most creative aspects of civilization. In this way, asserted Rank, these two opposing facets of culture can be mutually reinforcing, the efforts of extraordinary individuals combining with those of the common people to produce and maintain a living and growing social unit. Creative personalities, whether of a heroic or an artistic ilk, will attempt to take greater control of their destinies by finding ways to express their personal struggles, either by using the pre-existing collective institutions of their time and place, or by constructing new ones. Offsetting this, these collective institutions become the vehicles by which average members of the community can vicariously participate in the work of more creative individuals.

Rank concluded that in each culture of every age, collective needs had to be balanced with diverse personal interests, in order to construct selves, or personalities, that could viably participate in the day-to-day practices of their respective cultures, while allowing for a vision of immortality, or soul-belief. He theorized that with primitive group-life, individualistic, magical selves had sufficed to assure the everlasting existence of its participants, while with the more complex collective organization of later patriarchal systems, a more socialized self was required. This eventually resulted in a crisis, however, that led to the emergence of a more individualized conception of personality. In one passage, Rank sums up what he sees as an eternal, cross-cultural pattern of re-saving the self:

Time and again the individual self had to save itself from the coercion of

conforming mass-psychology which guaranteed the collective immortality of the tribe or nation. Be it in terms of magical self-perpetuation in the double, or in social terms of legalized fatherhood, or by the creation of a personality shaped after the pattern of a superhuman hero, it always amounted to an overlapping of the natural self living in this temporal world of affairs and the personality-self living for another world and a more or less indefinite future. (1941/1958, p. 166)Roman civilization and civic fatherhood. With the rise, development, and

consolidation of the Roman Empire came the assemblage of a patriarchal system that produced a highly socialized self, the“father-citizen,”around whose elevated significance, both the Roman State and its constituent families revolved. As Roman society evolved, it grew, at least for a time,increasingly democratic, inasmuch as it allowed the common people to share in the glory of the leaders of their families, the fathers, who themselves were molded in the image of the king, or emperor.

Roman civilization enabled the average citizen to participate in the advantages of socialized fatherhood. Every freeborn citizen had by the very fact of his political status the right to be a father, that is, to have legitimate children over whom he legally ruled. (1941/1958, p. 125) As another facet of this increasing trend toward democratization, Rank cited

Julius Caesar’s pledge to accomplish economic equality, at least among the father-citizens, even if this clearly did not include the mothers or daughters, or least of all, the slaves. Through a redistribution of wealth among the fathers, their equal status as citizens, in spirit, could then be reflected in economic reality; this was not destined to be, however.

“The task in which Roman civilization ultimately failed was to apply an ideology of magic origin which had worked socially in creating a new type of citizen, to the final test of establishing economic equality” (1941/1958, p. 128).

Over and above this failure of Roman civilization to make its father-citizens economically commensurate, however, Rank saw the main source of discontent, leading to a complete revaluation of the self, in the disenfranchisement of the “son-type.”The Roman conception of the self had become overly rationalized in terms of the father and the patriarchal institutions immortalizing him, and did not leave room for anyone else’s interests.

The right of every citizen to social fatherhood meant no right for the son except

the one to become a father in his turn, that is, a social type prescribed by this first

totalitarian state. Since the legal power of the father over his sons was equivalent

to his power over his slaves (the word “family” is derived from“famulus”–servant,

slave) we can justly say that the sons dominated by legalized fatherhood actually

were the first “have-nots.”(1941/1958, p. 126)

Although the sons could not be immortalized in their own right, however, their status as potential fathers to be, in Rank’s view, made them ripe for rebellion, whereas the mothers, daughters, and slaves were not yet in a position even to aspire to this. It was therefore the desire to immortalize the son-type that provided the impetus for Christianity’s reconceptualization of the self, concluded Rank.

Rank viewed the Christian religion as an innovative spiritual ideology that revitalized the stagnating institutions and practices of the Roman civilization. It allowed the emergence of a new attitude toward life for the common person, while preserving the spirit of the declining Roman Empire. He thought the Christian ideology further democratized the right to salvation, creating a means by which the average human being, as symbolized by the son, could share in the immortality of the superhuman hero, a privilege which, as has been seen, in Roman law had been restricted to the ordinary, but authoritarian, “father-citizen.”Most importantly, Rank believed it became the prototype for Western society’s psychological conception of the self, which, Rank asserted, had by World War I grown increasingly “neurotic.”

“Where Caesar had failed politically and economically, Christianity succeeded spiritually. The dispossessed founded a religion which solved for them their problems through a timeless and spaceless ideology establishing them as a powerful class with an entirely new psychology”(p. 141). Unable to triumph socially, the commoner now had a vehicle by which s/he could achieve a kind of spiritual victory.

In the emergence and development of Christianity is epitomized not only the rise

and decline of our whole Western civilization but the creation and decay of our

modern type of personality. Christianity. . . inaugurat[ed] an entirely new

philosophy of living and thereby precipitat[ed] a new psychological type of man.

(p. 144)

Whereas the Roman Empire continued to decline, and eventually fell, “finished off by the Barbarian invasion from the North it survived spiritually in and through Christianity” (p. 141).

Paul’s Synthesis. By combining ideas from Greek and Jewish traditions, with even older concepts from various ancient civilizations of the Middle East and the Orient, Paul, Rank believed, formulated a new synthesis which succeeded in spiritually preserving many elements of the Roman Empire by solving the problem of succession in a new way. “By incorporating the quintessence of the declining Orient into the sublime form of Hellenistic philosophy and fusing these with elements of the Jewish religion,” Christianity set forth a new “universal ideology.It thereby created first and foremosta new psychological type”(1958, p. 141).

Rank labeled this new personality, “the ‘inspirational’type,”because, patterned after the outstanding personality, it “inspired the common man–the average–to live up to a plane spiritually much higher than he could possibly aspire to in reality”(p. 144). By identifying spiritually with the life of Jesus, Paul, by virtue of his own example, gave the commoners a vehicle by which they could, in a sense, succeed themselves in the present, thus granting them immediate salvation. By worshiping Jesus as the heroic son who revolted against Roman law and Jewish ritual, both of which were patriarchal in nature, Paul allowed average Christians a way of saving their souls from being submerged in the

socialized self of the status quo, which representedthe immortality of the father.This desire to be good was instilled in the true Christian type who eventually carried it beyond its religious and moralistic meaning into the realm of personality development. By creating his personality in an effort for heroic immortalization, the individual at the same time had to resort to his true personal self. Thus, in saving his immortal self through accepting the Christian conception of love, the individual rescued his own real self from living on and in the “borrowed”self of the leader. (1941/1958, p. 166) Rank tried to convey how the emergence of this new kind of self allowed

separation from all of the past selves to take place, yet at the same time enabled a new way of experiencing old spiritual values.

The Christian type of personality starts his life, so to speak, on a secondary plane of experience, leaving behind him not only his own biological past but all past history before Christ, that is, psychologically speaking, the magical self, the heroic self and the socialized self–all of which we found synchronized in the spiritual self of the Christian type. (1941/1958, pp. 166-167)

Rather than merely the social product of an authoritarian and patriarchal system, such as the “son-type”of Roman times, who was the mere successor to his father, the common person him or herself, could now became immortal as an individual, through the spiritual self-succession of their own personality.

During the times of the acute struggle for the maintenance of a permanent, everlasting personality type, climaxed in the socialized self of the Roman citizen, Jesus enacted the creation-rite in terms of the dynamic religious ideology of his time, namely, messianic kingship. Through Paul’s philosophic interpretation, this new creation of man and his world furnished the ideology for the personality of the average type who in turn patterns his life after the heroic or moral leader. (p. 156) Thus, Paul, inspired by the heroic life of Jesus, became a theological theorist who

created an effective religious ideology for the masses. This dynamic not only resulted in a

whole new type of personality–the “inspirational”type–it had enormous social

consequences, as well. Christianity became the greatest moral and political revolution in the history of the human race. It not only preached the equality of human souls–the true basis for all other equalities, political, social and economic–but it separated Church from State by the well-known statements, “Render unto Caesar,”and “My Kingdom is not of this World.”Christianity in this way remade the ancient world and when it was overrun by the Barbarians they also fell under the spell of the new gospel. In this unique sense, Western civilization appears as a product of the egalitarian principles of Christendom. (p. 147)

VII. The ideology of the French Revolution, and further historical developments

Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In the modern West, Rank pointed to the French Revolution as a momentous turning point, a powerful example of how political ideologies interacted with historical events to significantly shape the development of civilization and its participants, both in Europe and the New World. By establishing the prototype for the democratic ideal, the French Revolution, and its ideological extension, American democracy, provided a forum in which the spiritual principles of Christianity, notably equality and self-determination, became concretized as political, economic, and eventually psychological principles.This extended the concepts of the spiritual equality and self-determination of human souls into actual socio-political practices. Thus, the self-sufficient bourgeois type was born.

The bourgeois personality was initially embodied in the relatively homogeneous lower middle class of 18th century Western Europe. Under the theorizing of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, however, it became a new ideological hero. Rank argued that this new personality supplied the impetus for major social changes and their consolidation in the modern West. In this way, Rousseau provided a systematic basis for social engineering, through what Rank referred to as “the birth of modern pedagogy.”This rational institution provided the mechanism by which citizens could now be methodically adjusted to new standardized norms that placed them on an equal basis with one another; they could be made to conform to almost any ideology that fit the “general will” of the community.

Although Rank believed that “education is always an expression of the existing social order and remains a willing instrument in the hands of the prevailing type by means of which he imposes his own psychology on the masses” (p. 52), he thought that Rousseau’s vision was particularly problematic. In a homogeneous environment that was relatively stable, where individuals did in fact share basic similarities, Rank conceded that this kind of indoctrination often seemed to work. When this democratic ideology of equality was adopted as a general principle of government, however, especially in a heterogeneous population such as the United States, he argued that the extreme diversity of the actual participants forced a need for regimentation that was often violent in its methods. Rank believed that Rousseau had developed a

sentimental conception of natural man’s fundamental likeness, a humanistic ideology which has set the pace for social experimentation since the French Revolution. The basic fallacy of this political theory of equality lies in the psychological presupposition that we are also born alike. . . .On the assumption of a fundamental likeness in man, all our educational systems rest. . . . Since men are not alike and cannot actually be equal, psychology could at least explain them as alike–be it through an indoctrination of educational, therapeutic or political ideologies. (p. 30) Rank believed Rousseau’s philosophy played a key role in this process:Rousseau’s idea that all men are equally free-born gave modern pedagogy the scientific presupposition implicit in every system of education; namely, that also the psychical aptitude of all men is the same and hence any individual can be made a representative of any ideology that the community likes. (Rank, 1930/1932, p. 13)

Rather than describing the universal facts of human nature, Rank suggested, Rousseau had “created the ideal of equality from his own personal experiences and suffering”(1930/1932, p. 12).

The spiritual principle of equality, which forms the basis of Christian faith and

which still forms the ideological basis of our methods of government and

education, cannot be translated into realistic terms of political equality and

economic freedom, however.Equality does not flourish under natural conditions

of freedom, as Rousseau. . . wanted to believe; real natural conditions rather foster

inequality and the reign of competition as Darwin saw it in nature. (Rank,

1941/1958, pp. 41-42)

Immanuel Kant. The German philosopher, Immanuel Kant was dissatisfied with the two dominant philosophical schools of thought of his day, rationalism and empiricism. Inspired in part by Rousseau, Kant was moved to formulate an alternative way of thinking that would do justice to what he perceived to be the fundamental dignity of human beings. Rather than rejecting the notion of reason entirely, however, Kant sought to reconceptualize it. He wrote of the deterministic laws of nature, contrasting this with the potential freedom of human conduct. Although considering both of these spheres to be rational, rather than viewing this rationality as an intrinsic part of the objective world, Kant instead hypothesized that reason itself was actually a human construction. Whereas people projected the principle of rational causality upon the physical elements of nature, they used their rational will to execute moral laws via the categorical imperative. In its primary formulation, the categorical imperative states one’s ethical duty to “act as if the maxim of your action were to become through your will a universal law of nature”(Kant, 1785/1964, p. 89).

As Rank viewed it, however, Kant universalized the personality of the bourgeois victor of the French Revolution, taking his historically situated social philosophy, and representing it as absolute. In this way, he justified this personality as ethically selfdetermined, and therefore, rational. Unlike some of his successors, however, Kant at least made a distinction between the world of moral human conduct and that of scientific, purely theoretical reason. In not allowing the former to be reduced to the latter, noted Rank, Kant maintained a certain autonomy, or freedom, for the human actor.

The idea of self-government on which the democratic state is supposed to function has been derived from the philosophic ideology of self-determination as promoted by Kant. By idealizing and ideologizing the victorious type of the French Revolution, this German philosopher envisioned a new type of ruler who set out to determine himself and be himself. (Rank, 1941/1958, p. 45)According to Rank’s analysis, although modern Western democracy started out as

a fulfillment of Kant’s categorical imperative, that is, of self-determination through practical reason as an end in itself, this was undermined by institutions of political equality. Regimentation became increasingly necessary as legal entities forced self-determining ends to be reduced to mere pre-determined means to ends.

Thus democracy was first of all an ethical absolute–not a political creed–which gives practical expression to the famous categorical imperative of Kant: “So act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of any other, as an end withal, never as a means only.”Yet in actual practice the striving towards self-autonomy in the liberated individual was counteracted by his adherence to the political creed of equality, and thus failed in the test. (Rank, 1941/1958, p. 45) Eventually, Rank concluded, individual psychology developed as an attempt to

justify the ego’s autonomy scientifically. “A science of the Self was needed to support the autonomy of the ego, and thus developed individual psychology as a “Weltanschauung,” supplementing and justifying the democratic ideal of self-determination”(1941/1958, p. 46).

Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. Rank posited that the romantic philosophers of German idealism continued to further reify and rationalize the concept of self-determination, making it still more individualistic, and ultimately allowing them to justify both personal and collective ideologies. They did this by taking things a step beyond Kant.

Kant had made a distinction between pure and practical reason, invoking the categorical imperative as a way of insuring the dignity of the person, who he thought, should never be used merely as a means to an end. Thus, although he granted the mind jurisdiction over natural law, he had kept this mechanistic causality out of the realm of human ethics, refusing to submit them to the dictates of any one supreme will. The absolute idealists, however, rather than following Kant’s lead, tended to see this restriction as a weakness in his overall philosophy. Thus, they unabashedly proceeded to subject all of history to a rational metaphysics of the self, placing them both under one absolute system.

After Kant–“the Philosopher of the Revolution”–had systematized the mentality of the bourgeois type, the underlying principle of self-determination was carried to its individualistic extreme by the romantic philosophers. Disappointed at the actual results of the French Revolution, the romantics outdid Kant, who had taught that the laws of nature had been legislated by the mind. This idealistic conception they applied to the whole pattern of historical development which they conceived of as identical with the growth of self-consciousness. Hence, the true object of knowledge could only be self-knowledge. On that basis they justified personal, class and national aspirations as being evolved from the development of the Self, construed by Fichte as ethical, by Hegel as logical and by Schelling as aesthetical. (1941/1958, p. 68) Historical selves cannot be explained in purely rational or absolute terms, as they

exist relative to specific sociopolitical conditions. By universalizing these selves, and justifying them as rational, other points of view, by definition, are labeled irrational. This contradicts Kant’s categorical imperative, which asserts that human beings are ends in themselves, that cannot be reduced to mere means. Self-consciousness cannot be the ground that determines history because self-consciousness itself is always historically situated.

Without explicitly mentioning Hegel by name, Rank critiques his concept of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, “the dialectical interpretation of events.”Rather than viewing this concept as a “rational exposition,”we should realize “the dynamic interplay of living forces behind this logical method of thinking”(1941/1958 p. 22), implored Rank. In this discussion, he goes on to say that “we falsify the whole outlook and meaning of life by conceiving of spontaneous natural developments as irrational and believing, contrary to all evidence, the will-ful to be the rational.”This is reminiscent of Hegel’s statement in his preface to The Philosophy of Right, in which he equates the unfolding of history with the self-actualization of Reason–“What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational” (1821/1952, p. 10).

Darwin, Marx, and the deterministic social theories of scientific materialism: “ideological conceptions of universality.” Charles Darwin and Karl Marx were two of the greatest social theorists of the nineteenth century, each dealing with different aspects of the human condition; that is, heredity and environment respectively. Rank asserted that although they presented their theories in rational terms, as scientific and universally valid, it was their irrational, “unscientific”aspects that gave these theories their practical value. Rather than discovering objective truths about an external, pre-existing world, Darwin and Marx had created ideologies that expressed the vital but temporary needs and interests of two opposing segments of society at a particular point in history. These ideologies resonated emotionally with the members of those segments, thus giving them their popularity.

All epoch-making theories, whether they deal with biological, sociological or

psychological phenomena, owe their popular appeal to their ideological

conception of universality. For this reason, in that they reach beyond scientific predictability into the realm of dogmatic certainty, they easily become substitutes

for religious beliefs. (1941/1958, p. 33)

The pull to make ideological conceptions absolute by extending them beyond their sociohistorical contexts has a spiritual basis, leading beyond rational science to the need for an immortal soul.

Not unlike the Prophets in their apocalyptic visions, those intellectual leaders

seem to know exactly how the future will work out. By interpreting the past and

predicting the future in terms of their secular “religion,”they project specific

conditions of a certain time and age. . . into a timeless and placeless universe. (pp.

3334)

Darwin’s theory of evolution. Up until the middle of the nineteenth century, the doctrine of creationism, with its tenet that species have remained unchanged over time, predominated in the Western world. It was Darwin, who succeeded in replacing this religious doctrine with his mechanistic theory of evolution, a deterministic model of life that appeared to be a momentous scientific advance. Rank concluded, however, that overall, far from revolutionary, Darwinism actually represented a step backward for humanity. With creationism, there had at least been acknowledgment of the wonderment of creation and new life, attributing this to God, but Darwin’s theory of “natural selection” explained only the extinction of species, not their creative maintenance. It acknowledged that human beings are largely determined by events outside of their control; that they are victims of life, rather than self-creative participants. ”Thus, with Darwin, man accepted a natural development of which he is not the creator but the creature, not the master but the victim” (p. 32).

Darwin’s theory, in other words, by invoking biological determinism, denied human creativity, including the creative will of Charles Darwin, even as he was actively exercising it in the construction of his own original system. Although he waseventually productive, however, Darwin “published his epoch-making work only after twenty years of doubtful hesitation”(p. 32). This was due, Rank speculated, not to Darwin’s“lifelong frailty which prevented him from working more than three hours a day,”as is often reported, but to an “inner resistance to renouncing man’s creativity while he himself was creating his own man-made universe” (p. 32). As far as Darwin’s physical weakness, “a person whom the slightest excitement, such as a visit with friends, sends to bed with a ‘shivering fit and nervous vomiting,’”Rank wryly commented, “certainly contradicts his theory of‘the survival of the fittest,’in the biological sense of the word. What enabled Darwin not only to survive but finally to triumph over physical obstacles and inner resistance,”he suggested,“was his creative urge and social position”(p. 32).

As has already been seen, Darwin, Rank asserted, denied his impulse to create in his biologically determined theory. Yet, that same theory, in its wider range of social applications, was more than merely biological–with it came new methods of education and government, as well. Far from universally valid, however, Rank maintained that this social philosophy reflected the needs and interests of a specific group, at a particular time in history. Biological evolution and the survival of the fittest explained and justified the political doctrine of laissez-faire capitalism.“[Darwin’s] theory. . . has been taken to justify the success of the victorious class in the industrial revolution–its meaning, not that the fittest survive but that those who survive ought to be considered the fittest”(p. 32).

Marx’s social theory of economics. By contrast, Rank proposed, Marx, rather than providing a justification for the ruling class, gave expression to “the victims of the industrial revolution,”and their “battle-cry against capitalism.”In advocating “aperfect egalitarian state on earth,”he reformulated “‘the particularities of the economic age into the general elements of the history of mankind’”(p. 33). Marx had benefitted, Rank noted, from Napoleon’s liberation campaign in which the Jews of his time were given more civil rights, but at the same time, he denied his own Jewish heritage. He was able to do this, Rank added, by projecting the fate of the Jews on to that of the worker, who he then glorified in his theory. In his prediction of victory for the proletariat, he went beyond social science, into the realm of religion, which he was forced to deny in his ostensibly scientific theory.

Although Marx went to great lengths to make his theory scientific, thus distinguishing it from the inferior “opiate of the people,”Marxism envisioned a perfect state on earth, and thus, Rank concluded, became the equivalent of religious doctrine. Marxism, however, “particularly in its present interpretation as Communism, failed to achieve rationally what Christianity could not maintain spiritually, namely, to translate the supernatural into the natural, i.e., to make it realistic”(p. 58)

Nietzsche’s dualistic view of social behavior. Following on the heels of the seminal theories of Marx and Darwin, and just prior to the emergence of psychoanalysis, Friedrich Nietzsche, one of the earliest and most profoundly influential thinkers of Rank’s life, sketched the outlines of a radically different kind of social theory. According to Nietzsche, the traditional scholars of the modern West had tended to construct monistic systems that privileged their own disguised moral values, treating them as universal. Nietzsche, however, impelled, Rank believed, by the Franco-Prussian War, one of the few European wars in an otherwise relatively peaceful and stable last half of the nineteenth century, “analyzed the different reactions of opposed groups in their eternal struggle for supremacy,”thus creating “a cultural group-psychology”(Rank 1941/1958, p. 25).

Rather than absolutizing the moral values from one perspective and taking them as universally given, Nietzsche emphasized the moral differences between people. In particular, he distinguished the mentality of the rulers from that of the ruled, labeling these respectively as master and slave moralities. This was a momentous step, Rank believed, in that it at least allowed for the potentially constructive use of such spiritual differences.

Nietzsche, by approaching human problems culturally, recognized the moral

conflict, both in the individual and in groups and nations, as the problem of

problems. In this sense, Nietzsche appears as the first and only thinker who realized this problem and tried to liberate human psychology from its involvement with moral issues. (p. 273) According to Rank, more traditional methods, each presuming to be rational,

could only conceive of suppressing irrational forces, and never of harnessing them creatively. Freud viewed these forces solely as destructive–as pathological in the human being, and hence, to be squelched. Rank believed that Nietzsche, however, through his own life experiences had discovered the creative potential of these irrational elements.

Nietzsche was the first to recognize. . . the human value of irrational forces in the suppressed self, which Freud in his rationalistic system could only see as the cause for neurosis. Hence, the cure psychoanalysis had to offer the individual could not be the creative expression of those energies. (p. 38)Nietzsche, on the other hand, saw even in some neuroses, the potential for

creative transformation, far beyond normal adjustment. Rank cited a quotation in which

Nietzsche, as Rank phrased it, in one of his revealing flashes of insight, puts to psychiatrists the bold question: are there no ‘neuroses of health’? Are there, that is, spontaneous reactions on the part of frustrated individuals toward a positive liberation of their blocked energies? (p. 54)While Rank lavished praise on Nietzsche for his ground-breaking work, however,

he criticized him for his derision of traditional religious values. Ultimately, Rank argued

that Nietszche’s amoral tendencies were attributable to his grandiosity. In blaming “Jewish-Christian morality,” which,. . . he throws into one and the same pot, Nietzsche overlooked the deep need in the human being for just that kind of morality; hence, his bizarre picture of the amoral superman, an anti-Christ only conceivable for a megalomaniac who considers himself a seer. (1941/1958, pp. 273-274)

VIII. Scientific psychology: disguised ideology of the bourgeois type

Rank asserted that scientific psychology, rather than an objective account of natural phenomena, was actually an ideology, expressing the philosophy of the prevailing social order and its preferred mentality, the “democratic” or“self-sufficient bourgeois-type”. Whereas psychological theorists purported to explain human actions on an objective and purely rational basis, the construction of their theories was ultimately propelled by spiritual motives–in short, their belief in a soul. Rather than pursuing rational understandings, the actions of these researchers were influenced by the very ideological prejudices they were claiming to nullify scientifically. Thus, Rank warned, to take scientific psychology at face value was to fall prey to a powerful, but hidden ideological agenda that sought to perpetuate specific cultural values at the expense of others.

Modern psychology carried the will of the self-sufficient, bourgeois type–the nuclear element of the democratic ideal (Rank, 1941/1958, p. 45). Thus, it at once expressed the mentality of the bourgeois type, suppliedthe prescription for the fulfillment, and justified its implementation by giving it a scientific explanation. However, in representing itself as “education”or“therapy,”it is really disguised white magic, promising to cure everything in the irrational other of which we do not approve. This is justified by its theory–“scientific”explanations that rationalize a hidden metaphysics of the soul, of which it is ashamed.

In Rank’s view, the self-understandings of human behavior that developed in the modern West had become increasingly abstract, absolute, and individualistic, as well as unnatural and artificial, detached from their practical, sociohistorical contexts. In fact, he believed the proponents of the social theories of his day, in their efforts to present the self as scientifically and objectively “rational”had deliberately sought to extract the spontaneous and sociohistorical elements of their practical situations from their methods of analysis. Thus, philosophers and social scientists regarded certain behavior as “irrational,”merely because these interactions were unpredictable, lying beyond the control of the researcher.

Whereas these theories purported to explain human actions on an objective and purely rational basis, Rank argued that, in practice, they were the expressions of the prevailing collective ideologies–reflections of their cultures that betrayed their hidden sociohistorical backgrounds. Although these intellectual theories attempted to explain human behavior absolutely and universally, he asserted, they were actually cultural artifacts that had emerged out of changing, practical situations. They were therefore unable to provide researchers, themselves embedded in culture, with perspectives unaffected by the forces they were trying to understand. While claiming to be objective and ahistorical, these theories were instead the products of the traditional, prejudiced, and ultimately irrational belief systems of their historical era.

Psychology, in other words, is not an objective instrument, like a telescope or

microscope, which can be applied for purposes of observation to the reactions of

individuals or groups of people; it is not a science beyond or above the

civilization it presumes to explain. (Rank, 1941/1958, p. 27)

Rank proposed that humans live in the cultural and natural worlds simultaneously– this blended milieu cannot be reduced to either element by itself, nor can the self that lives in it be extracted from it. Rather, he argued, the self and its environment is a unit that is inherently dualistic, expressing a dynamic relationshipbetween counterbalancing forces. The attempts to reduce humans to independent selves isolated from their environments, or to reduce these environments to either exclusively cultural or natural elements, are both distinguishing aspects of mechanistic causality. This model is found most prominently in the physical sciences of the modern era, but is misapplied in trying to understand human behavior.

Rank maintained that researchers who persisted in presenting their theories as acontextual, ignored the ideological agendas that actually shaped them. While representing these theories as sets of objective facts (universal standards against which all other beliefs, behaviors and institutions, regardless of time or place, could be measured), their proponents were actually engaging in ideological practices: The re-shaping of reality so as to perpetuate the particular values and interests of the prevailing social order of a certain time and place. This was the program of modern education, whereby pedagogical and therapeutic methods were systematically applied in order to indoctrinate the masses. In this way, anyone deviating from the accepted norm could be adjusted to the prevailing social order. This, Rank proposed, not only fulfilled an ideological agenda, but by purporting to make everyone alike, rationalized an even more basic spiritual need.

Supported by a seemingly universal psychology of human behavior, politicians and educators felt justified in molding and shaping the undefined masses according to their own purposes or ideals instead of frankly acknowledging and respecting their equal rights and chances as citizens. Since men are not alike and cannot actually be equal, psychology could at least explain them as alike with the more or less open purpose of making them alike–be it through an indoctrination of educational, therapeutic or political ideologies. In this bold enterprise, the duofold-or rather, three-fold aspect of psychology serves as a “utility tool”; as an expression of the mentality of a certain type it perpetuates this very type, hence, can finally be conveniently used to explain it. (1941/1958, p.31) Rank asserted that modern psychology, as the last of the rational science

ideologies, appeared promising at first, but ultimately proved inadequate, as well, in its attempts to use rational methods to control irrational human behavior. Instead, Rank warned that the exercise of this mentality had given undue weight to the artificial as against the natural, thus precipitating a backlash that had put the world on the verge of complete destruction.

IX. How Freud, Adler, and Jung misunderstood their therapeutic ideologies as absolute theories of the self

Rank believed that psychoanalysis started as a purely individual method of therapy, but developed into a static, abstract psychological theory. This presumably universal psychology consists not of absolute “facts,” but their interpretation according to the therapeutic ideology or social philosophy justified by the psychological system. Rank spoke of a fundamental confusion between theory and therapy in psychoanalysis: so-called “rational” theory was actually the disguised justification of ideological practices that furthered the agenda of the prevailing social order. Psychoanalysts conceived of therapy in terms of their ideological theory, which was actually an expression of their social philosophy (which they articulated as members of the established social order). Thus, they sought to cure neurotics in a so-called “rational” manner by adjusting them to the status quo.

About half a century ago, psychoanalysis started as a purely individual method of therapy and as such was helpful to a certain type of patient. The more Freud and his followers developed their therapeutic experience into a general psychological system, the more evident became the cleavage between this presumably universaltheory of psychological facts and its therapeutic use for the interpretation of the behavior of a certain type in terms of a specific social ideology. Hence, any deviation from the theoretically prescribed“norm”was soon called “neurotic,” even when it was not an outspoken illness but merely a matter of difference in temperament, character or social standards. (1941/1958, p. 28) Due to the fact that mortality caused fear of the irrational and the unknown,

psychoanalytic researchers, in attempts to mitigate thatfear dealtwith it ideologically in order to console themselves. They attack their fear intellectually, rationalizingit, and conceiving of it mechanistically, in terms of scientific explanation or theory. Analytic cure is understood to be intellectual understanding or insight; in particular, cure is thought to derive from making the unconscious conscious. That is to say, psychoanalysis is a process that renders the unconscious intelligible, controllable, and thus, acceptable to patient and therapist alike. Thus, they are led to understand it in a way that although putatively objective, is ideologically prejudiced, that is, in accordance with the unacknowledged social philosophy of psychoanalysis in its historical context.

To put it bluntly, in one sentence which shakes the foundation of the whole Freudian system and of psychology in general, for that matter: Freud, without knowing it, interpreted the analytical situation in terms of his world-view and did not, as he thought, analyze the individual’s unconscious objectively. Since he did not know the first and could not achieve the second, he really achieved neither of the two. (1941/1958, p. 278)

Rank believed that, through the above process, psychoanalysis had concealed its own ideological prejudices. Its so-called “theory” was actually ideological because it tried to make patients conform to certain normative standards by representing this process as curative. To add to the paradox, Rank then argued that the practice of psychoanalysis was treated as if it yielded objective, theoretical research: it was studied as if it was acontextual, that is, true in all times and places. This gave the knowledge gained through these practices the cachet ofscientific validity. “The therapeutic use of Freud’s rational ideology may be justifiable, inasmuch as it helps the patient, but becomes destructive as a general philosophy of life into which it has developed” (p. 277).

Rank believed Freud’s attempt to conquer the “inner”forces of human being, had been a particularly destructive one. By applying his deterministic analysis “to the personality itself,”Rank asserted, Freud, “deprived it of the very qualities which make man’s life human; autonomy, responsibility and conscience”(1941/1958, p. 34).

Modern psychology prescribes norms for human behavior, seeking to change this behavior in a certain direction so as to perpetuate the existing social order, of which it is an expression. It addresses deviant behavior by attempting to adjust it to the prevailing social norm, which it represents as the universal standard. It justifies the behavior of the political status quo by explaining it as universally valid.

This. . . leads to a general leveling of all human psychology to the common denominator of a neurotic world-view, according to which almost every manifestation of human thought and behavior has been labeled “pathological”or “abnormal,”except the psychology itself which is claimed as an unfailing standard. This standard is easily recognized as the rational self, in its most subtle guise, as the own ego’s self-revelation for the purpose of controlling the irrational self. Thus, in psychological terminology, the consciously controlled self from his rational point of view labels all irrational manifestations as “neurotic.”Hence, the term has been used, or rather, misused, in our present day as a convenient label by which to designate everything with which we do not agree, or of which we disapprove. In this sense, rationalistic psychology was only an outgrowth of the mentality of our age which is, or rather, was up to recently so highly rationalized that the irrational had only the neurotic form of expression. (1941/1958, pp. 288289)

The emergence of differences within the core group of the psychoanalytic movement: Freud’s thesis, Adler’s antithesis, and Jung’s synthesis. In an earlier section (point 6), it will be recalled, Rank juxtaposed theories of Darwin and Marx, showing how they represented the victors and victims of the industrial revolution, respectively. Rank argues that the theories of Freud and Adler have a similar relationship to one another.

“Freud, as is only too well-known, pronounced the sexual instinct the driving force in the individual, whereas Adler stressed the individual’s ego-drive for power, dominance and supremacy”(p. 29). What can account for this difference in view-points?, Rank asked, and then speculated:

It does not seem to me irrelevant that Adler, before he became interested in psychoanalysis, was a general practitioner in the poorer sections of Vienna and politically belonged to the Socialist Party. That all his patients suffered from an “inferiority complex,”whereas Freud’s cases seemed to be full of guilt, might very well have resulted from the fact that their respective clientele came from different classes. Be that as it may, the suffering from inferiority and the striving for dominance is unquestionably the psychology of a suppressed type, or under-dog. Freud’s conception of neurosis as a result of biological repression, on the other hand, virtually expresses the psychology of the “arrivist,”that is, the type who has used up his instinctual forces in order to gain power and maintain position. (pp. 29-30) In trying to reconcile Adler and Freud’s two discrepant theories, noted Rank, Jung

developed “his theory of two ‘psychological types,’the introvert and the extrovert.”In his synthesis, however, Jung depicted the two types in a static, abstract manner. Thus, just as he had criticized the Hegelian dialectic for failing to capture the interplay of spontaneous forces, so Rank impugned Jung for not recognizing “the social implications in the dynamic struggle of those opposing forces.”He suggested that “in real life the suppressed type may explode into action, that is, tend to become extrovert [sic], whereas the successful type is likely to develop a guilty conscience and on that basis become introspective”(p. 30).

That Freud’s psychology, being an interpretation rather than an explanation of human nature, was not valid for all races, Jung pointed out; that it did not apply to different social environments, Adler emphasized; but that it did not even permit individuals of the same race and social background to deviate from the accepted type led me beyond these differences in psychologies to a psychology of difference. (p. 29) Instead of trying to reconcile these different schools of psychological thought in the name of objective science, we should learn from recurring events that realistic psychology, as a living expression of the people, is changing as much as everything else is, and, furthermore, that it has to change in order to keep alive. Such a living psychology–which is not the one we study in the laboratory and learn from textbooks, but the one we ourselves have and practice in our daily life–can never be strictly scientific, that is, mechanistic; hence, can never be the absolute criterion for which it was taken and which we still seem to look for. It not only changes in time and place, but varies within one and the same civilization. (1941/1958, p. 26) Rank believed that when considered in historical context, these different

psychological theories expressed a practical, dynamic psychology of changing values. This living psychology reflected the ever-shifting strivings of the various personality-types of the early twentieth century, as expressed in their spontaneous and changing everyday cultural practices. As such, Rank thought they embodied a kind of historical or anthropological truth, but not one that was fixed or absolute.

What we actually find in practice is a variety of psychological theories sponsored by different leaders who accuse each other of not being scientific without realizing that their psychologies, as they have been interpreted and used in practice, are in reality ideologies representative of certain classes and types. Their “unscientific” aspect I believe to be their real value, inasmuch as they express vital needs and desires of a certain type or class within a certain period of time and a special environment. They outlived their significance when things changed, but they were useful in their time and place. (1941/1958, pp. 2627)In other words, These psychological theories themselves have to be explained as a part of the whole social system and understood as an expression of a certain type representing one particular layer of it. This makes intelligible the different schools of psychology we find, simultaneously, within one and the same cultural strata. Each of these contradictory systems claims to present the absolute truth, whereas in reality they represent different types, groups and classes, and register the shifting of human conditions along the lines of change. In that sense, theories of psychology change, one might almost say, like fashions, and are perforce compelled to change in order to express, as well as make intelligible, the existing type of man in his dynamic struggle for maintenance and perpetuation. (1941/1958, pp. 2728)

X. Feminine psychology and masculine ideology Throughout most of history, men have interpreted women in terms of their own

ideologies, while women have found ways of incorporating these masculine world views

in order to help navigate themselves through the variousmale-dominated civilizations.It has become a truism that man from time immemorial has imposed his masculine way of life upon woman, both individually and collectively. Traditions, likewise, seem to agree that woman not only willingly submitted to any man-made ideology which happened to prevail but was clever enough to assimilate it

and use it to her own advantage. (1941/1958, p. 235)

So Rank began the penultimate chapter of his book (“Feminine Psychology and Masculine Ideology”). He went on to state the less obvious corollary to this premise; “that man, while imposing his mentality on woman, usurped some of her vital functions and thus unwittingly took on some of her genuine psychology, differing fundamentally from his own masculine ideology”(p. 235). He unconsciously appropriatedsome of the positive qualities of female psychology, particularly in the Christian “conception of Agape [which] revived the vital principle of woman-love which had been lost in Antiquity”(p. 235).This enabled him to take advantage of this “female”version of love, without having to suffer the hindrances of her second-class status.

Rank claimed that Freud, along with other psychological theorists since Nietzsche, had tended to create psychologies that were “masculine”in nature, in the sense that they advocated a “rational utilization of suppressed energies”in order to gain “strength and power, in a word, manly qualities”(p. 37), or “Eros.”Therefore, Rank argued, it was not a surprise that feminine psychology was generally defined negatively in terms of its deficiencies as measured by masculine standards.The different psychologies which, by the very fact of their existence, prove that man did not even succeed in explaining all men alike, seem to agree in their attempt to explain woman as merely lacking in, or having qualities differing from, masculine characteristics. Adler’s“masculine protest” and Freud’s“castration-complex” are attitudes indicative of that masculinized psychology which puts all difference on a sexual basis. (p. 37)

Feminine psychology, Rank concluded, although seldom explicitly articulated in the course of normal events, could be characterized by a positive form of acquiescence: “a desire for yielding and surrender manifested in the need to be loved”(p. 174). This is in contrast to Freud’s system, where “the woman can only express her personality–professionally or otherwise–in the thwarted form of neurotic symptoms which, though easily explained, cannot be ‘cured’bythe further interpretation of a masculine psychology” (p. 268). Rather than seeing only the pathological aspects of this trait, and labeling it “neurotic,” “perverse, or “masochistic,”as did Freud (p. 186), Rank noted that often “this yearning for surrender was not a defeatist attitude, a negative giving-up”(pp. 174-175). In its affirmative aspects, it could be described as “a voluntary yielding in and to love”(p. 175): “the positive affirmation of the will wanting to surrender to something bigger that the Self”(p. 190).

Such self-surrender of the will affords for its understanding a totally different

psychology from that of the grabbing and possessive Eros, from which the

individual will originally springs. In that respect, Eros is willing selfishly and

greedily, whereas Agape is willing universally, that is, as a part of nature. (p. 190)

Although most of history is characterized by male domination supported by the social institutions of patriarchal societies, Rank’s studies led him to the theory that preceding these masculinized cultures, there had been matriarchal ones, in which women played the predominant role. Remnants of these more female-dominated cultures can be found in later male-dominated ones. For example, “In Greek civilization, . . . the original mother-goddess was finally replaced by the masculine ideal of the self-created hero”(p. 235).

In the Bible, in the book of Genesis, there is, of course, the story of creation, with its male and female protagonists: Adam and Eve. Rank notes a lesser known, earlier version of this story, fragments of which still exist alongside the more widely known later version. Whereas in the latter, Eve represents “a masculinized reversion of the fact that man is born of mortal woman”(p. 236), the female protagonist in the older version is named Lilith, and hearkens back to “the independent strong woman of pre-familial matriarchal organization who draws her strength and self-reliance from motherhood”(p. 250).

Due to ideological prejudices, discussions that attempt to delineate positive differences between men and women as generic groups inevitably become confounded with moralistic judgments. Traditionally, in the vast majority of societies, and in our modern Western civilization almost exclusively, women have been suppressed and dominated by men, who are granted privileged status in their communities. Because of the prevailing ideological prejudices that favor men, moral values of “good” and “bad,”–and in scientific terminology, “rational”and “irrational”have become associated with “masculine” and “feminine”respectively. Thus, qualities generally more often found in women, such as the ability to more freely express ones emotions, have been considered irrational, while abstract thinking and the instrumental manipulation of objects, traditionally thought to be masculine traits–have been labeled rational. “From the point of view of man’s rational psychology,” declared Rank, “‘feminine’ traits of emotionalism appear ‘irrational,’whereas in reality they represent human qualities of a positive nature”(p. 241).

Our social standards and values concerning masculine and feminine traits have

become inextricably bound up with our moral notions of good and bad. According

to this moral code, which Western man set up by interpreting nature in moral

terms, masculinity became identified with strength, power, if not creativity–in a

word, goodness; whereas femininity designates silliness, weakness, if not

wickedness–in a word, badness. (p. 241)

Rank saw the need for “a new evaluation beyond our moral classification of masculine and feminine which shall take into account the more fundamental difference concerning the functioning of the will in the personality of the two sexes.”Toward that end, he started with the basic hypothesis that “whereas man’s will in its free expression is simply ‘wanting,’inwoman’spsychology we meet the paradoxical will-phenomenon of wanting to be wanted”(p. 241). “There always was and still is a woman-psychology, which has not only remained unrecognized throughout the ages but has been misinterpreted religiously, socially, and psychologically in terms of masculine ideologies”(p. 241).

At present, to define what is meant by “masculine”or “feminine,” respectively, is

bound to lead to hopeless confusion, as we see in the cultural school of anthropology, unless it is conceived of on a broader basis than that given by biological facts, psychological interpretations or even cultural patterns of specific civilizations. It is, in the last analysis, as in all problems of difference, a question of two different world-views, two opposite attitudes toward life, springing from the prevalence of either the rational or irrational tendencies in the human being. (pp. 37-38)

XI. A psychology of difference: Rank’s “algebra” of cultural practices

At the beginning of the second chapter of Beyond Psychology, “The Double as Immortal Self,”Rank offers the essence of his “broader conception of personality,”and its implications for the study of human behavior:

Civilized man does not act only upon the rational guidance of his intellectual ego

nor is he driven blindly by the mere elemental forces of his instinctual self.

Mankind’s civilization, and with it the various types of personality representing

and expressing it, has emerged from the perpetual operation of a third principle

[italics added], which combines the rational and irrational elements in a world-

view based on the conception of the supernatural. (1941/1958, p. 62)

The third principle: variations on a theme by Kant. Here, Rank, without citing him, was drawing on a theme that Kant expounded in various ways throughout a number of his works–the idea of a “third principle,”or“term,”which provides the basis by which two seemingly opposed principles are united in a higher synthesis. In his explication of the categorical imperative, Kant’s ultimate test for the morality of our actions, this concept plays a prominent role.

In Kant’s system, the categorical imperative provides the justification for practical reason, which Kant distinguishes from theoretical reason, the subject of his first critique. It was there, in the Critique of Pure Reason, that Kant first discusses the “antinomy of freedom and necessity.”This addresses the problem that, with regard to our actions, the idea of free will seems to conflict with that of determinism. He concludes there that this apparent contradiction is really an illusion, based “on our conceiving man in one sense and relationship when we call him free and in another when we consider him, as a part of nature, to be subject to nature’slaws”(Kant, 1785/1964,p. 124). Exposing this illusion kept speculative reason intact, thus justifying its continued use in its proper realm of scientific theory (where it allows us to represent objects). In addition, however, solving the problem in this way, “clear[ed] a path for practical philosophy”(p. 124), which Kant took up in the Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (1785/1964) and then further elaborated in the Critique of Practical Reason (1788/1997).

In the course of his discussion at the beginning of the second chapter of Beyond Psychology, Rank refers to the antinomy concept (once again, without citing Kant as its originator, however), noting the “conflicting strivings between the two selves, manifested as the antimony [sic] of acting or ‘thinking and feeling’”(Rank, 1941/1958, pp. 65-66). These “two selves”coincide with the first two principles that Rank articulated in the quote I am examining, where neither principle by itself suffices to explain human behavior: “Civilized man does not act only upon the rational guidance of his intellectual ego [principle #1,] nor is he driven blindly by the mere elemental forces of his instinctual self [principle #2].”

In his explanation of the categorical imperative, Kant presents his two principles in a similar manner:

If I were solely a member of the intelligible world, all my actions would be in

perfect conformity with the principle of autonomy of a pure will [principle #1]; if

I were solely a part of the sensible world, they would have to be taken as in

complete conformity with the law of nature governing desires and inclinations-

that is, with the heteronomy of nature [principle #2]. (Kant, 1785/1964, p. 121)

A practical (as opposed to theoretical) conception or idea: a symbol for the creation of culture. Kant’s first principle, the “principle of morality,”emphasizes that moral laws must be made in accordance with formal principles, as if they were universal laws of nature. This allows our intellect to conceive of moral laws in a pure form, providing it with rational guidance. Kant’s second principle, the “principle of happiness,”refers to the raw, unorganized “needs and inclinations”of human beings, and in this sense represents the blind drivenness of irrational matter. Kant then introduces his third principle, which serves to resolve the apparent contradiction between the first two principles. It does this by combining the other two principles, those of“form” and“matter,” to create one total concept that includes both. He calls this the “concept of an intelligible world.”Kant sums up how this all ties together:

The intelligible world contains the ground of the sensible world and therefore also of its laws; and so in respect of my will, for which (as belonging entirely to the intelligible world) it gives laws immediately, it must also be conceived as containing such a ground. Hence, in spite of regarding myself from one point of view as a being that belongs to the sensible world, I shall also have to recognize that, qua intelligence, I am subject to the law of the intelligible world–that is, to the reason which contains this law in the Idea of freedom, and so to the autonomy of the will–and therefore I must look on the laws of the intelligible world as imperatives for me and on the actions which conform to this principle as duties. (Kant 1785/1964, p. 121) The intelligible world, or“kingdom of ends,”as Kant also referred to it, is the

symbol of a community that operates under moral laws. Members of this community relate to one another with mutual respect, inasmuch as each citizen is also the author of the laws he is bound to obey. As merely an idea, however, this community does not actually exist; unlike a material object, it cannot be accurately depicted in theoretical terms. Rather, it “is a point of view which reason finds itself constrained to adopt outside appearances in order to conceive itself as practical” (Kant, 1785/1964, p. 126).

Only the practical can provide us with the means for going beyond the sensible world and provide cognitions of a supersensible order and connection, which, however, just because it can be extended only so far as is directly necessary for pure practical purposes. (Kant, 1788/1997, p. 88) This “point of view,”a“practical perspective,”has Kant’s third, or supersensible

principle as its basis. This parallels Rank’s“worldview based on the conception of the supernatural.” Whereas Kant’s supersensible principle had combined rational form and irrational matter (principle #1 and principle #2), in order to adopt a point of view for practical purposes, Rank’s“third principle. . . combines the rational and irrational elements [principle #1 and principle #2] in a world-view based on the conception of the supernatural.”

Rank’s perpetually operating third principle leads to the co-emergence of civilization, or, as he also calls it, “culture,”as well as “personalities.” “Culture”(Kant, 1788/1997, p. 319) and “personality”are also terms used by Kant, with very similar connotations. Kant spoke of personality with particular reverence, describing how it

elevates a human being above himself. . . [and] connects him with an order of things that only the understanding can think and at the same time has under it the whole sensible world and with it the empirically determined existence of human beings in time and the whole of all ends. (Kant, 1788/1997, p. 74) What was Rank’s “broader conception of personality?“The ego represents what

may be called reason and common sense, in contrast to the id, which contains the passions,”Sigmund Freud succinctly states, in The Ego and the Id (1961, p. 25). His “pleasure principle,”as represented by the id, obviously coincides with Kant’s“happiness principle,”but, more interestingly, Freud calls the principle coinciding with Kant’s “morality principle,”the“reality principle,”thus conflating moral values with objective facts. In contrast to this, Rank’s“spiritual principle”is not only analagous to Kant’s“supersensible principle,”it counters Freud’s dualistic scheme of ego and id, with the dynamic causality of the creative will.

Kant’s third principle solves the apparent contradiction between the first two

principles–the “antinomy of freedom and necessity,”without upsetting the rationality, and in turn, internal consistency of his entire system. Rank, however, solves this antinomy differently. Rather than retaining the rational will, he instead embraces its irrationality–the creative expression of the total personality–in order to dynamically balance thinking and feeling, through a more complete experiencing. Rank believed that human behavior could not, nor should not, be strictly determined. He developed the idea of his spiritual principle, in order to make room for creative growth. This allows constructive developments of the individual will, that aspect of our own nature that cannot be controlled by our minds. This is exemplified by spontaneous social change, as well as by individual self-development that tends toward growth and differentiation.

In his most mature presentation, as stated in Beyond Psychology, Rank spoke of a “dynamic conception [that] makes room for the developing and functioning of the individual’s own will as the most constructive factor in the therapeutic movement” (1941/1958, p. 50). In introducing it this way, he placed less emphasis on the subjectivity of the agent, depicting it instead as something which must be given room to grow and develop. It is “an autonomous organizing force in the individual which does not represent any particular biological impulse or social drive but constitutes the creative expression of the total personality and distinguishes one individual from another”(p. 50).

Rank used what he called an “algebraic”approach (1941/1958, p. 64): He worked with variables, rather than constants; dynamic values, rather than absolute ones. He viewed social institutions and their personalities as interrelated structures that continually co-emerge as concrete symbols of the spiritual values of a particular civilization. With this algebraic approach, he found a way to examine the general form in which human beings construct civilization, as well as the fundamental motives for them to do so–the how and why of culture. Yet, he did this without resorting to a method which might privilege any one specific culture over another. With each worldview, human life is carried forward through the mixing of rational and irrational elements in meaningful

ways. In an earlier work, Truth and Reality (1929/1936), Rank retraced how he had

come to develop his algebraic method. He described how he had been ledto another kind of methodology of treatment and presentation. While in “The Trauma of Birth,”I proceeded from a concrete experience in the analytic situation and its new interpretation, and as in “Der Kunstler”strove to broaden it into the universally human and cultural, my present conception just reversed is based on the universally human–yes, if you will, on the cosmic idea of soul, and seeks to assemble all its expressions in the focal point of the separate individuality. (p. 2) In Art and Artist (1931/1932), as well, Rank described this new way of

generalizing the trends in the growth and development of the human will, this time with

regard to its creative manifestations in artistic achievements.In this presentation, we have on the one hand to put the collective cultural factor influencing the ideology of art on a far broader basis than has heretofore been the case–that is, on the general human basis; and on the other hand we have to aim at a spiritual comprehension of these collective ideologies, which will only be made possible by going beyond the limits of the scientific absolutism that characterizes our modern psychology. (1931/1932, pp. xiv-xv) Rank’s new method, he explained, tries “first, to reveal the human creative impulse,

broadly and genetically, and then to arrive at an understanding of its specifically artistic manifestations through their cultural development and spiritual significance.”This is because “the human urge to create does not find expression in works of art alone: it also produces religion and mythology and the social institutions corresponding to these. In a word, it produces the whole culture”(p. xiii).

Rank did this so as to not privilege any one cultural viewpoint over others. He attempted instead to resolve these points of dissension “in a higher synthesis.” For the difficulties arising out of conflicting opinions are, in many cases, only

apparent, and due to the attempt of a biased individual to explain things according

to personal prejudices, such as, for instance, the superiority of a particular style or

the eminence of a particular race over all others. (p. xiv)

Dynamic dualism and the linking of theory with practice: a practical psychology of difference. Rank refined his distinction between absolutist theories, and the changing practices in which we are engaged in our everyday lives, culminating in his concept of “dynamic dualism,”as he expressed it in Beyond Psychology. There, he expounded a view which emphasized psychological theories as rooted in the vicissitudes of lived experience. Thus, theory and practice became inextricably linked.

Dynamic dualism is concerned with the ever-changing meanings of our communal practices, as they pass through the changing sociohistorical contexts in which they are embedded. In this way, it provides a corrective to the mechanistic theories of the social sciences, embracing the basic irrationality of human beings by allowing room for its vital operation through the practices of everyday living.

In order to properly understand traditions, they must be experienced spontaneously through participation in the present. Although these values may become absolutized by the status quo, they can only be applied in a practical situation in the present, where change and difference can be taken into account. Thus, “there operates simultaneously with the traditional psychology of character which is taught, another more realistic one which has to be learned from spontaneous developments and applied to one’s own change as well as to the changing of others”(1941/1958, p. 20).

Rank believed that the spiritual values passed down through cultural traditions are repeatedly lost over time because of ideological rationalizations. These truths can only be rediscovered through the constant re-framing of our theories, so as to make room for the irrational in our lives–creative experience that occurs spontaneously in the present, and cannot be captured by any absolute method. This creative experiencing is a “heroic enterprise”that requires tremendous courage, for such an undertaking is not only painful, but self-sacrificing, as well. It demands that we dare go “outside the classroom,”in order to expose ourselves to “living forces outside the established social order”(pp. 20-21).

In facing our ultimate fears, not merely intellectually, but in how we experience our lives, there is the potential for converting it “into the active expression of new values” (p.15). These “new”values are not really new, but ancient traditional ones that, although intrinsic to our being, have been shut out by modern civilization. Rank called for “a re-discovery of the natural self of man”; in other words, he asserted the need to return to the natural self as contextual and dynamic–as inherently relational, rather than detached from his or her environment. He also affirmed the necessity “to discover new values in place of the old ones which seem to be crumbling before our very eyes–vital human values, not mere psychological interpretations predetermined by our preferred ideologies”(p. 14). He called this “the vital need for spiritual values”(p. 62), and urged that rather than rejecting “irrational life forces as belonging to our primitive past [we recognize] them in our present spiritual needs”(p. 63).

Discussion In the last chapter, I attempted to characterize Rank’s most mature position with regard to psychoanalysis’s understanding of itself (as well as that of psychology, at large, and even that of all of the human sciences), as he outlined it in Beyond Psychology. I did so by conceiving of this most completely developed Rankian viewpoint in terms of eleven main points (see chapter three. pp. 30-95). In this final chapter, I discuss the implications of these ideas, particularly, when examined in the light of philosophical hermeneutics, as presented by Hans-Georg Gadamer in Truth and Method (1960/1989), and other writings. Most of Rank’s critics argued that Rank’s Beyond Psychology demonstrated his final intellectual decline, which they attributed to various causes, ranging from manic-depression to economic opportunism. However, by describing the similarities between Rank and Gadamer, I have shown in this study that Rank’s post-Freudian perspective, rather than indicative of a decline in scientific thinking, instead amounted to an alternative way of approaching psychology and the human sciences; it was part of an intellectual movement that has emerged as a leading force in European and American universities.

Implications of the eleven points of Beyond Psychology. Rank believed that psychoanalytic practitioners, in their dual roles as researchers and therapists, had misunderstood their own practices. By viewing their practices as rational and scientific, these practitioners distorted what actually took place in the course of their work. Far from being benign, these distortions often had dire consequences. Rank attempted to illustrate how modern psychology–or more broadly, the psychological frame prominent in Western society–as exemplified by Freud’s theory and its offshoots, was pushing the world towards an ever-increasing level of destructiveness. By not allowing a cultural space in which a difference in moral values could be creatively and constructively expressed, hatred was being cultivated. This was manifested on the social plane by the violence of war and revolution, and on the individual plane by the self-destructiveness of proliferating neuroses. By developing a corrective to this distortive mode of self-understanding, Rank hoped to open a space for creative solutions.

Psychology is not teachable: self-development as practice. In his post-Freudian conception, as set forth in Beyond Psychology (1941/1958), Rank viewed psychoanalysis’s self-understanding–a scientific, universally applicable theory of human behavior–as fundamentally distorted. Rather than being perfectly rational or objective, Rank thought that psychoanalysis expressed the desires and needs of a specific mentality–the “bourgeois”type–within a particular social context, at a certain time in history. Thus, argued Rank, psychoanalysis was an ideology–not a natural science of the self. As such, it could not supply objective methods with which either to explain or to educate human beings. Although it claimed to be neutral, psychoanalysis was moral and, in the hermeneutic sense, highly prejudiced. It justified, as well as promulgated the values of the status quo, and thus was “the climax of man’s self-rationalization”(1941/1958, p. 15), under the guise of being objective.

Rank emphasized that, no matter what disguise it took on over the ages, psychology never lost its “practical aspect, that is, the tendency to control and direct other people’s actions”(1941/1958, p. 44). Psychology, in other words, is not a neutral, academic theory, but concerns the moral practices of human beings. Whereas in primitive cultures, this practical aspect invoked supernatural forces, and thus was considered magical,

In modern times, it is rehabilitated through psycho-therapy as a kind of “white magic,”promising to “cure” everything in the other which we dislike. Here our therapeutic psychology of the neurotic betrays its deceptive character by making all psychology appear “teachable,”like Socrates’virtues. On a large scale, however, such “education”can only be attempted by violence whereby the opposing groups–whatever they may represent–accuse each other of being irrational, while their leaders pretend to have rationalized their needs and demands. (Rank, 1941/1958,

p. 44)

Rank disagreed with the philosophic tradition in Western society, characterized by Socrates and Plato (or at least, by the traditional interpretations of their ideas), and more recently by Freud, that conceived of morality in universal terms, thus making it teachable. “The rationalistic slogan of Socrates that virtue can be taught and that self-knowledge is healing appears revived in Freud’s therapeutic conviction that truth in and by itself is curative”(1941/1958, p. 279). Just as virtue cannot be taught, cautioned Rank, it is not the intellectual knowledge of“truth”that is curative in psychotherapy. In this sense, psychology is not teachable.

In other words, Rank argued that psychology, both as research and psychotherapy, is a moral practice. Although its prevailing norms and standards can be taught intellectually, in its spontaneous development, it must be lived. Similarly, it is not intellectual understanding, or “truth”in the abstract, that is curative in therapy, but the act of experiencing the creative development of the self, as this unfolds in the practical context of a therapeutic relationship with an other.

Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Philosophical Hermeneutics: Hermeneutics is not teachable. Rank’s conception of a “psychology of difference” shares many similarities with the philosophical hermeneutics of HansGeorg Gadamer. Gadamer saw his practical philosophy of hermeneutic dialogue as a corrective to the monological, absolute methods typically employed in the social sciences of today. In Truth and Method (1960/1989, p. 312), he introduced Aristotle’s concept of phronesis in order to demonstrate its relevance for hermeneutics. Phronesis involves making moral decisions in a particular historical context, (i.e., Heidegger’s “readytohand” process [see Packer 1985, p. 1083]), by way of participating in the social practices specific to that era. This creates a situation which cannot be reduced to a formalized application of hypotheticodeductive reasoning (i.e., Heidegger’s “present-at-hand”process [see Packer 1985, p. 1084]).

In the course of his discussion of Aristotle’s phronesis, Gadamer, like Rank, contrasted Plato’s theory of virtue with Aristotle’s practice of ethics.

By circumscribing the intellectualism of Socrates and Plato in his inquiry into the

good, Aristotle became the founder of ethics as a discipline independent of metaphysics. . . . His critique demonstrates that the equation of virtue and knowledge, arete and logos, which is the basis of Plato and Socrates’ theory of virtue, is an exaggeration. . . . The very name“ethics”indicates that Aristotle bases arete on practice and “ethos.”(1960/1989, p. 312) Gadamer recapitulated this argument in a recent essay, “Reflections on my

Philosophical Journey”(1997), while distinguishing between two different kinds of practices–those which are the merely the technical application of theories, or “techne,”as against those which are primary modes of living, or “phronesis.”

For Aristotle, practical and political knowing represent a fundamentally different type of knowing than all the teachable forms of knowledge and their “practical” applications. It is this practical knowledge which, in reality, assigns and opens the space for each scientifically grounded capacity to do things. . . . Whoever believes that science, thanks to its indisputable competence, can serve as a substitute for practical reason and political reason, misunderstands the real conditions under which human beings have to organize and design human life. Only practical wisdom is capable of employing science, like all human capacities, in a responsible way. (Gadamer, 1997, pp. 56-57) In making a distinction between theoretical and practical methods, and giving

primacy to practice, Gadamer allowed science to be placed back into the moral framework from which it has been wrenched. In this way, scientists can become more aware of the societal “conversations”of which they are already a part.

Parallels between Gadamer’s hermeneutics and Rank’s psychology: the neurotic cannot be cured “rationally.” In Rank’s view, Freud tried to study, as well as cure, neurotics by rationalizing them in terms of his natural science ideology, but this one-sided research was an alienated form of a more complete conversation–a would-be dialogue that was reduced to a monologue on the part of the researcher. “To ‘understand’ him, as psychoanalysis rationally attempts to do,” Rank asserted, “is merely to mis-interpret him, because his whole being rebels against the over-rationalization of which psychology represent our last futile attempt”(p. 49). Freud wanted to understand neurotics (and in turn, wanted neurotics to understand themselves) “rationally,”but by not allowing them to give voice to their irrational selves, argued Rank, Freud unwittingly forced them to conform to the prevailing social order.

But just as much as the hero, so the frustrated neurotic of our day wants to live,

i.e. not merely to understand but also to express, his irrational self; whereas the rational type of the therapist, because he is fearful of life, can only understand. (Beyond Psychology, 1941/1958, p. 279) Rank believed that modern neurotics were suffering from alienation, having

become detached and isolated from the cultural traditions that formerly provided them with a sense of unity with the cosmos. Psychoanalysis, he argued, rather than helping neurotics to reconnect with their traditions, actually further alienated them from their traditions. Instead of allowing them to experience the spiritual significance of their past by actualizing it in the present, psychoanalysis “historicized” their past, setting it apart from their immediate experience. Thus, the spiritual values of the past became rationalized over time, leaving the rebellious hero to discover them anew.

According to Rank, Freud reduced these spiritual values by rationalizing them into the concept of sexual impulses, Adler rationalized them into the concept of social affiliation, and Jung rationalized them into the concept of racial collectivity. “In this sense,” noted Rank,

Psychology is searching for a substitute for the cosmic unity which the man of Antiquity enjoyed in life and expressed in his religion, but which modern man has lost–a loss which accounts for the development of the neurotic type. (1941/1958,

p. 37)

Further parallels between Gadamer and Rank: history cannot be studied “rationally.”

Gadamer looked at aesthetic consciousness and historical consciousness as two alienated forms of a more complete encounter with tradition. By using natural scientific methods to study art and history, he believed that the immediate truths they revealed in people’s lives were diminished or lost. This led him to re-examine the prereflective ways in which they had been experienced.

The inherited forms of consciousness that we have acquired historically in our education–what we call “aesthetic consciousness” and “historical consciousness”–represent only alienated forms of our true historical being. The unique, originary experiences that are mediated through art and history cannot be grasped within these alienated forms. The tranquil distance from which a consciousness conditioned by the usual middle-class education enjoyed its cultural privileges does not take into account how much of ourselves must come into play and is at stake when we encounter works of art and studies of history. (1997, p. 27)By making us aware that we have already “come into play,”Gadamer allows us to

look at the reciprocal, as well as conflicting movements of the various human “players.” We may be seekers of knowledge, but even more significantly, we are participants in being, who have real effects on those with whom we interact, even as they affect us.

The event character of understanding. Rather than merely gathering knowledge in a detached way from the sidelines, Rank was a proponent of engaged action on the part of the human researcher. He believed that he or she best sought meaning through participation in ongoing events. Thus, rather than prescribing a specific, disengaged method of research, Rank advocated “an actual living in and with the flow of events, following its changing currents as we swim along fully aware of its dangerous under-currents”(1941/1958, p. 18).

Gadamer, as well, thought of understanding as an event, as opposed to something achieved through an objective, removed method:

Understanding is to be thought of less as a subjective act than as participating in

an event of tradition, a process of transmission in which past and present are constantly mediated. This is what must be validated by hermeneutic theory, which is far too dominated by the idea of a procedure, a method.. (1960/1989, p. 290) Gadamer critiqued the hermeneutical consciousness of Schleiermacher and

Dilthey, whose conceptions of epistemological hermeneutics as a universally applicable method “psychologizes” a more complete conversation by trying to understand the intentions of the conversationalists, rather than the cultural-historical frame that brings to light the subject-matter they are discussing. In order to keep the dialogue in better balance, Gadamer, in his philosophical hermeneutics, conceived of a more complete conversation emulating real experience. In this sense, epistemological hermeneutics can be seen as a dialogue reduced to a monologue–an alienated, truncated version of philosophical hermeneutics.

In order to get beyond the idea of self-consciousness as the ground of understanding, Gadamer suggested that understanding has a dialogical structure that is better captured by the notion of “Spiel,”that is, play, or the game.

So I sought in my hermeneutics to overcome the primacy of self-consciousness, and especially the prejudices of an idealism rooted in consciousness, by referring to the mode of “game or play”[Spiel]. For when one plays a game, the game itself is never a mere object; rather, it exists in and for those who play it, even if one is only participating as a “spectator.”(Gadamer, 1997, p. 27) The dialogue–and the rules of the game–plays the participants as much as they

play it. Dynamic dualism and the hermeneutic circle. By emphasizing the

hermeneutic circle, theorists mean the hermeneutic circle is notvicious, because the relationship between part and whole are [sic] not entirely determinate. The part-whole dialectic is dynamic; it always includes the possibility that additional readings of specific examples of the subject of interest will require shifts in the overall interpretation or that a better articulation of the global perspective will lead to alterations and improvements in the partial readings. (Richardson, Fowers, & Guignon, 1999, p. 303) In describing the part-whole dialectic as “dynamic,”Guignon has used a similar

argument to the one Rank made against Hegel (and which Gadamer used as well, when he sought “to restore to a place of honor what Hegel termed ‘bad infinity’” [Gadamer, 1997,

p. 37]). Rank criticized the “predominance of thought”that reverts “to the dialectical interpretation of events instead of realizing the dynamic interplay of living forces behind this logical method of thinking”(1941/1958, p. 22). Rank might say that there can be no “theory”of the hermeneutic circle without considering the ongoing “practices” that dynamically form and change it.

In Gadamer’s description of the hermeneutic circle, he makes a similar observation

as to why the circle cannot be theoretical, methodological, or formal: The circle, then, is not formal in nature. It is neither subjective nor objective, but describes understanding as the interplay of the movement of tradition and the movement of the interpreter. The anticipation of meaning that governs our understanding of a text is not an act of subjectivity, but proceeds from the commonality that binds us to the tradition. But this commonality is constantly being formed in our relation to tradition. Tradition is not simply a permanent precondition; rather, we produce it ourselves inasmuch as we understand, participate in the evolution of tradition, and hence further determine it ourselves. Thus the circle of understanding is not a “methodological” circle, but describes an element of the ontological structure of understanding. (1960/1989, p. 293) Just like the hermeneutic circle, Rank’s dynamic dualism is ontological rather than

methodological. It is a pre-existing, self-correcting aspect of our everyday existence, and cannot provide us with objective truth. Rather than a source of anguish, however, this is what gives the spring to life.

Instead of striving for a onesided, that is, absolute solution–which in practice

would mean stagnation–we should realize that a dynamic dualism operates in the

human being as a force of balance and not only as a source of conflict.

(1941/1958, p. 21)

Summary. Rank’s break with Freud has generally been portrayed in a way that is disparaging to Rank. Psychoanalytic scholars, if they have even read his post-Freudian writings, consider his ideas to be rambling and increasingly unscientific, while non-psychoanalytic researchers often present Rank’s concepts in a simplistic manner. What is lacking–indeed sorely lacking–in the literature is an accounting of Rank’s later ideas that puts them into a broad, historical perspective. This is something that perhaps could only occur with a certain passage of time, and a shifting of prejudices on the part of researchers.

By using an interpretive, hermeneutical approach to study Rank’s ideas, I hoped to make some sense of what is often regarded as nonsensical, if regarded at all. I chose to look at Rank’s final and uncompleted work, Beyond Psychology, a dense multidisciplinary examination of psychology, soul-belief, collective ideologies, and culture, by taking some of his material, and dividing it into eleven major points.

Rank contended that human behavior has irrational roots, which throughout history have been repeatedly forgotten, only to be re-discovered. The spiritual beliefs which sustain human practices are often disguised, but their influence in the form of prevailing collective ideologies continues to live on. The primordial belief is that of a soul; an immortality symbol that allows mortal human beings to achieve immortality. With the increasing complexity of social organization, spiritual values become concretized in the form of social institutions, requiring multiple participants over time to pass on and contribute to their effects.

The modern Western personality has emerged through a cultural heritage as expressed via social practices that were designed to maintain certain spiritual values. Magical soul-belief became religious, and Paul, via Christianity, and its hero Jesus, launched the prototype of the modern self. With the French Revolution, many traditional values were over-turned, but others were rationalized, and took on new forms. Science gained prominence over religion, and later, philosophy, but science, too, fostered values that it denied, understanding itself to gather indisputable facts, while disguising other agendas.

Freud’s psychoanalysis came on the scene as a therapy to help troubled individuals, but became a universal theory of the self. What Freud and his followers did not see, but Rank understood all too well, was that this ostensibly absolute science of the self disguised the ideology of the successful type of the time, the “self-sufficient,” bourgeois personality, whom Immanuel Kant had unwittingly championed earlier, also thinking he was dealing with a universal self. In this way, it unwittingly adjusted deviates to the prevailing social order.

Rank concluded that, in the course of pursuing its practices, both theoretical and therapeutic, psychoanalysis had distorted what actually occurred. By denying and disguising its own ideology, it confused “theory”with “therapy,”invoking theoretical methods, in an attempt to study people objectively. At the same time, it considered these same theoretical methods to be therapeutic, attributing any consoling effects of psychotherapy to their “educative”applications.

Rank’s most developed post-Freudian ideas bear a remarkable resemblance to the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer. Gadamer, as well, argued that science has misunderstood itself in its self-concept. Similar to Rank, he declared the primacy of practice over theory, valorized engagement over detachment, and advocated the importance of bringing prejudices into awareness, so that they could more forthrightly be addressed, and their “truths”experienced. In his emphasis on conversation and dialogue, as well as on“play,”he counteracted the modern overemphasis of individualism, and by so doing, allowed for creative growth to take place.

In light of these findings about Rank’s ideas, his work in relation to Freud should be re-examined. When Rank left the psychoanalytic movement in the 1920′s, a potentially fruitful conversation came to an abrupt halt, or rather, was replaced by mutual vitriol. The time to renew such a conversation among therapists and researchers, alike, however, is long overdue. By reminding therapists that they are not only part of the therapy, but representatives, wittingly or not, of the prevailing social order, Rank’s approach provides a sociohistorical context to what is often considered an individualistic enterprise. And by cautioning researchers that, they too, are unable to remove themselves from history, and as a result are very much“part of the conversation,”Rank’s way of thinking encourages researchers to be a conscious, rather than an unconscious part, of what they are researching.

Rank’s work was not the isolated ravings of an obtuse and idiosyncratic madman, who failed to conform to the scientific standards of the psychoanalytic movement. Nor was it merely the product of the personal crisis of an erudite author, an artistic, literary effort that carries no specific social relevance . It can more fittingly be understood as a part of an intellectual movement that has become triumphant both in European and U.S. universities. Postmodernism has swept through a great many humanities and social science departments and has profoundly influenced several modes of psychotherapy, most especially psychoanalysis. In fact hermeneutics (and especially Gadamerian hermeneutics), as a type of postmodernism, is thought by some (see Cushman, 1995, 2001; Stern, 1997) to be the most promising influence in the recently emerging school of Relational Psychoanalysis.

In this study I have shown how Rank’s later ideas fit well with the mid-century hermeneutics of Heidegger and Gadamer. In fact, Rank’s ideas must have been a reflection of the same stream of innovative, early twentieth century Continental philosophy. Far from burying Rank, mainstream psychoanalysis has itself been increasingly informed by the very intellectual movement of which Rank was an unknown member. In 1939, when Rank published Beyond Psychology, Heidegger’s Being and Time had been recently published (1927), but Gadamer’s Truth and Method would not be available in Europe until 1960 and in the U.S. until 1975.

Far from a ranting manic-depressive, or an opportunistic huckster, Rank can be seen as an innovative genius, who far outstripped the rigid and self-righteous analysts who criticized him so vehemently. The sad story of Freud’s split with Rank thus becomes another in the long and distinguished line of history’s great ironies: the despised, dispossessed outcast turns out to have been right, all along. Unfortunately, Rank died without witnessing his own vindication. Neither he nor his contemporaries could know the extent of his foresight. But, 62 years after his death, we can.

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Psychologist and Philosopher (1884 Vienna -- 1939 New York)

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