Every time I start an essay on this very provocative and controversial subject matter of 'Freud's and Masson's Seduction Theory Controversy', I keep looking for more and more interpretive and evaluative clarity, first in myself, and second in the way I convey my thinking to you -- I start in essentially the same place and end up up traveling to, and finishing up, somewhere completely, or at least partly different.
Today is no different.
The biggest problem is that I have so many different issues and ideas and theories swirling around inside my head on this subject matter that it is very hard to present one small essay, in concise format, with one small thesis, that starts at point A and ends at point B -- without bringing in points C,D,E,F,G,H,I, J, and K -- at the same time, or at least at some point along our path, preferrably sooner than later, if all of these different points and/or theories are totally relevant and pertinant to our discussion at hand.
So somehow or another, I have to be able to clearly explain to you how points and/or theories C,D,E,F,G,H, I, J, and K -- are all critically important to clearly understanding the very complex problem and controversial subject matter at hand, meaning, in this case, the very complicated and mirky Seduction Theory Controversy on the one hand, and even more complicated, the whole foundation of Psychoanalysis on the other hand.
I have to do this even if I can't or won't try to throw all these different theories at you, at one sitting.
My goal is extremely ambitious here. Basically, in as few and/or as many essays as it takes, I wish to build a new, multi-dialectic-integrative-humanistic-existential model of Psychoanalysis.
I hate to say 'Psychoanalysis' because I am not formally trained as a Psychoanalyst but there is really nothing else to call it. Because it is Psychoanalysis -- just a highly unorthodox and brand new, multi-integrative version of it that does not exclude: Adlerian Psychology, Jungian Psychology, Gestalt Therapy, or Transactional Analysis.
This is what you call 'thinking outside the box' -- inventing a new paradigm that partly includes most if not all of the old paradigms, models, and theories that have either been around since the beginning of Psychoanalyis, or evolved inside it, or evolved outside it, along the way. I am a really big believer in the expression 'What goes around comes around.' All these 'post' and 'neo' and 'anti' versions of Psychoanalysis were still born from Psychoanalysis -- and to Psychoanalysis they will -- at least if I have anything to do with it -- return.
This is not any Freudian version of Psychoanalysis that you will be taught in any classroom or institute. But many of the most important components of Classic Psychoanalysis, Object Relations, and perhaps even Self-Psychology, you will find here. But you will just get a lot more for your money (it's free!) as well. You will experience me thinking inside and outside the Psychoanalytic Theoretical Box -- at the same time, or at different times.
To begin with, what I am presenting here is many of Freud's most paradoxical and opposing theories and sub-theories all united into one multi-integrative whole -- and then even further spiced up with some further additional help from some of the main friends and later antagonists in Freud's life (or after his life) such as Adler, Jung, Ferenzci, Rank, Reich, and even some post-neo-and/or anti-Freudians such as: Klein, Fairbairn, Kohut, Fromm, Horney, Perls, Masson,
and probably others that I am missing off the top of my head right now.
How on earth is such a monstrous integration possible?
How on earth can we restore theoretical order from such un-integrated disorder and chaos?
Let us start by labeling most if not all of the most pertinent points or theories at our potential service here.
'A' is 'Traumacy Theory'.
'B' is 'Seduction (meaning Childhood Sexual Abuse) Theory.
'C' is 'Childhood and Adult Sexuality Theory'.
'D' is 'Defense Theory'
'E' is Oedipal and Internal-External Object Relations (Mother, Father, Sibling... Complex Theory'.
'F' is 'Narcissistic (Traumacy, Self-Esteem, Egotism, Fixation, Mastery, Power, Sexuality, and Revenge) Theory'.
'G' is 'Gestalt Unfinished Situation (or Unfinished Business) Theory'.
'H' is 'Transference Theory'.
'I' is 'Identification with the Aggressor, Counter-Phobia, and Narcissistic Transference-Reversal Theory'
'J' is Adlerian Lifestyle, Compensation, 'Masculine Protest', 'Feminine Protest', Mastery, Superiority-Striving, and Conscious Early Recollection Theory'.
'K' is Eric Berne's Theory of 'Transactional Analysis' including his theory of different 'Ego-States or Compartments', and various types of 'Ego-Splits'.
'L' Jung's theory of 'Persona', 'Shadow', 'Archetypes', and 'The Self'.
The following quote came into my email box this morning.
'A house must be built on solid foundations if it is to last. The same principle applies to man, otherwise he too will sink back into the soft ground and be swallowed up by the world of illusion.' -- Sai Baba
The same principle can be applied to any theory -- and, in particular here, any theory of personality and/or neurosis.
Our theory of psychological health and disease (or 'neurosis') is exactly the same as our theory of physical health and disease. It is a multi-dialectical, multi-bi-polar model following in the tracks of Anaxamander, Heraclitus, Lao Tse, Hippocrates, the Han Philosophers, Aristotle ('The Golden Mean'), Hegel (thesis, anti-thesis, synthesis), and Cannon ('homeostasis' and 'The Wisdom of The Body').
Basically, the theory is as simple as this: Disease is either caused by 'too much of a bad thing' and/or 'not enough of a good thing'. One is the disease of 'toxic or pathological or narcissistic excess', the other is the disease of 'nutritional deficiency'. Often, if not usually, both come hand to hand in the same client case.
All that remains -- in the case of psychological health and pathology (choose the word that is most relevant and/or the word you are most comfortable with here: 'disease', 'disorder', 'neurosis'
and/or 'psychosis'/'schizophrenia') -- is to establish what good and/or bad things can happen in the health and/or pathology of the individual person and personality.
I say that as if it is as simple as 2 plus 2 equals 4. Obviously, it is not.
Welcome to Psychoanalysis -- in the widest sense of the word, not the narrowest sense of the word -- which to me, includes virtually all of the different schools of psychology and psychotherapy that came behind it. They were all born from Psychoanalysis except perhaps Behaviorism -- which was probably also a reaction against Psychoanalysis.
Let us back track a bit.
I keep going over this whole 'Freud and Classical Psychoanalysis' vs. 'Masson and the modern day Seduction Theorists' relative to this now 113 year old Seduction Theory Controversy' which Masson re-opened very forcefully and dramatically in the early 1980s.
I pound my head with this issue, going back over the clinical facts and the editorial conclusions from both sides, trying to establish for myself where 'right' and 'wrong' is, 'good' and 'bad', 'guilty' and 'innocent'.
One time Freud is wrong but innocent of all moral-ethical charges against him. Another time -- he is not. There is still the 'Emma Ekstein scandal' and what would seem to be Freud's almost 20 year involvement with 'cocaine' (1894-1904) in which Freud was passing out cocaine like it was aspirin to his friends, probably his wife, his patients, probably Fliess and/or visa versa, a patient died to some combination of morphine and cocaine addiction under Freud's watch...even though no one knew at the beginning what the properties of cocaine were, how dangerous it was, how addictive it was, and other doctors were experimenting with it in similar ways, still Freud was involved in some highly risky and dangerous forms of 'medical and surgical treatment' that seemed to fly in the face of (without too much concern on Freud's part) the medical establishment's Hippocratic Oath: 'First, Do the patient no harm!'
But then again, there have always been risky and dangerous forms of 'therapy' in the evolution of medical treatment, and even today, one can quite legitimately ask the question: 'How closely do radiologists and chemo-therapists adhere to The Hippocratic Oath?'
Still, Freud's involvement with cocaine between approximately 1894 and 1904 is a bigger taboo topic than even his abandonment of The Seduction Theory between 1896 and 1899, and someone has to legitimately ask the question -- no different than an athlete who is known to be, or have been, on steroids -- 'To what extent did Freud's cocaine involvement during this time period (1894-1904) affect his theoretical as well as therapeutic work?'
And more specifically, did it have any affect on Freud's abandonment of The Seduction Theory and his evolution into 'Fantasy Theory'?
Doesn't it seem rather strange that no orthodox Psychoanalyst in approximately 110 years has ever professionally touched this question, let alone attempted to answer it, not even to my knowledge, Dr. Masson?
And then there is -- the 'bull in the china shop' -- Dr. Masson. Did Dr. Masson commit any epistemological and/or ethical errors or omissions in this 'Watergate' of a Psychoanalytic controversy/scandal? Such as accusing Freud of 'losing moral courage' when none of us 80 to 100 years later can profess to know for sure what Freud's mindset was back between 1896 and 1900. Did Masson overstep his own ethical boundaries in this respect -- and kill his own career in Psychoanalysis in the process?
And then there is the question of whether Freud's 'Seduction Theory' -- meaning his 'Childhood Sexual Assault Theory' -- was ever fully justified by the clinical evidence in the first place? I have made this point this point before. Freud had a propensity for jumping to fast, provocative generalizations and theoretical conclusions (The Seduction Theory, The Oedipal Theory, The Childhood Sexuality and Sexual Fantasy Theory, The Death Instinct Theory...) that had a tendency of overstepping the boundaries of 'good epistemology' -- 'good rational-empiricism'. It almost seemed like Freud had a propensity throughout his life -- almost as if it was a 'transference repetition compulsion and/or serial behavior pattern' -- to 'shock people first', and then to 'justify' his provocative, controversial, shocking 'scientific conclusions' with 'rhetorical arguments' that were well put together and seemingly tightly argued -- almost like a prosecution or defense lawyer putting together a 'good case' -- even though, when you really delve into the case and get to the bottom of it, you find that the case, is at best, based on very 'flimsy' and 'far-stretched' clinical evidence that could just as well or better support 5 or 10 other completely different clinical theories.
Again and again, I need to impress upon you as a reader, that life offers each and every one of us a myriad of ever changing, connected and unconnected, stimuli that can be interpreted and evaluated in a multitude of different ways depending on our own personal background, our own experiences, our own narcissistic biases and interests...so to create a theory -- any theory -- is to start to 'think inside a box', 'a theoretical box of our own making' which in effect, 'leads the witness', leads the reader, in a particular direction, towards the conclusion and the theory of our own making -- which may be only one of many other possible conclusions and theories that another person could draw from the same myriad of connected and/or not connected stimuli.
Furthermore, as soon as we start to abstract, as soon as we start to pick and choose what evidence we will include and what evidence we will leave out we are once again, leading the witness, leading the reader, on a trip to either 'epistemological and/or ethical clarification' and/or on a trip to 'Never, Never Land' -- a 'boxed theory of our own making', good and/or bad, which for better or for worse, is a 'sound bite' or a 'visual bite' that leaves part of life out and this part of life that is left out may be either non-important to the discussion at hand or it could be critically important and, at the same time, neglected, suppressed, marginalized.
This problem of 'thinking inside a narcissistically biased theoretical box' is just as relevant to Masson and his re-trumpeting the Seduction Theory as it is relative to Freud basically abandoning the Seduction Theory and moving into his replacement theories: 1. 'The Oedipal Theory' and 2. 'Childhood/Adult Fantasy Theory'.
That is why I like, for the most part, to take a combined, integrative dialectical approach and go with the assumption that there is usually a 'combination of truth, distortion, and fantasy in each and every theory' -- not just in The Seduction Theory that can be categorically stated as 'wrong', nor in the Oedipal Theory that again can be categorically stated as wrong (at least not as I define and describe it) -- but rather, both have elements of truth and distortion in them and are contextually bound to each and every case as it presents itself; not as some 'pre-ordained clinical fact'. And even more than this, there is the very real possibility -- indeed, in my view, the very real probability -- that most clinical cases of 'neurosis' are a 'dialectical mixture of both traumacy and fantasy' and if this is true, then as good scientists, therapists, and theorists, we need to follow 'the epistemological truth' wherever it takes us and however convoluted it may be -- not just invent 'either/or simplicity' for the sake of 'partisan righteous-narcissistic bias' and/or to take some aspect of nature and human functioning and dysfunctioning that is inherently complicated and intertwined, and try to 'box it into a nice, cleancut, simple theory' that eliminates half the phenomenon that you are trying to understand properly.
You see, I am like a conceptual, theoretical, and historical 'marriage counselor' going back into history and doing my best to 're-unite' Freud and Adler, Freud and Jung, Freud and Reich, Freud and Ferenczi, Freud and Rank, Freud and Perls, Freud and Masson...
The individual personalities may be impossible to unite -- not then, and not now.
However, the particular 'partisan' ideas which are now a valuable part of the public domain, can be re-integrated any way we want -- and that is exactly what I intend to do.
This idea of uniting seemingly dualistic and paradoxical theories is certainly not foreign to science. In the evolution of physics, 'particle' theory evolved into 'wave' theory which then evolved into a dialectically united 'particle-wave' theory which scientists now call 'quantum physics'.
I don't pretend to understand quantum physics but I certainly do understand the concept of 'dialectic union' such as 'dialectically uniting particle theory and wave theory to somehow get quantum physics'.
Let me put this as simply as I possibly can. There can be no evolution theory without a dialectical union theory to go with it -- regardless of whether we are talking about Anaxamander, Heraclitus, Lao Tse, The Han Philosophers, Hegel, Darwin, or anyone after Darwin.
Evolution can be shown to clearly follow this pattern: individuation, union, individuation, union, individuation...
Pessimistically speaking, that might be translated into: marriage, divorce, marriage, divorce...you get the 'serial pattern'?
Most successful 'marriages' allow -- in Otto Ranks words that can be found in my tribute essay to him -- for a maximum possible amount of both individuation and union at the same time (or at different times). That might be different degrees of both for different couples. No generic solution is possible. Either a couple works it out -- or they don't.
Back to physics...
Let us see what this particular website below has to say about the seemingly dualistic, paradoxical nature of matter and light.
I don't pretend to understand it. Just glance over it -- if like me -- you get stuck somewhere in the middle...
..........................................................................
http://www.spaceandmotion.com/Physics-Particle-Wave-Duality-Paradox.htm
On Truth & Reality
The Spherical Standing Wave Structure of Matter (WSM) in Space
This website is primarily on the subjects of truth and reality. We get about 300,000 page views each week and are one of the top philosophy / physics sites on the Internet. The central thesis is best stated in three parts;
i) We must know the truth to act wisely, and truth comes from physical reality.
ii) Our present and past societies are not founded on truth and act unwisely (overpopulation, destruction of nature, pollution, climate change, religious and economic wars, etc.).
iii) We now know the correct language for describing physical reality (all matter interactions are wave interactions in space), and this knowledge is critical for our future survival, being the source of truth & wisdom.
So how do we prove that this is true? Everyone will agree that true knowledge of reality must explain and solve the fundamental problems of knowledge in physics, philosophy and metaphysics. This website does exactly that. The above subject pages provide short summaries / simple solutions to these central problems of knowledge. To begin it is useful to read the Introduction & Summary to this Physics Philosophy Metaphysics Website.
Short Summary of Quantum Physics
These Quantum Physics pages (on either side) show how this new understanding of physical reality (that all light and matter interactions are wave interactions in Space) explains and solves the central problems of Quantum Theory.
The mistake was to work from Newton's foundation of particles and instantly acting gravity forces in space and time (many things) and then have to add more things to explain light and electricity, i.e. charged particles, continuous electromagnetic fields and waves (Faraday, Maxwell, Lorentz, Einstein's Special Relativity).
Thus by 1900 the central concepts of Physics were;
Matter as discrete particles with both gravitational mass and electrical charge properties (mass-charge duality).
Light as continuous electromagnetic waves (velocity of light c).
Continuous electromagnetic fields created by discrete charged particles (discrete particle-continuous field duality).
Local charge interactions limited by the velocity of electromagnetic waves (velocity of light c).
Over the next 30 years Quantum Theory destroyed these foundations by showing the exact opposite, that;
Matter has wave properties thus a particle-wave duality (de Broglie Waves, Schrodinger's wave equations).
Light has discrete particle properties thus a particle-wave duality (Light 'quanta', Max Planck, Albert Einstein)
Continuous deterministic fields are replaced by discrete statistical fields e.g. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, Niels Bohr's Copenhagen Interpretation, Born's probability waves to predict the location of the particle.
Non-Local matter interactions (instant action-at-distance EPR Bell Aspect)
The solution to this confusion and contradiction is simple once known. Describe reality from One thing existing, Space (that we all commonly experience) and its Properties. i.e. Rather than adding matter particles to space as Newton did, we consider Space with properties of a continuous wave medium for a pure Wave Structure of Matter. This is the Most Simple Science Theory of Physical Reality (despite many claims to the contrary, science does actually work, we just needed the correct foundation of continuous Space rather than discrete matter).
Most importantly, this Dynamic Unity of Reality provides simple solutions to all the 'strangeness' of quantum physics that has resulted from this discrete / disconnected 'particle' conception of matter.
i.e.
Matter is a Wave Structure of Space - the Spherical Wave Center creates the 'particle' effect.
Light is a Wave Phenomena - however, spherical standing waves (matter) act as spherical resonators and only interact (resonantly couple) at discrete frequencies / energies which gives the effect of discrete light 'quanta'.
Reality is both Continuous (Space) and Discrete (Standing Wave Interactions).
Reality is both Local and Non-Local - matter is causally inter-connected in Space by its Spherical In and Out Waves (traveling at velocity c, i.e. Einstein's Locality).
However (and very importantly), with relative motion these matter wave interactions form de Broglie phase waves that travel at high velocities (c2/v), explaining EPR and apparent Non-Locality / Instant-Action-at-a-Distance.
Reality is Causally Connected but Non-Deterministic / Statistical. The waves in quantum theory are real waves (not abstract 'probability waves') but lack of knowledge of the interconnected whole (infinite Space) causes statistical behaviour of matter (as Einstein believed).
I realize this is a pretty abrupt / radical introduction to a new way of seeing things - that it will take some time to adjust. But the Wave Structure of Matter is simple sensible and obvious once known. Each Quantum Physics page has a short summary and important quotes, so it is easy to click around and confirm things for yourself. Enjoy! Think!
.................................................................................
DGB...cont'd..
I am reminded of a movie I recently watched -- a 'crazy' movie that I liked -- called 'Choke'. It was about a sex addict whose mother was locked up in a psychiatric institute and who was looking for some sort of cathartic conflict resolution with his mother while at the same time going around seducing women, having emotionless sex with them.
At one scene in the movie, our main character has successfully managed to seduce a female doctor at the psychiatric institute (who unbeknownst to him is actually a patient disguised as a doctor). However, at the actual point of their sexual engagement, our main character can't get it going. The doctor/patient asks him: 'How is it that you can have sex with pretty well every other female patient and/or nurse in the institute but you can't have sex with me.' And he replies, 'Well, I think it is because I am beginning to like you.' And she replies: 'Well, has it ever occurred to you that maybe the two do not have to be mutually exclusive?'
Well, this is exactly my point here also -- and the point of each and every possible or actual dialectical theory -- seemingly opposing, paradoxical theories do not have to necessarily be mutually exclusive. Rather, they may easily -- or with some dialectical creativity -- dialectically merge into each other.
Freud's Seduction, read: Childhood Sexual Assault, Theory' was too reductionistic -- quite simply, it may partly apply to a certain class of people who have been sexually assaulted (and/or 'seduced') as children but childhood sexual assault is not the root of all neurosis because not every person is sexually assaulted as a child.
Thus, Freud's early (1893-1895) 'Traumacy-Cathartic Therapeutic Release' theory was a better theory because it applied to a much broader range of people -- indeed, probably all of us. But Freud's Traumacy Theory as it stood back between 1893 and 1895 was insufficient. It needed some creative upgrading.
From my perspective, it needed some 1. 'Transference Theory', 2. some 'Adlerian Lifestyle and Conscious Early Memory Theory', 3. some 'Gestalt Unfinished Situation Theory', 4. some 'Narcissistic Fixation Theory', and 5. some 'Oedipal Theory' -- all added to the collective mix -- as well as all the other theories and sub-theories mentioned at the beginning of this essay.
So let us again call this multi-dialectic integrative model that I am proposing, 'The DGB 12 Theory Model of Humanistic-Existential Psychoanalysis, Personality Theory, and Psychopathology (Neurosis and Psychosis)'.
The model looks like this:
1. Traumacy Theory.
2. Seduction (meaning Childhood Sexual Abuse) Theory.
3. Childhood and/or Adult Sexuality Theory.
4. Defense Theory.
5. Oedipal and Internal-External Object Relations (Mother, Father, Sibling... Complex Theory.
6. Narcissistic (Traumacy, Self-Esteem, Egotism, Fixation, Mastery, Power, Sexuality, and Revenge) Theory.
7. Transference Theory
8. Identification with the Aggressor, Counter-Phobia, and Narcissistic Transference-Reversal Theory
9. Adlerian Lifestyle, Compensation, 'Masculine Protest', 'Feminine Protest', Mastery, Superiority-Striving, and Conscious Early Recollection Theory'.
10. The Gestalt Theory of 'Foreground' and 'Background' and 'The Unfinished Situation' or 'Unfinished Business'
11. The Jungian Theory of 'Persona' and 'Shadow', 'Archetypes', and 'The Self'.
12. Eric Berne's Theory of 'Transactional Analysis' including his theory of different 'Ego-States or Compartments', and various types of 'Ego-Splits'.
In the essays that follow, we will begin to unravel all the different individual and integrated parts of this rather complicated multi-dialectic model.
But it is worth the time and effort to do this.
Stay tuned...
-- dgb, Sept. 4th, updated and modified Sept. 9th, 2009.
-- David Gordon Bain
-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiations...
-- Are still in process...
......................................................................
Monday, August 31, 2009
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
The Good and The Bad of 'Conceptual Constructs' in Describing The Internal Workings of The Personality -- The 'Self', The 'Ego', The 'I'
I am an old-fashioned 'rational-empiricist' -- and student of General Semantics -- meaning that I believe in the 'representational' idea of 'conceptual constructs' reflecting some aspect of 'phenomenal reality' (and/or 'noumenal' reality in a Kantian sense).
Thus, the equation relative to words, concepts, reality, and meaning, from a DGB rational-empirical-General Semantic perspective goes something like this:
1. Words are short forms for concepts (or conceptual constructs).
2. Concepts (or ideas) are mental representations of our phenomenal or phenomenological experience which entails a combination of our observations, interpretations (or inferences) and value judgments.
3. Theories involves interrelationships between concepts which again are supposed to reflect some aspect of the way 'objective reality works', meaning a representational and structural correspondence between our theoretical constructs and what is or was 'really happening out there (or in there).
4. There will always be the so-called 'Kantian (or 'subjective-objective') Split' which means that there will always be some greater or lesser degree of 'structural and/or process error' between what we think is happening in our 'objective world of reality both inside and outside our body' and what really is happening. For example, I just had an MRI done on my liver yesterday in which doctors were trying to get a 'better picture and representational model' relative to what was happening with my liver (and liver pathology). Oftentimes, a 'picture' is worth more than a thousand speculative inferential or interpretive or assumptive guesses without the picture.
Now, when it comes to 'personality theory', concepts or conceptual constructs can be put together and pulled apart faster than a set of Legos. Why? Because we have no way of getting 'pictures' of 'mental images' or 'concepts' or 'ideas'. These things are strictly metaphysical in that they cannot be seen although they are often meant to stand for something that can be seen. For example, the word 'dog' cannot be seen although it is meant to stand for a whole host of similar but different individual dogs such as such and such a dog over here, 'Rover', who can be described more specifically in term of his or her individual characteristics.
However, one of the main problems relative to personality theory is: How do you see a 'Self' or an 'Ego' or a 'Superego' or an 'Id' or a 'Persona' or a 'Shadow'.
These concepts are meant to stand for something -- some aspect of our 'mental or phenomenological (subjective, conceptual) reality that cannot be seen. And things cannot be seen tend to create much more controversy in terms of whether they actually exist or whether we are just 'making something up' that does not exist.
Consequently, philosophers like David Hume -- being the very strict, reductionist- empiricist that he was -- denied the phenomenological concept or conceptual construct of 'The Self' as even having any kind of 'real-objective existence'. Perhaps even more so with concepts like 'The Soul' or 'God' which again have no 'observational reality'.
'Behavioral theorists' -- being strict psychological empiricists -- have also denied the 'real-objective existence' of anything that goes on within our mind in the way of 'mental, representational images'.
Strict empirical behavioral theorists deal with a 'Stimulus-Response(SR)' Model and Formula that denies any existence of any 'mental representations' inside our heads that have anything to do with 'explaining or understanding behavior'.
In contrast, 'cognitive theorists and therapists' advance a model and formula that goes more like this: 'Stimulus-Belief-Response(SBR)'. This model, in contrast to the SR model advanced by the Behavioral Theorists and Therapists takes into account our inner phenomenological process our -- 'inner cognitions or beliefs or mental representations'.
The professor at the University of Waterloo back in 1979 who was marking my Honours Thesis paper was a 'Cognitive-Behavioral Theorist and Therapist', Dr. Donald Meichenbaum, who was trying to bridge the gap (I think very successfully) between the very strict behavioral theorists (like B.F. Skinner) and the more 'rationally-empirically' based Cognitive Theories (like Albert Ellis, Aaron Beck, and George Kelly whose philosophy can be traced back through the Enlightenment, through philosophers like John Locke, Sir Francis Bacon, and all the way back to the ancient Roman philosopher, Epictetus and his famous saying: 'Man is not disturbed by things but by the view he takes of them.').
In 1979, I advanced a model of what now I would call 'The Central Ego' which was a 'Cognitive-Emotional-Behavioral' model influenced by my readings of the Cogntive Theorists, by the General Semanticists (primarily Alfred Korzybski and S.I., Hayakawa) and influenced partly by the 'Objectivist and Self-Esteem Philosophy' of Nathaniel Branden ('The Psychology of Self-Esteem', 1969), as well as indirectly, Ayn Rand who created Objectivist Philosophy and who strongly influenced Branden during the eighteen years they worked and were professionally and personally involved with each other (from 1950-1968).
My 1979 'Central Ego' model could/can also be referred to as a 'Stimulus-Perception or (Sensory Perception)-Interpretration-Evaluation-Response' (SPIER) -- an extension of the more basic Stimulus-Belief-Response (SBR) Cognitive Model. There is not too much about the 1979 model that I would change today except perhaps in an updated format that takes into account everything that I have learned philosophically and psychologically in the 30 years from 1979 to the present. Still, the basic 'Central Ego' model remains the same.
Now going back to the word 'Ego' which is of German origin (at least as far back as I can trace it), dating back at least to the philosophy of Johann Fichte (1762-1814), and meaning basically 'I' or 'Self', often used in an almost 'objective third party sense' as if our 'Ego' is operating outside of ourselves which can create some serious difficulties relative to 'denying accountability and responsibility for what comes out of our Ego -- which is basically just another way of saying 'I' or 'Self'.
The Classic Psychoanalytic Model, for example, tends to be very 'deterministic' with certain classes of thoughts and/or impulses and/or restraints and/or behaviors coming out of one of the three main Psychoanalytic Psychic Departments or Compartments -- 'Ego' (mediating and problem solving compartment of the personality), 'Id' (the impulsive, biological and/or instinctual compartment of the personality), or 'Superego' (the social and internal righteous-ethical conscience compartment of the personality) -- almost as if we have no, or at least, little 'free control' of what comes out of these three 'zones' of the personality, and relative to how we ultimately behave (with all of the 'historical, biological, childhood, and socially determining forces that are at play in the way that we think, feel, want, and act).
In contrast, a more 'humanistic-existential psychoanalytic model' such as the one I am trumpeting here in Hegel's Hotel, as developed from my own thinking, in conjunction with my own source of historical, philosophical, psychological, and experiential influences, adds a more 'free will' and 'first person I' perspective to the more traditional perspective of Psychoanalysis. Perhaps my main influential mentor here is the Humanistic-Existential Psychoanalyst -- Eric Fromm (1900-1980) -- who was a highly influential force on my thinking in the 1970s, and who continues to influence my work today.
Once we start 'splitting the Ego' up into 2 or 5 or 10 or 20 or 25 different compartments, the issue becomes all about 'functional-theoretical-therapeutic convenience' -- every 'ego-theorist' ostensibly looking for some kind of ideal balance between 'simplicity and sophistication' with almost as many different renditions of 'ego-splits' out there as there are theorists. It is all 'cognitively metaphysical' in that no one can see any picture of 'the ego' or any 'sub-compartment of the ego' whether we want to use the Classic Psychoanalytic terminology or some other different rendition of it.
In fact, in the Classic Psychoanalytic model, the 'Ego' is not even equivalent to the 'Total, Wholistic Self' but rather to a sub-component of The Self -- a mainly consciously aware part of our selves as opposed to the activities of the allegedly more unconscious and biologically/narcissistically driven 'Id'.
In contrast, I view the Ego as reflecting every aspect and every mental and emotional activity within the Self. In other words, 'Self' and 'I' and 'Ego' are all equivalent words for the same representation of our entire, wholistic, dialectically integrated and/or split subjective-objective Self -- including both our 'aware' components and our 'unaware' components, both our biologically and psychologically impulsive components and forces as well as our ethically righteous and/or safety restraining components and forces.
We can reduce our personality -- our Self, our Ego, our 'I' -- into as many different useful and/or not useful conceptual constructs as we want, put them together and/or dismantle them at a moment's notice, and/or put some reductionist 'Ego-compartments' into our 'theoretical closet' until we need to pull them back out and use them, but in the end -- like the operation of any company with few or many different 'departments' in it -- still have to come back to the main overall functioning of the company which may come down mainly to the philosophy and activity of 'The CEO' or in our case here -- 'The Central (Mediating and Executive) Ego'.
Every other 'Ego-Compartment' or 'Ego-Split' in the personality, as constructed by me -- which are like 'lobbyists', each appealing to their particular realm of specific, functional and/or dysfunctional interest -- has to, in the end, answer to the CEO of the personality -- the Central Ego -- the 'subjective-objective I' of the personality, even if the Central Ego, like a weak boss, allows itself (ourselves) to be overwhelmed by this internal lobbyist or that one -- for example, overwhelmed in the addictive personality to the hedonistic impulses of the 'Id' or as I prefer to call this portion of the personality -- our 'Dionysian Ego'.
In such instances, we simply need to find ways of 'strengthening the power' of our Central Ego and/or the activities of another conceptually constructed division of our personality -- the 'Superego' in Psychoanalytic terminology, the 'Topdog' in Gestalt Terminology, the 'Apollonian Ego' in my own DGB terminology.
In opposite instances, we may need to strengthen the 'power' of our Dionysian or Narcissistic Ego in order to increase our self-assertiveness and our ability to both say -- and get what we want. We can say that people who 'beat around the bush' all the time and/or 'allude to immediacy' without directly stating the immediacy of what they are thinking and/or wanting are people who have 'weak Dionysian and/or Narcissistic Egos'. The same goes with people who are 'pleasing' and/or 'submissive' all the time -- here we may have to 'strengthen the activities of our Righteous and/or Rebellious and/or Dionysian and/or Narcissistic Ego' in order not to be dominated all the time by someone else's 'will to power' and/or 'will to hedonism' and/or 'will to narcissism'. We need to 'step up to the plate more' unless of course we get some sort of 'Dionysian and/or approval-seeking pleasure' out of staying exactly where we are and playing the 'Submissive Ego' -- or 'Doormat' -- role.
Been there. Done that. Kicked myself for doing it. More narcissistic self-assertion needed please. Sometimes we need to fill up our 'narcissistic tank'. Other times, we need to fill up our 'altruistic tank'. Both tanks are needed for a 'healthy, well-balanced personality. Same with our Dionysian and Apollonian tanks. And our 'Enlightenment' and 'Romantic' tanks. And our 'Humanistic' (compassionate) and 'Existential' (self-accountability) tanks.
These are some of the different types of 'Polar-Ego-Compartments' or 'Polar-Ego-Splits' can be functionally used by a psychotherapist to help a client re-integrate whatever his or her particular dominant polar split is to arrive at a more balanced dialectical-democratic wholism.
Meanwhile, each and everyone of us generally goes through our particular day with one polar-ego-compartment dominating over another -- some version of our 'dominant Persona' pushing aside our 'marginalized Shadow' -- as opposed to finding and using a more ideally operative set or system of 'dual-action-dual-polarities-democratically and dialectically working with and against each other to find a healthier state of being in the middle of these two opposing internal polar lobbyists'
This can be viewed as Aristotle's version of 'the middle path' or my DGB post-Hegelian version of the middle path (even as we are bound to experiment with opposite Nietzschean and/or anti-Nietzschean extremes before we get to the place we are ultimately looking for in the middle).
Such is the 'ideal purpose' of using 'conceptual constructs' to describe and sometimes alter the inner activities of our Self, our Ego, our 'I'.
-- dgb, Aug. 26th, 2009.
-- David Gordon Bain
-- Dialectical Gap-Bridging Negotiations...
-- Are still in process...
..............................................................................
Thus, the equation relative to words, concepts, reality, and meaning, from a DGB rational-empirical-General Semantic perspective goes something like this:
1. Words are short forms for concepts (or conceptual constructs).
2. Concepts (or ideas) are mental representations of our phenomenal or phenomenological experience which entails a combination of our observations, interpretations (or inferences) and value judgments.
3. Theories involves interrelationships between concepts which again are supposed to reflect some aspect of the way 'objective reality works', meaning a representational and structural correspondence between our theoretical constructs and what is or was 'really happening out there (or in there).
4. There will always be the so-called 'Kantian (or 'subjective-objective') Split' which means that there will always be some greater or lesser degree of 'structural and/or process error' between what we think is happening in our 'objective world of reality both inside and outside our body' and what really is happening. For example, I just had an MRI done on my liver yesterday in which doctors were trying to get a 'better picture and representational model' relative to what was happening with my liver (and liver pathology). Oftentimes, a 'picture' is worth more than a thousand speculative inferential or interpretive or assumptive guesses without the picture.
Now, when it comes to 'personality theory', concepts or conceptual constructs can be put together and pulled apart faster than a set of Legos. Why? Because we have no way of getting 'pictures' of 'mental images' or 'concepts' or 'ideas'. These things are strictly metaphysical in that they cannot be seen although they are often meant to stand for something that can be seen. For example, the word 'dog' cannot be seen although it is meant to stand for a whole host of similar but different individual dogs such as such and such a dog over here, 'Rover', who can be described more specifically in term of his or her individual characteristics.
However, one of the main problems relative to personality theory is: How do you see a 'Self' or an 'Ego' or a 'Superego' or an 'Id' or a 'Persona' or a 'Shadow'.
These concepts are meant to stand for something -- some aspect of our 'mental or phenomenological (subjective, conceptual) reality that cannot be seen. And things cannot be seen tend to create much more controversy in terms of whether they actually exist or whether we are just 'making something up' that does not exist.
Consequently, philosophers like David Hume -- being the very strict, reductionist- empiricist that he was -- denied the phenomenological concept or conceptual construct of 'The Self' as even having any kind of 'real-objective existence'. Perhaps even more so with concepts like 'The Soul' or 'God' which again have no 'observational reality'.
'Behavioral theorists' -- being strict psychological empiricists -- have also denied the 'real-objective existence' of anything that goes on within our mind in the way of 'mental, representational images'.
Strict empirical behavioral theorists deal with a 'Stimulus-Response(SR)' Model and Formula that denies any existence of any 'mental representations' inside our heads that have anything to do with 'explaining or understanding behavior'.
In contrast, 'cognitive theorists and therapists' advance a model and formula that goes more like this: 'Stimulus-Belief-Response(SBR)'. This model, in contrast to the SR model advanced by the Behavioral Theorists and Therapists takes into account our inner phenomenological process our -- 'inner cognitions or beliefs or mental representations'.
The professor at the University of Waterloo back in 1979 who was marking my Honours Thesis paper was a 'Cognitive-Behavioral Theorist and Therapist', Dr. Donald Meichenbaum, who was trying to bridge the gap (I think very successfully) between the very strict behavioral theorists (like B.F. Skinner) and the more 'rationally-empirically' based Cognitive Theories (like Albert Ellis, Aaron Beck, and George Kelly whose philosophy can be traced back through the Enlightenment, through philosophers like John Locke, Sir Francis Bacon, and all the way back to the ancient Roman philosopher, Epictetus and his famous saying: 'Man is not disturbed by things but by the view he takes of them.').
In 1979, I advanced a model of what now I would call 'The Central Ego' which was a 'Cognitive-Emotional-Behavioral' model influenced by my readings of the Cogntive Theorists, by the General Semanticists (primarily Alfred Korzybski and S.I., Hayakawa) and influenced partly by the 'Objectivist and Self-Esteem Philosophy' of Nathaniel Branden ('The Psychology of Self-Esteem', 1969), as well as indirectly, Ayn Rand who created Objectivist Philosophy and who strongly influenced Branden during the eighteen years they worked and were professionally and personally involved with each other (from 1950-1968).
My 1979 'Central Ego' model could/can also be referred to as a 'Stimulus-Perception or (Sensory Perception)-Interpretration-Evaluation-Response' (SPIER) -- an extension of the more basic Stimulus-Belief-Response (SBR) Cognitive Model. There is not too much about the 1979 model that I would change today except perhaps in an updated format that takes into account everything that I have learned philosophically and psychologically in the 30 years from 1979 to the present. Still, the basic 'Central Ego' model remains the same.
Now going back to the word 'Ego' which is of German origin (at least as far back as I can trace it), dating back at least to the philosophy of Johann Fichte (1762-1814), and meaning basically 'I' or 'Self', often used in an almost 'objective third party sense' as if our 'Ego' is operating outside of ourselves which can create some serious difficulties relative to 'denying accountability and responsibility for what comes out of our Ego -- which is basically just another way of saying 'I' or 'Self'.
The Classic Psychoanalytic Model, for example, tends to be very 'deterministic' with certain classes of thoughts and/or impulses and/or restraints and/or behaviors coming out of one of the three main Psychoanalytic Psychic Departments or Compartments -- 'Ego' (mediating and problem solving compartment of the personality), 'Id' (the impulsive, biological and/or instinctual compartment of the personality), or 'Superego' (the social and internal righteous-ethical conscience compartment of the personality) -- almost as if we have no, or at least, little 'free control' of what comes out of these three 'zones' of the personality, and relative to how we ultimately behave (with all of the 'historical, biological, childhood, and socially determining forces that are at play in the way that we think, feel, want, and act).
In contrast, a more 'humanistic-existential psychoanalytic model' such as the one I am trumpeting here in Hegel's Hotel, as developed from my own thinking, in conjunction with my own source of historical, philosophical, psychological, and experiential influences, adds a more 'free will' and 'first person I' perspective to the more traditional perspective of Psychoanalysis. Perhaps my main influential mentor here is the Humanistic-Existential Psychoanalyst -- Eric Fromm (1900-1980) -- who was a highly influential force on my thinking in the 1970s, and who continues to influence my work today.
Once we start 'splitting the Ego' up into 2 or 5 or 10 or 20 or 25 different compartments, the issue becomes all about 'functional-theoretical-therapeutic convenience' -- every 'ego-theorist' ostensibly looking for some kind of ideal balance between 'simplicity and sophistication' with almost as many different renditions of 'ego-splits' out there as there are theorists. It is all 'cognitively metaphysical' in that no one can see any picture of 'the ego' or any 'sub-compartment of the ego' whether we want to use the Classic Psychoanalytic terminology or some other different rendition of it.
In fact, in the Classic Psychoanalytic model, the 'Ego' is not even equivalent to the 'Total, Wholistic Self' but rather to a sub-component of The Self -- a mainly consciously aware part of our selves as opposed to the activities of the allegedly more unconscious and biologically/narcissistically driven 'Id'.
In contrast, I view the Ego as reflecting every aspect and every mental and emotional activity within the Self. In other words, 'Self' and 'I' and 'Ego' are all equivalent words for the same representation of our entire, wholistic, dialectically integrated and/or split subjective-objective Self -- including both our 'aware' components and our 'unaware' components, both our biologically and psychologically impulsive components and forces as well as our ethically righteous and/or safety restraining components and forces.
We can reduce our personality -- our Self, our Ego, our 'I' -- into as many different useful and/or not useful conceptual constructs as we want, put them together and/or dismantle them at a moment's notice, and/or put some reductionist 'Ego-compartments' into our 'theoretical closet' until we need to pull them back out and use them, but in the end -- like the operation of any company with few or many different 'departments' in it -- still have to come back to the main overall functioning of the company which may come down mainly to the philosophy and activity of 'The CEO' or in our case here -- 'The Central (Mediating and Executive) Ego'.
Every other 'Ego-Compartment' or 'Ego-Split' in the personality, as constructed by me -- which are like 'lobbyists', each appealing to their particular realm of specific, functional and/or dysfunctional interest -- has to, in the end, answer to the CEO of the personality -- the Central Ego -- the 'subjective-objective I' of the personality, even if the Central Ego, like a weak boss, allows itself (ourselves) to be overwhelmed by this internal lobbyist or that one -- for example, overwhelmed in the addictive personality to the hedonistic impulses of the 'Id' or as I prefer to call this portion of the personality -- our 'Dionysian Ego'.
In such instances, we simply need to find ways of 'strengthening the power' of our Central Ego and/or the activities of another conceptually constructed division of our personality -- the 'Superego' in Psychoanalytic terminology, the 'Topdog' in Gestalt Terminology, the 'Apollonian Ego' in my own DGB terminology.
In opposite instances, we may need to strengthen the 'power' of our Dionysian or Narcissistic Ego in order to increase our self-assertiveness and our ability to both say -- and get what we want. We can say that people who 'beat around the bush' all the time and/or 'allude to immediacy' without directly stating the immediacy of what they are thinking and/or wanting are people who have 'weak Dionysian and/or Narcissistic Egos'. The same goes with people who are 'pleasing' and/or 'submissive' all the time -- here we may have to 'strengthen the activities of our Righteous and/or Rebellious and/or Dionysian and/or Narcissistic Ego' in order not to be dominated all the time by someone else's 'will to power' and/or 'will to hedonism' and/or 'will to narcissism'. We need to 'step up to the plate more' unless of course we get some sort of 'Dionysian and/or approval-seeking pleasure' out of staying exactly where we are and playing the 'Submissive Ego' -- or 'Doormat' -- role.
Been there. Done that. Kicked myself for doing it. More narcissistic self-assertion needed please. Sometimes we need to fill up our 'narcissistic tank'. Other times, we need to fill up our 'altruistic tank'. Both tanks are needed for a 'healthy, well-balanced personality. Same with our Dionysian and Apollonian tanks. And our 'Enlightenment' and 'Romantic' tanks. And our 'Humanistic' (compassionate) and 'Existential' (self-accountability) tanks.
These are some of the different types of 'Polar-Ego-Compartments' or 'Polar-Ego-Splits' can be functionally used by a psychotherapist to help a client re-integrate whatever his or her particular dominant polar split is to arrive at a more balanced dialectical-democratic wholism.
Meanwhile, each and everyone of us generally goes through our particular day with one polar-ego-compartment dominating over another -- some version of our 'dominant Persona' pushing aside our 'marginalized Shadow' -- as opposed to finding and using a more ideally operative set or system of 'dual-action-dual-polarities-democratically and dialectically working with and against each other to find a healthier state of being in the middle of these two opposing internal polar lobbyists'
This can be viewed as Aristotle's version of 'the middle path' or my DGB post-Hegelian version of the middle path (even as we are bound to experiment with opposite Nietzschean and/or anti-Nietzschean extremes before we get to the place we are ultimately looking for in the middle).
Such is the 'ideal purpose' of using 'conceptual constructs' to describe and sometimes alter the inner activities of our Self, our Ego, our 'I'.
-- dgb, Aug. 26th, 2009.
-- David Gordon Bain
-- Dialectical Gap-Bridging Negotiations...
-- Are still in process...
..............................................................................
Thursday, August 20, 2009
From Deterministic, Classical, Orthodox Psychoanalysis to DGB Dialectic-Democratic, Humanistic-Existential Psychoanalysis
just finished...Aug. 20th, 2009.
The way to evolve from 'Deterministic, Classical, Orthodox, Psychoanalysis' to 'Humanistic-Existential Psychoanalysis' is to be wary of, skeptical of, even pessimistic of, all pre-ordained, pre-canned generic theories.
Each and everyone of us comes 'custom-made' and we don't live 'generic, pre-ordained lives' -- we live customized, 'rigid anal-retentive routine' and/or 'recklessly impulsive' (or somewhere in between) lives.
We live some combination of 'Our Essence and Our Wall'.
Sometimes too rigid, sometimes to impulsive...
A life riddled with 'separations'...and 're-births'...
'Traumacies' and/or 'narcissistic fixations'...
'Anal restraints' and/or 'oral obsessive-compulsions' and 'addictions'...
Or somewhere in between...
Freud was always getting it right....
And then making dumb mistakes, ethical, theoretical, therapeutic, and/or personal mistakes...
Freud was brilliant...but far from perfect...
Sometimes rigidly anal-retentive, at other times impulsively reckless...
Masson too was brilliant...is brilliant...he is still alive...and doing other things...
Masson is righteously anal-retentive and sometimes recklessly impulsive...present or past tense...I don't pretend to know his present life...
For a man who became so intimately close to Freud's work,
Masson perhaps turned out to be Freud's worst critic...
Not only challenging his work and his theoretical conclusions...
But also challenging Freud's ethical-moral character...
According to Masson, 'Freud lost moral courage'...
In effect, Freud wimped out...he back away from a 'politically incorrect theory' that brought him 'professional heat and disdain'...and threatened to ruin his credibility, future, and economic viability as a doctor...
So said/says Masson...(The Assault on Truth, 1992)
But both Freud and Masson were 'stuck inside an Aristolean either/or paradigm'...
Masson knows very well that 'The Seduction (Childhood Sexual Assault) Theory alone cannot carry Psychonalysis on its entire shoulder...The Traumacy Theory fared better in this regard (and could easily include the Seduction Theory as a 'subset' of The Traumacy Theory).
But not even this is enough. Life is not only about traumacy but rather, what you make of traumacy -- both good and bad, creative, compensatory -- and this is the thing that Freud could not get his head around because he thought it violated the 'pleasure principle' -- and that is 'eroticized traumacy compensation'...
To understand this, you need to understand 'the mastery compulsion', the 'unfinished situation', and 'the wish to undo and/or reverse or compensate for childhood rejections'... You need to also understand Fairbairn's 'rejecting' and 'exciting' object -- which paradoxically and almost unbelievably -- turn out to be essentially the same thing...
More than anything, to get from a 'Deterministic, Pre-Ordained, Pre-Canned, Generic, Sterile, Classical-Orthodox' form of Psychoanalysis, and move to a more 'Humanistic-Existential, Here-and-Now, I and Thou' form of Psychoanalysis...you have to 'loosen yourself from the shackles of any and all pre-ordained concepts and theories, all forms of either/or thinking', and start to think 'dialectically in terms of engaging and negotiating opposite polar concepts and theories towards some form of better and more flexible bi-polar theory in the middle -- that can allow you, the theorist, and/or the therapist, to think in terms of each and every 'custom-made and custom-living client' who walks through the room and who could -- or might not -- support and/or refute either polar theory that you have available to you at your workside -- or again, possibly, something completely different.
Ours is not to question why, ours is just to follow the client wherever he or she may take us, for better or for worse, at least until we have some form of reasonable and sustained, consistent proof or some semblance of it, that the client is taking us down a path of blind alleys, throwing 'smoke and mirrors' at us, narcissistic manipulations, distorted half truths -- or less, a 'house of cards', his or her 'protective shield or persona', his or her 'Wall' to hide his or her 'Essence' that could be extremely 'bad' and/or extremely 'vulnerable', 'shaky', and hiding an underlying 'schizoid existential anxiety' -- 'The Abyss between The Wall and The Essence'..
Life is not all about truth and lies, about traumatic memories and narcissistic fantasies and fixations, about Dionysian and Apollonian biases and polar existences...
But rather, life is also about the bridges that join them...and mend the distortions and different brands of righteous and/or narcissistic extremism of one-side polar theories and lives that are dissociated from their other polar half...
This is the domain of Hegel's Hotel...
Think 'dialectic-democratic, humanistic-existential engagement'; as opposed to 'mutually exclusive dialectic dissociation, on-sided dominance and the other side marginalization'.
At least in this context.
As I learned in Gestalt Therapy,
Everything is subject to change.
There are no ironclad formulas in life -- other than in mathematics.
Psychology is not mathematics.
Far from it.
-- dgb, Aug. 20th, 2009.
-- David Gordon Bain,
-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiations...
-- Are still in process...
.......................................................
The way to evolve from 'Deterministic, Classical, Orthodox, Psychoanalysis' to 'Humanistic-Existential Psychoanalysis' is to be wary of, skeptical of, even pessimistic of, all pre-ordained, pre-canned generic theories.
Each and everyone of us comes 'custom-made' and we don't live 'generic, pre-ordained lives' -- we live customized, 'rigid anal-retentive routine' and/or 'recklessly impulsive' (or somewhere in between) lives.
We live some combination of 'Our Essence and Our Wall'.
Sometimes too rigid, sometimes to impulsive...
A life riddled with 'separations'...and 're-births'...
'Traumacies' and/or 'narcissistic fixations'...
'Anal restraints' and/or 'oral obsessive-compulsions' and 'addictions'...
Or somewhere in between...
Freud was always getting it right....
And then making dumb mistakes, ethical, theoretical, therapeutic, and/or personal mistakes...
Freud was brilliant...but far from perfect...
Sometimes rigidly anal-retentive, at other times impulsively reckless...
Masson too was brilliant...is brilliant...he is still alive...and doing other things...
Masson is righteously anal-retentive and sometimes recklessly impulsive...present or past tense...I don't pretend to know his present life...
For a man who became so intimately close to Freud's work,
Masson perhaps turned out to be Freud's worst critic...
Not only challenging his work and his theoretical conclusions...
But also challenging Freud's ethical-moral character...
According to Masson, 'Freud lost moral courage'...
In effect, Freud wimped out...he back away from a 'politically incorrect theory' that brought him 'professional heat and disdain'...and threatened to ruin his credibility, future, and economic viability as a doctor...
So said/says Masson...(The Assault on Truth, 1992)
But both Freud and Masson were 'stuck inside an Aristolean either/or paradigm'...
Masson knows very well that 'The Seduction (Childhood Sexual Assault) Theory alone cannot carry Psychonalysis on its entire shoulder...The Traumacy Theory fared better in this regard (and could easily include the Seduction Theory as a 'subset' of The Traumacy Theory).
But not even this is enough. Life is not only about traumacy but rather, what you make of traumacy -- both good and bad, creative, compensatory -- and this is the thing that Freud could not get his head around because he thought it violated the 'pleasure principle' -- and that is 'eroticized traumacy compensation'...
To understand this, you need to understand 'the mastery compulsion', the 'unfinished situation', and 'the wish to undo and/or reverse or compensate for childhood rejections'... You need to also understand Fairbairn's 'rejecting' and 'exciting' object -- which paradoxically and almost unbelievably -- turn out to be essentially the same thing...
More than anything, to get from a 'Deterministic, Pre-Ordained, Pre-Canned, Generic, Sterile, Classical-Orthodox' form of Psychoanalysis, and move to a more 'Humanistic-Existential, Here-and-Now, I and Thou' form of Psychoanalysis...you have to 'loosen yourself from the shackles of any and all pre-ordained concepts and theories, all forms of either/or thinking', and start to think 'dialectically in terms of engaging and negotiating opposite polar concepts and theories towards some form of better and more flexible bi-polar theory in the middle -- that can allow you, the theorist, and/or the therapist, to think in terms of each and every 'custom-made and custom-living client' who walks through the room and who could -- or might not -- support and/or refute either polar theory that you have available to you at your workside -- or again, possibly, something completely different.
Ours is not to question why, ours is just to follow the client wherever he or she may take us, for better or for worse, at least until we have some form of reasonable and sustained, consistent proof or some semblance of it, that the client is taking us down a path of blind alleys, throwing 'smoke and mirrors' at us, narcissistic manipulations, distorted half truths -- or less, a 'house of cards', his or her 'protective shield or persona', his or her 'Wall' to hide his or her 'Essence' that could be extremely 'bad' and/or extremely 'vulnerable', 'shaky', and hiding an underlying 'schizoid existential anxiety' -- 'The Abyss between The Wall and The Essence'..
Life is not all about truth and lies, about traumatic memories and narcissistic fantasies and fixations, about Dionysian and Apollonian biases and polar existences...
But rather, life is also about the bridges that join them...and mend the distortions and different brands of righteous and/or narcissistic extremism of one-side polar theories and lives that are dissociated from their other polar half...
This is the domain of Hegel's Hotel...
Think 'dialectic-democratic, humanistic-existential engagement'; as opposed to 'mutually exclusive dialectic dissociation, on-sided dominance and the other side marginalization'.
At least in this context.
As I learned in Gestalt Therapy,
Everything is subject to change.
There are no ironclad formulas in life -- other than in mathematics.
Psychology is not mathematics.
Far from it.
-- dgb, Aug. 20th, 2009.
-- David Gordon Bain,
-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiations...
-- Are still in process...
.......................................................
Jenny Sanford: Affair was like 'punches to gut'
Foreward: DGB Editorial Remarks...From A Masculine Perspective...To The Internet Article Below...
I read the article below and had to give a 'DGB masculine (masculine-feminine egalitarian) editorial perspective' on the article.
I could feel my blood pressure start to rise on this one.
I have no problem with Jenny Sanford standing up for what she believes is right. And for not letting her husband 'off the hook' in similar cases to where other wives have tried to put on a (probably false) persona of 'nurturing support' for their husbands -- if only to protect their potentially crashing political careers.
I applaud Jenny Sanford for voicing her own opinions, feelings -- and wants.
Self-assertiveness as well as social sensitivity and empathy is imperative for any healthy, successful relationship.
I am reminded of another article I just read on Otto Rank (See my Otto Rank essay) in which it was stated:
Rank explored how human beings can learn to assert their will within relationship, and advocated a maximum degree of individuation within a maximum degree of connectedness.
The problem -- sometimes the major, divisive problem -- in a relationship becomes: What happens when 'maximum individuation' conflicts mightily with 'maximum connectedness'. In effect, we have a 'major personal and relationship conflict of interest'.
This question -- and this oftentimes major problem and/or conflict -- within a relationship, we will come back to shortly.
What I do have a problem with is any kind of 'negative stereotyping of men' and/or 'positive stereotyping of women' -- by women (either women writing an article and/or women being interviewed for an article).
And another problem that I have -- although I cannot claim to be 100 percent innocent myself -- is with both masculine and feminine hypocrisy.
Relative to the 'negative, sexist stereotyping problem', if the shoe was on the other foot, a hundred or a thousand feminist groups -- and even politically unconnected egalitarian women -- would be going ballistic over stereotyped, sexist comments made by any male writer or man being interviewed.
In this respect, I am reminded of my favorite political comment of the question this year by Lindsay Graham when he was interviewing Sotomayor for her prospective Supreme Court Judicial position. (Personally, I don't think she should have been hired because of her various reverse-disciminatory remarks in more than one speech.
Here's his quote from Graham to Sotomayor on this issue of her speeches:
"When it comes to your speeches, that is the most troubling thing to me, because that gives us an indication, when you're able to get outside the courtroom without the robe, an insight into how you think life works, and this wise Latino comment has been talked about a lot. But I can just tell you one thing: If I had said anything remotely like that, my career would have been over."
Back to Jenny Sanford.
Regarding the following article, I will make my editorial comments short and sweet.
The issue of 'out of relationship affairs' is not only a 'masculine problem'. Nor is it only a 'mid-life problem'.
Rather it is perhaps the biggest -- or at least one of the biggest -- threats to any ongoing marital, common-law, and/or long-term relationship romantic-sexual relationship.
Jenny Sanford is right on one thing and I will paraphrase.
'Love', 'romance', 'seduction', 'lust' and 'sex' can easily become 'obsessive-compulsive' and 'addictive' -- in or out of wedlock, for both sexes, at any time of teenage and/or adult life.
To repeat, what I am talking about here -- and I think each and everyone of you out there who have lived a substantial part of your life know exactly what I am talking about -- is that 'affairs of the heart and/or the loins' are neither a solely 'masculine problem' nor a solely 'mid-life crisis problem'.
Rather, the risk -- and the temptation -- acted upon or not -- comes with being alive. It is a lifelong problem.
So let no person who has been where I am talking about 'throw the first stone'.
It is easy to preach 'righteous, Holier Than Thou moral values, -- which often, oh, so often, turn out to be blatant hypocrisy' -- than it is to own up the whole 'monogamy vs. infidelity' dialectic as being one of the most difficult issues for any ongoing couple to deal with.
For most of us, it remains a relatively 'suppressed dialectic' -- shoved into the closet until one day the stench of dirty laundry comes tumbling out the door if either party has not exactly lived up to the other's expectations.
And then we all raise and shake our pointed fingers...
'Sex rears its ugly head again.'
And another politician bites the dust.
It is worse when there is hypocrisy involved.
Like Mark Sanford...
Mark Sanford, a conservative Republican who called President Bill Clinton’s philandering “reprehensible,” seemed an unlikely candidate for sexual scandal.
The affair came to light when Sanford, 49, could not be contacted over Father’s Day weekend. Aides initially said he had gone hiking in the Appalachians, but it soon came to light that the governor was in Argentina, visiting the woman he called his “soul mate.”
What we need here is a full 'Oxford Style Debate' on the 'potential -- and real -- humanistic-existential dichotomies in any long term relationship' between 'stable loyalty' on the one hand, and the wish for 'newness and new encounters and/or relationships' on the other hand, which romanticized and sexualized, in essence, becomes the dialectic between 'monogamy and infidelity/cheating'.
Anyone want to start this debate?
I will pass on this one...
Too hot to handle...
Easier to sit back and wave a righteous finger...
At situations and dilemmas that bring down many politicians and celebrities -- including politicians careers -- for the type of impulsive, 'non-rational', potentially self-destructive decisions that we probably all have experienced at one time or another.
'To be or not to be...that is the question...'
A wise play writer once wrote that through one of his most famous characters. (Shakespeare, Hamlet, of course)
'To be reckless or not be reckless...', I said that.
That's why our brain functions have 'safety, restraint functions'...
Dionysus vs. Apollo again...Nietzsche vs. Kant...Id vs. Superego...Persona vs. Shadow..
Out of our Shadow can come personal growth...
Out of our Shadow can come self-destruction...
Different contexts offer and/or require different choices.
Mark Sanford made his...
Ouch!
It is always the family that gets hurt...
And/or the marginalized spouse...
But eventually,
What goes around, comes around...
Who first said that?
Anaxamander, in different words, basically said that...
Some 2550 years ago...
Call it 'cosmic justice'...
What goes around, comes around...
From the limelight, we get kicked to the Shadows...
To lick our wounds, re-think things, compensate, mutate, re-energize...
And hopefully, one day rise again...
Or forever get lost in The Shadows...
The weak get lost, the strong metamorphisize...
Rise again, like The Phoenix...
Shake off their stupid mistakes...
And/or their impulsive ventures...
Into the Dark Side...
Dionysus' Den...
Who amongst us hasn't been there...
Or hasn't fantasized going there...
Worst case scenario...
You go to be a lovestruck and/or luststruck politician...
You wake up minus your family...
Ouch!
So much for 'soul mates'...
-- dgb, Aug. 19th, 2009.
-- David Gordon Bain,
-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiations,
-- Are still in process...
.............................................................................
--
Jenny Sanford: Affair was like ‘punches to gut’
South Carolina governor’s wife pulls no punches of her own in Vogue article
Video
Gov. Sanford’s wife speaks out
Aug. 18: Jenny Sanford, the wife of the South Carolina governor who admitted an affair with a woman in Argentina, is breaking her silence. NBC’s Norah O’Donnell reports.
Today show
From the internet, Aug.18th, 2009.
Jenny Sanford moves out
Aug. 8: The wife of South Carolina governor Mark Sanford has moved out of the governor's mansion.
By Jonann Brady
TODAYShow.com contributor
updated 9:20 a.m. ET, Tues., Aug 18, 2009
Jenny Sanford, the wife of South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, told Vogue magazine that finding out about her husband’s affair with an Argentine woman felt like “punches to the gut.”
Sanford, 47, has remained relatively quiet since her husband’s infidelity became public in June, but in an in-depth interview in the magazine’s latest issue, she pulls no punches of her own about her feelings.
Sanford and her four sons, ranging in age from 10 to 17, have moved out of the governor’s mansion and into the family’s home in Sullivan’s Island. She has been praised for her reaction to the affair, in contrast to other political spouses in similar situations who put on a brave front in public to stand by their men.
Story continues below ↓advertisement | your ad here
Roots of obsession
Sanford told Vogue that male politicians become blinded to how infidelity can poison their personal lives and political careers.
“Politicians become disconnected from the way everyone else lives in the world. I saw that from the very beginning,” said Sanford, who helped run her husband’s Senate and gubernatorial campaigns. “They’ll say they need something, and 10 people want to give it to them. It’s an ego boost, and it’s easy to drink your own Kool-Aid. As a wife, you do your best to keep them grounded, but it’s a real challenge.”
Sanford, who found out about the affair in January, said her husband was “obsessed” with visiting the Argentine divorcee Maria Belen Chapur.
“I have learned that these affairs are almost like an addiction to alcohol or pornography. They just can’t break away from them,” Sanford told Vogue.
Mark Sanford, a conservative Republican who called President Bill Clinton’s philandering “reprehensible,” seemed an unlikely candidate for sexual scandal.
The affair came to light when Sanford, 49, could not be contacted over Father’s Day weekend. Aides initially said he had gone hiking in the Appalachians, but it soon came to light that the governor was in Argentina, visiting the woman he called his “soul mate.”
More humiliating still were the e-mails between Sanford and the woman then known only as “Maria,” in which the governor waxed poetic about his lover’s body and her “magnificently gentle kisses.”
Men and midlife
Despite those embarrassing e-mails, Jenny Sanford remained stoic in public and philosophical in her interview with Vogue.
Image: Friend helps Jenny Sanford moves out of home
Mary Ann Chastain / AP
Jenny Sanford (right) and a friend move clothing and boxes from the South Carolina governor’s mansion in Columbia, S.C. Sanford and her sons have moved to the family home on Sullivan's Island.
“I think my husband has got some issues that he needs to work on, about happiness and what happiness means,” she says. “I think when a lot of men get to this midpoint in life, they start asking questions that they probably should have asked a long time ago.”
Sanford said that men going through a midlife crisis react differently than women do. Especially with his political future unclear, Sanford said her husband is questioning his legacy and what comes next in his life.
“I know my legacy is my children, so I don’t worry about that,” Sanford said.
Jenny Sanford has not ruled out the possibility of reconciliation with her husband, but she makes it clear her husband has to decide what he wants.
“If you don’t forgive, you become angry and bitter. I don't want to become that,” she said. “Now I think it’s up to my husband to do the soul-searching to see if he wants to stay married. The ball is in his court.”
More about Jenny and Mark Sanford
* S.C. first lady, sons move out of state residence
* Spiritual adviser: ‘Darkness’ gripped Sanford
* Does ‘love’ make governor more sympathetic?
I read the article below and had to give a 'DGB masculine (masculine-feminine egalitarian) editorial perspective' on the article.
I could feel my blood pressure start to rise on this one.
I have no problem with Jenny Sanford standing up for what she believes is right. And for not letting her husband 'off the hook' in similar cases to where other wives have tried to put on a (probably false) persona of 'nurturing support' for their husbands -- if only to protect their potentially crashing political careers.
I applaud Jenny Sanford for voicing her own opinions, feelings -- and wants.
Self-assertiveness as well as social sensitivity and empathy is imperative for any healthy, successful relationship.
I am reminded of another article I just read on Otto Rank (See my Otto Rank essay) in which it was stated:
Rank explored how human beings can learn to assert their will within relationship, and advocated a maximum degree of individuation within a maximum degree of connectedness.
The problem -- sometimes the major, divisive problem -- in a relationship becomes: What happens when 'maximum individuation' conflicts mightily with 'maximum connectedness'. In effect, we have a 'major personal and relationship conflict of interest'.
This question -- and this oftentimes major problem and/or conflict -- within a relationship, we will come back to shortly.
What I do have a problem with is any kind of 'negative stereotyping of men' and/or 'positive stereotyping of women' -- by women (either women writing an article and/or women being interviewed for an article).
And another problem that I have -- although I cannot claim to be 100 percent innocent myself -- is with both masculine and feminine hypocrisy.
Relative to the 'negative, sexist stereotyping problem', if the shoe was on the other foot, a hundred or a thousand feminist groups -- and even politically unconnected egalitarian women -- would be going ballistic over stereotyped, sexist comments made by any male writer or man being interviewed.
In this respect, I am reminded of my favorite political comment of the question this year by Lindsay Graham when he was interviewing Sotomayor for her prospective Supreme Court Judicial position. (Personally, I don't think she should have been hired because of her various reverse-disciminatory remarks in more than one speech.
Here's his quote from Graham to Sotomayor on this issue of her speeches:
"When it comes to your speeches, that is the most troubling thing to me, because that gives us an indication, when you're able to get outside the courtroom without the robe, an insight into how you think life works, and this wise Latino comment has been talked about a lot. But I can just tell you one thing: If I had said anything remotely like that, my career would have been over."
Back to Jenny Sanford.
Regarding the following article, I will make my editorial comments short and sweet.
The issue of 'out of relationship affairs' is not only a 'masculine problem'. Nor is it only a 'mid-life problem'.
Rather it is perhaps the biggest -- or at least one of the biggest -- threats to any ongoing marital, common-law, and/or long-term relationship romantic-sexual relationship.
Jenny Sanford is right on one thing and I will paraphrase.
'Love', 'romance', 'seduction', 'lust' and 'sex' can easily become 'obsessive-compulsive' and 'addictive' -- in or out of wedlock, for both sexes, at any time of teenage and/or adult life.
To repeat, what I am talking about here -- and I think each and everyone of you out there who have lived a substantial part of your life know exactly what I am talking about -- is that 'affairs of the heart and/or the loins' are neither a solely 'masculine problem' nor a solely 'mid-life crisis problem'.
Rather, the risk -- and the temptation -- acted upon or not -- comes with being alive. It is a lifelong problem.
So let no person who has been where I am talking about 'throw the first stone'.
It is easy to preach 'righteous, Holier Than Thou moral values, -- which often, oh, so often, turn out to be blatant hypocrisy' -- than it is to own up the whole 'monogamy vs. infidelity' dialectic as being one of the most difficult issues for any ongoing couple to deal with.
For most of us, it remains a relatively 'suppressed dialectic' -- shoved into the closet until one day the stench of dirty laundry comes tumbling out the door if either party has not exactly lived up to the other's expectations.
And then we all raise and shake our pointed fingers...
'Sex rears its ugly head again.'
And another politician bites the dust.
It is worse when there is hypocrisy involved.
Like Mark Sanford...
Mark Sanford, a conservative Republican who called President Bill Clinton’s philandering “reprehensible,” seemed an unlikely candidate for sexual scandal.
The affair came to light when Sanford, 49, could not be contacted over Father’s Day weekend. Aides initially said he had gone hiking in the Appalachians, but it soon came to light that the governor was in Argentina, visiting the woman he called his “soul mate.”
What we need here is a full 'Oxford Style Debate' on the 'potential -- and real -- humanistic-existential dichotomies in any long term relationship' between 'stable loyalty' on the one hand, and the wish for 'newness and new encounters and/or relationships' on the other hand, which romanticized and sexualized, in essence, becomes the dialectic between 'monogamy and infidelity/cheating'.
Anyone want to start this debate?
I will pass on this one...
Too hot to handle...
Easier to sit back and wave a righteous finger...
At situations and dilemmas that bring down many politicians and celebrities -- including politicians careers -- for the type of impulsive, 'non-rational', potentially self-destructive decisions that we probably all have experienced at one time or another.
'To be or not to be...that is the question...'
A wise play writer once wrote that through one of his most famous characters. (Shakespeare, Hamlet, of course)
'To be reckless or not be reckless...', I said that.
That's why our brain functions have 'safety, restraint functions'...
Dionysus vs. Apollo again...Nietzsche vs. Kant...Id vs. Superego...Persona vs. Shadow..
Out of our Shadow can come personal growth...
Out of our Shadow can come self-destruction...
Different contexts offer and/or require different choices.
Mark Sanford made his...
Ouch!
It is always the family that gets hurt...
And/or the marginalized spouse...
But eventually,
What goes around, comes around...
Who first said that?
Anaxamander, in different words, basically said that...
Some 2550 years ago...
Call it 'cosmic justice'...
What goes around, comes around...
From the limelight, we get kicked to the Shadows...
To lick our wounds, re-think things, compensate, mutate, re-energize...
And hopefully, one day rise again...
Or forever get lost in The Shadows...
The weak get lost, the strong metamorphisize...
Rise again, like The Phoenix...
Shake off their stupid mistakes...
And/or their impulsive ventures...
Into the Dark Side...
Dionysus' Den...
Who amongst us hasn't been there...
Or hasn't fantasized going there...
Worst case scenario...
You go to be a lovestruck and/or luststruck politician...
You wake up minus your family...
Ouch!
So much for 'soul mates'...
-- dgb, Aug. 19th, 2009.
-- David Gordon Bain,
-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiations,
-- Are still in process...
.............................................................................
--
Jenny Sanford: Affair was like ‘punches to gut’
South Carolina governor’s wife pulls no punches of her own in Vogue article
Video
Gov. Sanford’s wife speaks out
Aug. 18: Jenny Sanford, the wife of the South Carolina governor who admitted an affair with a woman in Argentina, is breaking her silence. NBC’s Norah O’Donnell reports.
Today show
From the internet, Aug.18th, 2009.
Jenny Sanford moves out
Aug. 8: The wife of South Carolina governor Mark Sanford has moved out of the governor's mansion.
By Jonann Brady
TODAYShow.com contributor
updated 9:20 a.m. ET, Tues., Aug 18, 2009
Jenny Sanford, the wife of South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, told Vogue magazine that finding out about her husband’s affair with an Argentine woman felt like “punches to the gut.”
Sanford, 47, has remained relatively quiet since her husband’s infidelity became public in June, but in an in-depth interview in the magazine’s latest issue, she pulls no punches of her own about her feelings.
Sanford and her four sons, ranging in age from 10 to 17, have moved out of the governor’s mansion and into the family’s home in Sullivan’s Island. She has been praised for her reaction to the affair, in contrast to other political spouses in similar situations who put on a brave front in public to stand by their men.
Story continues below ↓advertisement | your ad here
Roots of obsession
Sanford told Vogue that male politicians become blinded to how infidelity can poison their personal lives and political careers.
“Politicians become disconnected from the way everyone else lives in the world. I saw that from the very beginning,” said Sanford, who helped run her husband’s Senate and gubernatorial campaigns. “They’ll say they need something, and 10 people want to give it to them. It’s an ego boost, and it’s easy to drink your own Kool-Aid. As a wife, you do your best to keep them grounded, but it’s a real challenge.”
Sanford, who found out about the affair in January, said her husband was “obsessed” with visiting the Argentine divorcee Maria Belen Chapur.
“I have learned that these affairs are almost like an addiction to alcohol or pornography. They just can’t break away from them,” Sanford told Vogue.
Mark Sanford, a conservative Republican who called President Bill Clinton’s philandering “reprehensible,” seemed an unlikely candidate for sexual scandal.
The affair came to light when Sanford, 49, could not be contacted over Father’s Day weekend. Aides initially said he had gone hiking in the Appalachians, but it soon came to light that the governor was in Argentina, visiting the woman he called his “soul mate.”
More humiliating still were the e-mails between Sanford and the woman then known only as “Maria,” in which the governor waxed poetic about his lover’s body and her “magnificently gentle kisses.”
Men and midlife
Despite those embarrassing e-mails, Jenny Sanford remained stoic in public and philosophical in her interview with Vogue.
Image: Friend helps Jenny Sanford moves out of home
Mary Ann Chastain / AP
Jenny Sanford (right) and a friend move clothing and boxes from the South Carolina governor’s mansion in Columbia, S.C. Sanford and her sons have moved to the family home on Sullivan's Island.
“I think my husband has got some issues that he needs to work on, about happiness and what happiness means,” she says. “I think when a lot of men get to this midpoint in life, they start asking questions that they probably should have asked a long time ago.”
Sanford said that men going through a midlife crisis react differently than women do. Especially with his political future unclear, Sanford said her husband is questioning his legacy and what comes next in his life.
“I know my legacy is my children, so I don’t worry about that,” Sanford said.
Jenny Sanford has not ruled out the possibility of reconciliation with her husband, but she makes it clear her husband has to decide what he wants.
“If you don’t forgive, you become angry and bitter. I don't want to become that,” she said. “Now I think it’s up to my husband to do the soul-searching to see if he wants to stay married. The ball is in his court.”
More about Jenny and Mark Sanford
* S.C. first lady, sons move out of state residence
* Spiritual adviser: ‘Darkness’ gripped Sanford
* Does ‘love’ make governor more sympathetic?
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
DGB Editorial Comments on The Monumental Achievements of Otto Rank and his Unofficial Title as 'The Founder of Humanistic-Existential Psychoanalysis'
Reconstructed from another paper (The Seduction Theory Controversy, Part 2) August 18th, 2009.
Let me begin by giving you a 'caveat emptor' (buyer beware).
I am currently engaged in by far my most vigorous investigation into the history of Psychoanalysis that is turning up new and partly and/or totally different information each and every day that I didn't know previously.
Thus, an essay of this type right here -- and every one like it -- that I write on the subject and history of Psychoanalysis is necessarily of a continually evolving nature -- with sometimes strong new information entering my interpretive and evaluative system that may necessitate a sudden, perhaps radical change in judgment based on the relevance of this new information and what it means relative to the issue or problem as a whole that I am addressing.
I can only imagine -- with reasonable confidence -- that the same type of scenario was present for Freud between around 1889 and 1900 as Freud learned from both Breuer and Charcot, and sought for the first time, to start to put these ideas that he was learning from them, from himself, and from his patients, into therapeutic practice.
It is interesting to note for example that in 1889, in Freud's first case, the Frau Emmy case, cited in 'Studies on Hysteria' (1893-1895), Freud is using massage therapy as well as hypnosis, in contrast to the strict 'no touch' policy that Freud would begin to adhere to later in his career (let us say after 1900 although it was probably earlier than this), and which Freud would strictly enforce in his 'orthodox teachings of Psychoanalysis' while other psychoanalysts like Wilhelm Reich and Sandor Ferenczi wanted to -- and were -- practicing a 'wilder', non-orthodox and non-approved, form of touch-based Psychoanalysis.
It would not be the first or the last time that other theorists and therapists would pick up a particular idea and/or technique that Freud had basically 'been there and done that' -- and for one reason or another -- abandoned and/or marginalized the specific idea and/or technique that other theorists/therapists still wanted to go back to and re-investigate because they thought Freud had left something important behind. We can include Reich, Rank, and Ferenczi in this category, as well as Perls and Masson -- and I am sure there are numerous others.
For example, it defies my imagination how in 37 years of studying psychology from the time I first picked up the best-selling book 'Psycho-Cybernetics' (Maxwell Maltz, 1960) in around 1972, to the present, Aug 18th, 2009, I could largely overlook the momentously creative work of Otto Rank, who I will describe as holding the unofficial title of 'the founder of Humanistic-Existential Psychoanalysis',
Otto Rank has been an indirect, 'under the cover of darkness', influential lynch pin of my thinking, my beliefs, my values, in Hegel's Hotel through his influence on the growth of Humanistic-Existential Psychology and Psychotherapy, through such theorists and therapists as Rollo May and Carl Rogers, probably Karen Horney, and most notably Frederick Perls and all of Gestalt Therapy.
While Dr. Masson was complaining in the 1980s and 1990s about the 'emotional sterility' of Psychoanalysis, Rank and Ferenczi, in collaboration with each other, were saying essentially the same thing back in the 1920s and 1930s. (See the Wikipedia article below.)
Perhaps most remarkable in Rank's system of ideas is his ideas on creativity, his ideas on the dialectic dichotomy between man's 'fear of life' and his 'fear of death', and his ideas on 'separation anxiety' as first experienced in 'birth trauma' which then becomes an 'existential metaphor' of his and/or her whole life.
Man is caught in a life-long approach-avoidance conflict between the twin poles of life and death, and the paradoxical wish for individuality and union at the same time.
The "fear of life" is the fear of separation and individuation. The "fear of death" is the fear of union and merger—in essence, the loss of individuality. Both separation and union, however, are desired as well as feared since the "will to separate" correlates with the 'will to individuate', 'the will to create', and 'the will to become what one is inherently capable of becoming' while the "will to unite" correlates with the wish for contact, friendship, intimacy, family, love, romance, passion...
To respond obsessively to just one of the two paradoxical 'wishes and/or needs' — for example, by choosing to 'separate totally' or to 'merge totally' -- is to have the other wish and/or need thrown back at one's self -- unfulfilled. (See the Wikipedia article below.)
Rank explored how human beings can learn to assert their will within a relationship, and advocated a maximum degree of individuation within a maximum degree of connectedness. (See the Wikipedia article below.)
Writes Rank,
On a microcosmic level, therapy is a process of learning how to give and take, surrender and assert, merge and individuate, unite and separate — without being trapped in a whipsaw of opposites. Therapist and client, like everyone else, seek to find a constructive balance between separation and union. In psychological health, the contact boundary that links I and Thou harmoniously [fuses] the edges of each without confusing them," Rank wrote in Art and Artist (1932/1989, p. 104). Joining together in feeling, therapist and client do not lose themselves but, rather, re-discover and re-create themselves. In the simultaneous dissolution of their difference in a greater whole, therapist and client surrender their painful isolation for a moment, only to have individuality returned to them in the next, re-energized and enriched by the experience of "loss." (See the Wikipedia article below.)
In 1979, in my Honours Thesis, as well as in a preceding essay leading up to my Honours Thesis, I was mesmerized by the following Erich Fromm quote which I can see now as showing a definite Rankian influence.
'It is the paradox of human existence that man must simultaneously seek for closeness and independence; for oneness with others and at the same time for the preservation of his uniqueness and particularity. (Erich Fromm, I need to find the right book that it came from and the page reference as I am quoting from my own 1979 essay. I believe it was from 'Man For Himself although it could have been from 'Escape From Freedom', 'The Sane Society', and/or even 'The Art of Loving'.)
I will say and do no more in this essay than to pay special tribute to Otto Rank's special contributions to the evolution of humanistic-existential psychology and psychotherapy as detailed below from Wikipedia.
-- dgbn, Aug. 18th, 2009
-- David Gordon Bain,
-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiations...
-- Are still in process.
...............................................................................
Otto Rank
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Born April 22, 1884 (1884-04-22)
Vienna, Austria
Died October 31, 1939 (1939-11-01)
New York, New York
Fields Psychology
Institutions University of Pennsylvania
Alma mater University of Vienna
Influences Sigmund Freud, Henrik Ibsen, Freidrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer
Influenced Jessie Taft, Carl Rogers, Paul Goodman, Rollo May, Ernest Becker, Stanislav Grof, Matthew Fox, Anais Nin, Henry Miller, Irvin Yalom
Part of a series of articles on
Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis
Concepts
Psychosexual development
Psychosocial development
Conscious • Preconscious • Unconscious
Psychic apparatus
Id, ego, and super-ego
Libido • Drive
Transference
Countertransference
Ego defenses • Resistance
Projection • Denial
Important figures
Alfred Adler • Michael Balint
Wilfred Bion • Nancy Chodorow
Erik Erikson • Ronald Fairbairn
Sándor Ferenczi
Anna Freud • Sigmund Freud
Erich Fromm • Harry Guntrip
Karen Horney
Ernest Jones • Carl Jung
Melanie Klein • Heinz Kohut
Jacques Lacan
Margaret Mahler • Otto Rank
Wilhelm Reich
Harry Stack Sullivan
Susan Sutherland Isaacs
Donald Winnicott
Important works
The Interpretation of Dreams
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Civilization and Its Discontents
Schools of thought
Self psychology • Lacanian
• Object relations
Interpersonal • Relational
Ego psychology
Psychology portal
This box: view • talk • edit
Otto Rank (April 22, 1884 – October 31, 1939) was an Austrian psychoanalyst, writer, teacher and therapist. Born in Vienna as Otto Rosenfeld, he was one of Sigmund Freud's closest colleagues for 20 years, a prolific writer on psychoanalytic themes, an editor of the two most important analytic journals, managing director of Freud's publishing house and a creative theorist and therapist. In 1926, after Freud accused Rank of "anti-Oedipal" heresy, he chose to leave the inner circle and move to Paris with his wife, Tola, and infant daughter, Helene. For the remaining 14 years of his life, Rank had an exceptionally successful career as a lecturer, writer and therapist in France and the U.S.
Contents
[hide]
* 1 In the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society
* 2 Post-Vienna life and work
* 3 Influence
* 4 Major publications by date of first publication
* 5 References
* 6 External links
[edit] In the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society
In 1905, at the age of 21, Otto Rank presented Freud with a short manuscript on the artist, a study that so impressed Freud he invited Rank to become Secretary of the emerging Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Rank thus became the first paid member of the psychoanalytic movement, and Freud's "right-hand man" for almost 20 years. Freud considered Rank, with whom he was more intimate intellectually than his own sons, to be the most brilliant of his Viennese disciples.
Rank was one of Freud's six collaborators brought together in a secret "committee" or "ring" to defend the psychoanalytic mainstream as disputes with Adler and then Jung developed. Rank was the most prolific author in the "ring" besides Freud himself, extending psychoanalytic theory to the study of legend, myth, art, and other works of creativity. He worked closely with Freud, contributing two chapters on myth and legend to later editions of The Interpretation of Dreams. Rank's name appeared underneath Freud's on the title page of Freud's greatest work for many years. Between 1915 and 1918, Rank served as Secretary of the International Psychoanalytical Association which Freud had founded in 1910. Everyone in the small psychoanalytic world understood how much Freud respected Rank and his prolific creativity in expanding psychoanalytic theory.
In 1924 Rank published Das Trauma der Geburt (translated into English as The Trauma of Birth in 1929), exploring how art, myth, religion, philosophy and therapy were illuminated by separation anxiety in the “phase before the development of the Oedipus complex” (p. 216). But there was no such phase in Freud’s theories. The Oedipus complex, Freud explained tirelessly, was the nucleus of the neurosis and the foundational source of all art, myth, religion, philosophy, therapy – indeed of all human culture and civilization. It was the first time that anyone in the inner circle had dared to suggest that the Oedipus complex might not be the supreme causal factor in psychoanalysis. Rank was the first to use the term “pre-Oedipal” in a public psychoanalytic forum in 1925 (Rank, 1996, p. 43). In a 1930 self-analysis of his own writings, Rank observes that "the pre-Oedipal super-ego has since been overemphasized by Melanie Klein, without any reference to me" (ibid., p. 149n). In the next edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, Rank will be credited with coining the term "pre-Oedipal", which was previously mistakenly thought to have been introduced by Freud or Klein.
After some hesitation, Freud distanced himself from The Trauma of Birth, signalling to other members of his inner circle that Rank was perilously close to anti-Oedipal heresy. Confronted with Freud’s decisive opposition, Rank resigned in protest from his positions as Vice-President of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, director of Freud’s publishing house, and co-editor of Imago and Zeitschrift. His closest friend, Sándor Ferenczi, with whom Rank collaborated in the early Twenties on new experiential, object-relational and "here-and-now" approaches to therapy, vacillated on the significance of Rank's pre-Oedipal theory but not on Rank's objections to classical analytic technique.
The recommendation in Freud’s technical papers for analysts to be emotionless, according to Ferenczi and Rank (1924), had led to "an unnatural elimination of all human factors in the analysis" (pp. 40-41), and to "a theorizing of experience [Erlebnis]" (p. 41): the feeling experience of the intersubjective relationship, two first-person experiences, within the analytic situation. "The characteristic of that time," remembers Sándor Rado, who was in analysis with Karl Abraham from 1922 to 1925, "was a neglect of a human being's emotional life." Adds Rado: "Everybody was looking for oral, pregenital, and genital components in motivation. But that some people are happy, others unhappy, some afraid, or full of anger, and some loving and affectionate -- read the case histories to find how such differences between people were then absent from the literature." (Roazen & Swerdloff, 1995, pp. 82-83)
All emotional experience by human beings was being reduced by analysis to a derivative, no matter how disguised, of libido. For Freud, emotion was always sexual, derived from a dangerous Id that must be surgically uprooted: "Where Id was [Wo es war]," Freud said famously, "there ego shall be [soll ich werden]" (S.E., 22:80).
“Libido,” according to Freud’s 1921 work on Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (S.E., 18: 90), “is an expression taken from the theory of the emotions.” Emotion is the cause of neurotic disorder. Increases in emotion, according to Freud, are unpleasurable. Cure, for Freud, means analyzing, "working through" and eventually uprooting the emotions of the patient, “like the draining of the Zuyder Zee” (Freud, S.E., 22:80). The analyst makes the unconscious conscious by providing cognitive insight to the patient, thereby subduing the pressing drive for the irrational, for emotions—for the Id—to emerge from the patient’s unconscious.
In a 1927 lecture, Rank (1996) observes that “surgical therapy is uprooting and isolates the individual emotionally, as it tries to deny the emotional life” (p. 169), the same attack he and Ferenczi had leveled against psychoanalytic practice in their joint work. Reducing all emotional experience—all feeling, loving, thinking, and willing—to sex was one of Freud's biggest mistakes, according to Rank, who first pointed out this confusion in the mid-twenties. Emotions, said Rank, are relationships. Denial of the emotional life leads to denial of the will, the creative life, as well as denial of the interpersonal relationship in the analytic situation (Rank, 1929-31).
For Freud, said Rank in Will Therapy (1929-31), "the emotional life develops from the sexual sphere, therefore his sexualization in reality means emotionalization" (p. 165), two experiences that psychoanalysts continued to conflate for half a century after Freud’s death. Until the end of the 20th century, psychoanalysis had no theory of emotional experience and, by extension, no theory of emotional intelligence. Weinstein (2001) identified over two dozen articles in the major psychoanalytic journals lamenting the absence of a theory of emotions. "[S]uch comments persisted through to the 1990s" (Weinstein, 2001, p. 40).
"The emotional impoverishment of psychoanalysis," wrote Ernest Becker (1973) in The Denial of Death, which was strongly influenced by Rank's ideas, "must extend also to many analysts themselves and to psychiatrists who come under its ideology. This fact helps explain the terrible deadness of emotion that one experiences in psychiatric settings, the heavy weight of the character armor erected against the world" (p. 195n).
Written privately in 1932, Ferenczi’s Clinical Diary identified the “personal causes for the erroneous development of psychoanalysis” (Ferenczi, 1995, p. 184). According to Ferenczi, "… One learned from [Freud] and from his kind of technique various things that made one’s life and work more comfortable: the calm, unemotional reserve; the unruffled assurance that one knows better; and the theories, the seeking and finding of the causes of failure in the patient instead of partly in ourselves … and finally the pessimistic view, shared only with a few, that neurotics are a rabble [Gesindel], good only to support us financially and to allow us to learn from their cases: psychoanalysis as a therapy may be worthless" (Ferenczi, 1995, pp. 185-186).
But terrified at the prospect of losing Freud's approval, Ferenczi aborted his enthusiasm for The Trauma of Birth and began to distance himself personally from Rank – whom he shunned during a chance meeting in 1926 at Penn Station in New York. "He was my best friend and he refused to speak to me," Rank said (Taft, 1958, p. xvi).
Ferenczi's rupture with Rank cut short radical innovations in practice, and left no one in the inner circle who would champion relational, pre-Oedipal or "here-and-now" psychotherapy. Classical psychoanalysis, along the lines of Freud's 1911-15 technical writings, would now be entrenched in training institutes around the world. The attack leveled in 1924 by Ferenczi and Rank on the increasing "fanaticism for interpretation" and the "unnatural elimination of all human factors" from the practice of analysis would be forgotten.
Relational, expressive and "here-and-now" therapy would not be acceptable to most members of the American Psychoanalytic Association or the International Psychoanalytic Association for half a century. "[T]hose who had the misfortune to be analyzed by [Rank] were required to undergo a second analysis in order to qualify" for membership in the American Psychoanalytic Association (Lieberman, 1985, p. 293). As far as classical analysis was concerned, Rank was dead.
[edit] Post-Vienna life and work
In May 1926, having made emotional relationship in the "here-and-now" central to his practice of psychotherapy, Rank moved to Paris where he became a psychotherapist for artists such as Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin and lectured at the Sorbonne (Lieberman, 1985).
According to Rank, all emotional life is grounded in the present. In Will Therapy, published in German in 1929-31, Rank uses the term “here and now” for the first time in the psychotherapeutic literature: “Freud made the repression historical, that is, misplaced it into the childhood of the individual and then wanted to release it from there, while as a matter of fact the same tendency is working here and now” (Rank, 1929-31, p. 39). Instead of the word Verdrängung (repression), which laid stress on unconscious repression of the past, Rank preferred to use the word Verleugnung (denial), which focused instead on the emotional will to remain ill in the present: “The neurotic lives too much in the past [and] to that extent he actually does not live. He suffers … because he clings to [the past], wants to cling to it, in order to protect himself from experience [Erlebnis], the emotional surrender to the present” (Rank, 1929-31, p. 27).
In France and later in America, Rank enjoyed great success as a therapist and writer from 1926 to 1939. Traveling frequently between France and America, Rank lectured at universities such as Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and University of Pennsylvania on relational, experiential and “here-and-now” psychotherapy, art, the creative will, and “neurosis as a failure in creativity” (Rank, 1996).
Just as Erik Erikson was the first analyst to focus on identity and adulthood, Rank was the first to propose that separation from outworn thoughts, emotions and behaviors is the quintessence of psychological growth and development. In the late 1920s, after he left Freud’s inner circle, Rank explored how human beings can learn to assert their will within relationship, and advocated a maximum degree of individuation within a maximum degree of connectedness.
Foreshadowing the central themes of Piaget, Kohlberg, McClelland, Erikson and Kegan, Rank was the first to propose that human development is a lifelong construction, which requires continual negotiation and renegotiation of the dual yearnings for individuation and connection, the will to separate and the will to unite. Decades before Ronald Fairbairn, now credited by many as the inventor in the 1940s of modern object-relations theory, Rank's 1926 lecture on "The Genesis of the Object Relation" marks the first complete statement of this theory (Rank, 1996, pp. 140-149). By 1926 Rank was persona non grata in the official psychoanalytic world. There is little reason to believe, therefore, that any of the other writers credited with helping to invent object relations theory (Melanie Klein or Donald Winnicott, for example) ever read the German text of this lecture, published as Zur Genese der Object-beziehung in Vol. 1 of Rank's Genetische Psychologie (1927, pp. 110-22).
Rank died in New York City in 1939 from a kidney infection, one month after Freud's physician-assisted suicide on the Jewish Day of Atonement. "Komisch" (strange, odd, comical), Rank said on his deathbed (Lieberman, 1985, p. 389).
[edit] Influence
Rollo May, a pioneer of existential psychotherapy in the United States, was deeply influenced by Rank’s post-Freudian lectures and writings and always considered Rank to be the most important precursor of existential therapy. Shortly before his death, Rollo May wrote the foreword to Robert Kramer's edited collection of Rank’s American lectures. “I have long considered Otto Rank to be the great unacknowledged genius in Freud’s circle,” said May (Rank, 1996, p. xi).
In 1936 Carl Rogers, the most influential psychologist in America after William James, invited Otto Rank to give a series of lectures in New York on Rank’s post-Freudian models of experiential and relational therapy. Rogers was transformed by these lectures and always credited Rank with having profoundly shaped "client-centered" therapy and the entire profession of counselling. "I became infected with Rankian ideas," said Rogers (Kramer, 1995).(http://www.ottorank.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/rogers.pdf).
The New York writer Paul Goodman, who was co-founder with Fritz Perls of the Gestalt method of psychotherapy, one of the most popular in the world today, and one that makes Otto Rank's "here-and-now" central to its approach, described Rank’s post-Freudian ideas on art and creativity as “beyond praise” in Gestalt Therapy (Perls, Goodman and Hefferline, 1951, p. 395). According to Ervin Polster (1968), a pre-eminent Gestalt therapist, "Rank brought the human relationship directly into his office. He influenced analysts to take seriously the actual present interaction between therapist and patient, rather than maintain the fixed, distant, 'as though' relationship that had given previous analysts an emotional buffer for examining the intensities of therapeutic sensation and wish. Rank's contributions opened the way for encounter to become accepted as a deep therapeutic agent" (p. 6).
Rank also affected the practice of action-oriented and reflective therapies such as dramatic role-playing and psychodrama. "Although there is no evidence of a direct influence, Rank's ideas found new life in the work of such action psychotherapists as Moreno, who developed a psychodrama technique of doubling ... and Landy [director of the drama therapy program at New York University], who attempted to conceptualize balance as an integration of role and counterrole" (Landy, 2008, p. 29).
Rank's psychology of creativity has recently been applied to action learning, an inquiry-based process of group problem solving, team building, leadership development and organizational learning (Kramer 2007; 2008). The heart of action learning is asking wicked questions to promote the unlearning or letting go of taken-for-granted assumptions and beliefs. Questions allow group members to “step out of the frame of the prevailing ideology,” as Rank wrote in Art and Artist (1932/1989, p. 70), reflect on their assumptions and beliefs, and reframe their choices. The process of “stepping out” of a frame, out of a form of knowing – a prevailing ideology – is analogous to the work of artists as they struggle to give birth to fresh ways of seeing the world, perspectives that allow them to see aspects of the world that no artists, including themselves, have ever seen before.
The most creative artists, such as Rembrandt, Michelangelo and Leonardo, know how to separate even from their own greatest public successes, from earlier artistic incarnations of themselves. Their “greatness consists precisely in this reaching out beyond themselves, beyond the ideology which they have themselves fostered,” according to Art and Artist (Rank, 1932/1989, p. 368). Through the lens of Otto Rank’s work on understanding art and artists, action learning can be seen as the never-completed process of learning how to “step out of the frame” of the ruling mindset, whether one’s own or the culture’s – in other words, of learning how to unlearn.
Comparing the process of unlearning to the “breaking out” process of birth, Rank was the first psychologist to suggest that a continual capacity to separate from “internal mental objects” – from internalized institutions, beliefs and neuroses; from the restrictions of culture, social conformity and received wisdom – is the sine qua non for life-long creativity.
In a 1938 lecture, Rank said: "Life in itself is a mere succession of separations. Beginning with birth, going through several weaning periods and the development of the individual personality, and finally culminating in death – which represents the final separation. At birth, the individual experiences the first shock of separation, which throughout his life he strives to overcome. In the process of adaptation, man persistently separates from his old self, or at least from those segments off his old self that are now outlived. Like a child who has outgrown a toy, he discards the old parts of himself for which he has no further use ….The ego continually breaks away from its worn-out parts, which were of value in the past but have no value in the present. The neurotic [who cannot unlearn, and, therefore, lacks creativity] is unable to accomplish this normal detachment process … Owing to fear and guilt generated in the assertion of his own autonomy, he is unable to free himself, and instead remains suspended upon some primitive level of his evolution"(Rank, 1996, p. 270).
Unlearning necessarily involves separation from one’s self concept, as it has been culturally conditioned to conform to familial, group, occupational or organizational allegiances. According to Rank (1932/1989), unlearning or breaking out of our shell from the inside is “a separation [that] is so hard, not only because it involves persons and ideas that one reveres, but because the victory is always, at bottom, and in some form, won over a part of one’s ego” (p. 375).
In the organizational context, learning how to unlearn is vital because what we assume to be true has merged into our identity. We refer to the identity of an individual as a “mindset.” We refer to the identity of an organizational group as a “culture.” Action learners learn how to question, probe and separate from, both kinds of identity—i.e., their “individual” selves and their “social” selves. By opening themselves to critical inquiry, they begin to learn how to emancipate themselves from what they "know" – they learn how to unlearn.
In 1974, the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker won the Pulitzer prize for The Denial of Death (1973), which was based on Rank’s post-Freudian writings, especially Will Therapy (1929-31), Psychology and the Soul (1930) and Art and Artist (1932/1989). The feeling of anxiety, writes Rank in Will Therapy (1929-31), divides into two currents, running in opposite directions: one toward separation and individuation; the other toward union and collectivity. The outbreak of neurosis typically comes from the streaming together of these two fears—which Rank also calls the "fear of living" [Lebensangst] and the "fear of dying" [Todesangst] – “which, even in The Trauma of Birth, I had designated as the fear of both going forward and of going backward” (Rank, 1929-31, p. 124). A crisis "seems to break out at a certain age when the life fear which has restricted the I’s development meets with the death fear as it increases with growth and maturity," writes Rank in Will Therapy (1929-31). "The individual then feels himself driven forward by regret for wasted life and the desire to retrieve it. But this forward driving fear is now death fear, the fear of dying without having lived, which, even so, is held in check by fear of life" (pp. 188-189).
The "fear of life" is the fear of separation and individuation. The "fear of death" is the fear of union and merger—in essence, the loss of individuality. Both separation and union, however, are desired as well as feared since the "will to separate" correlates with the creative impulse and the "will to unite" with the need for love. To respond obsessively just to one need—by choosing to separate "totally" or to merge "totally" -- is to have the other thrown back at one's self.
According to Rank (1929-31), "Birth fear remains always more universal, cosmic as it were, loss of a connection with a greater whole [einen größeren Ganzen], in the last analysis with the 'All' [dem All] ... The fear in birth, which we have designated as fear of life, seems to me actually the fear of having to live as an isolated individual, and not the reverse, the fear of loss of individuality (death fear). That would mean, however, that primary fear [Urangst] corresponds to a fear of separation from the whole [vom All], therefore a fear of individuation, on account of which I would like to call it fear of life, although it may appear later as fear of the loss of this dearly bought individuality as fear of death, of being dissolved again into the whole [ins All). Between these two fear possibilities these poles of fear, the individual is thrown back and forth all his life, which accounts for the fact that we have not been able to trace fear back to a single root, or to overcome it therapeutically" (ibid., p. 124).
On a microcosmic level, therapy is a process of learning how to give and take, surrender and assert, merge and individuate, unite and separate—without being trapped in a whipsaw of opposites. Therapist and client, like everyone else, seek to find a constructive balance between separation and union. In psychological health, the contact boundary that links I and Thou "harmoniously [fuses] the edges of each without confusing them," Rank wrote in Art and Artist (1932/1989, p. 104). Joining together in feeling, therapist and client do not lose themselves but, rather, re-discover and re-create themselves. In the simultaneous dissolution of their difference in a greater whole, therapist and client surrender their painful isolation for a moment, only to have individuality returned to them in the next, re-energized and enriched by the experience of "loss."
"[T]he love feeling," Rank observes in a lecture delivered in 1927 at the University of Pennsylvania, "unites our I with the other, with the Thou [dem Du], with men, with the world, and so does away with fear. What is unique in love is that—beyond the fact of uniting—it rebounds on the I. Not only, I love the other as my I, as part of my I, but the other also makes my I worthy of love. The love of the Thou [des Liebe des Du] thus places a value on one's own I. Love abolishes egoism, it merges the self in the other to find it again enriched in one's own I. This unique projection and introjection of feeling rests on the fact that one can really only love the one who accepts our own self [unser eigene Selbst] as it is, indeed will not have it otherwise than it is, and whose self we accept as it is." (Rank, 1996, p. 154)
On a macrocosmic level, taking the experience of love as far as humanly possible, to the boundary of the spiritual, Rank compared the artist's "giving" and the enjoyer's "finding" of art with the dissolution and rediscovery of the self in mutual love. "The art-work," says Rank in Art and Artist, "presents a unity, alike in its effect and in its creation, and this implies a spiritual unity between the artist and the recipient" (Rank, 1932/1989, p. 113). It is in art, and its correlative, love, that microcosm meets macrocosm, the human meets the spiritual. At the height of the individuating impulse, the "will to separate," artists feel most strongly the longing for attachment, the "will to unite." Although artists begin the creative process by separating from their fellow human beings and liberating themselves from conforming to the past, escaping from the anxiety of influence, eventually the creative impulse merges into a desire for a return to "a greater whole," to "the ALL" (Rank, 1929-31, p. 155) -- in human terms, to the "collective" that alone has the power to immortalize the artist with the approval it grants the artwork:
"For this very essence of man, his soul, which the artist puts into his work and which is represented by it, is found again in the work by the enjoyer, just as the believer finds his soul in religion or in God, with whom he feels himself to be one. It is on this identity of the spiritual ... and not on a psychological identification with the artist that [aesthetic pleasure] ultimately depends... But both of them, in the simultaneous dissolution of their individuality in a greater whole, enjoy, as a high pleasure, the personal enrichment of that individuality through this feeling of oneness. They have yielded up their mortal ego for a moment, fearlessly and even joyfully, to receive it back in the next, the richer for this universal feeling (Rank, 1932/1989, pp. 109-110).
In one of his most poetic passages, Rank suggests that this transcendent feeling implies not only a "spiritual unity" between artist and enjoyer, I and Thou, but also "with a Cosmos floating in mystic vapors in which present, past, and future are dissolved" (Rank, 1932/1989, p. 113)--an identity with "the ALL" that once was but is no more. The healing nature of artistic experience, Rank believed, affirms difference but, paradoxically, also "leads to the release from difference, to the feeling of unity with the self, with the other, with the cosmos" (Rank, 1929-31, p. 58). In art, microcosm meets macrocosm. Of the uncanny feeling of emotional unity we experience in surrendering ourselves—giving up temporarily the burden of our difference—to the Other in art, Rank writes in Art and Artist: "[It] produces a satisfaction which suggests that it is more than a matter of the passing identification of two individuals, that it is the potential restoration of a union with the Cosmos, which once existed and was then lost. The individual psychological root of this sense of unity I discovered (at the time of writing The Trauma of Birth, 1924) in the prenatal condition, which the individual in his yearning for immortality strives to restore. Already, in that earliest stage of individualization, the child is not only factually one with the mother but beyond that, one with the world, with a Cosmos floating in mystic vapors in which present, past, and future are dissolved. The individual urge to restore this lost unity is (as I have formerly pointed out) an essential factor in the production of human cultural values" (Rank, 1932/1989, p. 113).
No one has expressed the conflict between the will to separate and the will to unite better than Ernest Becker (1973), whose award-winning The Denial of Death captured the largest—macrocosmic—meaning of separation and union for Rank: "On the one hand the creature is impelled by a powerful desire to identify with the cosmic forces, to merge himself with the rest of nature. On the other hand he wants to be unique, to stand out as something different and apart" (Becker, 1973, pp. 151-152). "You can see that man wants the impossible: He wants to lose his isolation and keep it at the same time. He can't stand the sense of separateness, and yet he can't allow the complete suffocation of his vitality. He wants to expand by merging with the powerful beyond that transcends him, yet he wants while merging with it to remain individual and aloof ..." (ibid., p. 155).
On a microcosmic level, however, the life-long oscillation between the two "poles of fear" can be made more bearable, according to Rank, in a relationship with another person who accepts one's uniqueness and difference, and allows for the emergence of the creative impulse—without too much guilt or anxiety for separating from the other. Living fully requires "seeking at once isolation and union" (Rank, 1932/1989, p. 86), finding the courage to accept both simultaneously, without succumbing to the Angst that leads a person to be whipsawed from one pole to the other. Creative solutions for living emerge out of the fluctuating, ever-expanding and ever-contracting, space between separation and union. Art and the creative impulse, said Rank in Art and Artist, "originate solely in the constructive harmonization of this fundamental dualism of all life" (1932/1989, p. xxii).
On a macrocosmic level, the consciousness of living—the dim awareness that we are alive for a moment on this planet as it spins, meaninglessly, around the cold and infinite galaxy—gives human beings "the status of a small god in nature," according to Ernest Becker: "Yet, at the same time, as the Eastern sages also knew, man is a worm and food for worms. This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still has the gill marks to prove it ... Man is literally split in two: he has awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with" (Becker, 1973, p. 26).
Through the influence of Ernest Becker's writings, Rank's eternal dialectic between "life fear and death fear" has been tested experimentally in Terror Management Theory by Skidmore College psychology professor Sheldon Solomon, University of Arizona psychology professor Jeff Greenberg, and Colorado University at Colorado Springs psychology professor Tom Pyszczynski.
The American priest and theologian, Matthew Fox, founder of Creation Spirituality and Wisdom University, considers Rank to be one of the most important psychologists of the 20th century. See, especially, Fox's book, Creativity: Where the Divine and the Human Meet (Jeremy P. Tarcher, 2002), paperback: ISBN 1-58542-329-7.
Stanislav Grof, a founder of transpersonal psychology, based much of his work in prenatal and perinatal psychology on Rank's The Trauma of Birth (Kripal, 2007, pp. 249-269).
In 2008, the philosopher Maxine Sheets-Johnstone published The Roots of Morality (Pennsylvania State University Press), which contains an analysis of Rank's argument that "immortality ideologies" are an abiding human response to the painful riddle of death. Sheets-Johnstone compares Rank's thought to that of three major Western philosophers—René Descartes, Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida: "Because immortality ideologies were originally recognized and in fact so named by Rank, a close examination of his writings on the subject is not only apposite but is itself philosophically rewarding ... Rank was a Freudian dissident who, in introducing the concept of immortality ideologies, traced out historical and psychological roots of 'soul-belief' (Seelenglaube)... [My chapter] points up the extraordinary cogency of Rank's distinction between the rational and the irrational to the question of the human need for immortality ideologies" (Sheets-Johnstone, 2008, p. 64). Sheets-Johnstone concludes her book on a note reminiscent of Rank's plea for the human value of mutual love over arid intellectual insight: "Surely it is time for Homo sapiens sapiens to turn away from the pursuit of domination over all and to begin cultivating and developing its sapiential wisdom in the pursuit of caring, nurturing and strengthening that most precious muscle which is its heart" (ibid., pp. 405-06).
Today, Rank can be seen as one of the great pioneers in the fields of humanistic psychology, existential psychotherapy, Gestalt therapy and transpersonal psychology.
[edit] Major publications by date of first publication
Year German Title (Current Edition) English Translation (Current Edition)
1907 Der Künstler The Artist
1909 Der Mythus von der Geburt des Helden (Turia & Kant, 2000, ISBN 3-85132-141-3) The Myth of the Birth of the Hero (Johns Hopkins, 2004, ISBN 0-8018-7883-7)
1911 Die Lohengrin Sage [doctoral thesis] The Lohengrin Saga
1912 Das Inzest-Motiv in Dichtung und Sage The Incest Theme in Literature and Legend (Johns Hopkins, 1991, ISBN 0-8018-4176-3)
1913 Die Bedeutung der Psychoanalyse fur die Geisteswissenschaften [with Hanns Sachs] The Significance of Psychoanalysis for the Human Sciences
1914 "Traum und Dichtung" and "Traum und Mythus" in Sigmund Freud's Die Traumdeutung The Interpretation of Dreams eds. 4-7: "Dreams and Poetry"; "Dreams and Myth" added to Ch. VI, "The Dream-Work." In Dreaming by the Book L. Marinelli and A. Mayer, Other, 2003. ISBN 1-59051-009-7
1924 Das Trauma der Geburt (Psychosozial-Verlag, 1998, ISBN 3-932133-25-0) The Trauma of Birth, 1929 (Dover, 1994, ISBN 0-486-27974-X)
1924 Entwicklungsziele der Psychoanalyse [with Sandor Ferenczi] The Development of Psychoanalysis / Developmental Goals of Psychoanalysis
1925 Der Doppelgänger [written 1914] The Double (Karnac, 1989, ISBN 0-946439-58-3)
1929 Wahrheit und Wirklichkeit Truth and Reality (Norton, 1978, ISBN 0-393-00899-1)
1930 (Consists of Volumes II and III of "Technik der Psychoanalyse": Vol. II, "Die Analytische Reaktion in ihren konstruktiven Elementen"; Vol. III, "Die Analyse des Analytikers und seiner Rolle in der Gesamtsituaton". Copyright 1929, 1931 by Franz Deuticke.) Will Therapy, 1929-31 (First published in English in 1936;reprinted in paperback by Norton, 1978, ISBN 0-393-00898-3)
1930 Seelenglaube und Psychologie Psychology and the Soul (Johns Hopkins, 2003, ISBN 0-8018-7237-5)
1932 Kunst und Künstler (Psychosozial-Verlag, 2000, ISBN 3-89806-023-3) Art and Artist (Norton, 1989, ISBN 0-393-30574-0)
1933 Erziehung und Weltanschauung : Eine Kritik d. psychol. Erziehungs-Ideologie, München : Reinhardt, 1933 Modern Education
1941 Beyond Psychology (Dover, 1966, ISBN 0-486-20485-5)
1996 A Psychology of Difference: The American Lectures [talks given 1924–1938; edited and with an introductory essay by Robert Kramer] (Princeton, 1996, ISBN 0-691-04470-8)
[edit] References
Book-length works about Otto Rank.
* Karpf, Fay Berger (1970). The Psychology and Psychotherapy of Otto Rank: An Historical and Comparative Introduction. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-8371-3029-8.
* Lieberman, E. James (1985). Acts of Will: The Life and Work of Otto Rank. Free Press. ISBN 0-684-86327-8. Updated ed. University of Massachusetts Press, 1993. French translation: La volonté en acte: La vie et l'œvre d'Otto Rank PUF (1991) ISBN 2 13 0433065; German translation Otto Rank: Leben und Werk Psychosozial (1997) ISBN 3-932133-137
* Menaker, Esther (1982). Otto Rank: A Rediscovered Legacy. Columbia University Press.
* Taft, Jessie (1958). Otto Rank: A Biographical Study Based on Notebooks, Letters, Collected Writings, Therapeutic Achievements and Personal Associations. New York: The Julian Press.
* Website: http://www.ottorank.com Otto Rank
Articles or chapters about Otto Rank.
* Journal of the Otto Rank Association Vols. 1 – 17, 31 issues, 1967–1983, diverse writers, including Otto Rank.
* Kramer, Robert (2003). Why Did Ferenczi and Rank Conclude that Freud Had No More Emotional Intelligence than a Pre-Oedipal Child? In Creative Dissent: Psychoanalysis in Evolution, Claude Barbre, Barry Ulanov, and Alan Roland (eds.), Praeger, Ch.3, pp. 23–36.
* Kramer, Robert (1995). The Birth of Client-Centered Therapy: Carl Rogers, Otto Rank, and 'The Beyond,' an article in Journal of Humanistic Psychology, Volume 35, pp. 54–110. [1]
* Kramer, Robert (1995). The ‘Bad Mother’ Freud Has Never Seen: Otto Rank and the Birth of Object-Relations Theory, an article in Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis, Volume 23, pp. 293–321.
* Landy, Robert J. (2008). The Couch and the Stage: Integrating Words and Action in Psychotherapy. Lanham: Jason Aronson, pp. 23-33.
* Lieberman, E. James. (2003) The Evolution of Psychotherapy Since Freud. In Creative Dissent: Psychoanalysis in Evolution, Claude Barbre, Barry Ulanov, and Alan Roland (eds.), Praeger, Ch. 4, pp. 37–44.
* Roazen, Paul and Bluma Swerdloff (eds.) (1995). Heresy: Sandor Rado and the Psychoanalytic Movement. New Jersey: Jason Aronson.
* Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine (2008). The Roots of Morality. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, pp. 63-91.
Diary of Sándor Ferenczi.
* The Clinical Diary of Sándor Ferenczi (1988), Editor Judith Dupont, Translator Michael Balint and Nicola Zarday Jackson, Harvard University Press.
Articles or chapters on application to action learning of Rank's psychology of art and unlearning.
* Kramer, Robert (2007). How Might Action Learning Be Used to Develop the Emotional Intelligence and Leadership Capacity of Public Administrators? Journal of Public Affairs Education,13 (2), pp. 205-246.
* Kramer, Robert (2008). Learning How to Learn: Action Learning for Leadership Development. A chapter in Rick Morse (ed.) Innovations in Public Leadership Development. Washington DC: M.E. Sharpe and National Academy of Public Administration, pp. 296-326.
Other references.
* Becker, Ernest (1973). The Denial of Death. New York: The Free Press.
* Kripal, Jeffrey J. (2007). Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
* Weinstein, Fred (2001). Freud, Psychoanalysis, Social Theory: The Unfulfilled Promise. Albany: State University of New York Press.
* Polster, Erving (1968). A Contemporary Psychotherapy. In Paul David Pursglove (ed.) Recognitions in Gestalt Therapy New York: Funk & Wagnalls.
[edit] External links
* OttoRank.com
* The Ernest Becker Foundation
* International Psychoanalytical Association
* Photo of Otto Rank
* The Myth of the Birth of the Hero, at sacred-texts.com
[hide]
v • d • e
Psychology
History · Portal · Psychologist
Basic
Affective · Biological · Clinical · Cognitive · Cognitive neuroscience · Comparative · Developmental · Emotion · Evolutionary · Experimental · Mathematical · Neuropsychology · Personality · Physiological · Positive · Psycholinguistics · Psychopathology · Psychophysics · Psychophysiology · Qualitative research · Quantitative research · Social · Theoretical
Psi
Applied
Assessment · Clinical · Counseling · Educational · Forensic · Health · Industrial/organizational · Legal · Media · Military · Occupational health · Psychometrics · Relationship counseling · School · Sport · Systems
Orientations
Analytical · Behaviorism · Cognitive behavioral therapy · Cognitivism · Descriptive · Ecological Systems Theory · Existential therapy · Family therapy · Feminist therapy · Gestalt psychology · Humanistic · Narrative therapy · Psychoanalysis · Psychodynamic psychotherapy · Rational emotive behavior therapy · Transpersonal
Eminent
psychologists
Alfred Adler · Gordon Allport · Albert Bandura · Raymond Cattell · Kenneth and Mamie Clark · Erik Erikson · Hans Eysenck · Leon Festinger · Viktor Frankl · Sigmund Freud · Donald O. Hebb · Clark L. Hull · William James · Carl Jung · Jerome Kagan · Kurt Lewin · Abraham Maslow · David McClelland · Stanley Milgram · George A. Miller · Neal E. Miller · Walter Mischel · Ivan Pavlov · Jean Piaget · Carl Rogers · Stanley Schachter · B. F. Skinner · Edward Thorndike · John B. Watson
Lists
Counseling topics · Important publications in psychology · Psychological research methods · Psychological schools · Psychologists · Psychology disciplines · Psychology organizations · Psychology topics · Psychotherapies · Timeline of psychology
Wiktionary definition · Wikisource · Wikimedia Commons · Wikiquote · Wikinews · Wikibooks
Let me begin by giving you a 'caveat emptor' (buyer beware).
I am currently engaged in by far my most vigorous investigation into the history of Psychoanalysis that is turning up new and partly and/or totally different information each and every day that I didn't know previously.
Thus, an essay of this type right here -- and every one like it -- that I write on the subject and history of Psychoanalysis is necessarily of a continually evolving nature -- with sometimes strong new information entering my interpretive and evaluative system that may necessitate a sudden, perhaps radical change in judgment based on the relevance of this new information and what it means relative to the issue or problem as a whole that I am addressing.
I can only imagine -- with reasonable confidence -- that the same type of scenario was present for Freud between around 1889 and 1900 as Freud learned from both Breuer and Charcot, and sought for the first time, to start to put these ideas that he was learning from them, from himself, and from his patients, into therapeutic practice.
It is interesting to note for example that in 1889, in Freud's first case, the Frau Emmy case, cited in 'Studies on Hysteria' (1893-1895), Freud is using massage therapy as well as hypnosis, in contrast to the strict 'no touch' policy that Freud would begin to adhere to later in his career (let us say after 1900 although it was probably earlier than this), and which Freud would strictly enforce in his 'orthodox teachings of Psychoanalysis' while other psychoanalysts like Wilhelm Reich and Sandor Ferenczi wanted to -- and were -- practicing a 'wilder', non-orthodox and non-approved, form of touch-based Psychoanalysis.
It would not be the first or the last time that other theorists and therapists would pick up a particular idea and/or technique that Freud had basically 'been there and done that' -- and for one reason or another -- abandoned and/or marginalized the specific idea and/or technique that other theorists/therapists still wanted to go back to and re-investigate because they thought Freud had left something important behind. We can include Reich, Rank, and Ferenczi in this category, as well as Perls and Masson -- and I am sure there are numerous others.
For example, it defies my imagination how in 37 years of studying psychology from the time I first picked up the best-selling book 'Psycho-Cybernetics' (Maxwell Maltz, 1960) in around 1972, to the present, Aug 18th, 2009, I could largely overlook the momentously creative work of Otto Rank, who I will describe as holding the unofficial title of 'the founder of Humanistic-Existential Psychoanalysis',
Otto Rank has been an indirect, 'under the cover of darkness', influential lynch pin of my thinking, my beliefs, my values, in Hegel's Hotel through his influence on the growth of Humanistic-Existential Psychology and Psychotherapy, through such theorists and therapists as Rollo May and Carl Rogers, probably Karen Horney, and most notably Frederick Perls and all of Gestalt Therapy.
While Dr. Masson was complaining in the 1980s and 1990s about the 'emotional sterility' of Psychoanalysis, Rank and Ferenczi, in collaboration with each other, were saying essentially the same thing back in the 1920s and 1930s. (See the Wikipedia article below.)
Perhaps most remarkable in Rank's system of ideas is his ideas on creativity, his ideas on the dialectic dichotomy between man's 'fear of life' and his 'fear of death', and his ideas on 'separation anxiety' as first experienced in 'birth trauma' which then becomes an 'existential metaphor' of his and/or her whole life.
Man is caught in a life-long approach-avoidance conflict between the twin poles of life and death, and the paradoxical wish for individuality and union at the same time.
The "fear of life" is the fear of separation and individuation. The "fear of death" is the fear of union and merger—in essence, the loss of individuality. Both separation and union, however, are desired as well as feared since the "will to separate" correlates with the 'will to individuate', 'the will to create', and 'the will to become what one is inherently capable of becoming' while the "will to unite" correlates with the wish for contact, friendship, intimacy, family, love, romance, passion...
To respond obsessively to just one of the two paradoxical 'wishes and/or needs' — for example, by choosing to 'separate totally' or to 'merge totally' -- is to have the other wish and/or need thrown back at one's self -- unfulfilled. (See the Wikipedia article below.)
Rank explored how human beings can learn to assert their will within a relationship, and advocated a maximum degree of individuation within a maximum degree of connectedness. (See the Wikipedia article below.)
Writes Rank,
On a microcosmic level, therapy is a process of learning how to give and take, surrender and assert, merge and individuate, unite and separate — without being trapped in a whipsaw of opposites. Therapist and client, like everyone else, seek to find a constructive balance between separation and union. In psychological health, the contact boundary that links I and Thou harmoniously [fuses] the edges of each without confusing them," Rank wrote in Art and Artist (1932/1989, p. 104). Joining together in feeling, therapist and client do not lose themselves but, rather, re-discover and re-create themselves. In the simultaneous dissolution of their difference in a greater whole, therapist and client surrender their painful isolation for a moment, only to have individuality returned to them in the next, re-energized and enriched by the experience of "loss." (See the Wikipedia article below.)
In 1979, in my Honours Thesis, as well as in a preceding essay leading up to my Honours Thesis, I was mesmerized by the following Erich Fromm quote which I can see now as showing a definite Rankian influence.
'It is the paradox of human existence that man must simultaneously seek for closeness and independence; for oneness with others and at the same time for the preservation of his uniqueness and particularity. (Erich Fromm, I need to find the right book that it came from and the page reference as I am quoting from my own 1979 essay. I believe it was from 'Man For Himself although it could have been from 'Escape From Freedom', 'The Sane Society', and/or even 'The Art of Loving'.)
I will say and do no more in this essay than to pay special tribute to Otto Rank's special contributions to the evolution of humanistic-existential psychology and psychotherapy as detailed below from Wikipedia.
-- dgbn, Aug. 18th, 2009
-- David Gordon Bain,
-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiations...
-- Are still in process.
...............................................................................
Otto Rank
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Born April 22, 1884 (1884-04-22)
Vienna, Austria
Died October 31, 1939 (1939-11-01)
New York, New York
Fields Psychology
Institutions University of Pennsylvania
Alma mater University of Vienna
Influences Sigmund Freud, Henrik Ibsen, Freidrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer
Influenced Jessie Taft, Carl Rogers, Paul Goodman, Rollo May, Ernest Becker, Stanislav Grof, Matthew Fox, Anais Nin, Henry Miller, Irvin Yalom
Part of a series of articles on
Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis
Concepts
Psychosexual development
Psychosocial development
Conscious • Preconscious • Unconscious
Psychic apparatus
Id, ego, and super-ego
Libido • Drive
Transference
Countertransference
Ego defenses • Resistance
Projection • Denial
Important figures
Alfred Adler • Michael Balint
Wilfred Bion • Nancy Chodorow
Erik Erikson • Ronald Fairbairn
Sándor Ferenczi
Anna Freud • Sigmund Freud
Erich Fromm • Harry Guntrip
Karen Horney
Ernest Jones • Carl Jung
Melanie Klein • Heinz Kohut
Jacques Lacan
Margaret Mahler • Otto Rank
Wilhelm Reich
Harry Stack Sullivan
Susan Sutherland Isaacs
Donald Winnicott
Important works
The Interpretation of Dreams
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Civilization and Its Discontents
Schools of thought
Self psychology • Lacanian
• Object relations
Interpersonal • Relational
Ego psychology
Psychology portal
This box: view • talk • edit
Otto Rank (April 22, 1884 – October 31, 1939) was an Austrian psychoanalyst, writer, teacher and therapist. Born in Vienna as Otto Rosenfeld, he was one of Sigmund Freud's closest colleagues for 20 years, a prolific writer on psychoanalytic themes, an editor of the two most important analytic journals, managing director of Freud's publishing house and a creative theorist and therapist. In 1926, after Freud accused Rank of "anti-Oedipal" heresy, he chose to leave the inner circle and move to Paris with his wife, Tola, and infant daughter, Helene. For the remaining 14 years of his life, Rank had an exceptionally successful career as a lecturer, writer and therapist in France and the U.S.
Contents
[hide]
* 1 In the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society
* 2 Post-Vienna life and work
* 3 Influence
* 4 Major publications by date of first publication
* 5 References
* 6 External links
[edit] In the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society
In 1905, at the age of 21, Otto Rank presented Freud with a short manuscript on the artist, a study that so impressed Freud he invited Rank to become Secretary of the emerging Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Rank thus became the first paid member of the psychoanalytic movement, and Freud's "right-hand man" for almost 20 years. Freud considered Rank, with whom he was more intimate intellectually than his own sons, to be the most brilliant of his Viennese disciples.
Rank was one of Freud's six collaborators brought together in a secret "committee" or "ring" to defend the psychoanalytic mainstream as disputes with Adler and then Jung developed. Rank was the most prolific author in the "ring" besides Freud himself, extending psychoanalytic theory to the study of legend, myth, art, and other works of creativity. He worked closely with Freud, contributing two chapters on myth and legend to later editions of The Interpretation of Dreams. Rank's name appeared underneath Freud's on the title page of Freud's greatest work for many years. Between 1915 and 1918, Rank served as Secretary of the International Psychoanalytical Association which Freud had founded in 1910. Everyone in the small psychoanalytic world understood how much Freud respected Rank and his prolific creativity in expanding psychoanalytic theory.
In 1924 Rank published Das Trauma der Geburt (translated into English as The Trauma of Birth in 1929), exploring how art, myth, religion, philosophy and therapy were illuminated by separation anxiety in the “phase before the development of the Oedipus complex” (p. 216). But there was no such phase in Freud’s theories. The Oedipus complex, Freud explained tirelessly, was the nucleus of the neurosis and the foundational source of all art, myth, religion, philosophy, therapy – indeed of all human culture and civilization. It was the first time that anyone in the inner circle had dared to suggest that the Oedipus complex might not be the supreme causal factor in psychoanalysis. Rank was the first to use the term “pre-Oedipal” in a public psychoanalytic forum in 1925 (Rank, 1996, p. 43). In a 1930 self-analysis of his own writings, Rank observes that "the pre-Oedipal super-ego has since been overemphasized by Melanie Klein, without any reference to me" (ibid., p. 149n). In the next edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, Rank will be credited with coining the term "pre-Oedipal", which was previously mistakenly thought to have been introduced by Freud or Klein.
After some hesitation, Freud distanced himself from The Trauma of Birth, signalling to other members of his inner circle that Rank was perilously close to anti-Oedipal heresy. Confronted with Freud’s decisive opposition, Rank resigned in protest from his positions as Vice-President of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, director of Freud’s publishing house, and co-editor of Imago and Zeitschrift. His closest friend, Sándor Ferenczi, with whom Rank collaborated in the early Twenties on new experiential, object-relational and "here-and-now" approaches to therapy, vacillated on the significance of Rank's pre-Oedipal theory but not on Rank's objections to classical analytic technique.
The recommendation in Freud’s technical papers for analysts to be emotionless, according to Ferenczi and Rank (1924), had led to "an unnatural elimination of all human factors in the analysis" (pp. 40-41), and to "a theorizing of experience [Erlebnis]" (p. 41): the feeling experience of the intersubjective relationship, two first-person experiences, within the analytic situation. "The characteristic of that time," remembers Sándor Rado, who was in analysis with Karl Abraham from 1922 to 1925, "was a neglect of a human being's emotional life." Adds Rado: "Everybody was looking for oral, pregenital, and genital components in motivation. But that some people are happy, others unhappy, some afraid, or full of anger, and some loving and affectionate -- read the case histories to find how such differences between people were then absent from the literature." (Roazen & Swerdloff, 1995, pp. 82-83)
All emotional experience by human beings was being reduced by analysis to a derivative, no matter how disguised, of libido. For Freud, emotion was always sexual, derived from a dangerous Id that must be surgically uprooted: "Where Id was [Wo es war]," Freud said famously, "there ego shall be [soll ich werden]" (S.E., 22:80).
“Libido,” according to Freud’s 1921 work on Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (S.E., 18: 90), “is an expression taken from the theory of the emotions.” Emotion is the cause of neurotic disorder. Increases in emotion, according to Freud, are unpleasurable. Cure, for Freud, means analyzing, "working through" and eventually uprooting the emotions of the patient, “like the draining of the Zuyder Zee” (Freud, S.E., 22:80). The analyst makes the unconscious conscious by providing cognitive insight to the patient, thereby subduing the pressing drive for the irrational, for emotions—for the Id—to emerge from the patient’s unconscious.
In a 1927 lecture, Rank (1996) observes that “surgical therapy is uprooting and isolates the individual emotionally, as it tries to deny the emotional life” (p. 169), the same attack he and Ferenczi had leveled against psychoanalytic practice in their joint work. Reducing all emotional experience—all feeling, loving, thinking, and willing—to sex was one of Freud's biggest mistakes, according to Rank, who first pointed out this confusion in the mid-twenties. Emotions, said Rank, are relationships. Denial of the emotional life leads to denial of the will, the creative life, as well as denial of the interpersonal relationship in the analytic situation (Rank, 1929-31).
For Freud, said Rank in Will Therapy (1929-31), "the emotional life develops from the sexual sphere, therefore his sexualization in reality means emotionalization" (p. 165), two experiences that psychoanalysts continued to conflate for half a century after Freud’s death. Until the end of the 20th century, psychoanalysis had no theory of emotional experience and, by extension, no theory of emotional intelligence. Weinstein (2001) identified over two dozen articles in the major psychoanalytic journals lamenting the absence of a theory of emotions. "[S]uch comments persisted through to the 1990s" (Weinstein, 2001, p. 40).
"The emotional impoverishment of psychoanalysis," wrote Ernest Becker (1973) in The Denial of Death, which was strongly influenced by Rank's ideas, "must extend also to many analysts themselves and to psychiatrists who come under its ideology. This fact helps explain the terrible deadness of emotion that one experiences in psychiatric settings, the heavy weight of the character armor erected against the world" (p. 195n).
Written privately in 1932, Ferenczi’s Clinical Diary identified the “personal causes for the erroneous development of psychoanalysis” (Ferenczi, 1995, p. 184). According to Ferenczi, "… One learned from [Freud] and from his kind of technique various things that made one’s life and work more comfortable: the calm, unemotional reserve; the unruffled assurance that one knows better; and the theories, the seeking and finding of the causes of failure in the patient instead of partly in ourselves … and finally the pessimistic view, shared only with a few, that neurotics are a rabble [Gesindel], good only to support us financially and to allow us to learn from their cases: psychoanalysis as a therapy may be worthless" (Ferenczi, 1995, pp. 185-186).
But terrified at the prospect of losing Freud's approval, Ferenczi aborted his enthusiasm for The Trauma of Birth and began to distance himself personally from Rank – whom he shunned during a chance meeting in 1926 at Penn Station in New York. "He was my best friend and he refused to speak to me," Rank said (Taft, 1958, p. xvi).
Ferenczi's rupture with Rank cut short radical innovations in practice, and left no one in the inner circle who would champion relational, pre-Oedipal or "here-and-now" psychotherapy. Classical psychoanalysis, along the lines of Freud's 1911-15 technical writings, would now be entrenched in training institutes around the world. The attack leveled in 1924 by Ferenczi and Rank on the increasing "fanaticism for interpretation" and the "unnatural elimination of all human factors" from the practice of analysis would be forgotten.
Relational, expressive and "here-and-now" therapy would not be acceptable to most members of the American Psychoanalytic Association or the International Psychoanalytic Association for half a century. "[T]hose who had the misfortune to be analyzed by [Rank] were required to undergo a second analysis in order to qualify" for membership in the American Psychoanalytic Association (Lieberman, 1985, p. 293). As far as classical analysis was concerned, Rank was dead.
[edit] Post-Vienna life and work
In May 1926, having made emotional relationship in the "here-and-now" central to his practice of psychotherapy, Rank moved to Paris where he became a psychotherapist for artists such as Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin and lectured at the Sorbonne (Lieberman, 1985).
According to Rank, all emotional life is grounded in the present. In Will Therapy, published in German in 1929-31, Rank uses the term “here and now” for the first time in the psychotherapeutic literature: “Freud made the repression historical, that is, misplaced it into the childhood of the individual and then wanted to release it from there, while as a matter of fact the same tendency is working here and now” (Rank, 1929-31, p. 39). Instead of the word Verdrängung (repression), which laid stress on unconscious repression of the past, Rank preferred to use the word Verleugnung (denial), which focused instead on the emotional will to remain ill in the present: “The neurotic lives too much in the past [and] to that extent he actually does not live. He suffers … because he clings to [the past], wants to cling to it, in order to protect himself from experience [Erlebnis], the emotional surrender to the present” (Rank, 1929-31, p. 27).
In France and later in America, Rank enjoyed great success as a therapist and writer from 1926 to 1939. Traveling frequently between France and America, Rank lectured at universities such as Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and University of Pennsylvania on relational, experiential and “here-and-now” psychotherapy, art, the creative will, and “neurosis as a failure in creativity” (Rank, 1996).
Just as Erik Erikson was the first analyst to focus on identity and adulthood, Rank was the first to propose that separation from outworn thoughts, emotions and behaviors is the quintessence of psychological growth and development. In the late 1920s, after he left Freud’s inner circle, Rank explored how human beings can learn to assert their will within relationship, and advocated a maximum degree of individuation within a maximum degree of connectedness.
Foreshadowing the central themes of Piaget, Kohlberg, McClelland, Erikson and Kegan, Rank was the first to propose that human development is a lifelong construction, which requires continual negotiation and renegotiation of the dual yearnings for individuation and connection, the will to separate and the will to unite. Decades before Ronald Fairbairn, now credited by many as the inventor in the 1940s of modern object-relations theory, Rank's 1926 lecture on "The Genesis of the Object Relation" marks the first complete statement of this theory (Rank, 1996, pp. 140-149). By 1926 Rank was persona non grata in the official psychoanalytic world. There is little reason to believe, therefore, that any of the other writers credited with helping to invent object relations theory (Melanie Klein or Donald Winnicott, for example) ever read the German text of this lecture, published as Zur Genese der Object-beziehung in Vol. 1 of Rank's Genetische Psychologie (1927, pp. 110-22).
Rank died in New York City in 1939 from a kidney infection, one month after Freud's physician-assisted suicide on the Jewish Day of Atonement. "Komisch" (strange, odd, comical), Rank said on his deathbed (Lieberman, 1985, p. 389).
[edit] Influence
Rollo May, a pioneer of existential psychotherapy in the United States, was deeply influenced by Rank’s post-Freudian lectures and writings and always considered Rank to be the most important precursor of existential therapy. Shortly before his death, Rollo May wrote the foreword to Robert Kramer's edited collection of Rank’s American lectures. “I have long considered Otto Rank to be the great unacknowledged genius in Freud’s circle,” said May (Rank, 1996, p. xi).
In 1936 Carl Rogers, the most influential psychologist in America after William James, invited Otto Rank to give a series of lectures in New York on Rank’s post-Freudian models of experiential and relational therapy. Rogers was transformed by these lectures and always credited Rank with having profoundly shaped "client-centered" therapy and the entire profession of counselling. "I became infected with Rankian ideas," said Rogers (Kramer, 1995).(http://www.ottorank.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/rogers.pdf).
The New York writer Paul Goodman, who was co-founder with Fritz Perls of the Gestalt method of psychotherapy, one of the most popular in the world today, and one that makes Otto Rank's "here-and-now" central to its approach, described Rank’s post-Freudian ideas on art and creativity as “beyond praise” in Gestalt Therapy (Perls, Goodman and Hefferline, 1951, p. 395). According to Ervin Polster (1968), a pre-eminent Gestalt therapist, "Rank brought the human relationship directly into his office. He influenced analysts to take seriously the actual present interaction between therapist and patient, rather than maintain the fixed, distant, 'as though' relationship that had given previous analysts an emotional buffer for examining the intensities of therapeutic sensation and wish. Rank's contributions opened the way for encounter to become accepted as a deep therapeutic agent" (p. 6).
Rank also affected the practice of action-oriented and reflective therapies such as dramatic role-playing and psychodrama. "Although there is no evidence of a direct influence, Rank's ideas found new life in the work of such action psychotherapists as Moreno, who developed a psychodrama technique of doubling ... and Landy [director of the drama therapy program at New York University], who attempted to conceptualize balance as an integration of role and counterrole" (Landy, 2008, p. 29).
Rank's psychology of creativity has recently been applied to action learning, an inquiry-based process of group problem solving, team building, leadership development and organizational learning (Kramer 2007; 2008). The heart of action learning is asking wicked questions to promote the unlearning or letting go of taken-for-granted assumptions and beliefs. Questions allow group members to “step out of the frame of the prevailing ideology,” as Rank wrote in Art and Artist (1932/1989, p. 70), reflect on their assumptions and beliefs, and reframe their choices. The process of “stepping out” of a frame, out of a form of knowing – a prevailing ideology – is analogous to the work of artists as they struggle to give birth to fresh ways of seeing the world, perspectives that allow them to see aspects of the world that no artists, including themselves, have ever seen before.
The most creative artists, such as Rembrandt, Michelangelo and Leonardo, know how to separate even from their own greatest public successes, from earlier artistic incarnations of themselves. Their “greatness consists precisely in this reaching out beyond themselves, beyond the ideology which they have themselves fostered,” according to Art and Artist (Rank, 1932/1989, p. 368). Through the lens of Otto Rank’s work on understanding art and artists, action learning can be seen as the never-completed process of learning how to “step out of the frame” of the ruling mindset, whether one’s own or the culture’s – in other words, of learning how to unlearn.
Comparing the process of unlearning to the “breaking out” process of birth, Rank was the first psychologist to suggest that a continual capacity to separate from “internal mental objects” – from internalized institutions, beliefs and neuroses; from the restrictions of culture, social conformity and received wisdom – is the sine qua non for life-long creativity.
In a 1938 lecture, Rank said: "Life in itself is a mere succession of separations. Beginning with birth, going through several weaning periods and the development of the individual personality, and finally culminating in death – which represents the final separation. At birth, the individual experiences the first shock of separation, which throughout his life he strives to overcome. In the process of adaptation, man persistently separates from his old self, or at least from those segments off his old self that are now outlived. Like a child who has outgrown a toy, he discards the old parts of himself for which he has no further use ….The ego continually breaks away from its worn-out parts, which were of value in the past but have no value in the present. The neurotic [who cannot unlearn, and, therefore, lacks creativity] is unable to accomplish this normal detachment process … Owing to fear and guilt generated in the assertion of his own autonomy, he is unable to free himself, and instead remains suspended upon some primitive level of his evolution"(Rank, 1996, p. 270).
Unlearning necessarily involves separation from one’s self concept, as it has been culturally conditioned to conform to familial, group, occupational or organizational allegiances. According to Rank (1932/1989), unlearning or breaking out of our shell from the inside is “a separation [that] is so hard, not only because it involves persons and ideas that one reveres, but because the victory is always, at bottom, and in some form, won over a part of one’s ego” (p. 375).
In the organizational context, learning how to unlearn is vital because what we assume to be true has merged into our identity. We refer to the identity of an individual as a “mindset.” We refer to the identity of an organizational group as a “culture.” Action learners learn how to question, probe and separate from, both kinds of identity—i.e., their “individual” selves and their “social” selves. By opening themselves to critical inquiry, they begin to learn how to emancipate themselves from what they "know" – they learn how to unlearn.
In 1974, the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker won the Pulitzer prize for The Denial of Death (1973), which was based on Rank’s post-Freudian writings, especially Will Therapy (1929-31), Psychology and the Soul (1930) and Art and Artist (1932/1989). The feeling of anxiety, writes Rank in Will Therapy (1929-31), divides into two currents, running in opposite directions: one toward separation and individuation; the other toward union and collectivity. The outbreak of neurosis typically comes from the streaming together of these two fears—which Rank also calls the "fear of living" [Lebensangst] and the "fear of dying" [Todesangst] – “which, even in The Trauma of Birth, I had designated as the fear of both going forward and of going backward” (Rank, 1929-31, p. 124). A crisis "seems to break out at a certain age when the life fear which has restricted the I’s development meets with the death fear as it increases with growth and maturity," writes Rank in Will Therapy (1929-31). "The individual then feels himself driven forward by regret for wasted life and the desire to retrieve it. But this forward driving fear is now death fear, the fear of dying without having lived, which, even so, is held in check by fear of life" (pp. 188-189).
The "fear of life" is the fear of separation and individuation. The "fear of death" is the fear of union and merger—in essence, the loss of individuality. Both separation and union, however, are desired as well as feared since the "will to separate" correlates with the creative impulse and the "will to unite" with the need for love. To respond obsessively just to one need—by choosing to separate "totally" or to merge "totally" -- is to have the other thrown back at one's self.
According to Rank (1929-31), "Birth fear remains always more universal, cosmic as it were, loss of a connection with a greater whole [einen größeren Ganzen], in the last analysis with the 'All' [dem All] ... The fear in birth, which we have designated as fear of life, seems to me actually the fear of having to live as an isolated individual, and not the reverse, the fear of loss of individuality (death fear). That would mean, however, that primary fear [Urangst] corresponds to a fear of separation from the whole [vom All], therefore a fear of individuation, on account of which I would like to call it fear of life, although it may appear later as fear of the loss of this dearly bought individuality as fear of death, of being dissolved again into the whole [ins All). Between these two fear possibilities these poles of fear, the individual is thrown back and forth all his life, which accounts for the fact that we have not been able to trace fear back to a single root, or to overcome it therapeutically" (ibid., p. 124).
On a microcosmic level, therapy is a process of learning how to give and take, surrender and assert, merge and individuate, unite and separate—without being trapped in a whipsaw of opposites. Therapist and client, like everyone else, seek to find a constructive balance between separation and union. In psychological health, the contact boundary that links I and Thou "harmoniously [fuses] the edges of each without confusing them," Rank wrote in Art and Artist (1932/1989, p. 104). Joining together in feeling, therapist and client do not lose themselves but, rather, re-discover and re-create themselves. In the simultaneous dissolution of their difference in a greater whole, therapist and client surrender their painful isolation for a moment, only to have individuality returned to them in the next, re-energized and enriched by the experience of "loss."
"[T]he love feeling," Rank observes in a lecture delivered in 1927 at the University of Pennsylvania, "unites our I with the other, with the Thou [dem Du], with men, with the world, and so does away with fear. What is unique in love is that—beyond the fact of uniting—it rebounds on the I. Not only, I love the other as my I, as part of my I, but the other also makes my I worthy of love. The love of the Thou [des Liebe des Du] thus places a value on one's own I. Love abolishes egoism, it merges the self in the other to find it again enriched in one's own I. This unique projection and introjection of feeling rests on the fact that one can really only love the one who accepts our own self [unser eigene Selbst] as it is, indeed will not have it otherwise than it is, and whose self we accept as it is." (Rank, 1996, p. 154)
On a macrocosmic level, taking the experience of love as far as humanly possible, to the boundary of the spiritual, Rank compared the artist's "giving" and the enjoyer's "finding" of art with the dissolution and rediscovery of the self in mutual love. "The art-work," says Rank in Art and Artist, "presents a unity, alike in its effect and in its creation, and this implies a spiritual unity between the artist and the recipient" (Rank, 1932/1989, p. 113). It is in art, and its correlative, love, that microcosm meets macrocosm, the human meets the spiritual. At the height of the individuating impulse, the "will to separate," artists feel most strongly the longing for attachment, the "will to unite." Although artists begin the creative process by separating from their fellow human beings and liberating themselves from conforming to the past, escaping from the anxiety of influence, eventually the creative impulse merges into a desire for a return to "a greater whole," to "the ALL" (Rank, 1929-31, p. 155) -- in human terms, to the "collective" that alone has the power to immortalize the artist with the approval it grants the artwork:
"For this very essence of man, his soul, which the artist puts into his work and which is represented by it, is found again in the work by the enjoyer, just as the believer finds his soul in religion or in God, with whom he feels himself to be one. It is on this identity of the spiritual ... and not on a psychological identification with the artist that [aesthetic pleasure] ultimately depends... But both of them, in the simultaneous dissolution of their individuality in a greater whole, enjoy, as a high pleasure, the personal enrichment of that individuality through this feeling of oneness. They have yielded up their mortal ego for a moment, fearlessly and even joyfully, to receive it back in the next, the richer for this universal feeling (Rank, 1932/1989, pp. 109-110).
In one of his most poetic passages, Rank suggests that this transcendent feeling implies not only a "spiritual unity" between artist and enjoyer, I and Thou, but also "with a Cosmos floating in mystic vapors in which present, past, and future are dissolved" (Rank, 1932/1989, p. 113)--an identity with "the ALL" that once was but is no more. The healing nature of artistic experience, Rank believed, affirms difference but, paradoxically, also "leads to the release from difference, to the feeling of unity with the self, with the other, with the cosmos" (Rank, 1929-31, p. 58). In art, microcosm meets macrocosm. Of the uncanny feeling of emotional unity we experience in surrendering ourselves—giving up temporarily the burden of our difference—to the Other in art, Rank writes in Art and Artist: "[It] produces a satisfaction which suggests that it is more than a matter of the passing identification of two individuals, that it is the potential restoration of a union with the Cosmos, which once existed and was then lost. The individual psychological root of this sense of unity I discovered (at the time of writing The Trauma of Birth, 1924) in the prenatal condition, which the individual in his yearning for immortality strives to restore. Already, in that earliest stage of individualization, the child is not only factually one with the mother but beyond that, one with the world, with a Cosmos floating in mystic vapors in which present, past, and future are dissolved. The individual urge to restore this lost unity is (as I have formerly pointed out) an essential factor in the production of human cultural values" (Rank, 1932/1989, p. 113).
No one has expressed the conflict between the will to separate and the will to unite better than Ernest Becker (1973), whose award-winning The Denial of Death captured the largest—macrocosmic—meaning of separation and union for Rank: "On the one hand the creature is impelled by a powerful desire to identify with the cosmic forces, to merge himself with the rest of nature. On the other hand he wants to be unique, to stand out as something different and apart" (Becker, 1973, pp. 151-152). "You can see that man wants the impossible: He wants to lose his isolation and keep it at the same time. He can't stand the sense of separateness, and yet he can't allow the complete suffocation of his vitality. He wants to expand by merging with the powerful beyond that transcends him, yet he wants while merging with it to remain individual and aloof ..." (ibid., p. 155).
On a microcosmic level, however, the life-long oscillation between the two "poles of fear" can be made more bearable, according to Rank, in a relationship with another person who accepts one's uniqueness and difference, and allows for the emergence of the creative impulse—without too much guilt or anxiety for separating from the other. Living fully requires "seeking at once isolation and union" (Rank, 1932/1989, p. 86), finding the courage to accept both simultaneously, without succumbing to the Angst that leads a person to be whipsawed from one pole to the other. Creative solutions for living emerge out of the fluctuating, ever-expanding and ever-contracting, space between separation and union. Art and the creative impulse, said Rank in Art and Artist, "originate solely in the constructive harmonization of this fundamental dualism of all life" (1932/1989, p. xxii).
On a macrocosmic level, the consciousness of living—the dim awareness that we are alive for a moment on this planet as it spins, meaninglessly, around the cold and infinite galaxy—gives human beings "the status of a small god in nature," according to Ernest Becker: "Yet, at the same time, as the Eastern sages also knew, man is a worm and food for worms. This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still has the gill marks to prove it ... Man is literally split in two: he has awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with" (Becker, 1973, p. 26).
Through the influence of Ernest Becker's writings, Rank's eternal dialectic between "life fear and death fear" has been tested experimentally in Terror Management Theory by Skidmore College psychology professor Sheldon Solomon, University of Arizona psychology professor Jeff Greenberg, and Colorado University at Colorado Springs psychology professor Tom Pyszczynski.
The American priest and theologian, Matthew Fox, founder of Creation Spirituality and Wisdom University, considers Rank to be one of the most important psychologists of the 20th century. See, especially, Fox's book, Creativity: Where the Divine and the Human Meet (Jeremy P. Tarcher, 2002), paperback: ISBN 1-58542-329-7.
Stanislav Grof, a founder of transpersonal psychology, based much of his work in prenatal and perinatal psychology on Rank's The Trauma of Birth (Kripal, 2007, pp. 249-269).
In 2008, the philosopher Maxine Sheets-Johnstone published The Roots of Morality (Pennsylvania State University Press), which contains an analysis of Rank's argument that "immortality ideologies" are an abiding human response to the painful riddle of death. Sheets-Johnstone compares Rank's thought to that of three major Western philosophers—René Descartes, Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida: "Because immortality ideologies were originally recognized and in fact so named by Rank, a close examination of his writings on the subject is not only apposite but is itself philosophically rewarding ... Rank was a Freudian dissident who, in introducing the concept of immortality ideologies, traced out historical and psychological roots of 'soul-belief' (Seelenglaube)... [My chapter] points up the extraordinary cogency of Rank's distinction between the rational and the irrational to the question of the human need for immortality ideologies" (Sheets-Johnstone, 2008, p. 64). Sheets-Johnstone concludes her book on a note reminiscent of Rank's plea for the human value of mutual love over arid intellectual insight: "Surely it is time for Homo sapiens sapiens to turn away from the pursuit of domination over all and to begin cultivating and developing its sapiential wisdom in the pursuit of caring, nurturing and strengthening that most precious muscle which is its heart" (ibid., pp. 405-06).
Today, Rank can be seen as one of the great pioneers in the fields of humanistic psychology, existential psychotherapy, Gestalt therapy and transpersonal psychology.
[edit] Major publications by date of first publication
Year German Title (Current Edition) English Translation (Current Edition)
1907 Der Künstler The Artist
1909 Der Mythus von der Geburt des Helden (Turia & Kant, 2000, ISBN 3-85132-141-3) The Myth of the Birth of the Hero (Johns Hopkins, 2004, ISBN 0-8018-7883-7)
1911 Die Lohengrin Sage [doctoral thesis] The Lohengrin Saga
1912 Das Inzest-Motiv in Dichtung und Sage The Incest Theme in Literature and Legend (Johns Hopkins, 1991, ISBN 0-8018-4176-3)
1913 Die Bedeutung der Psychoanalyse fur die Geisteswissenschaften [with Hanns Sachs] The Significance of Psychoanalysis for the Human Sciences
1914 "Traum und Dichtung" and "Traum und Mythus" in Sigmund Freud's Die Traumdeutung The Interpretation of Dreams eds. 4-7: "Dreams and Poetry"; "Dreams and Myth" added to Ch. VI, "The Dream-Work." In Dreaming by the Book L. Marinelli and A. Mayer, Other, 2003. ISBN 1-59051-009-7
1924 Das Trauma der Geburt (Psychosozial-Verlag, 1998, ISBN 3-932133-25-0) The Trauma of Birth, 1929 (Dover, 1994, ISBN 0-486-27974-X)
1924 Entwicklungsziele der Psychoanalyse [with Sandor Ferenczi] The Development of Psychoanalysis / Developmental Goals of Psychoanalysis
1925 Der Doppelgänger [written 1914] The Double (Karnac, 1989, ISBN 0-946439-58-3)
1929 Wahrheit und Wirklichkeit Truth and Reality (Norton, 1978, ISBN 0-393-00899-1)
1930 (Consists of Volumes II and III of "Technik der Psychoanalyse": Vol. II, "Die Analytische Reaktion in ihren konstruktiven Elementen"; Vol. III, "Die Analyse des Analytikers und seiner Rolle in der Gesamtsituaton". Copyright 1929, 1931 by Franz Deuticke.) Will Therapy, 1929-31 (First published in English in 1936;reprinted in paperback by Norton, 1978, ISBN 0-393-00898-3)
1930 Seelenglaube und Psychologie Psychology and the Soul (Johns Hopkins, 2003, ISBN 0-8018-7237-5)
1932 Kunst und Künstler (Psychosozial-Verlag, 2000, ISBN 3-89806-023-3) Art and Artist (Norton, 1989, ISBN 0-393-30574-0)
1933 Erziehung und Weltanschauung : Eine Kritik d. psychol. Erziehungs-Ideologie, München : Reinhardt, 1933 Modern Education
1941 Beyond Psychology (Dover, 1966, ISBN 0-486-20485-5)
1996 A Psychology of Difference: The American Lectures [talks given 1924–1938; edited and with an introductory essay by Robert Kramer] (Princeton, 1996, ISBN 0-691-04470-8)
[edit] References
Book-length works about Otto Rank.
* Karpf, Fay Berger (1970). The Psychology and Psychotherapy of Otto Rank: An Historical and Comparative Introduction. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-8371-3029-8.
* Lieberman, E. James (1985). Acts of Will: The Life and Work of Otto Rank. Free Press. ISBN 0-684-86327-8. Updated ed. University of Massachusetts Press, 1993. French translation: La volonté en acte: La vie et l'œvre d'Otto Rank PUF (1991) ISBN 2 13 0433065; German translation Otto Rank: Leben und Werk Psychosozial (1997) ISBN 3-932133-137
* Menaker, Esther (1982). Otto Rank: A Rediscovered Legacy. Columbia University Press.
* Taft, Jessie (1958). Otto Rank: A Biographical Study Based on Notebooks, Letters, Collected Writings, Therapeutic Achievements and Personal Associations. New York: The Julian Press.
* Website: http://www.ottorank.com Otto Rank
Articles or chapters about Otto Rank.
* Journal of the Otto Rank Association Vols. 1 – 17, 31 issues, 1967–1983, diverse writers, including Otto Rank.
* Kramer, Robert (2003). Why Did Ferenczi and Rank Conclude that Freud Had No More Emotional Intelligence than a Pre-Oedipal Child? In Creative Dissent: Psychoanalysis in Evolution, Claude Barbre, Barry Ulanov, and Alan Roland (eds.), Praeger, Ch.3, pp. 23–36.
* Kramer, Robert (1995). The Birth of Client-Centered Therapy: Carl Rogers, Otto Rank, and 'The Beyond,' an article in Journal of Humanistic Psychology, Volume 35, pp. 54–110. [1]
* Kramer, Robert (1995). The ‘Bad Mother’ Freud Has Never Seen: Otto Rank and the Birth of Object-Relations Theory, an article in Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis, Volume 23, pp. 293–321.
* Landy, Robert J. (2008). The Couch and the Stage: Integrating Words and Action in Psychotherapy. Lanham: Jason Aronson, pp. 23-33.
* Lieberman, E. James. (2003) The Evolution of Psychotherapy Since Freud. In Creative Dissent: Psychoanalysis in Evolution, Claude Barbre, Barry Ulanov, and Alan Roland (eds.), Praeger, Ch. 4, pp. 37–44.
* Roazen, Paul and Bluma Swerdloff (eds.) (1995). Heresy: Sandor Rado and the Psychoanalytic Movement. New Jersey: Jason Aronson.
* Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine (2008). The Roots of Morality. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, pp. 63-91.
Diary of Sándor Ferenczi.
* The Clinical Diary of Sándor Ferenczi (1988), Editor Judith Dupont, Translator Michael Balint and Nicola Zarday Jackson, Harvard University Press.
Articles or chapters on application to action learning of Rank's psychology of art and unlearning.
* Kramer, Robert (2007). How Might Action Learning Be Used to Develop the Emotional Intelligence and Leadership Capacity of Public Administrators? Journal of Public Affairs Education,13 (2), pp. 205-246.
* Kramer, Robert (2008). Learning How to Learn: Action Learning for Leadership Development. A chapter in Rick Morse (ed.) Innovations in Public Leadership Development. Washington DC: M.E. Sharpe and National Academy of Public Administration, pp. 296-326.
Other references.
* Becker, Ernest (1973). The Denial of Death. New York: The Free Press.
* Kripal, Jeffrey J. (2007). Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
* Weinstein, Fred (2001). Freud, Psychoanalysis, Social Theory: The Unfulfilled Promise. Albany: State University of New York Press.
* Polster, Erving (1968). A Contemporary Psychotherapy. In Paul David Pursglove (ed.) Recognitions in Gestalt Therapy New York: Funk & Wagnalls.
[edit] External links
* OttoRank.com
* The Ernest Becker Foundation
* International Psychoanalytical Association
* Photo of Otto Rank
* The Myth of the Birth of the Hero, at sacred-texts.com
[hide]
v • d • e
Psychology
History · Portal · Psychologist
Basic
Affective · Biological · Clinical · Cognitive · Cognitive neuroscience · Comparative · Developmental · Emotion · Evolutionary · Experimental · Mathematical · Neuropsychology · Personality · Physiological · Positive · Psycholinguistics · Psychopathology · Psychophysics · Psychophysiology · Qualitative research · Quantitative research · Social · Theoretical
Psi
Applied
Assessment · Clinical · Counseling · Educational · Forensic · Health · Industrial/organizational · Legal · Media · Military · Occupational health · Psychometrics · Relationship counseling · School · Sport · Systems
Orientations
Analytical · Behaviorism · Cognitive behavioral therapy · Cognitivism · Descriptive · Ecological Systems Theory · Existential therapy · Family therapy · Feminist therapy · Gestalt psychology · Humanistic · Narrative therapy · Psychoanalysis · Psychodynamic psychotherapy · Rational emotive behavior therapy · Transpersonal
Eminent
psychologists
Alfred Adler · Gordon Allport · Albert Bandura · Raymond Cattell · Kenneth and Mamie Clark · Erik Erikson · Hans Eysenck · Leon Festinger · Viktor Frankl · Sigmund Freud · Donald O. Hebb · Clark L. Hull · William James · Carl Jung · Jerome Kagan · Kurt Lewin · Abraham Maslow · David McClelland · Stanley Milgram · George A. Miller · Neal E. Miller · Walter Mischel · Ivan Pavlov · Jean Piaget · Carl Rogers · Stanley Schachter · B. F. Skinner · Edward Thorndike · John B. Watson
Lists
Counseling topics · Important publications in psychology · Psychological research methods · Psychological schools · Psychologists · Psychology disciplines · Psychology organizations · Psychology topics · Psychotherapies · Timeline of psychology
Wiktionary definition · Wikisource · Wikimedia Commons · Wikiquote · Wikinews · Wikibooks
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)