Otto Rank
Psychology and the Soul (orig. 1930)
trans. Richter and Lieberman (1998)
[xii] —Why some faiths proselytize and others don't.
Any holdout from a group's particular belief system may "cost" the community in the salvation sweepstakes. This produces great pressure for conformity, with scapegoating of the holdout. In effect, religious proselytizing makes the claim, "My interpretation of the imaginary is better than yours." This phenomenon occurs also with literary critics in relation to readers, and with psychoanalysts in relation to patients.
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[xv] What we call soul, psyche, or personality is shaped by a combination of genetics, environment, and tradition; the idea that we shape ourselves invokes a will that can make changes from within, adding the stamp of psychological individuality. In Art and Artist (1932, 64), Rank wrote of "voluntary affirmation of the obligatory," or willing what is given, as the basis for creative action, which includes everyday relationships and self-government. He accepted the inevitability of and the need for illusion, partly as an antidote to consciousness of mortality and partly as the rehearsal for change in one's own identity, one's narrative. Rank saw the therapist as midwife to a psychological rebirth that occurs when one moves from creature to creator, not passively accepting the gift and burden of life but taking it up actively, refusing suicide, and adopting oneself. This is psychopoesis, soul-making.
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[4] For better or worse, the analyst must include himself, at least theoretically, when he reveals universal patterns in the patient's inner life. But in clinical practice, the analyst feels excluded from the results and subjectively uninvolved, and the more he focuses on the other the more true this is. We could call the clinical psychology of human nature a science of projection in this subjective sense, just as I referred to it from an objective standpoint as a science of relationships.
So we want both to practice on, and to have a psychology of, others, just as in the areas of morality and education we always think in terms of others. We assign the beneficent modalities of change to others, but psychology claims to be mainly self-knowledge that, paradoxically, comes from others and is tested on them. Scientific psychology seems comfortable enough with this inevitability, rationalizing that for observation and research an object is necessary, and this can hardly be oneself. What seems to be logical contradiction here is really emotional resistance. ...
Resistance to Self-knowledge
Psychologists can include themselves only by projecting their psychology onto the subject. Unaware of this process, we think we do just the opposite—
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extrapolating psychologically from subject to others and then back to ourselves—but actually we do project from self to other. One might argue that the result is more or less the same. The result interests us less right now than the psychological bias. Here the resistance to using oneself as the object of psychological study finds its emotional justification. Deep down, we don't want to observe ourselves and increase self-knowledge. First of all, the search for self-knowledge is not an original part of our nature; second, it is painful; and finally, it doesn't always help but is often disturbing. The presumption that self-knowledge is helpful makes self-consciousness easier to bear. Knowledge of others can be put to use; too often, self-knowledge proves a hinderance.
Objective, or technical, psychology began with magic and now shares in the psychoanalytic theory of human nature espoused by educators, caregivers, and therapists; it works to influence and control other people, the most important part of the external world. Subjective psychology, devoted to self-knowledge, lacks that practical advantage and often disturbs instinctive spontaniety, which is basically projective. The original naive tendency for projection is "antipsychological," whereas the newer objective-scientific psychology is still projection—that is, subjective—although it takes the form of a psychology of others. Psychology deals with this unavoidable situation by postulating that self-knowledge is prerequisite for understanding others. But that is not true; I can understand others all the better—intuitively, and perhaps objectively as well—the less I try to know myself through them. Self-focused, or introspective, psychology did not begin with the goal of self-knowledge. It always existed subjectively, but in self-representation, which is just projection, a barrier to self-knowledge. Psychology may have arisen as an objective discipline with practical aims—to influence or control people. Self-knowledge intruded, an unwelcome by-product valued only later on.
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[7] As science and as an influencing technique, psychology is really the interpretation of another's soul in terms of one's own feelings and will. Since we cannot remake (or unmake) our neighbor at will, we instead interpret him or her to suit ourselves. Our individual psychology is a reflexive phenomenon, a reaction to the projection of our psychology from neighbor back to self. In short, we not only interpret the other to suit our will—a hostile act, an act of domination—we also reinterpret ourselves in the other's terms and call it love. Psychology can be seen as a mutual reflexinve phenomenon, a mirage of our true self that we glimpse only in the mirroring reflection of another soul.
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[13] ...the first taboo, the prohibition of killing. This was actually no prohibition but something self-evident: a taboo—something forbidden by its very nature. ...[arising] not from an incipient conception of justice and not to protect others and society, but from the immediate sensation of being threatened—the perception of a threat to one's immortality. The victim finds no redemption until he has avenged himself by killing the murderer, to deprive him of collective immortality. Our later concept of justice, maintained through prohibitions and commandments (laws), came in response to internal, not external, threat —came not psychologically, but from the soul. This is clearly expressed in the primitive "causal" explanation of the natural death of the murderer as an act of revenge by the demons; this (like most "causal" interpretations) was a psychological interpretation, based on soul-belief.
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[50] The natural sciences developed from abstract to concrete, from spiritual to practical, while soul-belief began as a concrete, conscious idea of a bod-
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ily shadow that exists to ensure eternal life, and ended in scientific psychology with a partly mystical, partly abstract, and really difficult notion of the soul. In this the natural sciences maintain their earlier, spiritual phase... Yet psychology is antisoul because unlike the natural sciences it cannot maintain belief in the soul in another form but has to destroy it with soul-consciousness.
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Family versus State
Collective soul-belief changed slowly, gradually, and with myriad problems into the family organization. As a decisive turning point we have "mother-right," the first earthly, real (social) manifestation of belief in generative immortality in the sexual era. Previously, all women belonged to the supreme totem representing the collective soul, and children belonged to the clan. With mother-right a child was recognized as its mother's, though the father still played no official role in personal immortality. Male uncertainty about the soul, which had organized collective immortality in the totem-clan, still hindered men as late as the sexual era, when the collective principle was renounced in favor of the individual.
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A man could accept the father role spiritually only with the formation of the state, which, in the process of strengthening its own laws and mores, renounced spirituality or relinquished it to religion. With father-right, fully developed in the Roman state, his generative immortality was guaranteed because he owned his wife—dulcis anima [sweet soul]—and their children were his virtual slaves. He created a protector of these rights in the state, keeping there the old collective soul protection that the giant state could give legally and morally, but not through religion.
The community evolved greatly from original denial of paternity (collective immortality) to the establishment of legal paternity (individual immortality). From a society of souls—religio—it became a legal community with an externalized state religion. This new form of community, in which state and religion exist in parallel (not in and through one another), maintains the collective soul illusion even while the powerful state guarantees individual generative immortality through family, not community.
Familial authority for the man, which evolved from mother-right, appears only under state protection because the state protects the right of marriage and at the same time symbolizes prematrimonial collective immortality. Thus, the state, created to protect the family, gradually undermines and destroys it.
The family is based on the individual immortality principle through generative sex and its protection in marriage and inheritance rights, whereas the state and state religion are remnants of the collective immortality principle made lawful by the state, and moral by religion. State and religion share an interest in marriage, which guarantees individual sexual immortality through religious sanction.
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[54] While Judaism maintained the reality of earthly clan organization and the sexual basis of the family, Christianity reclaimed the immortal soul, which it could preserve only in a next-world state that then acquired all the human qualities of the earthly one. In this sense, Judaism and Christianity are not parallel and cannot be compared historically or religiously. They represent the opposite extremes of soul-belief—this life versus the next—which were united in totemism through collective reincarnation of the soul and then anchored in the social community. Judaism forfeited a worldly state, clinging to the ideology of familiar sexual immortality codified as a religious ideal, while Christianity became a worldly power that was revered (in the Middle Ages) by princes of nations and was based on a soul-immortality ideology centered on a state in the hereafter.
From the spiritual foundation of human society and emerging forms of state and religion we return to the individual, by and for whom these ideologies and institutions were created. The totemic soul-collective became a collective socialism reflected, for example, in Plato's ideal state. Women and children belonged first to the earthly representative of the collective soul; both earthly representative and collective soul were embodied in the clan and its totem. The rise of the sexual era, with the acceptance of individual generative immortality, destroyed this earthly communism, which was a copy of soul-communism. With mother-right the idea of the embodied collective soul found expression in the role of mother and of maternal deity (Mother Earth, who gives life to all things and nourishes all things). Finally, a worldly individualism established itself in paternity and father-right.
This individualism still needed the legal state and its community for a twofold assurance of its immortality: the soul-collective in the communal phenomena of society and religion; individual sexual immortality in its concrete outcomes of marriage, family, inheritance, and so on. Christianity destroyed this social patriarchal individualism, which tried to keep one foot on earth, the other on the disappearing ground of belief in the next world. What took its place was the son as true heir—not of the father, but of indi-
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vidualism! The role and function of spiritual soul-bearer passed from mother to son, to whom the sexual era had assigned this noble role, for he received the father's soul (through the mother) and in turn would pass it on to his own son. Hence the immense significance of the son since the advent if Christiantiy, the ideology that finally led the sexual era into the era of the child, in which we now find ourselves psychologically.
The Son-Principle and the Era of the Child
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Christianity's spiritual individualism of the son brought new conflicts and new solutions to the split between personal and group ideologies, and egoistic and generative tendencies and tasks. Beside the old collective solutions, which became increasingly un-souled and concrete, tendencies and ideologies arose bringing new individual solutions to the conflict. The individual had to do what the community could no longer do, since he now was more than just a member thereof but stood up to the community and to the cosmos as an independent entity, a microcosm .
... Goethe's Faust symbolically expresses individualism of the soul, as Don Juan does with sexuality and Hamlet with psychology (leading to neurosis). Over the centuries, traditions took hold in all three forms; here we discuss just a few important themes.
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Faust as Symbol of Individual Creativity
Faust first tries for immortality with black magic and the occult sciences of his time,...,along with the legitimate science of Goethe's era. Frustrated and hopeless, he trades his soul to the devil for a full worldly life. The pact symbolizes the individual's assertion of the right to determine the fate of his soul independent of the community of souls by sacrificing eternal salvation for earthly happiness. ...
... In exchange for one's immortal soul-portion, the devil prolongs earthly life (rejuvenation) and grants erotic pleasure in lieu of sexualized immortality. Helen of Troy represents the immortal soul personified in the sexual era's woman—an immortal soul that Faust pursues as though it were an elusive shadow. As is characteristic for the filial era, Faust wins individual immortality through creative action that reconnects him with the community and with his humanity.
The man's role as creator of culture now becomes understandable, as does his ceaseless striving for new expressive means and symbols for myriad forms of self and of individualism in general; his goal is an alternative to either collective immortality or sexual, generative immortality. As collective soul-bearer, woman remains a conservative symbol, while man, with the unfolding individualism of the filial era, takes on the role of earthly, ephemeral, mortal soul-part, which can be immortalized in ever-changing symbolic expression . Man's soul-inferiority in relation to woman seems to be a product of the sexual era, which evolved spiritually and socially from matriarchy. This inferiority is based on generative immortality (procreation), in which, biologically and socially, males have the lesser role. To sustain his self-image, man isolated himself from his role, which was branded as psychologically inferior. Isolation conferred and advantage in the animistic era of belief in individual immortality. Its value declined with belief in the collective soul; later, in the sexual era, it was perceived as inferior. Meanwhile, woman advanced from the medium of fertilization by spirits and of reincarnation to a creative soul-bearer, determining mortality and immortality. The ideol-
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ogy of male immortality had been based on denial of woman; man now found himself in servitude to her for his soul, proclaiming his independence with self-immortalizing works.
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***romanticism***
[58] In the partly literary and partly philosophical immortalized romantic self, emotion becomes the object of psychology for the first time—not in individual expression and fulfillment, but in the soul-sense Goethe gave it that penetrates and dissolves everything ("Emotion is everything"). Accordingly, romanticism seeks out folk creations and ethnopsychology, which the collective soul requires in this form (as well as in woman) as counterweight and comfort in the face of romantic individualism. Romanticism asks whether and how anonymous collective creations in myth, folktale, epic, and song are created by a people: it is a psychological probing of a people as a whole and its destiny .
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***introspection***
[59] Christianity, having quashed all internal doubts, sustained soul-belief against externalization and scientific analysis in late antiquity; it then came to view science as an external threat. Yet philosophical and scientific knowledge could no more undo deep-seated soul-belief than knowledge of biological laws could upset primitive belief in immortality. As is well known, the thinkers and researchers to whom science owes the most were deeply spiritual believers. Belief and knowledge are hardly mutually exclusive but indeed mat require one another, and in any case coexist to produce great achievements. There is one exception: psychological self-knowledge, which inevitably leads to doubt. Recognizing death could not destroy belief in individual immortality. But intellectual curiosity—that desire to grasp the immortal soul, and if possible to see, demonstrate, explain, and ultimately understand it—caused the deepest doubt about its very existence.
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A Statistical Law of Averages
Long ago, Epicurus allowed that the paths of falling atoms "differ very slightly" (completely by chance) from the vertical, and in The Problem of Free Will, Heinrich Gomperz rrives at a similar "spontaneity" theory, according to which material entities show individual and momentary behavioral peculiarities. Thus it seems that in physics as in psychology, freedom increases as one goes from groups to elements, and increases all the more as we minutely examine those components. Psychologically speaking, this means that the further we go toward the individual and the more we analyze his or her components, the less tenable is strict causal determinism and the more freedom we must grant to decisive personal elements.
In corresponding areas of physics, the statistical law of averages takes on the same functions in determining temporal position and in prediction and reconstruction that the strict law of causality previously covered, but with the distinction that the individual case could be temporarily located and predicted or reconstructed before, whereas now we deal only with the average.[Hugo Bergmann, The controversy over the law of causality in recent physics (1929)]
***the jacobs/weaver billiard balls***
Akin to this statistical law of averages, imposed on physics by quantum mechanics and supplanting the individualistic causal principle, behavioral science has a "normal psychology," which derives laws of averages from observation but cannot explain individual behavior in a single specific case or situation . Attempts by psychoanalysis and its schools to achieve an individual psychology have confronted the "statistical average," as shown by Freud's normal psychology, Adler's social psychology, and Jung's collective psychology.
The individual exists beyond lawful predictability and defies understanding and explanation in terms of scientific or humanistic causality (finality) . For me, the only approach lies in a psychology of will that includes both modes of observation but does not try to grasp phenomena through them alone or to understand phenomena completely. In psychology, too, a correct statement of the problem is more important than any attempt at solution. Most often, such attempts become necessary or even possible through a false or slanted statement of the problem, which results from mixing practical
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and theoretical points of view. The goal of the sciences—philosophy excepted, given its purely intellectual orientation—is not knowledge as such, but knowledge for mastery or rule of the world (through natural science) and of people (through the human sciences, especially psychology).
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Finality as Flexible Causality
Aristotle distinguished two types of underlying forces, causal and final. Quantum theory holds that causal explanations must be supplemented teleologically: "Besides determining future via the past, [it is necessary] to permit, even require, determination of past via the future" (Bergmann). Many physicists even assume a causal effect of later events upon earlier ones, for certain general laws of mechanics suggest the possibility of "conceiving the course of a process as dependent not only on the initial state but also on the end state" (Planck). In physics, then, also, we can imagine teleologically, not causally, a theory that "replaces the impetus of the past with the pulling force of the future" (Riezler). In this sense, the "pulling force of the future" in mental events seems beyond doubt, as the Zurich [Jungian] school of psychoanalysis emphasized from the beginning. This telological interpreta-
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tion of the influence of the future can now be brought together with the randomness and indeterminacy of events.
The individual event is subject to chance within limits. This is why it can be understood only after the fact. Because natural laws leave room for chance and allow a state of suspension between different possibilities, the choice made can be explained only in terms of the final state. (Bergmann, after Whitehead).Although finality only represents another type of causality, it adds flexibility to the causal principle. Teleology brings into physics an anthropomorphism formulated by Medicus in his book Free Will and Its Limitations (1926): "Atoms seek their goal." Many physicists, such as Eddington, lean toward a pan-psychic world view that has been advocated by Spinoza, Leibniz, Schelling, Schopenhauer, and other Western philosophers, and also underlies Indian philosophy and the animistic primitive world view.
The animistic world view is based on naive projection of soul phenomena onto reality, not on knowledge of nature and its laws. For us, its value lies precisely in the fact that, unlike our scientific interpretation, it does not claim to derive its view from nature; to be sure, it is not yet aware that its view is a projection of inner life, the soul.
If I might attempt a more forceful clarification: what makes "primitive" animism "primitive," as opposed to the Western "pan-psychic world view" which seems to reconverge upon it, is that the "primitives," by this account, merely projected "anthropomorpic"-ally upon, say, the slime mold; whereas if it is ultimately decided that the slime mold is in fact no less than conscious , even so that slime-consciousness must never be confused with human consciousness; and we would do well to despair of ever knowing that slime-consciousness firsthand and to settle (if we simply must press forward on such fronts) for codifying it secondhand, with numerous caveats therefore attached.
Thus, the power that gives life animistically to the primitive universe is man, thought to be supernatural because one sees its effects without knowing their cause. As with sexual biology, what gives us and primitives alike such problems is not this ignorance, but the fact that it persists beyond its logical ending, the relevant enlightenment. This happens through an act of will that I call denial, and that operates to preserve, protect, defend, and justify the self, or ego.
If it was on the basis of this ignorance of will that its effects were assumed to be supernatural, before long the recognition of one's own evil-working will led to a vindicating projection onto others: sorcerers, demons, gods, and the like. Pseudo-causes were found, or invented—initially for natural life-processes such as birth and death—to gratify the primitive's "hunger for causes," since pragmatically they were effective, comforting, and "therapeutic."
The human intellect has long since found many real causes, especially for natural events, but psychology, an intepretation of the soul then and now, remains fixed in the perspective of false (i.e. justifying) therapeutic connections. Psychoanalysis, which claimed to have uncovered "psychic reality" behind soul phenomena, is admittedly therapeutic; its causal theory of the psychic, which shifts personal responsibility away from the individual, is comfort-seeking, consoling. This attempt is in no way inferior to soul-be-
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lief or religious comfort: psychoanalysis derives the same comfort from the causal principle that soul-belief obtained from denying it, and religion obtained from moralizing it.
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The Scientific Causal Principle
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Earlier, causal physical theories (such as that of Newton) had to prove the divine regularity and significance of the world; now they reveal our imperfect observation of the world. This insight makes us acknowledge the dominant role of chance, that is, arbitrariness. This does not bring us back to the
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omnipotent will but only brings intellectual insight into its irrevocable loss, which in the works mentioned above I have described as the "subtraction of God." or the un-deifying of the world and the person. We see this manifest in more self-conscious perception of things and self-effacement in their interpretation. The religious person projected onto the god before whom he humbled himself his will-power and his conscious moral stance toward it, but otherwise remained proud and strong; we moderns recognize the god in ourselves and by contrast feel small and insignificant. We can control nature, but we cannot know it: we can impose our will upon is "causally," but this will is unknowable, unfathomable—as is, in the end, everything in nature.
Not coincidentally, psychology, along with physics, wallows in humbling self-knowledge. This "inferiority feeling" from which we suffer is no mere "neurotic complex," to be "healed" with Adler's pedagogical approach; it is rather a negative developmental process in the religious person, who can no longer mask his loss of significance.
We stand here on the border of psychology, which developed from soul-belief and which leads from projected knowledge of nature to moral self-knowledge and self-judgment. So long as psychology is projection—animistic, religious, or scientific—it is therapeutic, a helpful illusion; with increasing self-consciousness and insight it becomes destructive, until, knowing the truth about itself, it dies in the aftermath of its own impotence. The victory of science could not be crowned with a victory of self-knowledge but had to be paid for, and too dearly, with self-knowledge. If control over nature through scientific knowledge was our greatest victory, self-knowledge, flowing from self-consciousness, is our greatest defeat. Nietzsche rightly saw that we could be saved only by revaluing guilt as will, namely, by going back to active affirmation of will. But this seems impossible, so Nietzsche's work intellectually breaks down old values by exposing their genesis, while his positive philosophy of will is a patchwork.
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[122] Psychoanalysis must be understood as therapy in the widest, illusion-promoting sense. The psychology is based on the relation of "I" to "thou," whether we interpret this relation religiously (as does Jung), or socially (as does Adler), or as infantile (as does Freud). This psychology neither knows nor acknowledges the individual as such, whose will is explained "causally" as sexual libido and whose consciousnss is ultimately determined by the "unconscious." With his theory, Freud tried to explain the whole person in causal terms, and individuality per se; but individual means meta-causal, transcending causality .
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[123] analogous to Nietzsche's dictum concerning the inexactness of natural law as a condition of existence or being. ...it is the false false, "noncausal" connections in our soul that make it possible to adapt and function in the real world; we make reality bearable through denial, displacement, and rationalization, not by recognizing psychological truth, which is destructive. Paradoxical as it may sound, the false connections in our soul are the truly causal ones , for they are the "cause" of all the human reactions we observe and study in psychology. This dethrones psychology as self-knowledge and reestablishes ethics and epistemology in its place .
Psychology can no more replace knowledge gained through thought than it can replace religion and morality. Yet psychoanalysis seemed to make such a claim; at least, people wanted to believe that it could. Freudian doctrine could not have been extolled as a new religion and moral system without an inherent tendency to become that. In fact, religion, morality, and psychol-
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ogy all represent repeated attempts to solve the problem of will interpretatively by different means: religion, by means of projection; morality, by means of introspection; philosophy, by means of rationalization; and psychology, by means of intepretation. Religion and morality motivate causally—that is, fatalistically and morally, respectively; philosophy and psychology motivate in terms of the final state—rationalistically and interpretively, respectively. But the causal principle as such conforms to a moralistic formulation of the will-principle, so it cannot be applied in the pure psychology of the individual personality. Though not clearly expressed, this insight underlies two recent trends in psychology, structural theory and gestalt theory, in which neither object nor subject is measurable or subject to strict causality. There are wholes instead of parts, understanding instead of explanation, description in place of generalization. This "moderate" orientation resembles that of recent physics, but both are too negative, timid, even intimidated. Here I see a trend toward self-diminution among psychologists as among physicists, expressing the temper of the times, of course, but showing the psychology of the scientist more than that of people in general.
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The free action of positive will in the primal era seems here, in the psychological era, to be reaction—not only to external stimuli, which it always was, but to internal, self-constructed inhibitions and resistances, which function as "causes" just as mch as do external stim-
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uli. Freedom of will now appears only as denial of compulsion; the vestige of free, positive willing is morally rationalized as causal compulsion or inevitable fate, or is otherwise justified. So it is that psychic phenomena, psychology's concern, constitute the absolute negative of the soul, where projection of positive, free will reigned autocratically, aware of no guilt.