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Object Relations: Otto Rank Pt. 2

Will Therapy

For Rank, Goethe created the balance of life and art without having to destroy himself to make content. Similar to the title of Safranski's biography of him, Goethe: Life as a Work of Art, Rank said of Goethe that he "remains, in this regard also, the unparalleled model of a universal genius of the modern age; for he was able to balance the destructive elements in him creatively, by absorbing them into his poetry and his various other constructive activities, and thus to shape his life as an artistic-constructive whole. Other great writers have failed to achieve so complete a harmony, either ruining the artistic build of their lives by Romanticism or leading a philistine existence in order to have enough vitality left over for creation...His work is not only his particular expression of life: it both serves him and helps him to live, and his worth as an artist comes second — or even plays no special part at all." Safranski described how Goethe blended the rational and romantic, the subjective and objective. Both the Enlightenment and Romantic side worked together. "He took his own creative intelligence as something through which nature could observe itself and poetry produce itself. He always contemplated his subjectivity from an objective standpoint. It is no accident that, in the letters of his final years, he often simply leaves out the first-person pronoun." When it came to art imitating life or life imitating art, Goethe chose the former. "Poetry was all well and good, but not for leading one’s life. People who knew only about literature knew too little about life...To his delight, he rediscovered the artist in himself: a poet. But the poet not as a Man of Sorrows, a victim in despair among the worldly...but one who rises above [and]...who understands the differences but does not allow them to tear him apart." Essentially art can be a vehicle for learning, but it can easily devolve into wallowing and regression.

Now what about the consumers of the art? Here Otto mirrors Freud's Sublimation. "In play and in art the individual is able, by the aid of a collective or social ideology, to find such an illusory plane, whereon he can live potentially or symbolically without doing so in reality. The pleasure that he finds in this phantom life on an illusory plane lies in the fact that it enables one to avoid the expenditure of real life, which is, basically, in the escape that it provides from life itself and, behind all, from the fear that is inseparable from real life and experience." One can enjoy the art as it is, but there can be a hollowness compared to being the person who made the art. Either the art is inspiration for life lessons, or it is just escapism and regression for the audience. When audience members walk out of an artistic experience that is great, they usually gain wisdom in some way. Consuming art a lot can feel regressive in that the same subjects repeat again and again to avoid too much complexity.

As a way to balance off different ways of being free with desire, Rank was not ignorant of meditation practices from the east and west. "I suggested that the essence of pleasure lay in a certain brevity, and that of non-pleasure in the prolongation of any state, even one that was at first pleasurable." He reiterates the same in Truth and Reality, "...We here strike the paradox that the individual wants to prolong the pleasure whose essence lies just in its temporal limitation, which must miscarry in the same way as the shortening of pain, whose essence lies in the prolongation of any psychic state, even one that is pleasurable in the beginning. For pleasure is a certain brevity of consciousness, pain a lengthening of consciousness, at least on the level of neurotic self-consciousness, where consciousness disturbs experience in the form of self-consciousness and guilt consciousness and accordingly the individual wants to be saved from it." People can try to attain their desires, but pleasure feels more fresh when one is able to let go of the decay of the results of pleasure. "...Pleasure...a brief consciousness of will accomplishment itself." This is partially why celebration, a prolonging of consciousness, especially a premature celebration, can feel paradoxically not so good. Another way of seeing unnecessary pain is to literally look at how the mind is creating self-conscious pain or other emotional pains and just by witnessing the pain, the lower brain realizes what it's doing and stops on its own without Ego distractions, denials or avoidances. It sees it's touching a hot stove top and stops on its own.

Similar to the Pleasure Principle and the Nirvana Principle, Rank sees how individuals need a balance between desire and rest. He calls the contracted state of desire "partialization" and the completion of a goal or a reunion with oneness being a like a "totalist." Completion, oneness, and totality have a finality to them like death and there is a desire to return to partialization, but too much partialization is exhausting and makes one feel separated and lonely. The mind has trouble being in either state for prolonged periods of time, but they can play off of each other. "...It is the potential restoration of a union with the Cosmos, which once existed and was then lost." Any attempt at keeping totality or keeping partialization is a form of clinging for Rank, and a failed attempt at eternal salvation.

This value of art, to be like a balance between partialization and totality is explained by Brian Eno in his lecture What Is Art Actually For?, as a balance between control and surrender. Too much surrender means too little activity, and too much activity means no rest. When it comes to a magical way of making everything effortless, like an endless inspiration, to Brian, it's more of the balance where control can play off of intuition, so one doesn't have to wait for inspiration, because inspiration needs input from control and decision making to trigger creative intuition. "I stopped believing in inspiration a long time ago. Sometimes you just have to start making something. I still get [inspiration], but I don't wait for it...We are very bad judges of our internal state."

Because Psychoanalysis and Buddhism work well together it's important to look at the importance of choice. The reason why people don't feel like their mind is just running with things, which normally would be dangerous and pathological, is precisely because the attention span gathers information dualistically, and because of a limited attention span, the mind needs to be able to make considerations, comparisons, and deliberate. The Id needs the Ego to play off of for inspiration and the Id doesn't make as many specific object choices as one thinks. The Id has a nebulous overall desire and it needs cultural examples to imitate and it throws up options and choices when the Ego takes action, but the intuition doesn't make the choice like you are an automaton. This is so much so that the mind needs a lot of quieting and relaxation to even allow intuition to arise. Just putting a little effort to direct the attention span towards a choice, and a little effort to take action triggers the intuition to respond to the choice with intuitive suggestions. If the choice is a wrong path, the intuition will more than likely cough up options to turn back or choose a different path.

In Buddhism, the purpose of things like Right Effort, etc., is to see if the choice is worth it by being honest about pain. Authentic feelings of "it's not worth it" or excitement over a choice are what really motivate each person. The excitement feeling is based on whether something is accessible, pleasurable, and something to look back on with pride or appreciation. In Buddhism, the "it's not worth it" feeling comes from phenomenological facing of the self-conceptual label. It's seeing the conceptual self in a bad state and demotivating that dangerous choice. You could take the three characteristics in that practice and meld them with Subject > Object > Time narratives, and the future narrative becomes less compelling compared to enjoying well-being in the senses now. In this case it is Subject (Anatta - not self), Object (Dukkha - dissatisfaction), and Time (Anicca - impermanence). Like touching a hot stove, all that is needed is to the see the pain of contracting over a self-narrative, or partializing, and tuning into what tension and pain is there is often enough for the mind to relinquish clinging, or in Psychoanalysis, relinquish trying to make pleasant experiences last longer or unpleasant experiences to become shorter. Essentially resting in totality. Part of this practice is getting out of the conceptual mind and thinking with the body. You are noticing the depression with any particular rumination in the mind, and checking the body for physical wounds and not finding any. The Psychoanalytic method would include those things but also embrace the emotions related to the self-narrative, express those emotions, listen to them, and then respond with action to avoid any attempts at denial, numbing, and escapism through meditation. A balance and fine tuning between different functions in the brain.

Brian Eno - 'What is Art actually for?’: https://youtu.be/XIVfwDJ-kDk

In Rank's Will Therapy, he describes this balance of letting go of clinging, but also of affirming emotions as the best balance for emotional regulation. "...Emotion is either dissipated into impulsive action, or inhibited by will, or is hindered from expression by fear. For the expression of emotion tends always to totality, which means a giving up of self or losing of self, in the last analysis, death. He who does not perceive emotional expression as renunciation, that is, who affirms and does not fear it, will not need to use either a physical or a psychic illness to drain off his emotional life. The utilization of the rich scale of emotions of the human psychic life, with its capacity for feeling pleasure and pain in small doses, is the best guarantee for remaining well and being happy."

That balance of not meditating too much and not partializing all the time, to regulate emotions, also makes people feel a sense of agency because they can look to their own emotions instead of parental replacements in authority figures. Control and Surrender work together to achieve things and provide rest. The problem of relying on authority figures in religions is the same problem as relying on psychoanalysts. The goal is individual independence balanced with social contracts, but the locus of control is within.

In The Trauma Of Birth, Rank noticed that "in focusing attention analytically on these facts one noticed that people, theoretically and therapeutically entirely uninfluenced, showed from the very beginning of their treatment the same tendency to identify the analytic situation with the intrauterine state...The patients of both sexes identified the analyst with the mother from the beginning in a very decided manner, and in their dreams and reactions they put themselves back again into the position of the unborn. Hence the real transference-libido, which we have to solve analytically in both sexes, is the mother-libido, as it existed in the pre-natal physiological connection between mother and child."

Being torn away from the mother at birth, is a deeper level of regression that Rank controversially posited as a neurosis that was more fundamental than the Oedipus Complex. The process of analysis continues the same as a gathering of childhood materials, but the therapist at some point provides the suggestion, or it dawns on the analysand, that it all goes back to a desire to rely on a mother and a regression to an infantile dependence. As the mind realizes that at this later age in the patient's development, that this can never be a possibility, the reliance on the ego, or essentially the reliance on oneself to parent oneself, is the solution. The need of the therapist dissipates and the clinging to transference abates. There's nothing here magical that will replace the need for self-assertion, or the need for willpower for Rank, and one has to rely on oneself. The trick is to get the analysand to understand this at the right time so that the analysis isn't ended too soon, which is like another Trauma of Birth, or lasts too long in that mother dependence. "Thus it is the matter of letting the patient, who in his neurosis has fled back to the mother fixation, to repeat and understand the birth trauma and its solution during the analysis in the transference [the trusting of the therapist like a mother], without allowing him the unconscious reproduction of the same in the severance from the analyst."

The maternal transference is seen by the patient as being projected onto the stranger therapist and the illusion is seen through. The biological mother is either dead at this point in time or too old to really provide any of this healing so the fixation is naturally let go of. "Through the libidinal element in the identification the patient learns to overcome anxiety through the sexual side of the transference. Thus, finally, in therapy the compulsion to repetition of the primal trauma or of the primal situation is removed, in that the direction of the libido is changed in the sense of striving for adjustment." The clinging outward to a savior is disillusioned and returns inward to rely on one's own ego, and to power it. "...The patient has finally nothing else to do than to supplement a part of his development which was neglected or lacking...That his Ego is in the position, through identification with the analyst, to overcome the transference these actual libidinal tendencies as well as the regressive maternal tendencies, can be explained from the fact that his Ego from the very beginning was created and developed from the Unconscious for this special task. In analysis this normal means of help to development is then finally strengthened through conscious modification, and the fact of his identification with the analyst is ultimately made conscious to the patient, thereby making him independent of the analyst."

Object Relations

Otto Rank was one of the early psychoanalysts who expounded on the Object Relation. In The Genesis Of The Object Relation, Rank provides his own Neo-Freudian developmental theory where the sense of self and boundaries are demarcated, and where the child treats the breast as belonging to its self and then has to gradually accept the independence of the mother, but not without making a copy of the mother, and eventually copies of others, in the mind. "...In the relation of object to ego, the object is invested with libido originally transferred from the ego to the mother and later taken back into the ego...But, more important still, it explains the relation of the ego to other human beings in love and social life." The sense of "mine" pervades objects as well. We want the real people to behave the way we manipulate their object copies in our minds to make them pleasing for us. Objects are not the actual person but a memory of them. They get manipulated in the mind as the mind tries to understand and predict behavior, but it also has an emotional investment in that relationship. "The withdrawal of the object leads, as we have seen, to the search for a substitute in one’s own ego, but, on the other hand, every object cathexis [emotional investment] definitely contains ego elements." When meditating one can see a point of view, an emotional investment, and sometimes even a vision of oneself in relation to that other person. How we want them to behave or how we defend against their independent behavior if it's threatening to our interests. When the actual people withdraw, the mind looks for substitutes, and the old objects in the mind become a world map to navigate with. This is partly why our life experience and education often tell us more about ourselves, what we imitated from culture, and what we read, than our projections and predictions can explain accurately what the "the real world" is like. We also take on the roles of others unconsciously when there is a vacuum of their real life presence, through absence or death.

The object can be a good mother with positive transference, or a depriving mother with a negative transference. "We have shown how a substitute for the good mother—the mother as the source of pleasure gratification—is sought on one’s own body by sucking or masturbation or, later on, psychically in one’s own ego. At the same time, the depriving mother is set up in the child’s ego, through identification with maternal inhibitions, as a feared and punishing element, which manifests itself as anxiety or guilt-feeling." Someone good was there and when they are gone the brain looks for positive replacements and sets up defenses against negative behavior. Over time the child looks at the father as the possessor of the mother and then a transference of rivalry can move from the mother to the father and siblings. When the negative transference moves to the father and siblings then the boy can bring back the memories of the good mother, which is needed to then transfer those positive expectations towards a mate. "By contrast, the girl on the way to her Oedipus situation again finds the interfering, denying mother, and she gradually has to learn to find in her father a substitute for the pleasure-giving mother or breast. This comes about through equation of breast and penis, which presupposes a displacement from above downward and with it a reestablishment in the vagina of the original, oral sucking activity."

The Oedipus Complex begins with the good and bad mother, gets split onto a mother and father, typically on gender opposite lines, and then those mental predictions project onto the population, when the child is old enough to be concerned with worldly life. "The Oedipus situation compels the child to project onto both sexes the ambivalent attitude that originally referred to the mother only. The child has already built up this ambivalence in its ego as narcissism and guilt-feeling." Otto talks of an unburdening that happens when the sense of lack, and he borrows Ferenczi's "object hunger" to describe it, unburdens on others when those others become replacements for lost object relations in the past. These new relationships create a new strata of development overtop the original ones in childhood and one can regress back or develop forward. How psychoanalysts are able to learn about people is to view their object hunger in how they are treated by the patient. "One can, so to speak, unburden oneself in the love relation because one objectifies parts of one’s own ego in the partner...The aim of this unburdening is not merely reestablishment of the Oedipus situation as such, or even reestablishment of the original libido relation to the mother, as analysis of the neurosis undoubtedly teaches us. It also serves to relieve the ego of anxiety and guilt-feeling. This tendency of the ego to seize every available opportunity to unload itself of inner tensions through the object relation shows us that the ego is, as it were, built up against its own will, by necessity, as a result of deprivations. And it shows us, too, that the ego is always ready to unravel its structure in object relations as soon as it finds suitable objects and situations." This is like his earlier "deposit" where one can co-develop with the partner in reciprocity, in ideal circumstances, or it can turn into pathological exploitation, where the "deposit" is like a soiling on the floor and the partner has to clean it up. There's always a mixture of the co-operative and exploitative tendencies in all intimate relationships, and worldly ones. People can agree to clean up each other's deposits, but it's hard to balance that out when people are at different skills levels and physical health. When people can develop themselves with others, the relationship can proceed in a less parasitical fashion.

Use Somebody - Kings Of Leon: https://youtu.be/gnhXHvRoUd0

When there's a lack of stability in the ego, partially to deprivations, abuse, and many imbalances in parenting, spoiling, smothering, and treating children as a trophy, the object relations can require unsuitable unburdening onto the general population as well. With narcissism, people are so untrustworthy, they appear only as a threat, useful, or useless. In paranoia, the lack of trust can project a prediction that doesn't the match behavior of people in the actual social circle. Extreme forms of object relations can make healthy social relations impossible. To prevent too much blame on the parents, Rank views the Oedipus situation as not necessarily the actual personality of the parent, but it explains what the child's ego was trying to gain from the parent. The child needs to be able to partially exaggerate good and bad qualities in parents who are mixed with good and bad in order to move expectations from one parent to another, or to the general population of authority figures, and then find a role in society with a myriad of identities. The parasitical attitude towards the parents ideally wears off so that one can take care of oneself by joining the economy. It's a goal orientation to focus on what is good in the goal while ignoring negative attributes, because they are not a priority for that goal at that time. It's the goal that partializes the environment, which excludes elements in totality.

Object relations explain partly the parent's personality, but also how one's own ego was trying to solve problems of gratification in relation to the parents and eventually others. "In general the boy, as we have said, has to find at the Oedipus situation, the bad mother in father, irrespective of whether or not his father is strict. The boy must, so to speak, make his father bad, in order to keep his picture of the good mother clear." There's a natural scapegoating to achieve the goals of the child to maintain love attention between mother and child. One of the examples is the typical explanation of homosexuality in psychoanalysis. If the parent IS actually all bad, there's nothing left to preserve outwardly and it has to be generated inwardly. "In the boy, for instance, an especially intense disappointment in his mother will have as its consequence an inability to make an adequate displacement of the image of the bad mother onto his father. In life, too, he will continually have to look for and find the bad mother, which may lead to being repelled by women and attracted to men. Playing the part of the good mother himself, he will either love himself solely and narcissistically or look for the good mother in other men. The same is true for the girl, who, as a result of holding on too tightly to the depriving mother, comes to play the ideal mother toward other girls—in whom she loves herself." Like Freud's To Be or To Have, the child has to take the place of what was lost. "Individual character types and behavior can thus be explained according to whether an individual plays in life the good mother or looks for her in the object."

This utilitarian attitude in object relations leads to Rank's theory on social guilt because of how parents, siblings, and then the general public are used and treated. People aren't just venting but they are using you to unburden themselves, and if they have a moral compass, they experience guilt for the said manipulating. "All these negative emotional relations, which play such a large part in the love life, are intelligible only as attempts to solve conflicts in the ego, which seeks to free itself from inner tensions and inhibitions...At the same time, such attempts at freeing bring a new, secondary guilt-feeling with them, since the moral ego cannot bear the idea of making use of 'the other' (in the Kantian sense) as a means to an end...Guilt-feeling betrays the important role played by the ego in object relations: some guilt-feeling is present in all love relations." Rank connects this guilt with how one can feel a sense of having used another person in orgasm and that guilt can also connect with guilt over masturbation prohibition from back in early childhood.

Some of the early methods of detecting the severity of narcissism has to do with ego frustrations, defenses and responses to those early situations. "The degree of narcissism is a decisive factor in these later object relations, since it determines whether the original object is sought and found or whether one’s own ego is objectified." So the new relationship can be a re-establishment of those early relationships in reciprocity in development or exploitation in the aggrandizement of one's own ego. Working with people or using them. In a healthy person, one either creates a healthy bond re-created from the past, develops a new bond that is healthier, or like in narcissism one brings up defenses to try to control the relationship to meet one's own needs, leading to boundary violations based on an extreme sense of utilitarianism towards others. Development of one partner beyond another can also be a sense of threat and insecurity that can lead to over-compensation. There's always a sense of self-interest, concern, and prediction/projection, with relationships. "...In every object choice and love relation the two components, object and ego, are operative side by side...The greatest difficulties in the real love choice are to be explained by these two tendencies working against each other and also that most love conflicts arise when development of the ego disturbs a previously gratifying object relation." When partnerships, teams, and businesses are able to develop together, kind of like friendships that develop when things are tough, harmony increases. When there are mismatches in skills and development, and there is an opposite movement of development in one partner and regression in another, relationships usually end.

In the situations of masculinity and femininity, the example Rank provides again are about boys, and children in this theory are looking to take the place of others, originally their parents. Freud's To be or To Have connects with rivalry. The boy in his example envies the father's possession of the mother and wants to take his place and sends hostility his way. The Super-ego imitates the masculine tone in this case. That desire makes him want to be in the place of the father which targets the mother as desirable. It's a precursor for masculine rivalry to fight over a woman. It also provides the skills for protecting women as well. In reality, a person can be a fighter and a lover. If the hatred remains in the boy for the bad mother, then there is nothing to Have and so one can Be the mother in order to preserve the missing feminine energy. For Rank, this is a denial of reality, because it's an idealized image of the actual person, and it contains a repressed hostility that causes problems in real relationships towards women when suppressed revenge towards the bad mother is transferred onto women. "In such cases it is the task of therapy to bring the patient to recognize this primal image of the bad mother, whom he tries to deny by himself playing the part of the ideal, good mother. This succeeds only if he can work off his suppressed revenge toward the strict mother in the analytic situation, instead of in a real relation to the woman." A lot of psychoanalysis is about finding a place in society and it doesn't allow for one to not be in the masculine or feminine role. The improbable idealistic parent to Be in this imitation, of the lost so called "good mother," ends up being the mother that behaves perfectly to one's own desire without deprivation. Not the realistic good enough mother in reality. In early psychoanalysis, there's a concern that the boy or girl may turn into a homosexual because of hatred of the lost good mother and a desire to take on the missing role in worldly life. The key to this system is the Darwinian need to fulfill roles for survival. It's survival connected with sex. Each person has a mixture of masculine and feminine, through genetics, and developmental experiences, which adds needed flexibility in life and goes counter to the cartoonish masculine and feminine examples in culture, like Leonidas in 300, or the helpless princess motif in so many stories. This isn't to denigrate masculine and feminine roles, since there's been recent backlash against traditional gender norms, and there should be a respect for the enormous power these archetypal ideas have because of how they trigger gender specific hormones and procreation. The provider. The nurturer, etc.

300: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAacE5ukzrs

Green Finch and Linnet Bird - Sweeney Todd: https://youtu.be/O-K3m-KJV3s

Johanna - Sweeney Todd: https://youtu.be/4yFPYFcVZfE

Psychoanalysis - Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gvgq7-psychoanalysis-sigmund-freud-and-beyond.html

Later psychoanalytic theories, in this century, try to embrace a genderless approach to allow this complexity, so that can't be lost on the development throughout the 20th century in these reviews which almost exclusively focused on the etiology of pathology. It's a cause and effect style that serves well in certain situations but it's a case by case basis where theories may resonate with some people's experiences but conversely not for others. New theories are then created for genuine experiences left out. There is also heterosexual and homosexual transferences that psychologists have where they may pollute the therapeutic experience with their own agendas. There are those who think that homosexuals need to be rescued from their plight and become heterosexual, by dropping the good mother role and looking for it in a woman, in the male homosexual example, or that a patient needs to come out of the closest. This often can keep bisexual people stuck having to choose between one identity and another while ignoring their own libido, which is a form of erasure and adds to pathologies where people only do things because of what authority figures say. People only need cultural examples for their own deliberation, and their own authentic experiences from having tried on different roles. There is also an ignorance of sexuality when it comes to love and tenderness in relationships. A homosexual or a heterosexual act that is mainly lust and devoid of love and tenderness isn't the same as something more emotionally fulfilling. Helping people to remove compensations that impede the way to one sexuality or another is different because there is an authentic desire buried underneath trauma. On the other hand manipulating authentic desires is just another form of trauma, which is why rigid identities need to soften to allow for the varieties of experience, and changes over time that people actually go through and can be seen in psychology case studies that don't fit labels.

There are also complexities where the man is actually the good mother and the wife wears the pants in a reverse heterosexuality. There are also complications based on when a parent is lost through divorce, death, or neglect. These situations can happen at different developmental stages for a child and have more or less intense effects. One may simply miss the good mother or father and take on their aspects without it completely taking over one's identity. If a mother is missing due to death, abandonment, or neglect, the child unconsciously starts to take on the role of mother. The same goes for missing a father and taking on the father role. It's way of creating one's own comfortable psychological "home" and is a part of that nostalgic feeling that haunts people's lives when they experience turbulence, competition, rejection, and alienation in adult life. They yearn for a stable home somewhere. Nature abhors a vacuum and has to fill the emotionally empty gap, and for some the gap can't be filled and it's just emptiness that one has to live with and vent out over time. Musicians and artists often use this personal material in artistic projection, and often in moving fashion, and great accuracy. A good example of this is Bono from U2, where the early death of his mother haunts many of his songs. One of the many examples is Lemon. "So it was a very strange experience to receive, in the post, from a very distant relative, Super 8 footage of my mother, aged 24, younger than me, playing a game of rounders in slow motion. This beautiful, young Irish girl, with a narrow waist, curvaceous figure, dark gypsy hair. The film was early color and it looked extraordinary. It was a wedding, where she was the maid of honor in this beautiful lemon dress...There were two things going on at once, memory and loss, a portrait of a girl in a shimmering lemon dress that kept it sexy and playful and the pathos of a man separated from the things he loves... 'Lemon' is about leaving home, versus not leaving home." The emptiness of a lost mother motivates the man in this example to rebuild the woman in "banks" and "cathedrals," to create art as a primal scream therapy, because the "midnight" of the unconscious is where the "day" begins for the adult. Endless searching for a new home is a recreation of the old one to repair the past, so that home is with you wherever you go and the emptiness trails along. New partners appear in that projection with the hope that it will fill the emptiness with varying results.

The fun of Psychoanalysis is the depth that it goes into, like exploring a waking slumber and truly waking up the individual to the unconscious nudges and pulls of the survival drive that motivates conscious behaviour. Being able to see that "oh, I REALLY miss my Mom," and to release the emotion is a form of freedom through understanding. When one takes on the feminine role there's also criticism for the masculine role as seen in songs from U2 like Invisible, Sometimes You Can't Make It On Your Own, and Love And Peace Or Else. Bono opines that, "so many rock 'n' rollers write from a place of abandonment to a place of abandonment… In hip hop, it’s often the father. But in rock, it’s often enough the mother, even if the mother just passes away too early for adolescence to wear itself out..." The projection of resentment towards people in power, often the father, starts with criticism of authoritative parents, because from the vantage point of the good mother object in the mind, it demands a perfect father to match the perfect mother archetype in the mind, and then transfers that to authorities in society. When the father is missing, one can take on the perfect father archetype, that no real person is, and demand a perfect mother. Eminem in My Mom, shows his resentment for abusive parenting while at the same time feeling a sense of guilt at lashing out, and in the end she is the only mom he has. All these songs, including very critical ones, have a sense of "I miss you Dad. I miss you Mom!" This was cathartically performed by John Lennon in Mother, influenced by his primal scream therapy he was undergoing at the time.

In Rank's theory, he takes Freud's idea that in homosexual inclinations "one loves oneself in the same sex, as one’s mother loved (or should have loved) one," and adds more. "However, this is only one form of narcissistic object choice: the ego phenomena lying at its base is just as active as in the heterosexual object relation. In order to understand this, one must go beyond the libidinal explanation. It then becomes evident not only that one always looks for, or hopes to find, the ideal mother or the ideal ego in the love object, which is always chosen narcissistically, but that object relations in general are a kind of dumping ground for outworn phases of one’s own ego development. It may be a matter of wanting to find again the 'original' object or one’s own ego, at another time of wanting the 'idealized' object or ego or even the 'depreciated' object or ego. This last case, that of seeking the 'despised' object or ego, which is so important for an understanding of pathogenic development, makes it clear that all object relations represent attempts to solve ego conflicts." How one could look for a depreciated object is the fact that there is stress in self-development, and people with weaker skills can feel more comfortable to be around because they are less threatening, even though development through relationships is the ideal. Sometimes mutual regression feels better in the short-term.

U2 Lemon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEcx9F_FW2U

Songfacts - Lemon: https://www.songfacts.com/facts/u2/lemon

U2 Iris (Hold Me Close): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GAbVK8pZmU

U2 Sometimes You Can't Make It On Your Own: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_VHA0WsRUQ

U2 Love And Peace Or Else: https://youtu.be/C1htoqWPVus

U2 You're Song Saved My Life: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfGRZe6rdZw

U2 Invisible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajVoeX4eqIQ

Bono on John Lennon's Mother: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/bono-60-songs-that-saved-my-life-999226/patti-smith-people-have-the-power-999237/

Eminem My Mom: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3j2DwztCFU

Wyclef Jean New Day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXeiHQrStTs

Beatles Julia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgylB7SSrkU

John Lennon - Mother: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPYsMM1FvXs

Mother - Roger Waters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lCFaSL9aSE

Kelly Clarkson Piece by Piece: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqCqYP7hDWI&t=6s

Marvin Gaye Save The Children: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1KqO8YtXlY

Nas - Bridging the Gap (Video) ft. Olu Dara: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hq7z3JBKCTE

Modern music also betrays a sense of nostalgia where music from parents becomes inspiration for the children who listened to it in that cozy home environment, if it was cozy, and that aura of stability in a comfortable home. A "Golden Age" of regression. For example, some modern music sounds like those artists have just stepped out of a time machine from 1985. One wonders when the children of grunge parents will re-usher that resentment, rage, low self-esteem, contempt, and a reminder that not everyone is alright, that we saw in the early 90's. Each generation is trying to borrow identities from culture, like trying on different clothes, to find a good fit authentically, and thereby accidently bumping into competition with older generations, who fear being replaced, and there is an overall struggle to maintain a sense of True Self in harmony with the world, and the world pushes back.

M83 - Graveyard Girl: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MytGLO7iqhI

M83 - Kim and Jessie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_9EQenu8mQ

M83 - New Map: https://youtu.be/vbdJE65uy1Y

The Weeknd - Blinding Lights: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NRXx6U8ABQ

The Weeknd - I Feel It Coming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFLhGq0060w

The Weeknd - Out of Time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fDzCWNS3ig

Rihanna - Kiss It Better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49lY0HqqUVc

The Arcade Fire - Modern Man: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_0PhRlfjas

Nirvana - Smells Like Teen Spirit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTWKbfoikeg

Hole - Retard Girl: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pE_IHgEGLsU

Like an imposition on another person through "deposits," we can reward and be attracted to what makes us look good in the other person, typical of societal demands for success. There are also "deposits" from culture that provide predefined sex roles for people who would be misfits under those expectations. "As a male I need you to be this way. As a female I need you to be that way, to achieve such and such collective goal." This is expressed the most in relationships between parents and children. "In the most favorable cases, the ego grows and develops in biological harmony with and for one’s children, in whom one deposits large parts of one’s past (depreciated) and future (ideal) ego development. At the same time parents enable children, through identification, to develop their own egos and to build up their own ego structure. Every object relation nevertheless holds destructive elements within it, since the deposit of overcome and renounced ego phases always involves a breaking up and reorganization of the ego structure, which we know and fear as the destructive side of love." Children then develop some of the same strengths and weaknesses of their parents and have to learn to develop what is missing or find it in other people, and hence a reason to expand individual psychology to include family and cultural influences that can sometimes be left a mystery in therapy and in turn lead to stalemates in individual analysis.

What an Object-Relation understanding does is it helps to shine a light on psychological exploitation and to find opportunities to renegotiate relationships into one's that allow mutual development. This can apply to intimate relationships or any other relationships. "What parents have to learn—in their own interest and that of their children—is to resist the temptation to exploit this natural position of power in an emotional sense. Practically, it may not always be possible, as the child’s ego becomes stronger and tries to enforce itself on parents. But, as a rule, this form of misbehavior in the child is already a reaction to parental tyranny. When the child feels itself understood and loved, it will have no need of enforcing itself as a powerful factor against parents or brothers and sisters. In a word, the pedagogic situation must be transformed and developed into a mutual emotional relationship in which parents and children grow up with—and develop—one another." Rank's description of love is the ability to identify and expand the ego with the other, but of course this can break apart when predictable exploitation arises. Relationships can easily build and fall apart between the love feeling and the "Thou" psychology that Rank posits as self-interest.

"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 as it is, indeed will not have it otherwise than it is, and whose self we accept as it is. At the same time, however, we do not hold firmly onto this self. We develop it by means of identification and form ourselves according to the ideal of the Thou. This conforming to the love ideal of the Thou does not occur, however, through conscious work of adjustment, indeed is not to be attained at all by this means but occurs emotionally through identification, [inspirational imitation of others]...Perhaps love feeling even creates the ability to identify; it certainly increases it. In this sense love feeling would be the gate to the world of reality. It begins in the child’s feeling toward its mother. In all its manifestations, it proves to be decisive for our relationship to the outer world. However, study of the love feeling teaches us that this feeling is something that rests absolutely on reciprocity...When the function of feeling for uniting and identifying has failed—there results the 'pathological' expression of feelings that I call affect. It may be that there is no real feeling of reciprocity, or it may also be that we cannot establish it by means of inner substitution...The term affect I want to reserve for expression of the feeling of separation. With such separating affects as anxiety, hate, anger, or annoyance goes admission that the uniting force is not present or has failed. But, at the same time, the affect tries to deny even the tendency, the attempt, to unite— indeed, as it were, tries to deny the object itself." For Rank, identity is synonymous with unity and affect with separation, including the in between feelings of longing and hope with the latter.

When separation occurs the denial appears to try and prevent a normal expression of grieving, like when being dumped from a relationship. Identification, through creating an internal identity, that doesn't manifest in a real way from without, that denies the situation, leads to a denial of feelings and reality. The denial of a healthy expression of feelings, and accepting that one has feelings, is mystifying to Rank, but I think it can betray a fear of being vulnerable around others, because vulnerability tends to be attacked. There is also a knowing that connection with others presupposes a limitation of development that is like a prison. "The emotional solution of his conflicts consists in canceling the denial of his whole emotional life. That is, in the analytic situation, he has to admit that he has feelings and, moreover, admit this not only emotionally but also verbally. In doing so, at the same time, he cancels the blocking of his emotions, which he learns to express at least verbally. The therapeutic significance of this emotional release lies in the fact that the patient learns to express feelings without having them reciprocated, just as a means of self-expression. He learns to renounce the establishment of identity, and this enables him to accept the different one, the other, as an object...He learns to accept the fact that not everything is the ego, that there is also a Thou or other egos whom he has to accept without wanting to destroy or devour them." Without acceptance of those feelings, one can easily go into narcissism and create a false narrative of superiority, or go into masochism and denigrate oneself too far to the point that one sabotages oneself or fails to take care of oneself because the false identity is that one doesn't deserve it. Shame and guilt feelings between separation and unity can then be a limbo region that becomes a common emotional everyday influence. There are similarities to religions from east and west with psychoanalysis, but their contribution is to accept separation emotions and emotions of unity and to learn from those emotions. "...We cannot entirely remove the cause of emotional suffering— even when we find it—because suffering is in the nature of human emotional life. The emotional life itself is full of suffering and pain, and therefore it can be only a question of the more or less. To want to prevent emotional suffering would be to uproot the emotional life, as the Indian doctrine of healing attempts in practice, the Christian doctrine in certain of its dogmas, and the psychotic in his deadened emotions."

There's a reduction of clinging in the meditative style in that one doesn't try to make emotions last longer than they need to, but one feels the emotions and expresses them more freely. "Cathartically liberating therapy is uniting, seeks and finds the same emotions in the Thou, in one’s fellow beings, and thus share with them both suffering and joy...Psychotherapy again gives both—namely pleasure and pain—without doing away with conflict, without making pleasure undesirable, without making pain avoidable...What this guidance can and should have as its aim is not removal of the cause of suffering, the emotional life, but to make means of expression accessible to the emotional life, or to provide them...Denial of emotional suffering does not remove it but produces new suffering—which has to be numbed by ecstasy. Ecstasy again leads to catharsis and this again establishes a state of painful tension after a temporary alleviation...What can be done therapeutically, in essence, is chiefly one thing: to enable the patient free expression of his emotions at least in speech and so to give externally a certain discharge of affect."

Similar to Freud's deadline he gave to "The Wolfman," Rank would add a loose deadline based on the patient's displays of independence. It's timed in such a way that the analysis doesn't turn into a reliance on transference to the analyst, but movement towards emotional freedom. "Briefly the analysis should and must lead the patient beyond the stages of projection and identification to the development of personality, the first and most important accomplishment of which is the creation of his own analysis. The patient himself carries out the analytic task, corresponding in each case to his own type...The analysis can and should be made a personal creation of the patient’s, which he then accepts without guilt feeling and without extreme reactions, as his own accomplishment—indeed as an expression of his own newly created personality...It seems that our true self is the emotional self that is not expressed but rather is hidden. This true emotional self again seems to be closely connected with the biological I."

The 'Wolfman' Part 1 - Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gucp1-case-studies-the-wolf-man-13-freud-and-beyond.html

The True Self for Rank then moves beyond the individual's ability to express emotion, but to find others who authentically express emotion and find mutual love and care. The love bolsters self-esteem in both lovers. The only way then in dealing with separation is to be authentic with emotions, including the feeling of loss, and then connect with others where reciprocity can be developed again. "...A satisfactory love life, of which none of the three types is capable, unites all three factors in a harmonious way. The impulse-life is satisfied in sex, the individual will fulfills itself in the choice and creative transformation of the mate, while fear is overcome by the love emotion." Connecting a True Self of emotional expressivity with an authentic intimate partner and with authentic gainful employment is the ideal situation. You like your spouse, you like your kids, you like your job, and you like your hobbies, but Rank accepted that it is an ideal to aim at and with most people there can only be an approximation at best because stable reciprocity is difficult to achieve. Psychoanalysis is also not a cure all. Rank explains the bounds and limits of Psychoanalytic success: "We are all always far too 'theoretical,' and are inclined to think that knowledge alone makes us virtuous. That is not the case, as Psychoanalysis has proved. Knowledge is something entirely different from the healing factor. The depths of the Unconscious can, according to the latter’s very nature, be changed just as little as the other organs necessary for life. The only result we can attain in Psychoanalysis is a changed attitude of the Ego to the Unconscious...The sphere in which Psychoanalysis can be therapeutically effective includes all those cases in which it is a question of so regulating the relation of the Ego to the Unconscious, that through an adequate distribution of libido and anxiety, there results a harmonious relationship which we denote as normal adjustment."

Psychoanalysis is this compromise between the individual and society, and in a way Psychoanalysis is trying to reclaim Life for the analysand. There's a deep need for attention, to find confirmation in a partner that one is attractive and desirable. When people are misfits, there's a self-hatred and a desire to lash out for relief. So much of the reasons for wars, revolutions, addictions, depression, and suicides stems from this lack of self-acceptance. Even art becomes a way for the artists to resonate with people who feel bad about themselves and to make them feel justified or distracted by a different topic that is more entertaining. Maybe they can succeed in cheering them up, and like the clichéd songs that implore one to "hold on" and that "you are not alone," there's an attempt at psychological normalization. Then the idea of messing up your life becomes attractive because through that material, the audience can defend their idol who's splashed up on tabloids, because in a way by defending them they are defending themselves. The limitation of normalization in modern society is that it relies too much on outward confirmation, and regression. A healthier approach, and more authentic would be to be accepting of oneself when one is alone and to partner up with those that are also self-accepting. The foundation of authenticity in a True Self, where emotions are recognized and worked through without needing external objects to self-regulate, and without using partners as a crutch, or an idol celebrity, or a professional, like a psychoanalyst. True Self self-esteem is needed, because if you don't feel good about yourself enough to take care of yourself, who else is going to?

Everybody Hurts - REM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rOiW_xY-kc

The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank - Liberman, James E.: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781421403540/

Art and Artist - Otto Rank: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780393305746/

A Psychology Of Difference - Otto Rank: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780691044705/

Psychology and the Soul - Otto Rank: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781891396618/

The Trauma Of Birth - Otto Rank: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781578989768/

Truth and Reality - Otto Rank: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780393008999/

Will Therapy - Otto Rank: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780393008982/

Psychology: http://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/

#object relations #otto rank #psychoanalysis #brian eno #will therapy #trauma of birth #meditation #music nostalgia #nostalgia #mother complex #john lennon #bono #U2 #Nirvana #eminem #goethe #sigmund freud #buddhism

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psychreviews2 · 2 months

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Object Relations: Otto Rank Pt. 1

Otto Rank (1884 - 1939)

Like many early psychologists, Otto Rank read from philosophy that was already starting to turn inward toward the unconscious, and he was inspired by a certain Sigmund Freud who seemed to have all of the answers. Being in close proximity to Freud by being in Vienna, there was a meeting and Otto's life changed forever. Unlike Karl Abraham, Otto Rank worked with Freud for sometime, but then had to split off and move into his own right, even if that meant he was relegated to the shadows. Despite Otto's pariah status throughout the years, he lived a vigorous professional life, and like Sándor Ferenczi, both Neo-Freudians moved more from theory into therapy. These moves were entirely what should be expected when theories are created, which is that they will eventually be tested and altered with the clinical results. Despite the differences between later psychoanalyst's, there was a common theme in supporting emotional freedom and developing a True Self. Rank carved out his own path which predicted advances in Object Relations, Person-Centered Therapy, and Existential Therapy. He also brought more emphasis back on the influence of the mother on child development.

Like all other originators of a psychological movement, their personalities reflect themselves in the theories and the insights gleaned from therapeutic work. When James Liberman, in Acts Of Will, spoke to former patients of Rank's, one woman described meeting him and was surprised to see "a small man with a potbelly, his thick glasses made his eyes look as though they were bulging. Then after a short while with him I forgot all about that. His personality became so important...[He once said] 'I never try to cure. I utilize the neurosis'...With Rank there was no dogma. Everything was open from minute to minute. Nothing was imposed on you. Rank was not looking for disease, he was not trying to eradicate anything. He wanted you to open up and be as you might want to be but didn't dare to. He had an overwhelming force but it did not take away from anything else - it gave you a force of your own. Talking about my husband (who was also in treatment with Rank) he said, 'You might not like what he turns out to be.' I felt this as a subtle suggestion to let go of any preconceived idea of what he was. I must allow the process of finding out to go forward without imposing any restraint on it." Liberman described this type of therapy more like a psychopoiesis, a creativity added to personality development.

Otto was born on April 22, 1884 to parents Simon and Karoline Fleischner Rosenfeld. He lived with his family in an apartment in Vienna in the Leopoldstadt area which was the main location where Jewish immigrants settled in the city. The child went through diseases such as the measles, diptheria, and rheumatic fever, which had an effect throughout his life. Otto had a close relationship to his mother who focused on the children's wellbeing, as to be expected, and he described his brother Paul as being a very optimistic type. Otto's father was described as an alcoholic who was quiet before drinking and boisterous afterwards. The brothers had a lot of independence and would push back on the father. His elder brother Paul was chosen for more academic ambitions leaving Otto to educate himself, which often turns out to be the best education. As time passed Otto grew into a more solitary life. "...I have learned that friends are mostly props or burdens, in either case bad." Otto was more curious about older generations than his brother, but unfortunately that trust was taken advantage of when he was seduced by a man at the age of 7, which could easily have influenced a desire for him to look at friendship with a diminished trust. It appears to be a common experience for many children who become psychoanalysts, and Arturo Ezquerro researched "Simon Partridge [who] collected evidence that before his third birthday Freud was sexually stimulated by his nanny, one of his attachment figures, in a completely inappropriate way. Tschan pointed out that there are good grounds to believe that a number of leading early psychoanalysts (including Melanie Klein, Carl Jung, Otto Rank, Wilhelm Reich and Sandor Ferenczi) were sexually abused as children to different degrees."

Certainly within all psychoanalysis, or most talking therapies, there's an underlying mistrust of social influences and analysts level piercing critiques of power and its uses, and ironically scandals in psychoanalysis itself, another form of power differential, was no different. There's a desire to find personal freedom from social constraints in all these therapies. Yet social constraints can give way to inspirational choices in the form of self-learning. Doing things because you want to versus doing things because you were manipulated to. Despite Otto's lack of high academics, he was well read and the authors he encountered included Schopenhauer, Ibsen, Schiller, Stendahl, Dostoevsky, Wedekind, and later Nietzsche, Weininger, and Freud. Otto Rosenfeld adopted a pen name Rank from Ibsen's A Doll's House, and he declared himself an agnostic since he lived in a non-religious family. Changing a name also helped in dealing with social stigma in the social and occupational arenas as many Jewish people felt they had to do in order to advance. In a way this is a little like Otto's later therapies where personality can develop along individual lines outside of traditional culture.

Naturally a background like this would look congenial to Sigmund Freud. Anaïs Nin recalled Rank's description of their first meeting. "...He was taken by a friend to Dr. Adler because of lung trouble, where Otto spoke so thoughtfully of Freud that Adler brought him to the Professor, whose pupil Rank became in 1905." Freud thought Rank's manuscript displayed an "unusual comprehension."

What Otto didn't realize was that he was embarking on a difficult excursion where what was expected was a forum for free intellectual discourse, when in fact it was anything but. Scientists in more traditional physical studies eventually learn that originators of theories can harden those theories into dogma. Followers can only develop at times by severing relationships with their inspiration. In The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank, Anaïs Nin, a former lover, recalled Rank's point of view of his split with Freud which matched his theories on the desire for immortality. For example, Freud even considered his daughter Anna as a good match for Rank as a form of extending his dogma into posterity. The danger of non-conformity back then is the same as now with what is called "cancel culture." Disinterested science is an illusion. "Freud tried to analyze Rank, but this was a failure...Like all fathers he wanted a duplicate of himself...The real cleavage was achieved by the others...They hoped for a fissure. Even though Rank’s discoveries were dedicated to Freud, Freud could never quite forgive him for differing from his established concepts. He began to consider Rank’s explorations a threat to his own work. The other disciples worked actively to point up the estrangement, to add to it. Dr. Rank was made to feel so alienated from the group that he finally went to practice in Paris...He lost not only a father but a master, a world, a universe."

It's one thing to be on the safe end of pathologizing others, but Freud and Ernest Jones flipped on Otto in that direction when they diagnosed him as a manic-depressive, Bi-polar disorder today, when he veered away from Freud's Oedipus Complex as the main neurosis. His manic phases involved a lot of self-overcoming and the ability to produce considerably, which was then followed by depression and inhibition. These experiences helped to inform his understanding of motivation in others on how to overcome inhibition, especially in his exploration of motivation in art, which could easily be extrapolated to general creativity. For Freud, the desire to return to the security of the womb is partially explored, but he kept the Oedipus Complex as the nuclear neurosis. For Otto, that sense of separation at birth was more important.

Art and The Artist

Otto Rank's studies of inhibition follows similar Freudian lines of past traumas, but deep down there's an attitude of endless self-preservation. The survival part of the mind has trouble imagining things like death and tries to ignore it. "This individual urge to eternalization of the personality, which motivates artistic production, [it has shown] to be a principle inherent in the art-form itself, in fact its essence." For Rank, this impulse goes back to the beginning with primitive peoples and develops towards the romantic notions of the individual against the mob. "The urge for abstraction, which owed its origin to a belief in immortality and created the notion of the soul, created also the art which served the same ends, but led beyond the purely abstract to the objectivizing and concretizing of the prevailing idea of the soul." Early representations and constructions in primitive art held a desire to celebrate existence and harbor the hope for lasting existence beyond death. "It is precisely the concreteness of art as compared with the idea of the soul that makes it convincing; for it creates something visible and permanent in contrast to something which was merely thought or felt, which was at first handed down from one generation to another only by means of mystic tradition and was only fixed in literature of religious form at a very late stage...Thus primitive art must be, like the primitive idea of the soul, collective in order to achieve its aim, the continuation of the individual existence in the species. And it follows, too, that primitive art must be abstract in order to reproduce this abstract idea of the soul as faithfully as may be...It had to be made concrete, pictorial, and real, so as to prove its existence, and had to be presented in matter to demonstrate its indestructibility...It is therefore not a defective faculty of abstraction which drives to the concretization of the soul and its pictorial representation in the god, but the will to objectify it and thus to impart to it existence and, what is more, eternity."

Portrayals of Gods and magical forces could dwell in the mind, but making them concrete was a way to communicate these ideas to others. "...In art lay the only mode of exhibiting the soul in objective form and giving personality to God.’" The pressure of individual versus the collective is throughout Otto's work, and the artistic and creative impulse oscillates between a desire for social rewards and a desire to be free from social constraints. "Personal creativity is anti-religious in the sense that it is always subservient to the individual desire for immortality in the creative personality and not to the collective glorification of the creator of the world...He tries to save his individuality from the collective mass by giving his work the stamp of his own personality."

There is an interplay of personal needs and social needs that individuals can rely on in an ancient community, and those forces exist today. Inspirations from culture get turned into individual creations that in turn create social responses and absorb new developments. "Religion is the collective ideology par excellence, which can only spring from a powerful group-need and mass-consciousness, which itself springs from the need of the individual for dependence and implies his subjection to higher forces. Art also, which sprang originally from self-feeling, is then subordinated to religion, just as the creative personality is subordinated to the creator. Religion springs from the collective belief in immortality; art from the personal consciousness of the individual...The artist has need of religion so as to make his own impulse towards immortality collective, while religion needs the artist in order to make concrete its abstract notion of the soul; on the other hand, the artist seeks to eternalize his individuality apart from the collective ideologies, while religion would deny the individual in favour of the community. Thus though art is in the last resort anti-collectivist — in spite of the fact that it makes use of the various communal ideologies, especially of contemporary religion and the style dependent on it — it yet needs these collective ideologies, even if only to overcome them from time to time by the force of personality."

This pressure has an oscillating ambivalence that Rank felt was always there in the background. The trajectory from the collective primitive to the romantic individual moves towards the belief in individual genius and the dawning reality that if one wants to see change in the world, one can't wait for a deity, but one must take action. "The idea of genius is, in its mythical origin, a representation of the immortal soul, that part of the personality which can beget what is immortal, be it a child or a work...It seems psychologically indispensable to set an impulse of self-assertion against that of self-negation if we are to understand the creative personality as it develops out of the idea of genius...Psychologically the notion of genius, of which we see the last reflection in our modern artist-type, is the apotheosis of man as a creative personality: the religious ideology (looking to the glory of God) being thus transferred to man himself. Sociologically, it meant the creation and recognition of 'genius' as a type, as a culture-factor of highest value to the community, since it takes over on earth the role of the divine hero."

Going beyond Freud's sex motivation, there's a sense that sexuality can only really manifest if one is still alive and survival motives underlie sexual motives. "The only tangible statement which Freud’s theory could give us about the artistic process was that which asserted that the impulse to artistic productivity originated in the sex-impulse. But it is easy to see that this explanation (which I myself accepted in my first work on the psychology of artists) takes us no further in reality, being a pure paraphrase of the individual meaning already obvious in the very concept of genius (gignere = to beget). But psychology could not explain how from the sex-impulse there was produced, not the sex-act, but the art-work, and all the ideas called in to bridge this infinite gulf — 'compensation,' 'sublimation,' etc.—were only psychological transcriptions for the fact that we have here something different, higher and symbolical."

Attributing a sexual wish-fulfillment in Dreams also didn't shed much light on creativity and how it is subjectively experienced. "Dreams, too, which in the new interpretation of Freud seemed to promise so much for the elucidation of artistic creativity, proved, on a more careful comprehension of the problem, to be incapable of taking us beyond a superficial analogy.’ The fact that we all dream and, in dreams, are all (in the fine comparison of Schopenhauer) poets of the stature of Dante or Shakespeare is sufficient by itself to force to our notice the fact that we do not know what it is which allows a Dante or a Shakespeare to do in waking life what we all, according to Schopenhauer, do in our sleep."

So much of psychoanalysis involves resistance, inhibition, and battling low self-esteem. For anyone creative, including those productive people not categorized with artists, the need to go to a therapist stems often from this inability to assert oneself, tolerate failure and criticism, and to learn from those enlightening experiences. "The neurotic, no matter whether productive or obstructed, suffers fundamentally from the fact that he cannot or will not accept himself, his own individuality, his own personality. On one hand he criticizes himself to excess, on the other he idealizes himself to excess, which means that he makes too great demands on himself and his completeness, so that failing to attain leads only to more self-criticism. If we take this thwarted type, as we may do for our purposes, and compare him to the artist, it is at once clear that the artist is in a sense the antithesis to the self-critical neurotic type. Not that the artist does not criticize himself, but by accepting his personality he not only fulfils that for which the neurotic is striving in vain, but goes far beyond it. The precondition, then, of the creative personality is not only its acceptance, but its actual glorification, of itself."

Like a Nietzschean self-overcoming, Rank's therapy is much in the same vein of reducing inhibition so that the smothered authenticity can actually do its work. The striving and struggle of the neurotic is the pressure to BE somebody in society. There's a conflict between the individual and society, but there's also a need to find a place in society so that one has a following, fans, customers, and consumers of one's output. One wants to produce but not in a vacuum. There's a need to find a place where one can effectively trade with the rest of society to balance individuality and an honoring of the interdependence one has with the rest of society. Art desires originality, but it also desires an originality that has a utility for others beyond a hobby.Similar to Freud's ambition to be someone great, as seen in his dreams of Rome in The Interpretation of Dreams, and also his goal to be able to assimilate to the gentile world, and finally be accepted. There's a desire in all people to be a respected pillar of society, to be welcomed, appreciated and loved. Similar to Freud's Life-drive, Rank's desire for immortality fits in nicely. The desire for immortality is up against the understanding of human death for all people, and like Freud's Death Drive, there can be a sense of futility. There can be a fear of failure, an ambivalence, and indecision on the best path forward: choosing a religion, settling on a choice for lasting social contribution, whether to have children or not, or a combination of those. It becomes difficult to weigh the time sacrifice and choose amongst the array of options.

Freud and Italian Culture - by Pierluigi Barrotta, Emma Bond, Anna Laura Lepschy: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9783039118472/

Johnny and Mary - Bryan Ferry & Todd Terje: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Din_eWjJWe0

"For the creative impulse in the artist, springing from the tendency to immortalize himself, is so powerful that he is always seeking to protect himself against the transient experience, which eats up his ego. The artist takes refuge, with all his own experience only from the life of actuality, which for him spells mortality and decay, whereas the experience to which he has given shape imposes itself on him as a creation, which he in fact seeks to turn into a work. And although the whole artist-psychology may seem to be centred on the 'experience,' this itself can be explained only through the creative impulse — which attempts to turn ephemeral life into personal immortality. In creation the artist tries to immortalize his mortal life. He desires to transform death into life, as it were, though actually he transforms life into death. For not only does the created work not go on living; it is, in a sense, dead; both as regards the material, which renders it almost inorganic, and also spiritually and psychologically, in that it no longer has any significance for its creator, once he has produced it. He therefore again takes refuge in life, and again forms experiences, which for their part represent only mortality — and it is precisely because they are mortal that he wishes to immortalize them in his work." This is why creation can end in depression until one finds another project to be excited about. The creation itself at best is imperfect and a compromise from the mental image. If it is truly great, then it competes with future projects, creating self-doubt, a sense of decline, and if it is mediocre or a complete failure, it's a source for self-criticism.

The sexual desire that impulses towards social connection in the individual also contains a social fear of being engulfed, made unimportant, and disposable. Freud's sublimation for the successful artist, or any other creator, who develops him or herself in their individual pursuit, eventually finds themselves to be socially useful and attractive. For Rank, sublimation is something similar but he emphasizes the self-renunciation of sexuality, the sense of inferiority, and that struggle to find a place in the world, which signals that sense of survival and immortality along with the ability to be attractive sexually. Signals of success and superiority from others provides the social proof that one has finally found that spot in society where one can BE somebody, even if it's temporary. "...The fundamental problem is individual difference, which the ego is inclined to interpret as inferiority unless it can be proved by achievement to be superiority."

Similar to Freud's Reality Principle, Rank views control of libido, his important emphasis on willpower, as a way to differentiate a psychopathic person who justifies all impulses from that of a productive person or that of the neurotic. The Ego has to target areas of individual strength and social importance in order to gain credence and acceptance in society. An Id that has no moral guidance can't be accepted in society and a Super-ego that is excessively inhibiting, prevents productivity. "I see the creator-impulse as the life impulse made to serve the individual will...Positively willed control takes the place of negative inhibition, and that is the masterful use of the sexual impulse in the service of this individual will which produces the sublimation...If we compare the neurotic with the productive type, it is evident that the former suffers from an excessive check on his impulsive life, and, according to whether this neurotic checking of the instincts is effected through fear or through will, the picture presented is one of fear-neurosis or compulsion neurosis. With the productive type the will dominates, and exercises a far-reaching control over (but not check upon) the instincts, which are pressed into service to bring about creatively a social relief of fear. Finally, the instincts appear relatively unchecked in the so-called psychopathic subject, in whom the will affirms the impulse instead of controlling it. In this type —to which the criminal belongs — we have, contrary to appearances, to do with weak-willed people, people who are subjected to their instinctive impulses; the neurotic, on the other hand, is generally regarded as the weak-willed type, but wrongly so, for his strong will is exercised upon himself and, indeed, in the main repressively so it does not show itself."

The Pleasure Principle - Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gurqv-the-pleasure-principle-sigmund-freud.html

The Ego and The Id - Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gvdo1-the-ego-and-the-id-sigmund-freud.html

Similar to existential philosophy, Rank looks at time and the certainty of death as something that motivates in the right circumstances or demotivates towards dilettantism, or an impostor syndrome when out of balance. "Only through the will-to-self-immortalization, which rises from the fear of life, can we understand the interdependence of production and suffering and the definite influence of this on positive experience. This does not preclude production being a creative development of a neurosis in objective form; and, on the other hand, a neurotic collapse may follow as a reaction after production, owing either to a sort of exhaustion or to a sense of guilt arising from the power of creative masterfulness as something arrogant."

There is also a fear of life related to a grinding exhaustion by treating projects as a means to an end in a person forcing striving and ambition without authentic motivation, or there can be a bored satisfaction which mimics a psychological death, and can be acutely seen in bored psychopaths who manage some productivity in the world. It's a feeling of "is that all there is?" There's a desire in therapy to help balance out energy to maximize the energetic interest while controlling it towards worthy projects. When projects are both personally and socially interesting, and they match with social goals, a synergy between individual and the society is found, similar to descriptions of Ikigai, and the Psychology of Flow. "Instinct presses in the direction of experience and, in the limit, to consequent exhaustion — in fact, death — while will drives to creation and thus to immortalization. On the other hand, the productive type also pays toll to life by his work and to death by bodily and spiritual sufferings of a 'neurotic' order; and conversely in many cases the product of a type that is at bottom neurotic may be his sole propitiatory offering to Life. It is with reason, therefore, that from the beginning two basic types of artist have been distinguished; these have been called at one time Dionysian and Apollonian, and at another Classical and Romantic. In terms of our present dynamic treatment, the one approximates to the psychopathic-impulsive type, the other to the compulsion neurotic volitional type. The one creates more from fullness of powers and sublimation, the other more from exhaustion and compensation."

When individual works match with social goals and ideologies, there's a sense of immortality in creating a lifestyle, a psychological space, and institutions that new generations can file into and explore themselves. Appreciation from society, especially after long suffering in obscurity, can be a powerful reward and can draw tears from grown adults. "The productivity of the individual, or of the thing created, replaces—for the artist as for the community — the originally religious ideology ‘by a social value; that is, the work of art not only immortalizes the artist ideologically instead of personally, but also secures to the community a future life in the collective elements of the work. Even at this last stage of individual art-creativity there function ideologies (whether given or chosen) of an aesthetic, a social, or a psychological nature as collective justifications of the artist’s art, in which the personal factor makes itself more and more felt and appreciated."

If one has a meditation practice, the fear of death can be detected and how it intertwines with a fear of life. Ambivalence over which projects are worth spending precious time on, and the desire for distraction from those worries, shows how commitment and investment of psychological resources remind immediately one of death, and it can manifest very quickly an anticipation of failure, leading to a need for distraction in replacement desires like entertainment, addictions, gossip, envy, and a need to blame society for the inactivity and lack of results. A victim mentality can easily arise when people feel that there's really no point to endeavour if one cannot find a place in society where individual contributions can be appreciated. Not everyone by a long shot will be a Rembrandt. There has to be a place for mediocrity, partial or near success to relieve pressure. There also has to be a place for private contributions to smaller audiences like friends and family.

"If the impulse to create productively is explicable only by the conception of immortality, the question of the experience problem of the neurotic has its source in failure of the impulse to perpetuate, which results in fear, but is also probably conditioned by it. There is (as I have shown) a double sort of fear: on the one hand the fear of life which aims at avoidance or postponement of death, and on the other the fear of death which underlies the desire for immortality...A strong preponderance of the fear of life will lead rather to neurotic repression, and the fear of death to production — that is, perpetuation in the work produced. But the fear of life, from which we all suffer, conditions the problem of experience in the productive type as in other people, just as the fear of death whips up the neurotic’s constructive powers. The individual whose life is braked is led thereby to flee from experience, because he fears that he will become completely absorbed in it— which would mean death —and so is bound up with fear. Unlike the productive type, who strives to be deathless through his work, the neurotic does not seek immortality in any clearly defined sense, but in primitive fashion as a naïve saving or accumulation of actual life."

Look Back In Anger - David Bowie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eszZfu_1JM0

The artist who has to find a place in society, with the endless pressure to find utility in their art, is infected by the most self-conscious strain of all. This is especially true of the modern artist who has to become as close to genius as possible and has to sacrifice their life in order to create material for their art. "[The Romantic artist] can create only by perpetually sacrificing his own life." There is also a motivation to be rebellious and to become a leader of new generations through role-modeling, which is begrudgingly accepted by the successful artist. At times they see opportunities in current social movements to capitalize on their relevance and through association to create relevance in their art. Personal Style and Social Relevance. "That is, he is capable of forming the given art-ideology — whether of the collective kind (style) or the personal (genius-idea) — into the substance of his creative will. He employs, so to say, personal will-power to give form or life to an ideology, which must have not only social qualities like other ideologies, but purely artistic ones, which will be more closely specified from the point of view of aesthetics." As you will see later on, there's a difficulty in supporting social causes while balancing self-destructiveness.

Social relevance pressures can be readily seen in the need for a muse which can bring social connection to the individual. Connection to society involves friendship, sexuality and love, but also a need to be free from control and ironically the desire to control others. There's a deep friction between individual freedom of expression and action versus balancing harmony in intimate relationships. "The 'experience' which arises in this manner is not, like other sorts of experience, an external phenomenon set over against creative work, but is a part of it and even identical with it, always providing that the Muse— in practice, usually a real woman — is suited to this role or at least makes no objection to it, and so long as the artist can maintain such a relation on the ideological plane without confusing it with real life. It is this case, in which the conflict between life and creation reaches extreme intensity, that we so often see actualized in the modern type of artist." The Muse is used to project oneself into the subject which can uncomfortably interfere with their individuality. Rank later on calls this a "deposit," which has connotations of manipulation, penetration, excretion, and projection. An early form of Object Relations. "In any case his impulse to form man in his own image or in the image of his ideal inevitably brings him into conflict with real life and its conditions."

Artist examples of the Romantic type

As a detour into this subject, I'll provide some examples of the modern type of artist as commonly seen in the 20th century. Sometimes there's a better safety in cultural appropriation where the Muse can be in already recognized influences, and modern pop music is a great example. African American influenced music was a muse for Elvis and he had the ability to take those influences and make them popular to a white teenage audience. Another example was a synergy of influences between Michael Jackson and the ecstatic qualities of James Brown and the cool of Diana Ross. The role-model of best-ness is the ability to create something different, but not too different to be inaccessible, to artistically model fashion, to have good looks, to exude sexuality, to debut a newer sound, as a form of genius, and to live a lifestyle that imitators would find a social pinnacle. The audience is looking for role models where they can dream of putting themselves in the same position along with enjoyment of the artwork itself. A vicarious overcoming of social inhibition. That pressure to be a role model, instead of an imperfect human being that each person is, is incredibly hard to shoulder, as any examination of the lives of celebrity will betray. Extreme fans almost want to cannibalize their idols and internalize their strengths and powers.

Hound Dog & Dialogue - Elvis - Milton Berle Show - 5 June 1956: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJnVQDA9rHA

Jackson 5 Medley - Billie Jean - Moonwalk Debut - Michael Jackson and the Jackson 5: https://youtu.be/nlnqu2W7S18

I'm a Loser - The Beatles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukWRRNqMAZ4

Those early bursts of success leads to one to compete with oneself. To maintain that energy at those high levels, to respond to stressful criticism from a voracious public, to survive inevitable career slumps, it's easy to fall into dependency on narcotics and pharmaceuticals, to keep the engine running and to prevent depression. For example, Elvis died of heart problems and polypharmacy. When talking to Thomas Dolby, Michael Jackson said “[I] was sad that Brian Wilson had severe psychiatric problems and that his brother Dennis was a drunk and a drug addict. ‘It’s better to die a sudden death than just deteriorate. When I die,’ said Michael, ‘I want to die like Elvis.’" In 2009 Michael died of cardiac arrest from a sleep medication overdose. Another massive artist, Prince died of an accidental Fentanyl overdose. He was addicted to painkillers to deal with his social anxiety.

One can see the life drive tussle with the death drive in that artists fear fading away in the fear life life, but use the fear of death as a way to produce. Pharmaceuticals are the modern way of maintaining energy for the productive, but exhausting fear of death, and substances on the other hand can be an escape for those with a fear of life. Echoing a bit of Otto Rank's description of the negative feelings connected with artistic creativity, Charlie Rose's interview with David Bowie is illuminating. "Tell me the satisfaction of completing a painting. 'For me it's finishing it so I can get onto something else. It's getting through it. It's the process. There's something in it. It just turns me to jelly. My heart and my mind just become...I can't explain it. It's a very strange feeling. It's not particularly pleasant either. I can't say I enjoy music or painting in quite that...I mean it's not like sex. There's something volatile, emotive, something that makes me quite angry about going through the process of making music and doing visual arts..." There's a hook of desire for novelty and to want to create something new, but there's a sense of dissatisfaction with the now. That part of the mind can't rest in contentment and is fueled by a sense of not enough. On the matter of art and insanity Bowie said "I've often wondered if actually that being an artist in any way, in any nature is a sign of a certain kind of dysfunction, a social dysfunction...I think it's a looney kind of thing to do. I think the saner and rational approach to life is to survive steadfastly and create a protective home and create a warm loving environment for one's family and get food for them. That's about it. Anything else is extra. All culture is extra. Culture is a freebie. We don't need particular color plates...Anything will do but we insist on making 1,000 different kinds of chairs, 15 different kinds of plates. It's unnecessary and it's the sign of the irrational part of man I think. We should just be content with picking nuts."

Michael's Eerie confession: https://nypost.com/2016/10/08/michael-jacksons-eerie-confession-i-want-to-die-like-elvis/

Prince's 'Former Drug Dealer' Speaks About Pop Star's 'Major Addiction To Opioids': https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/princes-former-drug-dealer_uk_571bc654e4b018a884dce83f

In Bowie In Berlin: A New Career In A New Town, author Seabrook detailed Bowie's explanation of how stars, including himself, experience that pain of creativity and the need for energy to get things done. David Bowie explained "I didn't really use [drugs] for hedonistic purposes...I would work for days in a row without sleep. It wasn't a joyful, euphoric kind of thing. I was driving myself to the point of insanity." Bowie's guitarist Carlos Alomar explained that "the coke use is driven by the inspiration...if there's a line of coke which is going to keep you awake until 8am so that you can do your guitar part, you do that line of coke, because it basically just keeps you up and keeps your mind bright."

That sense of inadequate rest and bridging the gap with substances pushed Bowie to the edge. "Bowie’s drug use continued to escalate while he lived in L.A., leaving him in a state of psychosis that bordered on schizophrenia...[He was] existing on a diet of milk and green and red peppers, which had caused him to become painfully thin." The effects of the drugs also went into paranoia and manic depression. Despite that, he was still able to put out a classic album Station to Station, and star in the cult classic The Man Who Fell To Earth, directed by Nicholas Roeg. "...Such was the level of Bowie’s drug use at the time that he now says he recalls next to nothing of the making of Station To Station, claiming only to know that the record was cut in Los Angeles because he has subsequently read about it." There were some dry moments during the movie shoot but when returning to L.A., his old habits returned.

Station to Station - David Bowie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAj2iX9xqCo

The Man Who Fell To Earth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbgcLFj9k0U

There's A Fly In My Milk - David Bowie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYtGDZ0K2Bg

Bowie On Cocaine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWyiFxqwfP4

In an attempt to find that muse by moving to another city, Bowie and his friend Iggy Pop tried to clean up and work together. They would create hugely influential albums in Berlin, and in other places throughout Europe. When listening to these works, you can hear how musicians of the 80s and 90s had shoplifted this era with relish. Influenced by what was called Krautrock back then, which off put Germans preferred the term Kosmische musik, they pilfered influences from Neu!, Kraftwerk, and Harmonia, etc. Bowie did allow and support some of the influencing he was responsible for because he was already influenced himself in the same way. Muses can be intimate partners, and they often show up in the cryptic lyrics of many artists, but many muses are simply past artists and present ones who stoke a mixture of envy and inspiration. Many of those artists strategize that new generations will not recognize their influences so the styles presented appear brand new. In an interview with Dinah Shore Bowie confirmed that "I'm quite a rock fan and I get influenced by other bands, other artists, and tend to steal things from them. I think that's one of the most important elements of rock and roll."

The Model - Kraftwerk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEnx9xS79Lc

Deluxe - Harmonia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVphe18ZlWY

Neu! - Hallogallo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zndpi8tNZyQ

David Bowie on Dinah Shore 1976: https://youtu.be/IRudpIxXZ8I

A New Career In A New Town - David Bowie: https://youtu.be/kZssy0IiyMA

Oh Berlin - U2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAtsgk02oYI

Trent Reznor David Bowie interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jONvR5zMy1w

A Warm Place - NIN: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yld7Fs-VfRE

Crystal Japan - David Bowie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tg-9pL6k3CI

While searching for a muse, substances behave as a bridge, or a limbo between inspiration and creation. "Despite their stated intention to clean up, Bowie and Iggy’s initial time spent in Berlin was very much a period of transition – of binging and purging, relapse and recovery. They might have escaped the clutches of Los Angeles, a city seemingly built on cocaine...that Bowie called 'the most vile piss pot in the world,' but they now found themselves in what Bowie later called 'the heroin capital of the world', which made life particularly difficult for Iggy. Reminiscing on VH1’s Behind The Music two decades later, Iggy described the pattern of their first weeks in Berlin thus: 'There’s seven days in a week: two days for bingeing for old time’s sake; two more days for recovery; and that left three days to do any other activity.' The city 'hadn’t changed since 1910,' according to Iggy. There were 'organ grinders who still had monkeys; quality transvestite shows. A different world. By evening, I’d go have dinner with Bowie, see a film or watch Starsky And Hutch – that was our big thing, me and Bowie. If there wasn’t enough to do, I knew some bad people, and I’d get stoned or drunk. Sometimes I’d do the bad stuff with Bowie, and the good stuff with the bad people.'”

Nightclubbing - Iggy Pop: https://youtu.be/EpECxEO4uZM

Iggy had a Lust for Life, but his lyrics in The Idiot, showed a knowing ambivalence about the pleasure of drugs and alcohol, which makes for great material to exploit, even if one is exploiting oneself. In Funtime, Iggy describes some of those bad guys. "Last night I was down in the lab talkin' to Dracula and his crew." In Baby, Iggy instructs a girl "you're so clean...please stay clean...There's nothing to see I've already been down the street of chance."

Funtime - Iggy Pop: https://youtu.be/DDYatCwJvCA

Baby - Iggy Pop: https://youtu.be/nU3EyAYg4t4

Despite escaping Los Angeles, Los Angeles was still in Bowie's mind. Songs of isolation like in Sound and Vision, where he was waiting for inspiration, or Always Crashing In The Same Car, Bowie was processing what he went through and the anger towards himself and his dealers. In the later song, he describes his encounter with a drug dealer he recognized and how he felt after he slammed his car multiple times into the dealer's Mercedes. "Later the same evening, he finds himself in the basement car park of the hotel in which he and Iggy have been staying, driving round in circles, pushing close to 100 miles per hour and giving serious thought to the idea of bringing a definite close to this sorry charade by ramming the car into a wall. Until, that is, it runs out of gas." It would take some time to move on from this point in his life, process his experiences in the album titled Low, but then he found more popularity with the next album Heroes. There he was able to connect his artistic inspiration of Berlin with the Berlin wall, previously hinted at in an instrumental Weeping Wall, which was a world concern outside of dealing with personal demons and addictions. The romantic achievement is to create a personal stamp and to make a work of art that many people can see in their own way, and resonate with if they had similar experiences.

Heroes, loosely about a couple torn apart by the wall, but influenced by his struggles in his marriage and Tony Visconti's, the song was less single material for radio, because of its length, but became a huge anthem in concerts after that, and for some East Germans, they felt it helped with in an emotional reunification when Bowie played it at the Reichstag near the wall. Max Fisher on Vox, recounts the atmosphere. "The concert was held near enough to the border that many East Berliners crowded along the wall to listen to the forbidden American and British music wafting across the city, allowing these two halves of the city to hear the same show, divided but together...'The mood was one of enjoying forbidden fruit,' Olof Pock, then a 15-year-old kid living in East Berlin, later told Deutsche Welle. 'We knew that this was somehow being done for our benefit.'" A song that was originally about helplessness turned into a triumphant victory in the '80's and '90's. One can see Otto Rank's emphasis on the ambivalence between social connection and individual freedom that is omnipresent in every person's life. People wanted the social protection that Communism promised from a perilous capitalism, but they didn't want overregulation to hamper their freedom of choice, which is an unending conflict that is always relevant no matter what century you are in. Certainly this wasn't completely new territory for David Bowie because he already lived at a time when there was a relaxing of anti-homosexuality laws, and he was one of the first popular artists that discussed homosexuality and bisexuality openly. People living in the closet could see a role model that was confident with their feminine side, and possibly entertain their own self-confidence, instead of entertaining depression or suicide. Again that struggle to be an individual and live with others who are different, and also being able to put a personal stamp on what is ultimately popular entertainment. Then very easily within any group, band, duo, management, etc., that same dynamic can play out in the minature, and it did with Bowie and Iggy.

Heroes - David Bowie at the Reichstag Building: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCI9o5IErwc

David Bowie at the Berlin Wall - Max Fisher: https://www.vox.com/2016/1/11/10749546/david-bowie-berlin-wall-heroes

Less triumphant version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qcAtflfVYs

Low - David Bowie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-NBeLkOZvU&list=OLAK5uy_m9x2fCIkl-ZqsbZMNM0NDtc-nAfQHRchA

"Heroes" - David Bowie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1gfKaHxIfo&list=OLAK5uy_mO2pGEUc5-vrZZDGEi9uJI33xEZfYGCh0

Lodger - David Bowie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_8Wvh4DH94&list=OLAK5uy_mXLUFAfOWT0Ax6VJTHjChWPWuWEe0jUGQ

In a revealing and surreal interview with Dinah Shore, Bowie was worried about overshadowing Iggy Pop and that tension of connectedness and a need for independence was obvious. In the interview Bowie was concerned and asked for permission, "do you mind if I talk?" Bowie explained his interest in Iggy's music and his big influence. Iggy later opined that "I think I helped wiped out the 60's." David wanted to make clear about their collaboration and said "I would never want it to be considered I was some kind of hand manipulator or Svengali behind what Jimmy's doing now because he's getting popular now." Inevitably their collaborations paused for a long spell since their popular trajectories were different. Bowie was also tired of the drugs. "Touring with Iggy was very enjoyable for the most part. [But] the drug use was unbelievable and I knew it was killing me.” The Ego also needs to prove itself and see itself as independent in order to feel the satisfaction that one has genius residing in one's work. "In the handful of interviews [Iggy] did to support The Idiot, and during the subsequent tour, it soon became clear to Iggy that a lot of people were beginning to see him as Bowie’s lapdog. This is not a situation that anybody would have particularly enjoyed, but for someone in an industry as ego-driven as the record business, it was downright infuriating. The only way out of that, then, was for Iggy to prove himself, once again; and, this time, to do it on his own. 'We have drifted away from each other,' Bowie revealed two decades later. 'I think there was a moment where Jim decided that he couldn’t do a fucking article without my name being mentioned, and I don’t think that’s a very comfortable feeling. I think he had to physically take himself out of the picture to become autonomous again.'”

Iggy Pop and David Bowie - Dinah Shore: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2eB8f020Pc

Ashes to Ashes - David Bowie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNqo0kIR-TU

Like in intimate relationships, friendships, and work collaborations, it's hard to manage egos. Then the pressure to maintain success and to keep it going makes it easier for band members to argue over things like royalties, who does more work, and how they've been shafted. One of the bands heavily influenced by Bowie is U2. Their manager Paul McGuiness early on got the band to share the money equally to prevent resentment and the typical breakups that most bands experience. It worked out well so far with the same members being together for over 40 years. The defense mechanisms in people are quite strong and that inner struggle between independence and love can be seen in U2's The Fly. The character that Bono put together in a way allows one to explore other characters without having to be like them. A way to avoid destroying oneself in order to create new material. Like an actor, you go into character and go out of it. “I quite liked being this character...A barfly, a self-appointed expert on the politics of love, a bullshit philosopher who occasionally hits the nail on the head but more often it’s his own fingernail he leaves black and blue.” The psychological armour and defenses are well practiced and cover overtop the unconscious desire for love and connection. Yet for the Barfly, the unconscious continues pining with the fantasy "love we shine like a burning star....." but the fear of engulfment takes over and crushes the wish-fulfillment and he loses the belief in love by the end of the song because of the risk of rejection and conflict. "A man will rise. A man will fall, from the sheer face of love, like a fly from a wall. It's no secret at all."

U2 From The Sky Down: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oD5rH7yDyI

U2 The Fly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HDPenYIPtg

U2 and Alter-Egos: https://oneweekoneband.tumblr.com/post/36323690211/u2-and-alter-egos-the-fly-it-all-started-with

Bono, being an ENFJ if you follow Myers-Briggs, is definitely in the camp of trying to transcend the individual and move into the collective, with songs like One, and his goal to fight HIV in Africa. To achieve that Bono had to curry favor with his platform to make politicians pay attention. It yielded real life results because of the modern advances in HIV treatment. The side effect of this when walking with the powerful and financially abundant is that it can veer you into strange paths, and how you got success can trip you up from the original impulse of "making a difference." Power works like a drug and it can make anyone appear hypocritical and ridiculous when they marinate in that environment, yet this wasn't a new conflict for the band and it showed up early on as a compromise between individual spoils and sending the so called "right" message to audiences.

For example, when U2 started they always had a Christian ethos, but one that is more like a liberation theology left-wing kind, and the goal was to use Christian influences for social justice purposes. In the early Eighties, Bono, Edge, and Larry were briefly involved with a Christian group Shalom that were pressuring the band to use Christianity to proselytize to fans. They were beginning to dictate "how they should dress, what they should look like, the way they should sound. They resented being crowded, dictated to. It was time to move on. Looking around, they didn’t like the nihilism into which punk had descended. The New Romantics were as irrelevant, peddling pop of the most self-regarding and vacuous variety. Meanwhile the real world seemed to be permanently in the grip of one kind of crisis or another. Everything was out of kilter."

The band almost broke up at that time when trying to figure out how to live with Christianity in a superficial world of entertainment. "The three Christian members of the band had been under a lot of pressure from other members of the Shalom group to quit, that they had to choose one way or the other. It was on the beach in Portrane that The Edge broke the news to Bono that he might be leaving the band. If The Edge was going, Bono decided that he would too - that they'd break up the band. The Edge asked for two weeks, to give him time to go away and consider his position. When he came back he had decided that being a Christian in a rock ‘n’ roll band involved a contradiction alright - but one he could live with." The reality with anything, not just in the creative world, is that one has to balance self-interest with group feeling, and despite complaints of Bono's hypocrisy, this kind of trade off happens all the time and it stays dormant until there is success. Righteous indignation about poverty in the world, and especially in Africa, and the desires for taxation and a Marshall Plan to save the world, don't match well with the band's "tax efficiency" which is a euphemism for tax avoidance. In the 60 Minutes Australia interview, when Bono's wife suggested he get a hobby he said "...so I took up investing." Sooner or later the individual finds the demands of the audience feeling tiresome and constricted. The audience wants you to be wealthy but they want to come along with you. If they can't, then their social circles are infinitely divided and resentment builds. Success also opens doors to contact with others that are also successful and a bubble can be created. Songs like God Part II, Acrobat, The Showman, and especially The Little Things That Give You Away, it's evident that there's plenty of self-knowing. "You know that I know."

God Part II - U2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dvXG18ZA1I

The Showman - U2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzYneo6Yc3U

The Little Things That Give You Away - U2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulgxq7VKB_A

Into the Heart: The Stories Behind Every 'U2' Song: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781842222034/

60 Minutes Australia: On The Road In Brazil With U2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mhAoVzSUig

Yet, it still hurts to lose that sense of relevance when people stop listening to you. Songs like Blackout, originally being similar in theme to Acrobat, Bono criticizing himself, eventually turned into projection towards Donald Trump. "...The song 'started off its life about a more personal apocalypse, some events in my life that more than reminded me of my mortality but then segued into the political dystopia that we're heading towards now.'" This is the typical projection of oneself onto others, and Rank thought this type of projection was a way to deny faults in oneself. Instead of seeing where Trump was resonating, which is that unrestricted illegal immigration was a boon for the ruling class to get cheap slave labor, and they were defending their ignoble selfishness by saying they were being less racist, yet slave labor is what? Slavery. Shhhhh! No, they don't support that do they? In practice, yes they do, and have been doing so since the beginning of globalization. When each country develops multiple industries, restricts immigration during a recesssion, and hires unemployed people in their own country, and only increases immigration when there's an economic boom, individual citizens become wealthier because companies are forced to pay them more, and a nationalist prescription can apply not to just the U.S., but every country can tend to their own, just like individuals can recover from codependency, which is the psychology of slavery. This wasn't an easy realization for many of the general public that used to support globalization, and naturally there would be resistance from the ruling class who benefited from the exploitation. When you drop the masochistic pressure against oneself for being in the ruling class, a form of denial, there's a relief when you have someone else to blame. There are racists on the right, who obviously have Cluster B personality disorders, but there are also the hidden kind on the left who disguise themselves as the opposite. The artist tries to manipulate the politicians and then gets manipulated in the end.

Bono's lyrics repeatedly bring in the term WE to try and narrow the gap between the social justice audience and the entertainer-idol. In the same song he assures that "when the lights go out, don't you ever doubt the light that we can really be." In Invisible, he's more direct with the assertion that "there is no them. There's only us." Yet this gap will remain because the audience will easily be able to compare their regular lives from that of the idol. Knowingly, Bono provided this contract with the social justice audience years ago in Acrobat, and ironically lets them know that it is better if they are on their own. "I must be an acrobat to talk like this and act like that, and you can dream. So dream out loud and you can find your own way out." It is true to an extent, you are on your own, and eventually the worshippers have to find different revolutions when past revolutions haven't bared any fruit. People look at their lives, listen to the music, and see that their lives haven't changed and prospects are becoming slim. The celebrity idol is just another stone statue and prayers aren't working.

New U2 album takes on President Trump: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4907432/New-U2-album-takes-President-Trump-political-dystopia.html

The Blackout - U2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaJCFHXcWmM

U2 Acrobat - U2 - eXPERIENCE tour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgNCp5VF6ww

U2's Bono tells the WEF 'Capitalism is a wild beast.': https://youtu.be/SbjqbCWPNoQ

U2’s Bono Performs Pro-War Propaganda In Ukraine Subway Station - Jimmy Dore Show: https://youtu.be/Heice7eFS0U

Noor Bin Ladin Live from Geneva 'They’re Working On An Infrastructure To Control You' - The War Room: https://rumble.com/v15svh1-noor-bin-ladin-live-from-geneva-theyre-working-on-an-infrastructure-to-cont.html

Dr. Naomi Wolf Proven Right On 'Global Vaccine Passports': https://rumble.com/v164s83-dr.-naomi-wolf-proven-right-on-global-vaccine-passports.html

Globalists 'Doubling Down' On Lockdowns With Digital Vaccine Passports: https://rumble.com/v164h6v-globalists-doubling-down-on-lockdowns-with-digital-vaccine-passports.html

Rand Paul: This is the danger of a one-world government: https://youtu.be/KknfRwyckpM

Jack Posobiec: The Continued Cover Up Of Tiananmen Square: https://rumble.com/v17bcqv-jack-posobiec-the-continued-cover-up-of-tiananmen-square.html

Robert Lighthizer Former U.S. trade representative - "We have to have balanced trade": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4h0hDwIiQCo

Now I'm picking on U2 because so much is written about them, but this is the same for all successful romantic artists and it seems inescapable if those artists try to move from the personal into the relevant politically and try to take positions one way or another. Artists feel sorry for their fans, sometimes hate portions of their fans who have found them out, and have to come to grips that many of their fans have serious mental illnesses that are dangerous to them, as John Lennon unfortunately found out. Prior collaborator with David Bowie and U2, Brian Eno, not a person who's a U.K. right-wing type, was still able to maintain perspective between left-wing and right-wing politics after Trump took office in 2017, and he saw that the punk attitude this time came from the right, to the left's dismay. "You have 62 people worth the amount the bottom three and a half billion people are worth. Sixty-two people! You could put them all in one bloody bus…then crash it!...Most people I know felt that 2016 was the beginning of a long decline with Brexit, then Trump and all these nationalist movements in Europe. It looked like things were going to get worse and worse. I said: ‘Well, what about thinking about it in a different way?’ Actually, it’s the end of a long decline. We’ve been in decline for about 40 years since Thatcher and Reagan and the Ayn Rand infection spread through the political class, and perhaps we’ve bottomed out. My feeling about Brexit was not anger at anybody else, it was anger at myself for not realising what was going on. I thought that all those UKIP people and those National Fronty people were in a little bubble. Then I thought: ‘Fuck, it was us, we were in the bubble, we didn’t notice it.’ There was a revolution brewing and we didn’t spot it because we didn’t make it. We expected we were going to be the revolution.” The reality is that any revolution, whether from the left or the right, it has to resonate in the common people and it resonates when these regular people see direct improvement in their lives. That is the ONLY way a revolution succeeds. Factual and direct improvement that is readily visible. Even Eno's interviewer goes into that territory of wealth criticism. "Eno himself is a multimillionaire, largely because of his work as a producer. He wouldn’t be one of the 62, would he, I ask. 'I certainly wouldn’t be,' he says with a thin smile. 'No, I’m a long way off that.'"

We've been in decline for 40 years - Brian Eno - The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/jan/23/brian-eno-not-interested-in-talking-about-me-reflection

The way Iggy Pop described this trap, that all artists are tempted by when they are social commentators, but then become wealthy, is that you have to be careful not to turn into your enemy. "...You know, you go to school...You meet wonderful teachers and you meet wonderful kids, and then you meet some pricks. They're there because they are more Anglo than someone else's fucking parents. I took a little schtick with that when I was in high school. It put a chip on my shoulder and it made me want to succeed in the same world as the guy with the house in the Haute Bourgeois neighborhood, but I didn't want to be a fucking Haute Bourgeois." People with more power tend to bully and denigrate those with less power, which is rightly criticized, and this creates a motivation to prove oneself, or to get revenge. But what if that person succeeds? Even if Iggy lives life in as authentic way as he can, wealthy celebrities usually have to apply some boundaries simply because they can be recognized and stalked. Secondly, is that the lifestyle for the wealthy is usually more comfortable, and when people get used to that comfort, they tend to live in a Haute neighborhood anyways, especially if they need security, and it's tempting after sometime to begin rejecting people who can't keep up. It just happens naturally because your wealth will unconsciously put the rest of the population in the rear view mirror. To try and be class conscious while being wealthy is like trying to square the circle. Even the people criticizing these fallen prophets, thinking that they would be different, should look in the mirror. If they had the money they wanted they would live in the best possible location and do all the things they want to do. There usually needs to be a severe lack felt in the individual mind to bring that social mind back online, because the individual only cares about the social if they can advance along with others. When there's abundance the individual mind takes over and just runs with personal goals. That's how movements gain popularity and break apart.

Iggy Pop talks about his colossal career: https://youtu.be/Y0C6FkGrsWw

The pressure for artists, when they want to be the heartbeat of the world, with relevance and gravitas, to appear empathetic and caring, it's hard to balance a personal life with a bubble of abundance and see how regular people see. It turns into virtue signaling. The works that end up resonating with people are often personal and subjective, not connected to political institutions or fads, but can connect with many other people who've gone through similar personal experiences. Artists have difficulty aging gracefully and updating themselves to new cultural movements. That's the challenge in making timeless music, for example. When 10, 20 or 100 years pass by, how much of the artwork will actually resonate with future generations? Usually it's artwork dealing with unavoidable things like relationships, power differentials, and how to handle death that resonate the most. When David Bowie died, Bono said "the sky is a lot darker here without the Starman." Bowie's last album was literally an embrace of death and shows some of the ways that artists find where they realize that they are making a lifestyle for themselves and a lot of their art is to make art of one's life, but the true success is making the life one wants to live, choosing intimate relationships that are authentic, like a life designer. The message of freedom that an artist can give realistically is to model an individual life where people are free to make it what they want and let the audience find their own version of that and to face death in their own way. Death eventually is a freedom from all obligations like in Bowie's Lazarus. "I'll be free just like that bluebird." One of the creepy moments of Bowie's last album, Blackstar, are the lyrics from Girl Loves Me, "where the fuck did Monday go?" He died on a Sunday seeming like he was artistically curating his own death. A successful artist for Rank is one that faces death more than others and reduces the amount of neurosis. "The artist obtains his individual immortality by using the collective ideology for his personal creativity and, in this way, not only re-creates it as his own but presents it to humanity as a new collective ideology on an individual basis. Thus he himself becomes immortal along with his work."

Bono remembers David Bowie: https://ew.com/article/2016/01/27/bono-david-bowie-tribute/

Starman - David Bowie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBKEt3MhNMM

Lazarus - David Bowie: https://youtu.be/Piq-_MOcnRc

Girl Loves Me - David Bowie: https://youtu.be/wDCk1X2S00A

The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank - Liberman, James E.: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781421403540/

Art and Artist - Otto Rank: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780393305746/

Ezquerro A. Sexual abuse: a perversion of attachment? Group Analysis. 2019;52(1):100-113.