اولین سایت نشانه شناسی شوهر آهو خانم

TRUTH AND REALITY

Will Therapy

BY

OTTO RANK

Authorized Translation from the German,

with a Preface and Introduction, by

JESSIE. TAFT

W.W.NORTON & COMPANYINC

NEWYORK

TRUTH AND REALITY

A LIFE HISTORY OF THE HUMAN WILL

Jesus: I am come to bear witness unto the truth.

Pilate:What is truth?

I

THE BIRTH OF INDIVIDUALITY

The most important event in the life of a man is the moment when he becomes conscious of his own ego.

Tolstoi

The lines of thought comprehended in this book constitute a preliminary statement of the final working out of a coHcept of the psychic which I had anticipated in the work of my youth "Der Kunstler" ^ (1905) almost a quarter of a century ago.* The consequent building up and shaping of this early conception led me gradually to a "genetic" and "constructive" psychology which, on the basis of practical analytic experiences, has finally crystallized into a will psychology. This approach threw such meaningful light upon the psychological foundation of epistemology and ethics that it led me ultimately to a philosophy of the psychic which I now attempt to outline in the following chapters. The practical, therapeutic aspect of the will psychology I developed in the second part of my "Technique of Psychoanalysis" which was published simultaneously. While at first I was completely under the influence of Freudian realism and tried to express my conception of the creative man, the artist, in the biological-mechanistic terms of Freud's natural science ideology, on the basis of my own experience, I have since been enabled to formulate these common human problems in a common human language as well. "The Trauma of Birth," ^ a book written in 1923, marks the decisive turning point in this development.

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1"Der Kunstler. Ansatze zu einer Sexualpsychologie." Hugo Heller, Vienna and Leipzig 1907. Second and third editions the same 1918. "Der KUnstler and andere Beitrage zur Psychoanalyse des dichterischen Schaffens." Fourth enlarged edition. International Psychoanalytic Press, Leipzig, Vienna, Zurich 1925 (Imago-Bucher I).

2 Translator's Note: The German word "seelisch" has no exact equivalent in English. I have used "psychic" in lieu of something better, but it does not carry satisfactorily the reference to the concept of the soul in primitive cultures to which Rank relates modern psychology~t7VT2s book "Seelenglaiibe und Psychologie." 8 "Technik der Psychoanalyse, II. Die analytische Reaktion in ihren konstruktiven Elementen." F. Deuticke, Leipzig and Vienna, 1928. English translaUon, "Will Therapy," Book I. Alfred A. Knopf, 1936.

There I compared to the creative drive of the individual as treated in "Der Kiinstler," the creation of the individual himself, not merely physically, but also psychically in the sense of the "rebirth experience," which I understood psychologically as the actual creative act of the human being. For in this act the psychic ego is born out of the biological corporeal ego and the human being becomes at once creator and creature or actually moves from creature to creator, in the ideal case, creator of himself, his own personality.

This conception of the birth of individuality from the self as a consequent psychological carrying out of the original trauma of birth from the mother, leads also to another kind of methodology of treatment and presentation. While in "The Trauma of Birth" I proceeded from a concrete experience in the analytic situation and its new interpretation, and as in "Der Kiinstler" strove to broaden it into the universally human and cultural, my present conception just reversed is based on the universally human— yes, if you will, on the cosmic idea of soul, and seeks to assemble all its expressions in the focal point of the separate individuality. It has to do neither with a leading back of the general, the supra-individual, to the concrete and personal, nor with a wishing to explain the one from the other. Although this may often be the appearance, yes, at times may even underlie it, yet this is not the object of this presentation which rather sets for itself the goal of viewing the two worlds of macrocosm and microcosm as parallel, and only as far as possible, pointing out their inter-dependence and their reactions upon one another. In this attempt, excursions into the history of culture are naturally unavoidable, in order at least to note the great counterpart of the individual in a few of its typical forms.

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1 "Das Trauma der Geburt und seine Bedeutung fUr die Psychoanalyse." International Psychoanalytic Press, Leipzig, Vienna, Zurich, 1924 (Internationale Psychoanalytische Bibliothek XIV). French translation in the "Bibliotheque Scientifique," Payot, Paris, 1928. English translation in "International Library of Psychology, Philosophy and Scientific Method," London 1928, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd.

The main task, however, as indicated in "Genetische Psychologie" continues to be the presentation of the chief actor and at the same time chief onlooker, the individual ego, in this, his dual role. This involves not only the duality of actor and self-observer, but has yet another meaning, in that, for civilized man, the miheu is no longer the natural reality, the opposing force of an external world, but an artistic reality, created by himself which we, in its outer as in its inner aspects, designate as civilization. In this sense civilized man, even if he fights the outside world, is no longer opposed to a natural enemy but at bottom to himself, to his own creation, as he finds himself mirrored, particularly in manners and customs, morahty and conventions, social and cultural institutions. The phenomenon thus described is of fundamental meaning for the understanding of the human being's relation to the outer world as well as to his fellow man. For while Freud's reality psychology emphasized essentially the influence of outer factors, of the milieu, upon the development of the individual and the formation of his character, even in "Der Kiinstler" I opposed to this biological principle, the spiritual principle which alone is meaningful in the development of the essentially human.

This is based essentially in the conception that the inner world, taken in from the outside by means of identification has become in the course of time an independent power which in it's turn by way of projection, so influences and seek to alter the external, that it's correspondence to the inner is even more close.

The indication of its psychological determinants and dynamic factors in terms of this will psychology, forms the main content of the following chapters.

This conception of the influencing and transforming of the mileu by the individual allows for the inclusion of the creative, the artist type, for whom there is no place in Freud's world picture where all individual expressions are explained as reactions to social influences or as biological instincts and therewith are reduced to something outside the individual. For with Freud the individual in the nucleus of his being (the so-called "id") is subject to the great natural laws, under the guise of the "repetition compulsion," while personality consists of the layers of identifications which form the basis of the parental super-ego.

This perhaps may account for the great mass, the average, although even here it can be true only roughly, but it can never explain the creative t3'pe nor the so-called "neurotic," who represents the artist's miscarried counterpart. In this cursory survey I should like to characterize the creative type, in a preliminary way only, in this regard, that he is able, in a way soon to be described more closely, to create voluntarily from the impulsive elements and moreover to develop his standards beyond the identifications of the super-ego morality to an ideal formation which consciously guides and rules this creative will in terms of the personality. The essential point in this process is the fact that he evolves his ego ideal from himself, not merely on the ground of given but also of self-chosen factors which he strives after consciously. As a result the ego, instead of being caught between the two powerful forces of fate, the inner id and the externally derived super-ego, develops and expresses itself creatively. The Freudian ego driven by the libidinal id and restrained by parental morality, becomes almost a nonentity, a helpless tool for which there remains no autonomous function, certainly not willing whether this be creative or only a simple goal conscious striving. In my view the ego is much more than a mere show place for the standing conflict between two great forces. Not only is the individual ego naturally the carrier of higher goals, even when they are built on external identifications, it is also the temporal representative of the cosmic primal force no matter whether one calls it sexuality, libido, or id. v{]he ego accordingly is strong just in the degree to which it is the representative of this primal force and the strength of this force represented in the individual we call the wilh This will becomes creative, when it carries itself on through the ego into the super-ego and there leads to ideal formations of its own, which, if you will, in the last analj'sis arise from the id, at all events not from without.lOn this account, the creative man of every type has a much stronger ego than the average man, as we see not only in genius but also in the neurotic, whose convulsed hjrpertrophied ego is just what creates the neurosis, psychologically a creative achievement just as much as any other.The creative type, whose denial we see in the inferior neurotic is therefore not only characterized by a stronger impulse life, but also by a wholly special utilization of it, the most important aspect of which I consider the ideal formation from the own self (i. e. on the basis of the own impulsive make-up) whose "negative" we have to recognize in the neurotic symptom formation. However, while the neurotic so strengthens his repressions against his stronger than average impulsive self, that they finally make him completely incapable of willing and acting, in the creative man there occurs a qualitatively different impulse displacement, which manifests itself psychologically as ideal formation with simultaneous expression in conscious creative activity of will. Such a conception makes creative power and creative accomplishment comprehensible for the first time, rather than the insipid and impotent concept of sublimation, which prolongs a shadowy existence in psychoanalysis. From this viewpoint one could say that with human beings sometimes even impulsive expressions are only a weaker, less satisfactory substitute for that which the creative power of will would like. Therefore, as it were, not only the phantasy-produced substitute for unattained reality, but even the reality which is attainable, isonly a weaker substitute for the inexhaustible willing.

The psychological understanding of the creative type and of its miscarriage in the neurotic, teaches us therefore to value the ego, not only as a wrestling ground of (id) impulses and (superego) repressions, but also as conscious bearer of a striving force, that is, as the autonomous representative of the will and ethical obligation in terms of a self constituted ideal.

Freud's original wish fulfilment theory lay much nearer to this recognition than his laier doctrine of instincts which actually only represnted biologizing of the unconscious wishes.

We easily recognize in the Freudian wish the old will of the academic psychologists, although in the romantic guise of natural philosophy, while the wish, as I first explained it in "Der Kiinstler," actually corresponds to an impulse tendency which later was ascribed to the supra-individual id.

But the consciousness wish fulfilment tendenry of the ego for the designation of which the suitable word wil exists, extends (as Freud himself finally had to perceive in "The Ego and Id") much further than he was willing to admit, while the instinctual impulse tendency in men is less extensive than he originally thought, since it is repressed by the powerful super-ego factors for Freud and, for me, in addition, is molded by the self-created ideal formation. Also this fact appears clearly in the dream phenomenon in which Freud has seen the wish fulfilment tendency, since the conscious wishes of the day are often strong enough to put through their fulfilment in dreams while the ostensibly stronger unconscious wishes (the impulse drives) are almost regularly blocked by the ethical repressions, still watchful even in sleep (Freud's censor). All these facts and considerations would have been able to save psj'choanalysis from an over-valuation of the power of the unconscious impulsive life in men, and from the under-valuation of his conscious willing ego, if a kind of psychic compulsion, which reaches far beyond the personal psychology of its creator, had not, of necessity, blocked it. Before we seek the source and nature of this compulsion, I should like to justify here briefly by way of introduction what causes me to speak of a compulsion. The whole of psychoanalysis in its theoretical and practical aspects is actually an unparalleled glorification of consciousness and its power as I have already observed in "Der Kiinstler," while Freud himself designates his theory as a psychology of the un-. conscious and as such wishes it to be understood. It certainly is that, too, but the more it became a doctrine of the unconscious, the less it remained psychologv\ As a theory of the unconscious it became a biological foundation of psychology as which I also tried to present it in "Der Kiinstler." In its mechanisms of super-ego formation it gives on the other hand a foundation of characterolog}'. The actual field of psychology, the conscious ego, with its willing, its sense of duty, and its feeling, psychoinalysis has treated verj' like a step-child because it has placed the ego almost entirely under the guardianship of extra-individual factors, of the id and the super-ego, at least as far as theory is concerned. In practice, however, psychoanalysis represents, as has already been said, a glorification of the power of consciousness ; in its therapeutic meaning, according to which neurosis is cured by making conscious the unconscious motive underlying it, in its cultural significance as a tremendous broadening of consciousness in the development of humanity, as I represented it in "Der Kiinstler," and finally in its scientific meaning, as the recognition and knowledge of a part of the unconscious in nature. Before we can investigate how such a contradiction could arise between theory formation, the facts on which it rests, and the conclusions to which it leads, we must review the factors which, according to our viewpoint, psychoanalj'sis has undervalued. At first we said it was the significance of the inner, independently of the outer factors, then the significance of the creative will, and finally the meaning of a conscious sense of duty.

We recognize now that these factors belong together intimately and condition one another, yes, in a certain sense, represent one and the same thing. We started from the "inner" which originally was an "outer," but became inner, and as its representative we accept the super-ego in the Freudian sense, that is, as far as it is built up on identifications. If we add to this "outer" also the id which is in a certain sense supra-individual because generic, that which Jung designates in the racial sense as collective unconscious, there remains left over as the actual own "inner" of the individual, his ego, which we have distinguished as bearer of the creative will, or generally speaking, of the conscious personality. If we have once acknowledged its power—and psychoanalysis, as already said, had recognized but denied it —there appear as a result further interesting perspectives which the old academic psychology in spite of its recognition of the meaning of conscious willing, could not let itself dream of because it lacked the dynamic viewpoint which psychoanalysis, it is true, conceived purely on the level of biological instinct while we approach it rather from the basis of the individual creative.

First of all, there is the possibility of the creative reaction of this strengthened willing ego upon the overcome instinctual id ; on the other hand, there follows therefrom the already noted influencing of the super-ego formation through the self-constructed ideal. The first effect leads us into the most impei»taat but also the darkest field of all psychology, namely, the emotional life, while the effect of the willing ego, on the other side," comprehends all actual sublimation phenomena, therefore the spiritual, in the broadest sense. In a word we encounter here for the first time the actual ground of psychology, the realm of willing and ethics in the purely psychic, not in the biological or moral sense, therefore not in terms of any supra-individual force, but of freedom as Kant understood it metaphysically, that is, beyond external influences. Psychoanalysis has scarcely approached the problem of the emotional life because the "unconscious" feelings which it accepted corresponding to the "unconscious" wishes were not so easily reducible to instinctive life as the latter. In want of a better explanation, one could perhaps allow the assumption to serve that the affects correspond to such unconscious feelings but the whole sphere of human emotions, important as they are, with their finely graded scale is as undeniably a phenomenon of consciousness, as the whole man himself. One can better accept from this standpoint the Freudian explanation of consciousness as a sens organ for the perception of physic qualities in the genetic sense. Probably consciousness even earlier was entirely a sense organ for the perception of external qualities (sensation psychology) which it still is today also later was added the function of the perception of inner qualities and a further developmental level of consciousness was that of an independent and spontaneous organ for partial ruling of the outer as of the inner world. Finally, consciousness became an instrument of observation and knowledge of itself (self-consciousness) and as such again it has reached in psychoanalysis and the will psychology which I built further upon it, a peak of development and self-knowledge. The individual ego frees itself therefore always more and more with the weapon of increased power of consciousness, not only from the rule of environmental natural forces, but also from the biological reproduction compulsion of the overcome id; it influences thereby also more and more positively the super-ego development in terms of the self-constructed ideal formation and finally in a creative sense the outer world, whose transformation through men on its side again reacts upon the ego and its inner development. Thus we are finally led back again from the problem of will to the problem of consciousness and this all the more, the more psychological we remain. For however fundamental and important the will —whatever one may understand by that —for all stimulation of the individual to acting, feeling and thinking finally we can only comprehend all these phenomena in and through consciousness, (in this deeper sense psychology can of necessity be nothing other than a psychology of consciousness yes, even more, a psychology of consciousness in its various aspects and phases of development. We shall examine later this relativity, not only of all conscious human knowledge, but of all phenomena of consciousness itself/First of all we face the whole problem of psychology, namely, that we become aware of the actual driving factors in our psychic life always only through the medium of consciousness, but that this consciousness itself is nothing firm, constant, or unaJterabla There results from this situation a series of difficulties withoutKnowledge of which every psychology is impossible, since the understanding of these contradictions forms the very warp and woof of phychologj' as such. These difficulties are : first, that we, as said, are aware of the will phenomena only through the medium of consciousness ;second, that this conscious self offers us no fixed standpoint for observation of these phenomena, but itself ceaselessly alters, displaces and broadens them. This leads to the third and perhaps most important point, namely, that we can observe these fluctuating phenomena of consciousness itself only through a kind of super_consciousness which we call self-consciousness. The difficulties are complicated still more seriously when we take into consideration the fact that consciousness itself and its development are determined essentially by will phenomena or at least are influenced in far reaching fashion.

We can hardly do justice to this highly complicated state of affairs when we say that a constant interpretation and reinterpretation takes place from both sides. Consciousness is constantly interpreted by will and the various levels of will, yes, consciousness originally is itself probably a will phenomenon that is consciousness was an instrument for the fulfilment of will before it advanced to the will controlling power of self_consciousness and finally of analytic hyperconsciousness, which on its side again interprets will and will phenomena continuously in order to make it useful for its momentary interests. If we actually want to pursue psychology we must protect ourselves from extending further this constantly reciprocal process of interpretation by any kind of theory formation. Theory formation of every kind is then only an attempt to oppose to the manifold spontaneous attempts at interpretation by will and consciousness a single interpretation as constant, lasting, true. This, however, on the basis of the considerations just presented, is exactly anti-psychological, since the essence if psychic processes_consists in changg and_in the variability o f the possibilities of interpretation. The compulsion to theory formation corresponds then to a longing after a firm hold, after something constant, at rest, in the flight of psychic events. Is there perhaps some way out, which might free us from this external compulsion to interpretation or at least let us rest a moment beyond it? Certainly it is not the way of historical or genetic analysis. For aside from the fact that even the final elements to which we can arrive by this path still represent phenomena of interpretation, it is also unavoidable that on the uninterrupted analytic path to these elements we should fall upon the interpretation compulsion of consciousness and of the will also. There remains therewith psychologically no other recourse than just the recognition of this condition and perhaps also an attempt to understand why it must be so. This would be the purely psychological problem, beyond which there begins again the kind of interpretation which we designate as knowledge in the broadest sense of the word. This knowledge, however, is not an interpretative understanding, but an immediate experiencing, therefore a form of the creative, perhaps the highest form of which man is capable, certainly the most dangerous form, because it can finally lead to pain, if it opposes itself to Uving inhibitingly, instead of confirming it pleasurably.

We shall treat in the following chapters this contrast between knowing and experiencing which colminates finally in the problem of "truth or reality in order to recognize in the opposition of most longed for psychic states of happiness and salvation, the double role of consciousness or of conscious knowing, as the source of all pleasure but also of all suffering.

Here I should like to go further by way of introduction as far as the location of the problem itself is concerned, and estimate the value of knowledge for the understanding of our own soul life .

We sought before for a way out from the contradictory interpretative compulsion, in which will excites consciousness and consciousness excites will.

It is that kind of knowledge which one can best designate_as philosophic because at least its tendency is directed notuponthis of that content but upon the exlslence of the phenomena themselves. The philosopher creates, as little as the artist or the religious believer, merely from his own personality. What manifests itself in all of them, although in different form, is at once something supra-individual, natural, cosmic, which accordingly and to this extent also has value some how for all humanity. At all events here we run against the problem of form, which is just the essential thing psychologically. But in the creative individual, in genius, there is manifested, becomes more or less conscious, not only a bit of the primal, but just as much the individual, the personal. How far and to what extent the knowledge is universally valid depends entirely on the relation of these two elements in this mixture and their effect on each other. At all events, the individual is liable to the danger, or at least the attempt, of again interpreting the universal which becomes conscious of itself in him in terms of his individual personal development, that is, speaking psychologically, of representing it as an expression of his will and not of a supra-individual force (compulsion). This is the psychology of the world view which in contrast to theory building, as we have previously characterized it, as flight from the interpretative doubt, represents an immediate creative experience not only of the individual himself, but of the cosmos manifested in him.

Again here, on the highest peak of the human elevation of conscipusne and its creative expression, we run upon the same basic conflict of will and compulsion which goes through the whole development of man and the process of bocoming -conscious. In the creative individual this conflict is manifest only at times, and we can best describe it thus, that nature becomes lan who at the same time with the inereasing knowledge of himself which we designate as individualization tries always to free himself further from the primitive.

It has to do. threfore. with a conflictual separation of the individual from the mass, undertaken and continued at every step of development into the new, and this I should like to designate as the never completed birth of individuality.

For the whole consequence of evolution from blind impulse through conscious will to self conscious knowledge, seems still somehow to correspond to a cotniued resuit of births, rebirths and new births, which reach from the birth of the child from the mother, beyond the birth of the individual from the mass, to the birth of the creative work from the individual and finally to the birth of knowledge from the work. In this sense, the contrast of will and consciousness as we have recognized it as the psychological problem par excellence, somehow corresponds to the biological contrast of procreation and birth. At all events we find in all these phenomena, even at the highest spiritual peak, the struggle and pain of birth, the separation out of the universal, with the pleasure and bliss of procreation, the creation of an own individual cosmos, whether it be now physically our own child, creatively our own work or spiritually our own self. At bottom it is and remains our own act of will, which we oppose to the outer force of reality as the inner pressure after truth.