اولین سایت نشانه شناسی شوهر آهو خانم

تفسیر دون ژوان اثر اتو رنک

بخش‌های مقدماتی و بخش یک

THE DON JUAN LEGEND
by Otto Rank

Translated and Edited, with an Introduction by
DAVID G. WINTER

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY

COPYRIGHT © 1975 BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PUBLISHED BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS,
PRINCETON AND LONDON

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

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PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE vii
LIST OF VERSIONS OF DIE DON JUAN-GESTALT X3
INTRODUCTION 16
THE LIFE AND WORK OF OTTO RANK 25
RANK'S INTERPRETATION OF THE DON JUAN LEGEND.
CHANGES IN RANK'S INTERPRETATION OF DON JUAN
THE DON JUAN LEGEND
CHAPTER I. PSYCHOANALYTIC INTERPRETATION OF THE DON JUAN LEGEND 37
CHAPTER 2 . DON JUAN AND LEPORELLO 45
CHAPTER 3. LEPORELLO AS EXSO IDEAL 49
CHAPTER 4. ELABORATION OF THE EGO IDEAL 53
CHAPTER 5. THE FIGURE OF AVENGING DEATH 61
CHAPTER 6. THE PRIIVIAL FATHER AND AVENGING DEATH 78
CHAPTER 7. THE DON JUAN LEGEND AS HEROIC DISTORTION 87
CHAPTER 8. WOMEN IN THE DON JUAN LEGEND 97
CHAPTER 9. THE LEGEND OVER TIME 103
CHAPTER 10. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE POET 120
BIBLIOGRAPHY 127
INDEX 137

PREFACE

OTTO RANK is today a curious and contradictory figure in the history of psychology. Acknowledged at one time as one of the most important figures in the psychoanalytic movement and the heir apparent to Freud himself, he is now not even a familiar name to the average graduate student in psychology. His early work on myth and legend displayed a brilliance of interpretation and depth of erudition that were widely acclaimed; yet many of these works are now preserved only in aging and untranslated books. His later theories of art and the artist have had some influence on theories of art; and his ideas and practices concerning psychotherapy had some influence on therapy and on different schools of the movement that is nowadays known as "humanistic psychology," though from citations and acknowledgments it is difficult to establish the precise extent of such influence.
The reason for this contradiction is of course Rank's separation from psychoanalysis and Freud during the middle years of his life. Whatever may be one's view of the reasons for this separation—and a definitive assessment would surely have to wait upon a complete biography of Rank—it remains clear that the separation was the turning point in his life and work. My purpose in translating this book is, therefore, twofold: first, to make one of Rank's heretofore neglected interpretations of an important literary theme available to the present day English-speaking scholar; and second, to suggest that Rank's interpretation of the Don Juan legend, as well as the progressive changes that he made in different versions of that interpretation, may reveal some of the personal issues that were at stake in his separation from Freud, as well as in his life and work as a whole.

I first discovered Rank's book on the Don Juan legend while teaching a course at Wesleyan University on the psychological aspects of the Don Juan myth. Fragments of the present book were available in anthologies, or were cited by literary scholars; but when I read the complete original German version, I realized that these fragments and references were misleading in that they were drawn mainly from the first four chapters of the book. Shortly thereafter, I studied the Don Juan legend further in the course of working out a theory of the origins of the power motive.1 Again, the complete text of Rank's interpretation was most valuable, as it seemed to coincide at many points with my own empirical results and ideas. Since Rank's full interpretation is not readily available even in German, I thought that an English translation would be useful. At the same time, elucidation of the connection between Rank's interpretation of Don Juan and the themes of his life might prove helpful for our understanding of Rank and his separation from Freud. Hence the rather extended biographical and analytic introduction.

Because I am interested primarily in the psychoanalytic version of Rank's work, I have used the 1924 book edition of Die Don Juan-Gestalt as the basis for this translation. In text footnotes and in the introduction I discuss earlier and later alterations, both major changes and minor variations. To the text I have added footnotes in brackets to suggest Rank's sources and to discuss some of the more esoteric mythic and literary examples that he used. Throughout I have used the American Psychological Association convention with respect to bibliographic citations. Apart from these changes, the chapter titles and some minor corrections of Rank's own quotations, anything in the text that is my own addition, and hence responsibility, is enclosed in brackets. While I have tried to produce a readable English version of what Rank wrote, I have also tried to keep close to the original wording and style, especially where this seemed important as the basis of the arguments in the introduction. The reader should in any case be aware that Rank's writing does not always evidence a clear organization: even Freud remarked in 1906 that Rank did not always stay within the limits of his subject nor follow an outline clearly! (Nunberg and Federn, 1962, p. 10)

I am grateful for the contribution of Abigail Stewart, who discussed, suggested, and argued the interpretations given in the introduction and many issues concerning the translation, and who also encouraged the project. Others who were helpful include: Kenneth Lohf and the librarians at the Manuscript Collections and Archives Reading Room of the Columbia University Library, Carol Orr of Princeton University Press, and Harry Tucker, Jr. A fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation supported the initial stages of the work.

LIST OF VERSIONS OF DIE DON JUAN-GESTALT

THE ANNOTATED list which follows gives the different versions of Rank's interpretation of the Don Juan legend. In the introduction and the text itself, versions are referred to by the italicized capital letter used in this list.

A A paper given at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Association on April 26, 1922. No record of this survives, except insofar as it is identical with the manuscript of B, which is preserved in the Rank papers at the Columbia University Library.

B An article in Imago, 1922, volume 8, pages 142-96. Corrected proofs of this article are in the Rank papers. An English abstract of the article, by Louise Brink, was published in The Psychoanalytic Review, 1926, volume 13, pages 480-84. An English translation of excerpts from parts 1-4 (Chapters 1-4 of this book), by Walter Bodlander, appears in The Thea­tre of Don Juan (Mandel, 1963, pages 625-34).

C A book version of Die Don Juan-Gestalt was published by the Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag in 1924. It is virtually identical to B, except for some minor alterations and additions. It is the basis for the present translation.

D A slightly modified version of Chapters 2-4 of the present book appeared in the Almanach fiir das Jahr 1927 (Psychoanalytic almanac for 1927), published by the Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, pages 172-80. The excerpt is titled "Don Juan and Leporello."

E In his 1930 book Seelenglaube und Psychologie, Rank refers to the Don Juan legend (pages 53-62); although he cites version C, the interpretation is clearly quite different from C: it is not at all psychoanalytic, and anticipates version F.

F Rank completely rewrote the book and combined it with a major revision of his book on the double motif (Rank, 1914) in a 1932 French book titled Don Juan: Une Btude sur Ie Double. The book was written in German, translated by S. Lautman, and published by Denoel and Steele.

G A typescript, apparently of an English translation of F, exists in the Rank papers. Rank himself did not make the translation, but there is evidence that he reviewed it. There is no date, but from internal bibliographic evidence it was written at least in 1934 or later. While it may have been intended for publication, it never appeared. In the present translation, this version has been used for occasional clarification of detail and references. Some of the major differences between G (thus F) and C are discussed in the introduction.

INTRODUCTION

THE LIFE AND WORK OF OTTO RANK

OTTO RANK was one of the most brilliant and imaginative, yet surely one of the most perplexing members of the group who were drawn to Freud and who participated in the early development of psychoanalysis. Rank analyzed myth and legend with an insight and a facility that approached that of the master; his energy and resourcefulness were essential to the survival of the early psychoanalytic publishing ventures; his wide reading and knowledge of literature were more than once of assistance to Freud's own work; and he was perhaps Freud's closest continuing associate for fifteen years. Yet in the midst of his brilliant career he left the psychoanalytic movement, physically removed himself from Vienna to Paris and later New York, and in time came to disavow the principal tenets of psychoanalysis. In this later period of his life, he abandoned further analysis of myth and legend (although he continually reworked his earlier formulations), and wrote largely about the process of therapy, out of which he finally developed a world-view that is both wide-ranging and, to many readers, incompletely articulated and confusing (Rank, 1941).

Whether such a great change is interpreted as "failing mental integration," the result of a manic depressive neurosis (Jones, 1955-57, III, Chapter 2 passim), or as a prolonged struggle for growth and responsible individualization (Taft, 1958, p. 98 and passim) is a question that must await a definitive biography of Rank, and as such is beyond the scope of this introduction. Yet The Don Jzian Legend is important not only in its own right, but also because it was the last work of Rank's first period— the last analysis of a legend carried out within a psychoanalytic framework. Moreover, Rank revised the work several times; in minor but significant ways during the last years with Freud, and in a major way several years after the break. Thus it will be appropriate to give some established biographical details in order to indicate the position of this book in Rank's life and work.

When Rank was born in Vienna in April 1884,1 he had a brother, Paul, who was three years older, and a sister who later died when Rank was very young. The family were middle class, perhaps precariously so; in any case his family background was of a "distinctly lower social stratum" from that of Freud's other early associates (Jones, II, p. 181). His surname at birth was Rosenfeld; the name Rank was used first as a pen name and then made legal in 1909 (Taft, p. 4). In his autobiography, written in 1903 as a part of his early diaries,

Rank describes his father as a "quiet drinker" who nonetheless was not "quiet after drinking"; later he compares his father with the character Hjalmar Ekdal in Ibsen's The Wild Duck. That apart, references to his family in the published parts of his autobiography (in Taft) are rather laconic, giving the general impression of parental disinterest, punctuated by episodes of loud rage. Although the family were Jewish, they appear not to have carried their religion beyond the observance of one or two holy days each year.

Perhaps because of the limited family resources, as well as a family emphasis on sons' earning their own way, there was little encouragement for Rank to pursue his studies. When he was thirteen, his uncle directed him to take a workshop course as preparation for technical school. In 1933, the diarist Aiia'is Nin recorded a conversation with Rank in which he said that "At an early age he was put to work in a glass blower's factory because his mother was a widow" (Nin, 1966-67,1, p. 278). No other source mentions his father's death or its exact date; at the very least, it can be assumed that Rank's father died before Rank met Freud.

Rank's own account of his early years is both ironic and cryptic. It is clear that he was miserable, lonely, in a state of turmoil, and given to thoughts of suicide. He read widely, including the works of Stendhal, Dostoevsky, Wedekind, Ibsen, and above all Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. He wrote poetry, fragments of several novels, and an analysis of each of Wagner's operas in terms of plot, characterization, development, and symbolic meaning (Taft, pp. 39-40). During the time that he was at technical school, his brother introduced him to the theater, and thereafter he attended it regularly.

From his diaries, it is clear that Rank had been reading Freud's available works by the year 1904. During 1905, he worked out the basic form of his psychoanalytic study of the artist, which, after later discussion with Freud and further revision, was published as Der KiinstIer (Rank, 1907). In 1906, he was bothered with lung trouble. By a later account, "A friend took him to Dr. Alfred Adler. During his physical examination they talked, and . . . Rank expounded some of his opinions of Dr. Freud's work. .. . Adler was so impressed with Rank that he introduced him to Freud" (Nin, I, pp. 278-79).

From Freud's own account (1914a, p. 25), Rank first appeared with the completed draft of Der KUnstler in hand. From this impressive beginning, Rank quickly rose to a position of respect, admiration, and great usefulness within the psychoanalytic circle. In 1906 he became the secretary of the Psychological Wednesday Evenings (which became the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1908), a position that he held until 1924. From 1906 on, he presented papers and vigorously participated in the scientific meetings of the society (see Nunberg and Federn, 1962). In 1908 he presented a brief note about Schiller's correspondence, which observation found its way into Freud's revision of The Interpretation of Dreams the next year (Jones, II, pp. 46-47; the note is recorded in Freud, 1909, pp. 102-03).

Freud was clearly drawn to Rank. He urged him to finish his education in the Gymnasium and the university, probably supported him financially both in his education and in his vacation travels (Jones, II, p. 104), and at the same time dissuaded him from becoming qualified as a doctor. (Rank and Sachs were the only nonmedical members of the pre-World War I circle.) Rank, for his part, took on major responsibilities and duties for Freud. He helped to found two psychoanalytic journals, as well as the psychoanalytic publishing company (lnternationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag). Until 1924 he served as the principal editor of the journals and the press. He carried out a variety of tasks for Freud himself: recataloging his library (in 1914; see Jones, II, p. 195); correcting proofs and updating bibliographic material for later editions of The Interpretation of Dreams (see Freud's prefaces to the third and fourth editions); and helping to trace mythological material for other writings (Jones, II, p. 405). According to Jones, Rank once joked that "Freud distributed references to other analysts' writings on the same principle as the Emperor distributed decorations, according to the mood and fancy of the moment" (Ibid., p. 458). When Jones suggested the founding of a committee of six persons to regulate and safeguard the interests of psychoanalysis, Rank was an obvious choice as the person who had known Freud the longest.

Freud and Rank were also close personally. Hanns Sachs recorded that Rank was a regular weekly dinner guest at Freud's home (1944, p. 82), and that Rank regularly accompanied Freud on the walk home from meetings of the psychoanalytic society (Ibid., p. 62), as well as that only Rank could keep up with Freud on long country walks (Ibid., p. 109). In 1914, Rank took a holiday with Freud and also accompanied him to Budapest to attend the funeral of a former patient (Jones, II, p. iiP).

Summing up the period before and immediately after World War I, Jones wrote: Rank would have made an ideal private secretary, and indeed he functioned in this way to Freud in many respects. He was always willing, never complained of any burden put upon him, was a man of all work for turning himself to any task, and he was extraordinarily resourceful. He was highly intelligent and quick-witted. (II, p. 181)

Rank's intellectual powers and analytic gifts were manifest in his publications of the prewar period. In addition to Der Kiinstler, there were Der Mythus von der Geburt des Heldens (The myth of the birth of the hero), in 1909; Das Inzest-Motiv in Dichtung und Sage (The incest motif in literature and legend) in 1912; and, in collaboration with Sachs, Die Bedeutung der Psychoanalyse fiir die Geisteswissenschaften (The significance of psychoanalysis for the humanities) in 1913. Besides these major works, Rank also wrote numerous papers analyzing particular myths and legends (collected in Rank, 1919), as well as papers on psychoanalytic theory. Finally, he completed his doctorate (in German literature) in 1912 with a thesis titled Die Lohengrinsage (The Lohengrin legend) .2

All of this changed soon after the war. Jones wrote that Rank "presented two quite different personalities before and after the first world war; I never knew anyone change so much. His personal experiences during the war brought out a vigour and other manifestations of his personality we had never suspected" (II, p. 180). To understand this change, it would be important to know about Rank's war experiences in detail; unfortunately, the available information is scanty and secondhand, apart from whatever unpublished correspondence may still exist. First, Rank had apparently arranged to visit Jones in London for a personal analysis in August 1914, but the outbreak of war made this impossible.8 Freud wrote to Ferenczi in December 1914 that Rank was trying to avoid conscription, "fighting like a lion against his Fatherland" (Jones, II, p. 198). However, he was called up in June 1915, and the following January was transferred to Cracow (in Galicia, that part of Austria-Hungary that became part of Poland in 1919). He was the editor of the Krakauer Zeitung, the only German-language daily newspaper in Galicia and moreover the official journal of the armed forces for the region.4 After 1915 he was separated from Freud and Vienna, except for a few brief visits and a few days' meeting with Freud in the resort town of Tatra (in Slovakia) in the summer of 1917. Jones noted, though without any evidence or description of detail, that Rank suffered two severe attacks of depression during this period, the later attack occurring toward the end of 1917 (II, p. 217). Finally, Rank met Beata Tola Mincer—"the woman who is created for me" (quoted in Taft, p. 70)—whom he married on November 7, 1918, shortly before the Armistice and his return to Vienna.5 Rank was the first of the Vienna psychoanalytic circle to return after the war.

He quickly and energetically resumed his prewar duties. He was instrumental in founding the Verlag, which put the publication interests of the psychoanalytic movement on a secure basis. Until 1924 he was its general editor. He published a collection of his previous writings on myth and legend, as well as some further original work of this kind done during the war. He himself began to practice analysis for the first time after the war. Probably his own skill and his financial need were factors in this change; but Freud also needed someone who could take the patients that he himself could not, or did not wish to, analyze. Among this group were several Americans, some of whom invited him to New York in 1924 and subsequently formed the nucleus of a gathering that supported Rank's later ideas.

From this point several different problems slowly emerged. While it is beyond the scope of this introduction to evaluate the significance of all the relevant factors, it is appropriate to mention these problems because they occurred during the time that Rank wrote the first two versions of The Don Juan Legend. Chronologically, they are: (1) The conflict with Jones concerning the business affairs of the Verlag and the relationship between its Vienna and London branches (from about 1920); (2) Rank's book with Ferenczi, Entwicklungs-ziele der Psychoanalyse (Developmental goals of psychoanalysis), which proposed departures in technique and which disturbed Freud (Freud saw the manuscript in 1922; the book was published in 1924); (3) Freud's first operation for cancer of the palate (April 1923), with the resulting concern for his health and anxiety about his death; and (4) Rank's unexpected publication of Das Trauma der Geburt (The trauma of birth) in December 1923, which caused considerable debate, acrimony, and bitterness.

The conflict with Jones grew out of the complex relationship between the London and Vienna branches of the Verlag. The prospect of the vast English-speaking market for psychoanalytic writings convinced Freud that the London branch would, in the end, sustain not only the Vienna branch but the publications of psychoanalysis in general. At the same time, the drastic fall in the value of the Austrian currency indicated to both Jones and Rank that the most profitable course would be to print in Vienna and then ship books to London for sale, but this procedure would entail long delays in the transmittal of proofs in the race against time and the collapse of the Austrian currency. "Rank struggled heroically with the endless problems [of postwar Austria] and accomplished superhuman feats in coping with them almost single-handed," Jones wrote, while he himself had "a rather obsessive insistence on doing things in what I conceived to be the best way, with an impatience of sloppiness and a risk of provoking the sensibilities of other people concerned" (III, p. 48). The particular grounds of disagreement and misunderstanding multiplied; Rank displayed "an overbearing and hectoring tone. . . . over-ruling or ignoring. . . ." (Ibid.). The branches split apart in 1923.

The book with Ferenczi (Ferenczi and Rank, 1924) represented a slight change of emphasis in therapy: it was suggested that analysts should actively become involved in the transference of the patient, with a corresponding de-emphasis on interpretational penetration of analysis to the historic sources of the neurosis. Freud had read the manuscript and had made several suggestions; yet when the book did appear, he expressed some doubts. Other analysts, notably Jones, Abraham, and Rado, were even more disturbed. Rank himself dated his separation from the psychoanalytic movement from the publication of this book."

Rank had heard directly from Freud's doctors about the malignancy that was discovered in the course of the first operation in the spring of 1923, before Freud himself or anyone else knew. According to Jones, Freud maintained that the news "had a fateful effect on Rank, who was entirely dependent on him for a living, and that it had stimulated Rank to strike out on an independent path" (III, pp. 57-58). There is, however, no independent evidence of Rank's reactions.

The principal problem, that most often identified as the real break between Rank and Freud, was of course the publication of The Trauma of Birth in December 1923 (the publication date is 1924). First of all, the appearance of the book was a complete surprise to everyone in the Vienna group. Sachs, who counted himself a close friend of Rank, recounts his dismay:

He did not say a word about his new ideas to me until he presented me with a printed copy, although we had stayed at the same summer-resort and had seen each other daily while he was writing the book. (1944, pp. 60-61)

The actual content of the book precipitated a storm of confusion, dismay, and hostility. Because the themes of this book are relevant to some of Rank's interpretations of the Don Juan legend in the present book, they may be summarized briefly as follows: (1) The analytic situation is regularly symbolized by patients as birth, and in fact has numerous similarities to it (e.g., the couch as a symbol of the maternity bed). The ending of an analysis is a reproduction of the first separation from the mother, while resistance to ending analysis and transference express both a fixation on the mother and a hostility toward the father, who was responsible for the first separation from her. (2) Infantile anxiety, the prototype of all later anxiety, derives from fear of separation from the mother; only later is it displaced on to the father, because he prevents the return to the mother. (3) Sexuality is an attempt to overcome the trauma of birth by returning to the mother. The anxiety and ambivalence associated with birth (hence with the mother and, by association, with women in general) are reflected in a variety of perversions, as well as in both overestimation and underestimation of women. Women resolve this anxiety vicariously through reproduction; men cannot resolve it through a direct approach to the mother, because of the attendant anxiety that would thereby be aroused. This conflict is the real meaning of the Oedipus complex: men are driven to renounce the mother, and this renunciation recapitulates the primary (anaclitic) separation. (4) Psychoneuroses are regressions to the infantile wish to go back completely into the mother. (5) In terms of cultural pre-history, the renunciation of the mother postulated by Freud in Totem and Taboo actually occurs because although all of the men take sexual possession of the mother, not all of them can return into her. The "heroic lie" distorts this wish, so that only one son, the youngest, actually does so. (6) Society has gradually evolved into a patriarchy, with greater and greater exclusion of women, because of the painful memory of the birth trauma. The fear of the father which is so stressed in psychoanalytic theories of culture is in fact a displacement from the original fear of the mother. (7) The ambivalent attitude toward the mother is reflected in the development of technology, literature, religion, art, philosophy, and psychoanalytic knowledge itself.

Reaction to the book was strong. In Berlin, Abraham was hostile, while Sachs in Vienna thought the theory incomplete. Freud had discussed the theoretical ideas behind it with Rank over a year before. At the appearance of the book, Freud wrote to Ferenczi that "I don't know whether 66 or 33 percent of it is true, but in any case it is the most important progress since the discovery of psycho-analysis" (March 1924; quoted in Jones, III, p. 61). He was alarmed that the theory might dissolve his own work, but he counseled patience and investigation of the value of the theories, both to Abraham in Berlin and to the committee generally. Finally, Freud was distressed at what he perceived to be the increasing incoherence and lack of order in Rank's style.

Events moved rapidly from this point. Rank announced that the committee was dissolved in a letter circulated ten days before the International Psychoanalytic Congress at Salzburg in April 1924. He left the conference itself after the second day to travel to America, a visit that had been previously arranged on invitation from the president of the New York Psychoanalytic Society (Jones, III, p. 71). Rank spent six months in New York lecturing and analyzing patients. His initial enthusiasm waned by the summer (Taft, pp. 96-97), and he returned to Vienna in the autumn. The Freud-Rank correspondence during his absence had ranged from assurances of loyalty to clear and blunt statements of differences on both sides. After inconclusive talks with Freud, Rank made his second departure from Vienna in November. At this same time, Freud received disturbing news from Brill about statements and claims Rank had made in New York and the departures from psychoanalysis that seemingly had been evoked in Rank's American pupils (Jones, III, p. 74). Rank travelled to Paris and after a severe attack of depression (according to Jones), returned to Vienna in December. After intense conversation with Freud, he was overwhelmed, "confessed" the neurotic basis of his theories, and attempted to undo their effect by apologetically asking forgiveness from the committee (Ibid., pp. 76-77). From a very different point of view, Taft concludes a description of these events with the statement that "Anyone who has known Rank intimately could not doubt that he paid dearly for his freedom, in fear, conflict, illness, and suffering" (p. 109).

Rank travelled to America for the second time in January 1925; but he came back to Vienna at the end of February in a depressed state. Freud and Rank resumed fruitful intellectual discussion, with overtones of personal analysis; but Jones and Ferenczi continued to suggest that his ideas were obscure and unintelligible.7

Rank then left for his third visit to America, returning to Vienna before the end of 1925. In April of 1926 he left for Paris: this time it was the final departure from Vienna and the definitive break with psychoanalysis.

The events of 1922-26 in Rank's life have been discussed in some detail because they are important to a full understanding of the situation in which he wrote The Don Juan Legend and later revised it. A careful study of the several versions of this book, together with further research on the correspondence between Rank and the other committee members would, I believe, be most valuable to a biographer's understanding of Rank himself and the reasons for his break with Freud.

The rest of Rank's life is beyond the purview of this introduction, and will be discussed only briefly. He developed new techniques of therapy and a new theory of personality (see Karpf, 1953; Munroe, 1955; Progoff, 1956, Chapter 7; Maddi, 1972, pp. 55-60, 304-07); he reworked his earlier writings on art and the evolution of culture into Art and Artist (1932a) and Seelenglaube und Psychologie (Psychology and the soul, 1930). He continued yearly visits to America, where he finally settled in 1934. During his time in the United States, he was involved in giving lectures and seminars at schools of social work in New York and Philadelphia, and he practiced therapy. His later ideas had some influence on Carl Rogers, some of the existential psychologists, and some neo-Gestalt therapists (J. Jones, 1968). His emphasis on therapy as a relationship, in contrast to Freud's emphasis on exploration and analysis, has infiltrated American psychoanalytic thinking (Waelder, i960, pp. 79-80). In his last years, Rank was troubled by a variety of physical ailments (Taft, pp. 199-276 passim). He was divorced from his wife in June 1939 and remarried shortly there-after. After a brief illness, he died rather suddenly and unexpectedly in New York on October 31, 1939.

RANK'S INTERPRETATION OF THE DON JUAN LEGEND

Rank apparently had been interested in the legend of Don Juan from an early age. On January 19, 1904, at the age of nineteen, he recorded in his plans for writing a drama about "Don Juan, the man who seeks for his ideal of woman and cannot find her" (diary entry quoted in Taft, p. 21). Preserved in the Rank papers is a letter from the publisher of Heckel's Das Don Juan-Problem in der neueren Dichtung (The Don Juan problem in modern poetry) which apparently accompanied a review copy of the book. This book was the first German language critical investigation of the Don Juan theme, and was published in 1915. The publisher's letter was sent on May 16, 1916, and refers to the editor's (Rank's) request dated May 12, 1916. Apparently Rank requested this book for review during his tenure as editor of the Krakauer Zeitung. On the back of the letter, Rank had noted page references from the Heckel book under the headings of Gastmahl (banquet), Vater (father), Leporello, and the names of various authors of German versions of Don Juan. While not conclusive, this evidence strongly suggests that Rank began to work on his analysis of the legend during World War I, while he was away from Vienna.

As Rank mentions in the opening sentences of the book, he was stimulated to write the first version of his interpretation by seeing an "outstanding" performance of Mozart's Don Giovanni at the Vienna Opera on November 21, 1921. (The program from this performance is preserved in the Rank papers.) Within five months, he had completed an analysis for presentation to the Psychoanalytic Association meeting and for publication.8 The folder of his papers that is concerned with this study gives some suggestion of his energy and resourcefulness: notations penciled on the back of Verlag notepaper and cigar-box covers, annotated newspaper clippings, galley proofs of the Imago article with quotations from Rostand's play (which he acquired on April 4, 1922) appended.

The Don Juan Legend is in many respects a tour deforce of Rank's early work: erudition and familiarity with classical authors, myth, legend, and contemporary accounts of varied cultural practices; restless energy that sometimes distorts a clear line of argument in its enthusiasm; and a complete commitment to psychoanalytic modes of explanation (in the versions written before the break with Freud; the later versions show a complete renunciation of psychoanalysis). It is curious that Rank's work is the only worthwhile extended psychological interpretation of the Don Juan legend9—a legend that in terms of the number of versions is surely the most influential one in western literature, and one that, in its direct treatment of the themes of sexuality fused with punishment and damnation, symbolizes western culture since the era of imperial expansion around the year 1600.

Most interpretations of Don Juan take one of two general lines of analysis: either Don Juan is driven by some cosmic force, such as a longing for the ideal or the infinite (E.T.A. Hoffman, 1814), or the pure essence of sensuality (Kierkegaard, 1843); or else he is the apotheosis of the bored narcissist who is incapable of forming ties to others (Stendhal, 1822), or who is utterly indifferent to the consequences of his actions (Maeztu, 1938). Jung (1938) suggests that Don Juan is the result of the "mother complex," without being very lucid about why and how.

Eighteen years after writing the first version of The Don Juan Legend, Rank had occasion to compile an analysis of all of his writings. (This analysis is preserved in the Rank papers.) He recorded that this work was influenced by Freud's Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (Freud, 1921), especially Postscript B of that book, which describes the developmental sequence from the primal horde through fatherless matriarchy up to the emergence of individual psychology.10 Rank summarizes the Don Juan work as follows:

This with much of the material in the Beitrage11 (1911-1914) (written during the excitement of the war and hence not so well done) represents the Rankian view of discussions associated with Freud's Group Psychology (see Postscript B).

Rank's statement is tantalizingly imprecise about the exact meaning of "the excitement of the war;" moreover, most of the Beitrage essays were written before the war, and the Don Juan work was written three years after the war. Nevertheless, several events that did excite Rank occurred immediately before or else during the time he wrote The Don Juan Legend: his marriage, the pregnancy of his wife and the birth of his daughter, the conflicts with Jones, and his first efforts at clinical psychoanalysis, as well as the germination of the ideas in his book with Ferenczi and The Trauma of Birth.

The interpretation of the Don Juan legend advanced by Rank in this book may be briefly summarized. After a brief introductory chapter in which he outlines an "Oedipal" interpretation of Don Juan—that the many seduced women represent the one; unattainable mother, and that the many men whom he deceives, fights, and kills represent the father—Rank devotes three chapters to a discussion of the relationship between Don Juan and Leporello, his obedient but nevertheless critical servant. Leporello is proud of his master; yet he is a "cowardly, anxious, cringing soul." Rank quotes the servant's first words, which open the opera:12

I want to be a gentleman,

and I don't want to serve any more.

Toiling by day and night. . . sleeping badly. . . .

Don't count on me, master!

If I could only get away from here. . . .

Rank notes that "the tragedy of Leporello is that always he is permitted to represent his master only in the painful and critical situations"; and he quotes (with his own emphasis) Heckel's discussion of Leporello as the "negative hero" who "cannot extricate himself," an "entirely innocent scapegoat" for his master's tricks. Rank then argues that the servant is in fact identical with the master, but is split off from him as his ego ideal—just as the avenging statue is split off as a later and more powerful representative of the ego ideal. These chapters are cast in terms of Rank's interpretation of the motif of the double (see Rank, 1914), as well as earlier psychoanalytic discussion of how one personality is split into two or more different characters in a play.13 Perhaps this extended discussion of the master-servant relationship reflected some of Rank's concern about his own relationship with Freud.

Chapter 4 discusses the origin of the ego ideal in the primary narcissism that is renounced, for reasons of fear, in favor of identification with the father. Such a process actually preserves the primary narcissism in a vicarious way, since the object of cathexis has been incorporated into the ego itself. In like manner, the distortions of the deed of slaying the primal father that were made by the first poet (and, in a more general sense, by the artist) make clear that in glorifying the hero he is really glorifying himself. Then follow two chapters on the statue— the father whom Don Juan has slain, and who returns to avenge his death by summoning Don Juan to the grave and judgment. Rank traces a line of presumed cultural evolution,11 in which the belief that death is caused by the hostile wishes of a living person leads to guilt about these hostile wishes due to the fear that the dead will return to avenge their "murder." This guilty fear is the origin of numerous funeral practices, such as devouring, burning, or burying: practices designed to prevent such a return. The motif of devouring is especially prominent in these funeral practices, and this motif is preserved in the characteristic manner of Don Juan's end—Don Juan and the statue invite each other to a banquet, at which the hero himself is finally "devoured" by the grave.15

Rank then turns to a discussion of the role of women in the legend in the last part of Chapter 6 and all of Chapters 7 through 9. He argues that the hostility of women toward Don Juan in the earliest versions of the legend is derived from the primal struggle to subdue the mother, who emerged as dominant after the slaying of the primal father. She protected the hero in order to use him as the instrument of her liberation; yet on the other hand, she feels animosity toward him because he is an inadequate replacement for the slain father.16 Hence while superficially Don Juan struggles with the father, more profoundly he has foundered on the "mother complex"—a desire for the unattainable mother, rooted in the biological wish for exclusive possession of her. In the end, Don Juan fulfills this primal desire by being "swallowed" by the grave, which according to Rank is an obvious womb symbol. Rank then traces the emergence of the woman as Don Juan's principal antagonist in Mozart's Don Giovanni and in later versions, including that of Shaw and especially that of Rostand, which appeared as Rank was writing the first manuscript of The Don Juan Legend. Rostand's work is, according to Rank, the culmination of the devaluation and characterological destruction of Don Juan: the avenging women gather and "reveal to him how pitiable his imagined seduction technique had been: the women conquered him; and if he left them, it was because the unadmitted fear of having to remain with one of them drove him to it."

I think that Rank's emphasis upon the role of women in the Don Juan legend is correct. More broadly, his stress on the child's relation to the mother as antecedent to and in some respects determinative of the later "Oedipal" relationship to the father seems in many respects to be a valid and useful supplement to "patrifocal" psychoanalytic theory, although few people would accept the specific terms of this relation as described in The Trauma of Birth. Within recent years, the mother-child relation has been a major focus of interest and theory in some schools of psychoanalysis, notably Klein (see Klein and Riviere, 1937), the "attachment" theorists (Bowlby, 1969), and the "object relations" school in general (e.g., Fairbairn, 1952; Balint, 1963). Whether Rank actually influenced these later theorists is not fully clear; Guntrip acknowledged the analogy between the birth trauma and traumatic object relations, but was not favorable toward Rank's theory (1961, p. 320).

The last chapter of this book deals with the psychology of the artist—one of a series of such studies that began with Rank's first book (Rank, 1907) and ended with his post-Freudian Art and Artist (Rank, 1932a). In the present book, Rank argued that the artist deals with the major complexes of mankind in such a way as to allay the anxiety that is associated with them. This means that the nature of the artistic product will vary from time to time, according to which complexes are salient. In addition, there is a general process of development or evolution in the artistic treatment of any particular theme (i.e., complex). First is the "heroic" stage in which the original subject matter is so revised as to make unrecognizable the anxiety, or the motive stemming from the relevant complex. With time, successive elucidations of the subject matter make these original motives clear—as Mozart's opera and the later "psychological" versions of Don Juan did in the case of the true role of the woman.
The original anxiety is, thereby, reactivated, so that the elucidation requires a devaluation of the subject in order to allay the anxiety. Thus the later Don Juan versions portray the hero as aged and feeble, or give a romantic explanation of the hero's character (e.g., his search for the mother becomes the "quest for the ideal woman").

The artist himself is driven by a strong primary narcissism to create his art as a replacement for the previous ego ideal of the masses (i.e., conscience, standards). Yet the satisfaction deriving from such an accomplishment is doomed to failure for two reasons. First, if the artist's work becomes popular, then it also thereby becomes the ego ideal of the masses, so that the artist has done nothing new. Second, his replacement of the ego ideal is actually a repetition of the primal act of slaying the father (i.e., the received ego ideal) in a psychological sense. At this point, the artist is driven to devalue his own prior work, or his previous ego ideal formations. According to Rank, such a process can always be detected both in the evolution of art itself, and in the work of any individual artist or poet rWhen that work falls into distinct periods: the latter period is always a devaluation of the former one.

CHANGES IN RANK'S INTERPRETATION OF DON JUAN

In successive versions of The Don Juan Figure, Rank made the greatest changes from version C (1924) to versions F and G (1932 and after); but a careful reading of the manuscript, corrected proofs, and final version of B and C is also of interest.

At the beginning of the manuscript of B, Rank wrote that "after some hesitation I have decided to write down some observations . . ." on seeing the Mozart opera. In correcting the proofs (June 1922) he removed the reference to "hesitation" and switched the "I" to "we." In the second paragraph, a complex and tortured sentence that was several times revised in the actual manuscript shows evidence of uncertainty and ambivalence:17 If one is disposed to approach the Mozart opera with a psychoanalytic point of view—a disposition which happened to suggest itself to the author through work with certain circles of thought. . . .

Rank seems to mean simply that inasmuch as he is a psychoanalyst, he will write a psychoanalytic interpretation; but what finally emerged displays both some uncertainty and a curiously passive mood. In the manuscript of B, after considerable rewriting about Freud, Rank noted that the transformation of faithfulness to the one mother into manifest treachery toward women, as in Don Juan, involves the operation of several defense mechanisms that are activated by guilt. In the proofs of Β, however, he added the portentious advice that "when psychoanalysis is applied to an extra-analytic theme it can only serve as the starting point for advancing our under standing, rather than as a result that is known in advance and only has to be confirmed."18 Rank apparently introduced this sentence between April and June 1922, during the time that his clinical paper on "potency" (Rank, 1923) was probably being discussed with Freud and others (see Taft, pp. 75-76). Finally, Rank deleted from the proofs of B a final sentence in the penultimate paragraph of Chapter 1, a sentence advocating the "patient concentration" on analyzing defenses in order to "make understandable . . . the resistance of such intensive affect arising from a sense of guilt." This sentence was removed in 1922 during the time he was writing the first version of the monograph on technique (Ferenczi and Rank, 1924), and may reflect the themes of that monograph.

The book then turns to the master-servant relationship between Don Juan and Leporeilo. As noted in Chapter 4 of the translation (note 5), Rank originally included a reference to the "coarse jokes" of Don Juan's servant in the German puppet plays, in the context of a discussion of those versions in which Don Juan actually slays his own father. In the final version of B, this specific reference is removed to Chapter 9, in the general context of the devaluation of the hero through the power of women, and the specific context of those versions which emphasize both the enfeeblement of Don Juan (the "master") and his nature as "a criminal absolutely unrestrained by any thoughts of conscience, who would fashion an eating utensil out of the bones of those who perished through his fault." Perhaps this change reflects, through displacement and rationalization, the evolution of Rank's feelings about Freud.

The final changes that Rank made in 1922 involve the role of women. In the manuscript of B, Rank noted that Don Juan is no darling of women in the original versions, but rather that he "does not shrink from disguise and false promises of marriage." In B itself, this is changed into "shrinks from no weapon and therefore he actually struggles against the women as he does against the men." During this period (April-June 1922) Rank thus focussed on the theme of men's ambivalence toward women as an element of a struggle that is primary, and not to be derived solely from a phallic preoccupation with serial seduction. The theme was to receive fuller treatment in The Trauma of Birth, but the changes made in the present book enable us to date this altered focus more precisely—in fact, at just the time of Freud's criticism of Rank's clinical papers and the book with Ferenczi. Rank further altered his views at this time about the reasons for the ascendancy of women to positions of power. Originally, he simply quoted Freud's interpretation that the women had power because of the mutual opposition of the brothers (Freud, 1913, p. 144, and 1921, p. 135). However, in the final version of B, he referred to this as "Freud's hypothesis."

Rank introduced greater changes in version C, which appeared about two years after B and subsequent to the publication of The Trauma of Birth. In the second paragraph of the opening chapter, where he articulates his relationship to psychoanalysis, reference to "the psychoanalytic point of view" became reference to "a psychoanalytic point of view." At the same time, there is further elaboration of the master-servant relationship. Footnote 2 of Chapter 2 about Leporello's dissatisfaction at the beginning of the opera is now embellished with three actual quotations from the libretto, concluding with "If I could only get away from here. . . ." The hero justifies his behavior with Leporello's wife with the observation that "I have only got even for what you did to me."19 In B, Rank called this a "secret motive," but in C he called it a "deep motive of revenge, and clearly illuminating the interchangeability of master and servant." In version G, Rank further described this passage as Don Juan's "abuse" of Leporello. The analytically oriented reader may discern in these subtle changes further evidence of Rank's attitude toward Freud.

The interpretation of the role of women along the lines of the birth trauma theory is further emphasized in C. After the discussion of women in early myths and the hypothetical reconstruction of woman's role in prehistory, Rank concluded Chapter 7 in version B with the following cautious words:

But in this free reconstruction of the prehistorical fate of woman our fantasy has perhaps prevailed on too uncertain a foundation. Thus we turn to what the authoritative Don Juan poems have to say about the role of the woman.

CHANGES IN RANK'S INTERPRETATION

In C this is replaced by two paragraphs which confidently suggest that the real Don Juan fantasy of conquering countless women is to be traced back to the infantile tendency to regress to fusion with the mother, which can only be partly achieved because of her ultimate unattainability. Rank further held that the death of the hero is itself a fuller satisfaction of the primal tendency toward fusion with the mother—a marked departure from his previous interpretation whereby the hero's end was due to guilt feelings and a consequent tendency toward punishment—a tendency that arose from the ego ideal, and is personified in the father figure of the statue. (This earlier interpretation is also preserved in C.) "In the figure of the Stone Guest, who also represents the coffin, the mother herself appears, coming to fetch the son." Rank then added a new final paragraph introducing the study of the role of women in the Don Juan versions in order to show that the new interpretation "is not just in the service of a predetermined opinion or psychoanalytic theory." In introducing the early twentieth-century Don Juan versions of Friedmann, Bernhardt, and Rostand, in which the ghosts of Don Juan's female victims return to torment him, Rank changed his description of the motif from "perhaps sentimental" to "perhaps original, but in any case altered in a sentimental direction." The issue is the analytic stance toward the "feminization of conscience" and the appearance of the powerful woman. On the one hand, Rank argued that they are merely a displacement from the band of avenging brothers; yet on the other hand, his matrifocal theory of individual development and cultural evolution here conflicts with that orthodox interpretation (as well as with most of version C as a whole)—for now the powerful women are taken as the original meaning, the original situation, and the original motive of the legend.

Finally, Rank sharpened the contrast between artistic creation and the psychoanalytic process in the introduction to the final chapter on the social function of art and the nature of the artist. In the course of the evolution of the presentation of any particular theme, the original motive becomes elucidated, though in a devalued way.
The articulation of this unconscious motive then reaches a limit. In B, Rank wrote that "beyond this limit is the domain of psychoanalysis, which through intellectual means is able to lead back to the original value [of the motive], and no longer devalues it on affective grounds."
In C, the function of psychoanalysis is described in much more mixed terms: it "is able to judge and criticize on an intellectual basis rather than devaluing on affective grounds." Thus by 1924 Rank had begun to develop his later view that the work of psychoanalysis was by no means an unmixed blessing, especially to the creative artist (see Rank, 1930 and 1932a).

Version F contains much of the illustrative detail of the prior versions, but in a wholly different context of theory and interpretation. In fact, it is a completely different book. Since a complete discussion of this work would involve considerable elucidation of Rank's later views on personality and cultural evolution, I shall indicate only the main lines of departure from the earlier versions, using the manuscript G (presumably a draft for an English translation) as indicating Rank's final views on the Don Juan legend.

In version G Rank completely abandoned any attempt to explain Don Juan in terms of psychoanalytic concepts or mechanisms, including the quasi-analytic notions of birth trauma theory such as the "mother complex." In fact he argued that it was impossible to understand the Mozart opera purely from the standpoint of individual psychology: the legend represents a "revolutionary change which cannot be genetically traced from the individual complexes, but can only be made intelligible through the understanding of the historical development of folk-tradition."

Don Juan is now taken to represent the struggle between materialism and spiritual forces; in individual terms, between the ordinary self and the immortal soul.
Don Juan is condemned because he doubts the grace of God—he "has only reckoned with earthly values, and not with the spiritual force whose vengeance overtakes him" in the statue of the Commander. These spiritual forces are derived from Christian transformations of universal themes: the eternal longing for immortality becomes, in Christian thought, the belief in the immortality of the spirit and thus the rejection or devaluation of the purely mortal and material world. Don Juan is thus identified with the Christian devil as the incarnation of concern with purely material, instinctual values. As such, he acts out of a fear of losing his mortal soul through marriage and children; hence he is antagonistic toward women. In fact he personifies the ancient rite of the jus primaenoctis, by which powerful superior beings were thought to impregnate women in order to protect the soul of the husband from the jeopardy that would otherwise befall it through the process of reproduction. In Christian terms, this belief in the mortal self and the practices associated with it have become stigmatized as sexual libertarianism, so that Don Juan is punished and dies for his "violation of the Church's belief in the soul." Such a brief summary does not do full justice to this complex and rather confusing revision of an already complex book; but I hope that it makes clear how far Rank's final interpretation of the Don Juan legend departed from his earlier writings on the subject. Since the purpose of this translation is to bring before the English reader a psychoanalytic account of the most popular legend in western literature, I feel that the present brief account of versions F and G is sufficient. The reader who wishes to pursue Rank's later ideas in relation to the Don Juan legend is directed to his Psychology and the Soul (Rank, 1930).

Rank apparently omitted the entire last chapter from versions F and G. In one sense, they were irrelevant to these later works, for they involved a psychoanalytic outline of the personality of the artist and the function of art, in the tradition of his first publication (Rank, 1907). By 1932, Rank had come to repudiate the very worth of such an enterprise, for he felt that art and artist, as well as morale and culture itself, were threatened by the forces of rational materialism and analysis:

This process of increasing extension of consciousness in humanity, which psycho-analysis has fostered so enormously in the last decades—but not entirely to the advantage of mankind as a whole—was prophesied by me in my Kiinstler in 1905 (at the time of my first acquaintance with Freud) as likely to be the beginning of a decay of art. . . . And although the Oedipus complex, and the sexual problem of the child that is bound up with it, still forms the centre [of the psychoanalytic interpretation of art], this is rather the sign of a fatal stoppage than a proof of the superlative importance of this family problem. (Rank, 1932a, pp. 375, 63; see also Rank, 1941)

In the final G version, Rank devalued his previous interpretation of Don Juan ("such an [psychoanalytic] inter-pretation . . . is inadequate when it treats of a popular literary motif"); he turned away from his previous work on art and artist; and he repudiated the connection with Freud and psychoanalytic theory.

Most striking is Rank's changed treatment of the effect of the father's death on the creations of the artist.
He concluded the present book with the observation that Mozart's father died as Mozart began the music for Don Giovanni, and his best friend died during the course of the work. The death of the father should, Rank suggested, arouse "deeply ambivalent stirrings" of guilt, which are fused with unchecked sensuality "through the suppleness and immediacy of musical expression . . . the hero's conflict of conscience . . . and the passionate rhythm of an unbroken conquering nature." In version G, Rank deleted the discussion of the two emotions in conflict and fusion and withdrew all psychoanalytic interpretation of the father's death. Finally, he placed this passage at the very beginning of the book, in the context of an interpretation of the impetus for Mozart's frenzied creation of Don Giovanni as "solace for his oppressed soul," adding as an opening challenge that "it is impossible to comprehend this work of art purely from the standpoint of individual psychology."

A passing reference to the same episode in Mozart's life in Art and Artist suggests the final resolution, for Rank, of the problem of the artist as the primal hero, driven by conscience and guilt:

[The egoistical artist-type] needs, as it were, for each work that he builds, a sacrifice which is buried alive to ensure a permanent existence to the structure. . . . The frequent occasions when a great work of art has been created in the reaction following upon the death of a close relation seem to me to realize those favorable cases for this type of artist in which he can dispense with the killing of the building's victim because that victim has died a natural death and has subsequently, to all appearances, had a monument piously erected to him (Rank, 1932a, p. 49).

T H E D O N J U A N L E G E N D
DON JUAN
The oiily hero whom mankind admires!
Why, read their books, observe their plays, and find
Abundant proof! Mark with what lustful eyes
Virtue detests me! What do pond'rous louts
Expect from power, save a little while to be
What I am always? Mark the zeal,
The envious zeal, with which professors nose Into my life? Who does not secretly
Admire the kiss I dared and he dared not,
Because of cowardice or ugliness?
I make them homesick, all of them! There is
No deed—despite thy serpent's hiss—no faith,
No knowledge, and no virtue, save it springs
From grief at being other than myself!

THE DEVIL
What can you keep?
DON JUAN
What Alexander's dust
Has kept, the joy of knowing that it was
Almighty Alexander! Only, I
Am all my army, and 'tis I myself
That have possessed!
THE DEVIL
You have possessed? It is
A victor's word, but, dear immoralist,
Pray, what have you possessed?
DON JUAN
Ho, Sganarello!
(Enter Sganarello.)
My list!
Edmond Rostand, La derniere nuit de Don Juan
(first part)*
* The Last Night of Don Juan. English translation adapted from that of T. L. Riggs, published by Kahoe and Company, Yellow Springs, Ohio, 1929.

CHAPTER 1
PSYCHOANALYTIC INTERPRETATION OF THE DON JUAN LEGEND
THE IMMORTAL name of the Spanish love hero, with its magical sound, instinctively evokes a series of erotic images and anticipations that appear indissolubly bound up with it. We have decided to write down under this title certain reflections and thoughts which were stimulated by an outstanding performance of Mozart's masterpiece [Don Giovanni] at the Vienna Opera (November 13, 1921). Yet it must be said in advance that we shall discuss only a few of the generally fascinating aspects of the Don Juan figure. We shall say even less of Mozart, who had perhaps an even greater share in the immortality of his hero (as seems obvious to us from the fact that this musical version of the material, which is so popular with poets, remains the only one of enduring and profound effect).1
If one is straightaway disposed to approach the Mozart opera from a psychoanalytic point of view—a disposition which happened to suggest itself to the author through work with certain circles of thought—then to some extent one excludes from consideration the conscious goals of the erotic hero. Thus one notes readily (though not without surprise) that the action portrays anything but a successful sexual adventurer; on the contrary, it presents a poor sinner pursued by misfortunes, who finally arrives at the destiny of the Christian hell that is appropriate to his era and background. Imagining the happy, gratifying time of the real Don Juan is left to the fantasy of the audience—who appear only too happy to make use of this privilege2—while the stage is given over to presentation of the tragic features of the moral law. Therefore, in submitting this obviously painful aspect of Don Juan to psychoanalytic scrutiny, we are merely following the path indicated by tradition and poetry.

Thus our interest is first directed away from the finished form [of the legend] toward its development; yet even a quick glance at the numerous incarnations of Don Juan3 shows us that we can find no clarification there.
For the type immortalized by Mozart enters into literature fully developed,4 while the easy conqueror of women, so familiar to popular consciousness through its traditions, has in fact never existed. Consequently we can conclude that the essence of the Don Juan material is more profound than the frivolous breaking of hearts; rather, that from the beginning the legend and drama must have sought and found something else. The typical erotic love hero, even in such a grand manner, probably could be represented more easily and perhaps better by another figure.5 On the other hand, the Christian spectacle of hell, so laden with all the guilt feelings of original sin, also would seem to us as strange as the surviving medieval religious morality plays, if great men and artists had not rescued them in the way that Goethe created Faust out of the spiritual puppet play of the sorcerer, or in the manner in which Shakespeare created Hamlet out of the earlier ghost dramas. They have recovered the universal human content, stripping away all kinds of overgrown accretions and expressing it in eternal symbols.

The tradition clearly shows that the description of unbounded sexuality was not the principal motif of the Don Juan material. Nor do we need to consider the plain historical evidence that a real Don Juan figure never existed® in order to confirm our assumption that the unchecked, conquering nature of the hero is really a poetic fantasy construction; for this view is fully confirmed by the results of research in literary history. From the leg­endary traditions, the author of the Burlador took only the theme of the dead man, who was mocked, getting revenge on the arrogant blasphemer (i.e., the Burlador) .7

It was left to the author of the Burlador to make the offender a seducer of rWomen in the grand manner; and to that extent he deserves the credit for making of his hero the first recognizable Don Juan. . . . The Burlador already laid the essential foundations; 150 years later would be erected on them the splendid structure in which the Don Juan material finds its most gifted formulation—Mozart's Don Giovanni. (Heckel, 1915, pp. 7-8 [Rank's emphasis])

Again in agreement with our view, we also see that the literary development of the Don Juan material prior to Mozart does not elaborate the seduction motif that is so attractive and poetic to the popular consciousness.

Rather, as though under a mysterious force, it elaborates the ancient, painful-tragic motif of guilt and punishment. In a superficial way this is already indicated by the double title of the first play by Tirso de Molina: El Burlador de Sevilla y Convidado de Fiedra [The trickster of Seville and the stone guest], for the second part of the title—"The Stone Guest" [or "Stone Banquet"]—is the title of most Don Juan plays until the middle of the eighteenth century; while the imposing name of the hero does not appear at all in the title.8 Thus by keeping to the tradition that the motif of guilt and punishment is more meaningful than that of sexuality, we have narrowed down the problem of investigation.

On the basis of psychoanalytic theory, we are prepared to derive such forces of overwhelming guilt and punishment—connected with strongly sexual fantasies— from the Oedipus complex. Clearly the endless series [of seduced women] along with the "injured third party"® characteristics of the Don Juan type appear to confirm this analytical interpretation: that the many women whom he must always replace anew represent to him the one irreplaceable mother; and that the rivals and adversaries whom he deceives, defrauds, struggles against, and finally even kills represent the one unconquerable mortal enemy, the father. This psychologically elemental fact has been discovered through the analysis of individuals; yet when psychoanalysis is applied to an extra-analytic theme it can only serve as the starting point for advancing our understanding, rather than as a result that is known in advance and only has to be confirmed.10 For the trans­formation of this type, who in his unconscious remains true to the inviolable mother,11 into the treacherous, cynical person who despises women presumes the opera­tion of repression, displacement, and transvaluation.12 By tracing the paths and mechanisms of these processes, we have often learned our most important and interesting lessons.

After these limitations and justifications, we return to the Mozart opera as the point of departure. Two problems chiefly attract our attention: the first involves the topic of artistic form, and the second involves some analysis of content. Although these two problems differ basically in character, psychologically they are closely connected with each other and with the essence of the Don Juan material. In the end the problem of the material refers to the affect connected with guilt and punishment, and the problem of form involves the process of fantasy construction and the social function of art.

NOTES

1 See Winter (1973, Chapter 6): "The Don Juan Figure as an Archetype of the Power Motive."
_____________________'
1This account is drawn largely from Taft (1958, Chapters 1 and 2; Rank's 1903 autobiography is excerpted in Chapter 1), Jones (i955-j7t II and III), and Nin (1966-67). Page references will be given only for points of special interest.

2 Curiously enough, in a 1930 summary and analysis of his writings, written well after the break with Freud, Rank still re­ferred to this thesis as "probably the first one on psychoanalysis" at the University of Vienna. 8Jones (11, pp. 119, 181). Jones notes that apart from himself and Ferenczi, it was not the custom at this time for psychoana­lysts to be themselves analyzed (II, pp. 182-83).

4 In contrast, most of the other (medical) psychoanalysts were involved in medical work, often involving combat-related neuropsychiatric cases.
5 Beata Rank became a child analyst and contributed nu­merous papers to the psychoanalytic journals (e.g., B. Rank, 1924).

6 "This [book] was my first parting, not from Freud, but from his whole ideology, which is erected on the fundamental importance of intellectual understanding as a curative factor." From Rank's remarks to the First International Congress on Mental Hygiene, Washington, D.C., May 8, 1930; quoted in Taft (p. 150).

7 Undoubtedly the death of his older brother Paul after the war also had an effect on Rank. Paul had been involved in managing the Vienna Association and the journals. Unfortunate­ly, there is some uncertainty about the date of Paul's death. Jones said that it was in early 1925: (III, p. 77), while Taft gives January 1921 as the date (p. 73).
The criticism of Jones and Ferenczi referred to a paper Rank presented at the 1925 Psychoanalytic Congress, published as Rank (1926). Jones, III, p. 79; but see Taft, p. 117 for a contra­dictory evaluation.

8 The galley proofs for version B were sent to Rank in late May 1922

9 Other psychological studies of the Don Juan theme include Maranon (1940), Worthington (1962), Pratt (i960), and Win­ter (1973, Chapter 6). Weinstein (1959) mentions some minor interpretations. Reik (1945) and Fenichel (1945), among the psychoanalysts, refer in passing to Don Juan. Curiously, I have not been able to find any reference to the legend in any of Freud's works, although Freud was very fond of Mozart's Don Giovanni (Schur, 1972, p. 103).

10 Freud, for his part, noted at the beginning of Postscript B that "What follows at this point was written under the influ­ence of an exchange of ideas with Otto Rank," adding a specific footnote to Rank's Imago paper (version B) in the 1923 second edition (Freud, 1921, p. 135).

11 Psychoanalytische Beitrage zur Mythenforschung; gesammelte Studien aus den Jahren 1912 bis 1914 (Rank, 1919).

12 Quotations are translated from the German version of Da Ponte's libretto; see note j of Chapter 2.

13 The psychological significance of this dramatic device is further discussed in Fairbairn (1952, pp. 8-9).

14 Chapters 5 and 6 are closely related to Freud's Totem and Taboo (1913), and, like that earlier work, uses the conceptions of nineteenth-century evolutionary anthropology, in which "primitive" cultures are thought to preserve vestiges of earlier periods of belief and social organization which "modern" cul­tures passed through in prehistoric times. Nevertheless, Kroeber's sympathetic «interpretation of Freud's anthropology (Kroeber, 1939) can also be applied to Rank.

15 Austen (1939) also discussed the similarity between various aspects of the Don Juan legend (particularly the end of the hero) and a variety of cultural practices; while his work is not as wide-ranging as Rank's, it does give more attention to the specifically Spanish beliefs and practices which presumably were part of the cultural heritage of the author of the first Don Juan play in Spain at the beginning of the seventeenth century.

16 In this connection, see Rank's analysis of the legend of the faithless widow (Rank, 1913).

17 "1st man gerade in der Srimmung—wie sie zufallig dem Verfasser durch die Beschaftigung mit gewissen Gedankenkrei-sen nahe lag—. . . ." Rank's status as a nonmedical analyst, new to actual clinical practice, was at that time rather unclear.

18 Compare the following passage in Ferenczi and Rank (1924, p. 32), which was written during the summer of 1922 and later revised: "The connected recounting of complexes, or the attri­butes of these, may have its place in descriptive psychology, but not in the practical analysis of the neurotic, nor does it even belong in the psycho-analytic study of literary, or ethno-psychological products where it must undoubtedly lead to a monotony in no way justified by the many sidedness of the material. . . ."

19 As noted in note j of Chapter 2, this analysis is based on a line that appears only in the German translation of Da Ponte's libretto and not in the Italian original, but the point is irrelevant for present purposes.
________________
1 [Rank's judgment of Mozart's opera is shared by most literary scholars (e.g. Mandel, 1963, p. 21). Certainly Don Giovanni was the most popular and familiar version of the Don Juan leg­end during the nineteenth century. Yet Shaw and more recent writers argue that the original Spanish play by Tirso de Molina (see below, note 7) is an enduring and brilliant work in its own right. Probably this play was not available in a good German translation in Rank's time.]

2 [The manuscript of B adds here: "—yes, and apparently even to abuse it, while at the same time they will not let the tragic hero enter into their thoughts," in place of the rest of the sentence.]

3 [In the manuscript of B, Rank first wrote and then crossed out: "although (in number) they almost approach the love ob­jects of the hero."]

4 "The oldest Don Juan version in world literature is the Spanish comedy that appeared before 1620 in two slightlydiiferent versions: El Burlador de Sevilla and ^Tan Largo Me Lo Fiats?" (Heckel, 1 9 1 5 ) .

5 See Schmitz (1913).

6 "The opinion that has been firmly held for centuries, that Don Juan Tenorio (chamberlain of the Castillian king Pedro the Cruel) was the model for the Burlador, is recognized as an error through the research of Farinelli [1896] and others. . . . It can be taken as certain that the author of the Burlador chose the name of a recognized personality for his hero, without there being any connection between this person and the events on the stage" (Heckel, 1915, p. 6). [See Wade (1969, pp. 27-40) for more recent evidence about this assertion, which is certainly disputable.]

7 [The Spanish word "burlador" means literally "trickster," but with the strong connotation of "seducer" or "sadistic jokester" (see Wade, 1969, pp. 46-47). For studies of these earlier legends, see Austen (1939), MacKay (1943), Weinstein (1959), and Wade (1969). The conclusion of recent scholarship is that Tirso de Molina, generally acknowledged as the author of El Burlador de Sevilla, was the first to combine in a single character or theme the prior legends of (1) the easy seducer of a series of women, and (2) vengeance meted out by a dead man who had been mocked by the seducer.]

8 See the summary of poetic versions of the Don Juan material at the end of Heckel (1915) [and also the fuller and more re­cent lists by Weinstein (1959) and Singer (1965)].

9 See Freud's fundamental essay, "A special type of choice of object made by men" (Freud, 1910b).

10 It appears to me that Leo Kaplan's essay on the Don Juan legend (1921) is of this type. Only at the conclusion does it manifest an approach to one of the real problems.

11 One version of the tradition about the model for the Don Juan figure, that of Don Miguel de Manara (born 1626 in Seville), has developed this trait of faithfulness into pathology, so that the story almost seems to be the male counterpart of the legend of the faithless widow. [See Rank ( 1913b) on this legend and its psychoanalytic interpretation.] At the age of thirty, Mafiara married Girolina Carillo de Mendoza. He loved his wife more than life itself, and when she died, he nearly lost his mind. Tormented by unrestrained grief, he fled with the body of his beloved to the mountains. After he had assuaged his sorrow somewhat, he finally sought consolation and peace in a monastery. However, when he came to Seville once again, the old wounds reappeared and made him the victim of tragic delusions. Often it seemed to him as though he were present at his own funeral. If he went out into the street, there suddenly appeared before his eyes a woman who, in an illusion, resembled the dead Girolina both in figure and manner. This woman would quickly withdraw from the encounter; if she turned around toward her pursuer, she would stare at him out of the empty eye sockets of a skull. In order to free himself from this terrible delusion, and to atone for the past sins of his worldly sensuality, Don Miguel devoted himself with glowing fervor to religious devotions and difficult penances. He made lavish donations to the church, and humbled himself to the role of a servant of the poor and the wretched—to being the person who washes corpses. Henceforth he spent his days among the corpses of convicted criminals, which he washed and anointed with loving hands. Later, when he approached death, he set down his last wishes in the following testament: I command and direct that immediately after my death, my body be stretched out on a cross of ashes, as the stat-tes of our order [of Calatrava] command; barefoot and wrapped in the shroud of my cloak, with a cross at the hood, two candles, and my head uncovered. In this way should my corpse be carried into the church of Santa Caridad: in a humble bier, led by twelve priests and no more, without pomp or music. It should be buried in the cemetery of this church, outside the gate, so that everyone steps and tramples on me. Thus shall my foul body, which is not worthy to rest in the Temple of God, be buried. And it is my will that a stone measuring two feet [three-quarters of a vara] square be placed on top of my grave, inscribed with these words: HERE LIE THE BONES AND ASHES OF THE WORST MAN WHO EVER LIVED IN THE WORLD. PRAY TO GOD FOR HIM. [Rank's footnote on Mafiara was added in version C. It is perhaps based on an article, "Das Urbild des Don Juan—Neue Forschungen" in the Neues Wiener Journal, February 13, 1923. A fragment of the article is preserved in the Rank papers. I have translated the testament from the original Spanish, as cited in Granero (1961, p. 604). Since Don Miguel de Manara was born after Tirso de Molina wrote the Burlador, he clearly could not have been the model for Don Juan; nevertheless, scholars have often commented on similar elements in the two stories, and Merimee (1834) explicitly mixed the Manara and Don Juan legends. See Weinstein (1959, pp. 104-118) for a full discussion.]

12 [The German Umwertung is used by Freud to indicate the process which Nietzsche described as the "transvaluation of values," and so I have translated it thus here.]

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