Rank—Art and Artist (viii)—Partiality and Totality

Otto Rank
Art and Artist
trans. Charles Francis Atkinson
(1932/1989)

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[100] I have already, in another connexion, starting from the psychology of the neurotic and discussing psychotherapeutic possibilities of curing him, emphasized the therapeutic and indeed absolutely vital character of illusions

in contrast to Freud,

who regards them (even from a historical point of view) merely as infantile wish-fulfilments which we have to outgrow.

I believe, however, that everything that is consoling in life—that is, everything therapeutical in the broader sense —can only be illusional, and even the therapeutic effect of analysis I have tried to explain in my latest "technical" work by the unreality of the analytical situation.

To understand the work of art in its specific import, then, we have not only to advance, in our search for an explanation of creative imagination, from the wish fulfilment theory to will-psychology, but also to get hold of the negative aspect of the immortality-ideology in the fear-problem of the neurotic.

Now, I have always regarded the neurotic as a failed artist . In other words, to the eternalizing tendency of the individual will...there must be superadded a particular kind of overcoming of fear; and this we can certainly study better in the
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failed neurotic with his thwarted productivity than in the creative artist. For the artist overcomes this isolating fear socially , by getting society's sanction for his personal immorality-symbolism,

Society ? Or community?

If "society" and "community" can be differentiated, then sanctioning mechanisms must then also be distinguished; ditto the prospects and effectiveness of socially overcoming an isolating fear .

The most persistent problem in applying Rank's insights to the present day is that most of us artists do not get much sanction at all, and yet we persist anyway, often unhappily but doggedly all the same. To the extent that we are unhappy, a Rankian finds everything to be in order, more or less as Rank left it. But we find least sanction of all from society , and yet we persist. Could it be that we are seeking that sanction from somewhere, something, someone else?

There are good reasons not to take artists seriously when they claim precisely this. That said, what are the superior alternative explanations?

I don't mean to be too coy here, though I am being a bit coy for rhetorical effect. I tend to think that there is no God and no "society." And yet I am an "artist," I intend to remain one until the wheels fall off, and I did begin to catch myself sanction-seeking in unguarded moments, early and often in this journey. It was in precisely these realizations that the preoccupation of this blog with unfashionable things like "morality," "puritanism," "abstraction," and "individualism" had its genesis.

If an artist is both an atheist and an "ontological nominalist," then, any sanction-seeking cannot really be "religious" in any legitimate sense. What I sense within myself is that it is, ideally, a sort of displacement of the "ontological realist" conception of "society." One takes account of that side of things, certainly, but it makes no sense to seek sanction from some entity that one believes not to exist, at least not as any real "entity." There is no way to render this in words without giving the impression that it amounts, in the end, merely to some kind of denial or mind-trick. I don't think that's quite what it is. Really it's very basic: you write or play what you feel, and then you see who is interested, if anyone is. You would just love it if everyone thought you were a genius; but if they quite obviously don't, this does not dissuade you from pursuing something that is much more deeply felt than any such "social" epiphenomenon could be. That's it! It's what self-appointed evangelists of popular taste refer to as "self-indulgence." They are the first to notice, too, that there is far more renunciation than indulgence happening here, but this contradiction does not seem to trouble them too much.

This is, in other words, exactly what you would expect of a person who is, for whatever reason, an "ontological nominalist" to the bone, but who has (for whatever reason!) been thrust unwillingly into a terrifyingly large social world of billions of "ontological realists" and all of their various "realist" conceits. Supek, whose terminology I am relying upon here until I can scrounge up something better, names as the lineage of "ontological realism": "romantic philosophy"; Hegel and Schelling; Lazarus and Steinthal; Comte, Spencer, and Durkheim; finally (and jarringly!), "totalitarian doctrines of the fascist and Stalinist varieties."

For now, though I have some of the wrong allies, I'm happy enough to have some of the right enemies too!

whereas the neurotic fails to overcome his mortal fear because he has nothing to compensate it, either individually (in love), collectively (in religion), or, least of all, socially.

Again, though there is by this point in the argument a danger of overvaluing community as against society, this last bit does suggest that the specifically social compensations which elude the neurotic, those which elude him in abstract, impersonal "society," are those which must be achieved rather than ascribed. Rank has just described the creative artist as getting society's sanction . Sanction must be got rather than given, and the neurotic has trouble getting some. Hence the much remarked-upon correlation of "neurotic" suffering with the dispersion of community into society and the concurrent loss of those compensations attaching to rootedness in a community. Hence also the need of art and artist both to escape from community into society in order to have the chance of winning compensation rather than being given it (which in fact does nothing for the artist).

Of course art after the end of society does come out of this sketch looking like a solution in search of a problem, a matter which must be faced up to eventually, somehow.

Now, the study of neurotic fear, in whatever form we encounter it, cannot be handled and explained as a problem of reality, but at bottom represents an irrational phenomenon. Herein, incidentally, lies the very pardonable error of the Worringer concept of fear , which is far too realist to explain the abstract urge to art. For external fear no more leads to compensatory artistic activity than the real sex-impulse does so. ...

Fear is, in contrast to fright, not a real phenomenon: it cannot be traced to and explained (as psycho-analysis has attempted to explain it) by any real danger, even such an internal danger as one might postulate, for example, in the individual's own insistent impulses (Freud).

For every adequate cause of fear that we find, without or within, merely gives it the impress of fright, without touching the prime phenomenon of human fear of the unreal and irrational. Indeed, the linking of this prime fear even with the notion of death—unreal as this must be to our ignorance, and peculiarly close as it stands to the prime fear—seems a sort of tacking-on by way of afterthought.

The prime phenomenon itself I characterized in another connection...as "life-fear," because seemingly it is something given along with the life-
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process itself and working against the individual's fear of losing himself in life.

In so far, therefore, as the negative-inhibitive fear of life, as well as the positive will to perpetuation, acts in the creation of ideologies (including artistic ideologies), we have to deal with a second unreal factor.

To put it in another way, the fear that urges toward perpetuity is precisely as unreal —or, shall we say, illusory or fantastic —as the positive will-to-art that builds up for itself a second reality next above, parallel with, or inside the first.

But neither of these two tendencies alone is capable of constructing an ideology, be it of a religious, an artistic, or a social character; it requires the two together , cooperating according to the needs of the moment, to do that. Yet they are not one, they are not causally connected in a such a way that the fear of death leads to the will to eternalization, or the complete achievement of the will to eternalization leads to the fear of life.

This may seem to happen, or actually happen, even at a later stage in that which I have called the creative sense of guilt; but also it may only emerge from the attempt to overcome this fundamental dualism in the individual. Originally
the positive will to eternalization
seems to have led by itself only to actions of
a predominantly magical order
which, in the course of ritual development, became
pre-artistic expressions of a "practical" sort
(dance, and eventually instrumental music and song), while the
restraining fear
led solely to
magical hush-ceremonies
which we meet later in religious (like neurotic) ceremonial.

Only a combination of the two—in other words, a volitional grip on, and conquest of, the fear-phenomenon—leads to the creation of ideologies in which the will to eternalization satisfies itself (in the first instance) collectively, and individual fear is suspended or at least temporarily mitigated. Yet not only is the unreal character of these ideologies obvious, but (after what has been said) their unreal origin also: that is, the unreal motivation which they have in the individual.

Thus, at the very commencement of human development—
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then, indeed, in far greater measure than subsequently—we have the unreal element as the decisive factor which led to expression in art. But if religion is originally unreal , and the (psychologically speaking) equivalent love-experience at the other end of the scale is predominantly real , art stands in the middle, realizing the unreal and rendering it concrete. In so doing, it merely follows a universal law of development which I have formulated in my Seelenglaube und Psychologie: namely, that human development consists in a continuously progressive concretization of phenomena that were originally purely ideal or spiritual . In this sense the whole of cultural development is an artistic, or at least artificial, attempt to objectify human ideologies.

Tough to say concisely just what this theory of progressive concretization does and does not have going for it at today's late(r) date. It's easy enough to see that Western art gave rise to plenty of its own strictly ideal cognitions, and that these have indeed enjoyed their brief, wild rides on the concretization treadmill.

e.g. If the cinema has origins in the novel, then the cinema also is far more "concrete" than the novel. The cinema "concretizes" much which the novel necessarily leaves underdetermined.

The same applies to Mauceri's thought that, "Movies can be seen as an expression of what music was already doing in people's minds." It applies doubly, actually, since music "already" was far more "abstract" than any literature.

Beyond that?

There is a larger (enormous) project to be undertaken here, sifting in detail through the transition from "idealist" to "analytic" philosophical writing on art, and concurrently following the life-and-times of those various ideals which have stubbornly refused to go quietly into the proverbial dustbin. I suspect there are a few notable examples of such ideals living on in the concrete world, if not precisely to escape debunking by analytic philsophers (as if those writers exerted any real influence), then certainly as a re-form-ation into some (literal) object, an object which is more immune to debunking precisely because it has become concrete and has therefore exited the realm of abstract reason; an object now hiding out in the arena of practical application (purportedly), or perhaps merely amongst other chunks of rock in some ornamental rock garden to which no one pays much attention. Of course I am thinking of the various moral uplift conceits of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, on the one hand, and Baby Mozart records on the other; but I would bet that there are plenty of other examples, if only my purview were a bit wider. (What about all the t-shirts that say things like, "BE A KIND HUMAN"? That seems the best example of all of a process of ever-ongoing aesthetic concretization which ends in ambiguity, at best, or perhaps in outright self-contradiction. It's not very nice to show up to a gathering wearing one of those shirts!)

Nevertheless, art does stand out from the general line of development by the fact that it retains a substantial element of the original unreal character.

Oh, really? Doesn't that all depend on what art is imitative of?

Previously . . .

"[Art's] "aim" was to prove the existence of the soul by concretizing it, and it achieved this by presenting the abstract in abstract form— that is, by imitating as faithfully as possible, not reality, but unreality. Thus we can detect both the imitative instinct of artistic creativity and the practical aimlessness of art even in these primitive stages. The imitation, however, concerns the unreal, which later becomes steadily more naturalized and humanized, while the aimlessness concerns reality—a fact which æsthetics has, strangely enough, inverted...

I fear that any riff on the above is bound to be far too abstract (no pun intended) to be worthwhile. To be as basic as possible about it: already by Rank's own time, it was no longer a safe assumption that all art would continue to be progressively naturalized and humanized . Those -izeds are not interchangeable with concretized . Not even close.

It's tough to say for sure where Rank's own aesthetic sympathies lie. That is a positive feature of the book, to be sure. It is not a detriment. There are, in any case, occasional flashes of contempt shown for modern art, and they do burst the bounds of the merely incidental rhetoric involved in carrying out a lengthy and subtle argument. This does lead me to believe, although Rank sometimes seems to have thought of everything, that he did not take seriously enough the possibility of a truly non-representational art; and while it's easy enough to understand how this could happen to someone who simply never came in contact with such art, it is less understandable as long as music is considered to land among the arts, as one would expect it must for a Viennese of Rank's generation.

A simpler tell is that Rank has some unfortunate company in finding residual un-reality retained in modern art: that is the standard knee-jerk criticism of weekend gallery-goers who expected landscapes and fruit bowls but were confronted instead by monochromes and "action paintings," the latter seeming ultimately "unreal" only because they are made slave to the former expectations. Those expectations have been projected, indiscriminately, and then the stimulus du jour has been mistaken for representational content that is really unreal.

This observation may be out of line here, since full-on abstractionism was still very new as Rank was writing here. It did not lie in the future, though, in music! And yet that is not how music was understood by very many people at this time, or not yet. When works began to appear which demonstrated, for lack of a better way of putting it, abstractionism in reality, and in the terms of the time-and-place such that this was in fact a reasonable takeaway, all of this was simply denied and the various ascriptions of "unreality" trotted out, again and again. It would be better, then, to say that it was reception which more truly retained a substantial element of the original unreal character on which it had always come to rest. It is audiences and critics who have continued to insist on the reality of all sorts of wildly unreal ascriptions and "interpretations" when confronted with "visual music" and "sound sculptures." A few artists had begun, self-consciously and deliberately, to take a step back from the trappings of progressive concretization and present something that is ultimately "concrete" but, at the same time, not "imitative." By abstaining from depiction or representation or figuration or visual "reality" or . . . call it what you will, these artists broke not just with the conventions of "realism" or "naturalism" or "concretization" but also with the residual "unreality" of tribal and religious "seelisch" stuff.

I fear that this, then, is another uncharacteristically "mechanistic" moment in this book, wherein Rank persists in a teleology that already had a few cracks in it. That teleology will never entirely fall apart, now that it has gotten started, because people can (and they should!) see or hear what they will; most likely, they will see or hear some-thing rather than no-thing, lurking in the soulish realm, stilly "animating" the painting or the symphony. It will be (and it must be!) left to audiences to decide just how much "reality" they can handle.

Indeed, in certain artistic tendencies, and, for that matter, in its general development, it even emphasizes the unreal and spiritual element in contrast to this universal concretization-tendency and tries to protect itself against being pulled down to the levels of actual use .

True enough, and all for the better! But the problem remains that it is not necessary to emphasize the unreal in order to protect against mere use . As the kids say, what if things get too real? This has much the same effect!

Again I am at risk of warping the timeline, since Pollock and Rothko lie decades ahead in the future; but let's jump forward anyway, and then let's ask: what is so "unreal" here? The better term might be "a-real" rather than "un-real," but even then we are trapped in representation. We have not yet escaped to Kivy's "decorative" arena. (And yes, "decoration" certainly is a "use," but it is a use to which this kind of painting (and music, and . . . ) is actually well-suited. This is what it's for. And "decoration" is at least as universal a need as "story" or "ritual," no?)

Herein, we may fairly say, lies one of the motives for the æsthetic theory of the "purposelessness" of art: art in fact should represent this unreal ideality in an increasingly concretized world ; while, on the other hand, the imitative principle (as we shall see) appears as a reaction of the creative sense of guilt , driving the individual out of his unreal world and back to nature.

This theory of purposelessness is more or less my own. Who cares if it is quite as universally true as Rank says? Circumstance and temperament have conspired to deliver me there in any event, and at that point it doesn't much matter to me whether the theory can be extrapolated to entire epochs or milieus.

This theory of the creative sense of guilt is also tantalizing, but it is not my own, and so it is all the more glaring, to me at least, that it's validation too would require a kind and degree of emprirical support which seems permanently out of reach.

Throughout the steady concretization-process of the super-real ideologies—which become ever more earthly and end by actually humanizing the creative god in the artist—art conserves the irrational principle which finds expression in the individual creative will on the one hand and the æsthetic immortality-concept on the other.

It refuses to conserve the human being by imitating nature and man;

neither does it console by offering substitutes for what is unattainable or has been renounced, in reality:

what it seeks is to prove by objectification the emotional reality of what has never been real and can never
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be made real .

This psychic actuality is not, however (as analysis would have it), a precipatate of the real , but an idealism a priori anchored beyond all reality , which the will to eternalize objectifies in the artistic immortality-concept.

We seem headed here, finally, for the realization that absolute art hardly represents an escape from idealism per se; rather, this absolute idealism (what else to call it?) simply runs its course only on one side of the artist-audience transaction, in complete opacity ("anchored beyond reality") to the audience; and of course the same goes for the audience's own various "idealisms," which the artist can in no way foresee.

Of course this is not what Rank says here. He says something which is oblique to the old philosophical problem of intentionality in art. What he does do, in taking aim at analysis as the closest-at-hand proxy, is to attempt to describe the state of things before any mere "intention" has been formed at all. That is very ambitious! Seems correct to me, though! Whad'ya want?!

This specifically artistic immortality-ideology renders its creator immortal along with his work, by putting, on a work which expesses the prevailing collective ideology , the stamp of the individual artist-personality . This intermediate character of the work of art, which links the world of subjective unreality with that of objective reality — harmoniously fusing the edges of each without confusing them—has been superbly turned to account by the play-instinct , as Schiller æsthetically conceived it.

The only question is whether the æsthetic play-instinct, which transfers a conception taken from play to art and artistic productivity, really produces the latter or merely accounts for its pleasurable effect

For play, after all, differs not only conceptually, but factually, from art. It has in common with art the combination of the real and the apparent; yet it is not merely fancy objectivized , but fancy translated into reality , acted and lived. It shares with art the double consciousness of appearance and reality, yet it has more of reality , while art is content with the appearance .

Here we are reminded of Plato's definition, or, rather, poetic description, of art—which is really but the reflection of his whole picture of life;

for does he not explain daily life as the shadow of an actual reality, which he calls the Idea,

and does not art therefore naturally represent for him only a shadow of that shadow, a copy of a copy?

Had he meant that this artificial image of our shadow reality might have caught something of the original idea underlying it in the process, his conception would be so far removed from his ascription of an imitative character to art that we should be able to accept that conception.

It would not appear to be so, however. For art to him is imitation, and play, which for the Greeks was such an outstanding cultural factor, he seems to have regarded, quite generally, as just such a copy of real life.

[105]

But as we shall discuss in a later section the origin and significance of human play, as a problem of folk-psychology which is allied to, but by no means identical with, artistic creativity, we will now return to the pleasure-giving character that is common, as it seems, to art and play.

It seems to us that Schiller in his treatise contributed more to this purely æsthetic problem of satisfaction or pleasure than to the problem of artistic creativity proper—particularly in that he was able to regard the notion of the beautiful, which so greatly exercised æsthetic, as the result of the harmonization between the material-instinct and the form-instinct.

But the contemplation of the beautiful aroused pleasure, satisfaction, or liking, and the central problem of scientific æsthetic is to find out why and how this happens .

This, however, takes it for granted that the artist creates the beautiful that thereupon arouses pleasure in the enjoyer, a conclusion which seems an arbitrary assumption based on the effect of the work of art upon us .

In other words, it is assumed in æsthetic that the artist desires to create the beautiful and, in so doing, enjoys a pleasure corresponding to that of the spectator or listener. Yet that is just what we do not know , so that we can only say that we call a work beautiful when we get some pleasure-value or other out of it .

Indeed, and yet pretty much everyone seems to (think they) know exactly how all of this works. This is a major source of "illusion" in the world. But what kind of illusion is it?

Is it the kind of illusion that Rank himself says is essential to a sane human existence? (p. 100 above: ". . . the therapeutic and indeed absolutely vital character of illusions . . .")

Or is it a Beckerian "cultural illusion" which will sink us all the moment it (and we) run up against some countervailing piece of "reality?"

The answer can only be: it depends! But we would do well to look out for indications to one or the other effect.

In Psychology and the Soul Rank lands on a certain throwing-back of "psychology" upon "ethics and epistemology." This seems quite the obstacle to simply accepting a given level of endemic "illusion" in (at least) the social world, if less obviously the material one. In other words, one must ask: is precisely this type of "illusion" not what lies at the very root of so many breaches of "ethics and epistemology"? More simply: are we not, in fact, hurting only ourselves this way but rather also hurting others?

This is quite transparently the case with much contemporary "art" and with the chatter, activism and grandstanding surrounding it.

Herein perhaps is to be found the origin of Socrates' ranking of the beautiful on a level with the good and the useful , and of Plato's identification of it with the true —in the sense of his doctrine of Ideas, which leads him to interpret the soul's intuition of a self-beauty as the recollection of its prenatal existence.

Is our man daring to accuse these towering ancients of . . . solipsism?

And so we find the link with our previously outlined explanation of the beauty-concept as a derivative of the soul-concept, and also the relation with the immortality-concept, by bringing the prenatal—that is, a supernatural—state into the account.

Hmm. But "we can only say that we call a work beautiful when we get some pleasure-value or other out of it." If so, then there is nowhere much to go with this particular link but to simply wallow in it by and to ourselves.

The above seems merely a very sophisticated and polite way of leveling the accusation of solipsism against anyone who ever took for granted that their own pleasure-value taken must necessarily be shared in by everyone (anyone) else. And that is why I proudly call myself a Rankian!

At this point we can consider also the psychological
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significance of æsthetic pleasure in the beautiful, whether felt by the artist himself or put into the work by the enjoyer.

In spite of the difference between art and play, there is this element common to both, that they operate on a plane of illusion, which has its setting and its pattern in our own soul-life.

Analysis of the modern human type, moreover, has taught us to understand the emotional life (Gefühlsleben) as such an inner plane of illusion on which all experience is played out more or less potentially, without actual happening (Technik, III).

This provides us in principle with an internal phantom existence without actualized experience , but one in which the individual does not necessarily become conscious of its illusory nature.

It is only by looking at the matter thus that we can understand dream-life as an artificial phantom life on the illusionist plane of the emotions ("life is a dream").

In play and in art the individual is able, by the aid of a collective or social ideology, to find such an illusory plane, whereon he can live potentially or symbolically without doing so in reality .

The pleasure that he finds in this phantom life on an illusory plane lies in the fact that it enables one to avoid the expenditure of real life , which is, basically, in the escape that it provides from life itself and, behind all, from the fear that is inseparable from real life and experience .

Well, okay . . .

If it is indeed the inner plane of illusion on which someone is operating, then all is well and good here. But this very assessment is subject to the same inscrutability as Rank has just finished ascribing to æsthetic judgments. How exactly does social agent A merely observe social agent B, such that the "plane" of B's machinations can be conclusively ascertained?

One answer: via analysis , of course. One can only give Rank the benefit of the doubt on that front; the problem is, this is not (it cannot be) how daily life unfolds. What then?

Freud was the first to recognize the saving of energy as essential to the pleasure derived from wit and, eventually, to all æsthetic pleasure, but his view of energy as libidinous prevented him from extending this conception to the nature of pleasure generally, the purest form of which is, from a philosophical point of view, æsthetic pleasure.

But if, as Schopenhauer
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was perhaps the first to recognize, pleasure is not only nourished from positive sources but may even be just a condition characterized by the absence of fear or guilt, then the belief in the sexual origin of all pleasure... becomes at least questionable.

...in my Wahrheit und Wirklichkeit, ...I suggested that the essence of pleasure lay in a certain brevity , and that of non-pleasure in the prolongation of any state, even one that was at first pleasurable.

If we combine this factor of temporariness with the quantitative principle of economy, it would seem that pleasure is not only relatively short , but also relatively small —in fact, partial . From this view of æsthetic pleasure we should thus arrive at a general formula: pleasure is the result of a successful "partialization," in which avoidance of fear, which element would necessarily be present in a totality of experience, acts to enhance pleasurable emotions.

Every pleasurable feeling would therefore include, besides positive satisfaction (successful partialization), a being-spared (from fear, totality, life, and so on). And this again brings us to the view that æsthetic pleasure is not sexual , but that, on the other hand, sexual pleasure may also be termed "æsthetic" in so far as it is momentary and partial —two qualities which seem to us to sum up every pleasurable emotional experience.

The greater the economy, the greater the pleasure—provided always that this saving can be made in a relatively short space of time, for the neurotic, too, goes cautiously with life and seeks to conserve vital strength, only he is always saving and his mere hoarding gives him no pleasure.

Æsthetic pleasure is the highest or purest form of pleasure just because it supposes reception and gain , but not giving . But this clearly applies only to the one who enjoys the work of art and not to the creative artist . For him , therefore, a different psychology from the
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æsthetic must be found .

For the artist is also sparing of life in that he substitutes creation ; but then, again, he also wastes as he creates and this brings him new conflicts , from which again he seeks to escape by living.

In this sense all doing and feeling which fall within the province of sublimation , from the purely æsthetic to the simple emotional, would not be substitutes for real life and experience imposed from without —no consequence of deprivation, that is—but the deliberate creation of a plane of illusion , on which there is the possibility of a seeming life, entailing less expenditure and therefore less fear , and therefore again a surplus of pleasure .

Here the theory of the draining-off of superfluous energy in play is inverted: since now it is the play—that is, the attitude of make-believe—that releases forces which are set free by the saving of life.

With this we have found the key to a fundamental problem of life, to understand which is of far-reaching importance also for the psychological and ideological significance of artist and art.

I have discussed this problem of partial and total experience in another connexion (Technik, III): namely, in relation to the hinderance of fear which thwarts the neurotic equally in his life and his work.

The productive aspects of this conflict I was only able to touch upon briefly, but in any case the neurotic presented itself to me as a type predisposed to total experience and hindered only by fear—which to him is also total—from productively and constructively following up this tendency.

The result is, not only that he checks all manifestatons of life because their totality would let loose fear (that is, fear of death), but that the check is excessive (because total), and he only creates more fear, which manifests itself as fear of life.

His only thought, one may say, is to save life and life-force, but this saving brings him no æsthetic pleasure, but neurotic dissatisfaction, because it dreads every sort of spending, even spending on a plane of illusion. From the therapy of such cases it has emerged that the neurotic must first learn to live playfully, illusorily, unreally, on some plane of illusion —first of all on the inner emotional plane .

This is a gift which the artist,
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as an allied type, seems to possess from the outset, and in an even higher degree than the average person possesses it.

It's easy enough to accept that this would have some therapeutic value for the neurotic , ca. 1932. Also that the neurotic would "psychologically speaking represent the artist-type without ever having produced a work of art." (p. xxiv) But does any of this cinch the case for the artist as merely the "productive" type of neurotic?

It does not, not without showing that the artist can become "neurotic" and "unproductive" if deprived of their precious "illusions."

What kinds of "illusions" animate the novelist? The dancer? The concert pianist, or the brothel pianist?

What artist is freer of soulish illusions than the brothel pianist?! And are they any less of an "artist" for it?!

Perhaps we will see, by the end of the book, that some rapprochement is possible between the artist on one hand and reality on the other. It is clear enough all the same that what Rank says here does seem to explain the behavior of certain artists, just not all of them.

For the artist too is a totalist type that, unlike the average, cannot live in perpetual "partialization," but is forced to totalize every act of life.

And on the artistic plane of illusion, in the act of creating—which is at once appearance and reality, a part and a whole —he finds it possible to conquer creatively this fundamental human dualism and to derive pleasure therefrom.

Appearance is far preferable to simple "illusion!" Surface "appearance" is honest and can be known, even if it is necessarily misleading as to the underlying "depths." See:   . . . "ethics and epistemology" . . .

"Appearance" and "illusion" are not interchangeable, though sometimes they get interchange-d.

For when he creates , the artist uses the whole of himself without being in danger of losing that self therein, for it is certain that the work itself , from his point of view, represents only a part of his ego, although it does in fact represent the whole artist and his personality .

It is just, like every good symbol , a pars pro toto solution , in which, however, the artist does not go charily with his life, like the neurotic, but positively spends it as he creates .

This again he does not actually, but essentially—that is, he puts into it his being, his "soul," as we say—and this then stands for the whole living ego, just as the abstract soul in primitive and later immortality-beliefs represents not only the whole individual, but even more than that: his essence, and with it the essence of man and of humanness in general.

Once more we find art expressing the same thing as the abstract-soul concept, only in an objectified form, which we call beautiful precisely in so far as it is unreal , more than earthly.

This explains the "artifact!"

How on earth, then, does LRJ end up setting Black Music in opposition to those Euro-American "artifacts" which objectify the abstract-soul concept ?

The sticking point cannot be so simple as that Black expression "issued from life." Rank is often difficult to follow, but it is crystal clear that this (so far as it goes) is precisely his assumption, too.

Even less can the sticking point be that "Parker did not admit that there was any separation between himself and the agent he had chosen as his means of self-expression." This can be "admitted" or it can be repressed/suppressed, but in any case the very wording of this infamous diatribe speaks quite "separately" of Parker on one hand and his "agent" on the other. That is a particular kind of "illusion," certainly! But then, a different psychology from the æsthetic must always be found if the artist's own mindset is to be understood; the invidious Desmond-Parker comparison reeks of precisely that "arguing theoretically back from the contemplator to the creator" which Rank breaks with as a first order of business.

The unavoidable takeaway is that LRJ is so intent on articulating and preserving some distinctive Black identity that he forbids his protagonists any truck with humanness in general . There is no part-for-whole solution available to them, because they have been excluded (first unwillingly, and now, somehow, quite willingly) from that whole. This all evinces something like "internalized racism" precisely regarding the sorts of issues Rank is interested in here.

For this very essence of a man, his soul, which the artist puts into his work and which is represented by it, is found again in the work by the enjoyer,

Wait . . . really?!

just as the believer finds his soul in religion or in God, with whom he feels himself to be one. It is on this identity of the spiritual, which underlies the concept of collective religion, and not on a psychological identification with the artist, that the pleasurable effect of the work of art ultimately depends,

Hmm . . . This identity , all the same, still is properly speaking a semantic element, just like psychological identification . It is just as dependent on more or less direct "semantic" transmission. Thus it's not any easier to believe in the one than the other, even if the most vulgar excesses of interpretation are checked somewhat by the elimination of specifically "psychological" inferences.

Now, Rank says that "this identity...underlies the concept of collective religion." This suggests that great "semantic" precision is made possible by a correspondingly strong "collective" grounding. (Perhaps the "grounding" itself arises from truly "universal" needs? And that is why it is able to become "collective?) I've got nothing hard-and-fast with which to counter that idea, but I often wonder if those of us alive today do not actually overestimate the extent to which bygone "collective elements" veritably railroaded people into near-perfect conformity. Certainly by the time of the first self-conscious fine art, already it seems questionable to assume this kind of conformity, even if conformity must still have been relatively more severe than anything we are accustomed to today.

Or, if the thesis of the "identity of the spiritual" is to be taken as returning us, after all this verbiage, to something ultimately abstract and unreal, something which in fact permits of nothing "semantic" nor even discrete or knowable, well then . . . congratulations! What's time is lunch?

and the effect is, in this sense, one of deliverance. The self-renunciation which the artist feels when creating is relieved when he finds himself again in his accomplished work, and the self-renunciation
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which raises the enjoyer above the limitations of his individuality becomes, through, not identification, but the feeling of oneness with the soul living in the work of art, a greater and higher entity.

Thus the will-to-form of the artist gives objective expression, in his work, to the soul's tendency to self-eternalization, while the æsthetic pleasure of the enjoyer is enabled, by his oneness with it, to participate in this objectivization of immortality.

But both of them, in the simultaneous dissolution of their individuality in a greater whole, enjoy, as high pleasure, the personal enrichment of that individuality through this feeling of oneness. They have yielded up their mortal ego for a moment, fearlessly and even joyfully, to receive it back in the next, the richer for this universal feeling.

[End of Ch. 4]