Rank—Art and Artist (vi)—Life and Creation

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

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[37]

Chapter Two
LIFE AND CREATION

...

[38]

...the fundamental problem of the relation between living and creating in an artist,...the reciprocal influence of these two spheres.
...creativity lies equally at the root of artistic production and of life experience. ...lived experience can only be understood as the expression of volitional creative impulse, and in this the two spheres of artistic production and actual experience meet and overlap. Then, too, the creative impulse itself is manifested first and chiefly in the personality, which, being thus perpetually made over, produces art-work and experience in the same way. ...

[39] In creation the artist tries to immortalize his mortal life. He desires to transform death into life, as it were, though actually he transforms life into death. For not only does the created work not go on living; it is, in a sense, dead; both as regards the material, which renders it almost inorganic, and also spiritually and psychologically, in that it no longer has any significance for its creator, once he has produced it. ...

...besides the original biological duality of impulse and inhibition in man;...[there is also to be reckoned with] the psychological factor par excellence, the individual will, which manifests itself both negatively as a controlling element, and positively as the urge to create. This creator-impulse is not, therefore, sexuality, as Freud assumed, but expresses the antisexual tendency in human beings, which we may describe as the deliberate control of the impulsive life. ...

[40] If we compare the neurotic with the productive type, it is evident that the former suffers from an excessive check on his impulsive life, and according to whether this neurotic checking of the instincts is effected through fear or through
[41]
will, the picture presented is one of fear-neurosis or compulsion-neurosis. With the productive type the will dominates, and exercises a far-reaching control over (but not check upon) the instincts, which are pressed into service to bring about creatively a social relief of fear. Finally, the instincts appear relatively unchecked in the so-called psychopathic subject, in whom the will affirms impulse instead of controlling it. In this type...we have, contrary to appearances, to do with weak-willed people...; the neurotic, on the other hand, is generally regarded as the weak-willed type, but wrongly so, for his strong will is exercised upon himself and, indeed, in the main repressively...

And here we reach the essential point of difference between the productive type who creates and the thrwarted neurotic... Both are distinguished fundamentally from the average type, who accepts himself as he is, by their tendency to exercise their volition in reshaping themselves. ...

Art and Artist (v) + Bodies and Artifacts (v)

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

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[11] Primitive religion, as a belief in souls (as we know it), is originally so abstract that it has been called irreligious by comparison with higher religions, in which the gods have already assumed concrete form. But from a study of these abstract preliminary stages of religion, which are a matter of spirits and demons, we see also that the urge for abstaction in primitives is rooted in the soul-belief that, in the intellectualized form of the East, culminates in the absolute abstract of the soul. Compared with the idea of the soul or its primitive predecessors even the abstractest form of art is concrete, just as on the other hand the most
[12]
definite naturalism in art is abstract when compared with nature.

Good point, re: relative qualities. Naturalist artists are trapped in abstraction much as Satanists are trapped in Christianity.

But the origins-of-religion stuff is hard to follow. If the gods have already assumed concrete form in higher religions , did the "lower" religions not project the god-force onto very concrete beings and objects? The omniscient Christian god seems ultimately abstract compared to myriad snake-gods whose abstract being may at least inhabit real snakes periodically.

Rank—Art and Artist (iv)—Dynamic Needs of Equalization

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

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[xlviii] a paradoxical phenomenon discloses itself, which will not startle the psychologist and indeed will facilitate our approach to the understanding of the spiritual dynamism in artistic creativity. The autonomous individualism of primitive man, as well as that of the lordly masters appears to be more dependent on Nature in its artistic creativeness than is the sedentary collective type of man, who, though depending to a great extent on nature's moods and his own environment (of commerce), can yet rise to abstractions in art which are quite independent of reality. We shall see presently how this compensatory function of the art-form brings the development of personality and its dynamic need of equalization into unison. Here I would merely point out...that in neither of the two art-forms is it a question of an absolute style-principle, but only of a more or a less, while at the same time both style-forms alike possess the tendency to reproduce something absent , which in certain cases happens to be a natural object, while in others it pictures an idea. The obvious purpose in this tendency is domination , whether this takes the form of a naturalistic representation of an animal as a hunting spell or of the symbolic representation of a human abstraction. Behind both there is the creative will of the personality, which only now and then manifests itself directly, and at other times reacts to the compulsion of collective society and gives expression thereto. Undoubtedly this second art-form...is more capable of development, not only for stylistic and aesthetic, but for psychological reasons as well. For the abstraction at the base of this mechanical art represents even in itself a rising above nature, and it can be still further intensified and varied, whereas in naturalistic or organic art the objects within a cultural environment are limited, so that the artistic effort to deal with them otherwise than in their natural setting does not find them very malleable. In a word, art consists in the latter case of arbitrary

[xlix]

re-creation (not copying) of the given objects; in the other, of the new creation of ever changing ideas. Nevertheless, for both we must assume a creative force in the individual himself, which has to be studied in its various forms before we can arrive at a deeper understanding of the art-forms produced by it.

[end of Introduction]

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I

Rank's

feeling is insistent that artistic creativity, and indeed the human creative impulse generally, originate solely in the constructive harmonising of this fundamental dualism

of individual and collective. (p. xxii)

By therefore relegating

biography (or pathography)

to the margins, Rank reestablishes a line (perhaps a barrier) between transmission and reception, a line that uncritical, self-projecting observers have tended to blur.

I see no reason why the audience cannot also be creating something through their participation, incommensurable as that something may be with what the artist has presented to them. Yes, reception can be a (self-)generative act, a transformative act, or at the very least an act of consolidation, a renewing of vows to ego and/or to alter. Audiences must also have some dynamic need of equalization even if that need is not as tempestuous as that of the artist-type . But I also see no reason why we should be obligated to assume this of the audience tout court. The old saw about actions speaking louder than words is never too obvious or trite to be relevant. Experience permits us to be dubious when someone tells us offhandedly that a song or a movie or an unrealized concept piece "changed my life." Don't tell me, show me. Don't write your own biography so mechanistically. The fact that you yourself have done it does not make it valid.

Rank—Art and Artist (iii)—The Psychological Ideology of Art

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

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[xiii]

AUTHOR'S PREFACE

...

[xiv] On the one hand, the individual urge to create is by no means the only specific quality of the artist; equally, on the other hand, canons of style, evolved from the collective consciousness, can by no means be regarded as the true essence of artistic creation; the one individual factor represents merely the motive-power, while the other, collective, element provides the forms that are suited in the circumstances to its activity and utterance.

...

[xxiii] in The Trauma of Birth I discerned the fact, which I later developed theoretically, that the creative impulse, which leads to the liberation and forming of the individual personality—and likewise determines its artistic creativeness—has something positively antisexual in its yearning for independence of organic conditions. Correspondingly, my conception of repression differed from Freud's; for to him it is the result of outward frustration, while I trace it to an inward necessity, which is no less inherent in the dualistic individual than the satisfying of the impulse itself.

...

[xxiv] if the neurotic type, who fails to synthesize his dualistic conflict, be studied from the therapeutic angle, the impression received is that of individuals who (psychologically speaking) represent the artist-type without ever having produced a work of art. ... In short, it would seem that the creatively disposed and gifted type has to have something in addition

[xxv]

before it can become a really productive artist, while on the other hand the work of the productive individual must also be added to before it can rank as a genuine work of art.

Neither the cultural and scientific history of art nor the aesthetic psychology of the artist has so far provided a satisfactory answer to this central question of the whole problem of art: namely, what constitutes the correlation between artist-type and the art-product; that is to say, the artistic creativeness and the art-form? And although it may seem evident that this common factor in the artist and the art product must be a super-individual, collective element, so obvious a conclusion at once raises a series of questions, the mere meaning of which is enough to show that they but make the real problem more acute. The first among such questions is likely to be: what does this collective factor, both generally and particularly in the creative individual, mean? Following directly upon this comes the next question: what is the characteristic which distinguishes the specific, artistic collectivity—subjective or objective—from others, such as religious, social, or national? In other words, why does the individual, endowed with this mysterious collective force, become now a popular leader, now the founder of a religion, and now an artist?

Rank—Art and Artist (iib)—The Inessentiality of Biography (b)

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

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[379] One of the radical mistakes made by most ordinary biographies and by psychography is the notion of a parallelism between experience and creation.

This certainly exists, if not causally, at least phenomenally connected. [sic] Quite as important, however, or even more so, is the opposition of life and creation, which has been emphasized, but not understood, since this is impossible without taking account of the creative feeling of guilt.

It is significant that many of the greatest artists (though by no means all) have a strong bourgeois tinge, and Kretschmer, in his study of men of genius, declared that genius needs a strong touch of conventionality.

Many whose work is of the highest value and who live wholly in their art lead a very simple, ordinary life, and this purely human side often comes to the surface in their work, in contrast to the divine quality of genius.

The Muse, too, whose idealization by the poet himself and whose apotheosis in the mother-principle by the psychographer look so fine, often comes off badly enough in real life. Not only that she

[380]

has to endure, even enjoy, the moods of the divinely inspired master, but she very often becomes for the artist a symbol of an ideology that is no longer adequate, which she may have helped him to create, but which he has now to overcome and throw overboard.

In that case... the artist is both unable to create without her and prevented by her presence from any further creation. His inclination may be to let her go, along with the earlier ideology, but his guilt-feeling will not allow it. ...

Not only will the artist who finds a creative issue from this conflict show its traces in his work, but his work will often enough be purely the expression of the conflict itself, whose solution has to be justified as much as the failure to reach a solution would have to be.

This is unsatisfying given everything that has preceded it.

his work will often enough be purely the expression of the conflict itself

If biography is "inessential" here, then what exactly is meant by expression ?

Rank—Art and Artist (iia)—The Inessentiality of Biography (a)

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

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[xxii] during all the years when I was constantly absorbed by problems, particularly those connected with poetry, I did not attempt a single biography (or pathography) of a famous artist.

...anything in the nature of psychographic material and view-points that I myself had to contribute invariably presented itself to me at once as something fitting into a larger frame,...

...I propose to follow the line of reaching out beyond what is individual in the artist-personality and to show, or at least suggest, the collective aspect...

...my feeling is insistent that artistic creativity, and indeed the human creative impulse generally, originate solely in the constructive harmonising of this fundamental dualism of all life. I arrived at this conception by a concentrated psychological study of the two human types which most clearly reveal success and failure in this struggle to overcome: the so-called neurotic type, and the creative.

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[22] it is just these ultimate psychological problems of art that will trip us up if we have neglected or inadequately understood the creative personality, an understanding that is an inherent necessity in all æsthetic, however far it may advance into the domain of psychology.

For
æsthetic, by its nature, can only deal with the effect of a work of art, and it takes account of its creation by an artist only by arguing theoretically back from the contemplator to the creator.

But this conclusion, apart from its indirect nature, is a fallacy; for as we (or at least as I, myself) have been convinced by a study of the productive personality, there is between that and the unproductive type not only a quantitative but a qualitative difference.

...it seems to me clear that the idea of intuition (Einfühlung) as fashioned by psychological æsthetic has been attained as from a view-point of reception, while the notion of abstraction which Worringer contrasts with it refers rather to the spiritual attitude of the creative artist. ...

Ever since Aristotle's day this seems to me to have begun with the tacit assumption that the artist intended to present the effect he aimed at in its phenomenal form, and that therefore there were involved in the creation, at least potentially, the same psychological experiences and psychical

[23]

processes as are to be observed in the contemplator of the work and especially in the æsthetic critic.

... [of course] in some cases the artist does aim at a definite idea effect in his work,... Nor need we doubt that the artist occasionally does find pleasure and satisfaction in his creation, though the confessions of great artists themselves generally tell rather of the struggle and suffering of creating it.

But the fundamental difference in essence between the creative and the receptive types, which are psychologically complementary, is not affected by such evidences. While æsthetic pleasure, whether in the creator or in the contemplator, is ultimately a renunciation of self, the essence of the creative impulse is the exactly opposite tendency towards assertion of self.

Rank—Art and Artist (i)The Autonomy of the Spiritual

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

AUTHOR'S PREFACE

...

[xiii] the human urge to create does not find expression in works of art alone; it also produces religion and mythology and the social institutions corresponding to these. In a word, it produces the whole culture of which the works of art in a particular style-epoch have to be regarded as one of the expression-forms. We shall therefore avoid, as far as may be, the attempt to "explain" completely any one of these expression-forms in terms of another one, and shall rather consider all the expression-forms of human culture, however various, first in relation to their origins in the creative impulse, and thereafter in respect of their reciprocal action.

Here is one good reason to treat The Arts as a unit: despite their technical diversity, they share a common psychological origin in the human urge to create .

In the direction of transmission this is origin marks a point of "divergence" beyond which discipline-specific factors are operable.

In the direction of reception it is a point of "convergence" beyond which diverse artworks (and who knows what other cultural artifacts; e.g. religion , mythology , social institutions ) can be grouped together.