The Denial of Death Read Free Page B

Rank’s thought always spanned several fields of knowledge; when he talked about, say, anthropological data and you expected anthropological insight, you got something else, something more. Living as we do in an era of hyperspecialization we have lost the expectation of this kind of delight; the experts give us manageable thrills—if they thrill us at all.
    One thing that I hope my confrontation of Rank will do is to send the reader directly to his books. There is no substitute for reading Rank. My personal copies of his books are marked in the covers with an uncommon abundance of notes, underlinings, double exclamation points; he is a mine for years of insights and pondering. My treatment of Rank is merely an outline of his thought: its foundations, many of its basic insights, and its overall implications. This will be the pale Rank, not the staggeringly rich one of his books. Also, Ira Progoff’s outline presentation and appraisal of Rank is so correct, so finely balanced in judgment, that it can hardly be improved upon as a brief appreciation. 4 Rank is very diffuse, very hard to read, so rich that he is almost inaccessible to the general reader. He was painfully aware of this and for a time hoped that Anaïs Nin would rewrite his books for him so that they would have a chance to have the effect they should have had. What I give in these pages is my own version of Rank, filled out in my own way, a sort of brief “translation” of his system in the hope of making it accessible as a whole. In this book I cover only his individual psychology; in another book I will sketch his schema for a psychology of history.
    There are several ways of looking at Rank. Some see him as a brilliant coworker of Freud, a member of the early circle of psychoanalysis who helped give it broader currency by bringing to it his own vast erudition, who showed how psychoanalysis could illuminate culture history, myth, and legend—as, for example, in his early work on The Myth of the Birth of the Hero and The Incest-Motif . They would go on to say that because Rank was never analyzed, his repressions gradually got the better of him, and he turned away from the stable and creative life he had close to Freud; in his later years his personal instability gradually overcame him, and he died prematurely in frustration and loneliness. Others see Rank as an overeager disciple of Freud, who tried prematurely to be original and in so doing even exaggerated psychoanalytic reductionism. This judgment is based almost solely on his 1924 book The Trauma of Birth and usually stops there. Still others see Rank as a brilliant member of Freud’s close circle, an eager favorite of Freud, whose university education was suggested and financially helped by Freud and who repaid psychoanalysis with insights into many fields: cultural history, childhood development, the psychology of art, literary criticism, primitive thought, and so on. In short, a sort of many-faceted but not-too-well-organized or self-controlled boy-wonder—an intellectually superior Theodor Reik, so to speak.
    But all these ways of summing up Rank are wrong, and we know that they derive largely from the mythology of the circle of psychoanalysts themselves. They never forgave Rank for turning away from Freud and so diminishing their own immortality-symbol (to use Rank’s way of understanding their bitterness and pettiness). Admittedly, Rank’s Trauma of Birth gave his detractors an easy handle on him, a justified reason for disparaging his stature; it was an exaggerated and ill-fated book that poisoned his public image, even though he himself reconsidered it and went so far beyond it.Not being merely a coworker of Freud, a broad-ranging servant of psychoanalysis, Rank had his own, unique, and perfectly thought-out system of ideas. He knew where he wanted to begin, what body of data he had to pass through, and where it all pointed. He knew these things specifically as regards psychoanalysis itself,