Art and the Canvas of the Self: Otto Rank and Creative Transcendence

In obedience to the momentum of his own creativity, Otto Rank thrust, himself out of Freud's orbit, taking with him the seeds of understanding of the human will that would later come to fruition in his major work, Art and Artist.1 It is particularly with this work, and that of Psychology and [the Belief in] the Soul,2 that Rank brings to full voice the triumph of the human creative will over the acknowledgement of the finiteness of biological existence. Rank's theory of will,3,4 first stated as a dialectic against the primacy of Freud's instinctual biologism, and as an expression of Rank's personal awareness of the struggle for individuation, also becomes in the later works the realization of the need of the human spirit to conquer the knowledge of the necessity of death. Rank's formulation of the psychological relationship between creativity and the longing for immortality entailed not only the removal of creativity from the domination of the sexual drive, but the removal of the “self” from the domination of destructiveness inherent in Freud's death instinct.5,6,7

This paper, a tribute to Rank on the occasion of the centenary of his birth, examines the phenomena of artistic productivity, creativity, and neurosis in relation to the human will. Although Rank denied that either instinct or neurosis was the causal factor in creativity, paradoxically it is by understanding the interrelationship of creativity and neurosis in his work that we can arrive at a more precise understanding of each. Whereas in Freudian theory a conflict of instinctual origin had been considered the causal factor in neurosis, Rank understood neurosis as a conflict due to a failure of separation and individuation and a resulting failure to express the will of the self creatively.