I probably have posted something along these lines before, but I have been chewing on these ideas again lately in my normal pattern of bubbling, pulsing angst so I thought some of you might find them interesting as concepts.
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Personality Theories of Otto Rank
Life and death
Another interesting idea Rank introduced was the contest between life and death. He felt we have a “life instinct” that pushes us to become individuals, competent and independent, and a “death instinct” that pushes us to be part of a family, community, or humanity. We also feel a certain fear of these two. The “fear of life” is the fear of separation, loneliness, and alienation; the “fear of death” is the fear of getting lost in the whole, stagnating, being no-one.
Our lives are filled with separations, beginning with birth. Rank’s earliest work, in fact, concerned birth trauma, the idea that the anxiety experienced during birth was the model for all anxiety experienced afterwards. After birth, there’s weaning and discipline and school and work and heartbreaks…. But avoiding these separations is, literally, avoiding life and choosing death — never finding out what you can do, never leaving your family or small town, never leaving the womb!
So we must face our fears, recognizing that, to be fully developed, we must embrace both life and death, become individuals and nurture our relationships with others.
The artist
Rank also tackles the difficult issue of artistic creativity. On the one hand, Rank says, the artist has a particularly strong tendency towards glorification of his own will. Unlike the rest of us, he feels compelled to remake reality in his own image. And yet a true artist also needs immortality, which he can only achieve by identifying himself with the collective will of his culture and religion. Good art could be understood as a joining of the material and the spiritual, the specific and the universal, or the individual and humanity.
This joining doesn’t come easily, though. It begins with the will, Rank’s word for the ego, but an ego imbued with power. We are all born with a will to be ourselves, to be free of domination. In early childhood, we exercise our will in our efforts to do things independently of our parents. Later, we fight the domination of other authorities, including the inner authority of our sexual drives. How our struggle for independence goes determines the type of person we become. Rank describes three basic types:
First, there is the adapted type. These people learn to “will” what they have been forced to do. They obey authority, their society’s moral code, and, as best as they can, their sexual impulses. This is a passive, duty-bound creature that Rank suggests is, in fact, the average person.
Second, there is the neurotic type. These people have a much stronger will than the average person, but it is totally engaged in the fight against external and internal domination. They even fight the expression of their own will, so there is no will left over to actually do anything with the freedom won. Instead, they worry and feel guilty about being so “willful.” They are, however, at a higher level of moral development than the adapted type.
Third, there is the productive type, which Rank also refers to as the artist, the genius, the creative type, the self-conscious type, and, simply, the human being. Instead of fighting themselves, these people accept and affirm themselves, and create an ideal, which functions as a positive focus for will. The artist creates himself or herself, and then goes on to create a new world as well.
When I got into counseling a number of years ago, the first thing my therapist did was to get out a piece of paper and draw a line. On one end she wrote “safety,” on the other, “danger”. Then, under “safety,” she added “death,” and under “danger,” she wrote “life”. Kind of simplistic, I know, but it really made me think and I will never forget that. I was something I especially needed to hear; I was having profound anxiety problems and generally retreating from the world. I still have something of a tendency to want to hide from the dangers of life, and I remind myself of the death/safety vs. life/danger opposition often.