Will Therapy
For Rank, Goethe created the balance of life and art without having to destroy himself to make content. Similar to the title of Safranski’s biography of him, Goethe: Life as a Work of Art, Rank said of Goethe that he “remains, in this regard also, the unparalleled model of a universal genius of the modern age; for he was able to balance the destructive elements in him creatively, by absorbing them into his poetry and his various other constructive activities, and thus to shape his life as an artistic-constructive whole. Other great writers have failed to achieve so complete a harmony, either ruining the artistic build of their lives by Romanticism or leading a philistine existence in order to have enough vitality left over for creation…His work is not only his particular expression of life: it both serves him and helps him to live, and his worth as an artist comes second — or even plays no special part at all.” Safranski described how Goethe blended the rational and romantic, the subjective and objective. Both the Enlightenment and Romantic side worked together. “He took his own creative intelligence as something through which nature could observe itself and poetry produce itself. He always contemplated his subjectivity from an objective standpoint. It is no accident that, in the letters of his final years, he often simply leaves out the first-person pronoun.” When it came to art imitating life or life imitating art, Goethe chose the former. “Poetry was all well and good, but not for leading one’s life. People who knew only about literature knew too little about life…To his delight, he rediscovered the artist in himself: a poet. But the poet not as a Man of Sorrows, a victim in despair among the worldly…but one who rises above [and]…who understands the differences but does not allow them to tear him apart.” Essentially art can be a vehicle for learning, but it can easily devolve into wallowing and regression.
Now what about the consumers of the art? Here Otto mirrors Freud’s Sublimation. “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.” One can enjoy the art as it is, but there can be a hollowness compared to being the person who made the art. Either the art is inspiration for life lessons, or it is just escapism and regression for the audience. When audience members walk out of an artistic experience that is great, they usually gain wisdom in some way. Consuming art a lot can feel regressive in that the same subjects repeat again and again to avoid too much complexity.
As a way to balance off different ways of being free with desire, Rank was not ignorant of meditation practices from the east and west. “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.” He reiterates the same in Truth and Reality, “…We here strike the paradox that the individual wants to prolong the pleasure whose essence lies just in its temporal limitation, which must miscarry in the same way as the shortening of pain, whose essence lies in the prolongation of any psychic state, even one that is pleasurable in the beginning. For pleasure is a certain brevity of consciousness, pain a lengthening of consciousness, at least on the level of neurotic self-consciousness, where consciousness disturbs experience in the form of self-consciousness and guilt consciousness and accordingly the individual wants to be saved from it.” People can try to attain their desires, but pleasure feels more fresh when one is able to let go of the decay of the results of pleasure. “…Pleasure…a brief consciousness of will accomplishment itself.” This is partially why celebration, a prolonging of consciousness, especially a premature celebration, can feel paradoxically not so good. Another way of seeing unnecessary pain is to literally look at how the mind is creating self-conscious pain or other emotional pains and just by witnessing the pain, the lower brain realizes what it’s doing and stops on its own without Ego distractions, denials or avoidances. It sees it’s touching a hot stove top and stops on its own.
Similar to the Pleasure Principle and the Nirvana Principle, Rank sees how individuals need a balance between desire and rest. He calls the contracted state of desire “partialization” and the completion of a goal or a reunion with oneness being a like a “totalist.” Completion, oneness, and totality have a finality to them like death and there is a desire to return to partialization, but too much partialization is exhausting and makes one feel separated and lonely. The mind has trouble being in either state for prolonged periods of time, but they can play off of each other. “…It is the potential restoration of a union with the Cosmos, which once existed and was then lost.” Any attempt at keeping totality or keeping partialization is a form of clinging for Rank, and a failed attempt at eternal salvation.
This value of art, to be like a balance between partialization and totality is explained by Brian Eno in his lecture What Is Art Actually For?, as a balance between control and surrender. Too much surrender means too little activity, and too much activity means no rest. When it comes to a magical way of making everything effortless, like an endless inspiration, to Brian, it’s more of the balance where control can play off of intuition, so one doesn’t have to wait for inspiration, because inspiration needs input from control and decision making to trigger creative intuition. “I stopped believing in inspiration a long time ago. Sometimes you just have to start making something. I still get [inspiration], but I don’t wait for it…We are very bad judges of our internal state.”
Because Psychoanalysis and Buddhism work well together it’s important to look at the importance of choice. The reason why people don’t feel like their mind is just running with things, which normally would be dangerous and pathological, is precisely because the attention span gathers information dualistically, and because of a limited attention span, the mind needs to be able to make considerations, comparisons, and deliberate. The Id needs the Ego to play off of for inspiration and the Id doesn’t make as many specific object choices as one thinks. The Id has a nebulous overall desire and it needs cultural examples to imitate and it throws up options and choices when the Ego takes action, but the intuition doesn’t make the choice like you are an automaton. This is so much so that the mind needs a lot of quieting and relaxation to even allow intuition to arise. Just putting a little effort to direct the attention span towards a choice, and a little effort to take action triggers the intuition to respond to the choice with intuitive suggestions. If the choice is a wrong path, the intuition will more than likely cough up options to turn back or choose a different path.
In Buddhism, the purpose of things like Right Effort, etc., is to see if the choice is worth it by being honest about pain. Authentic feelings of “it’s not worth it” or excitement over a choice are what really motivate each person. The excitement feeling is based on whether something is accessible, pleasurable, and something to look back on with pride or appreciation. In Buddhism, the “it’s not worth it” feeling comes from phenomenological facing of the self-conceptual label. It’s seeing the conceptual self in a bad state and demotivating that dangerous choice. You could take the three characteristics in that practice and meld them with Subject > Object > Time narratives, and the future narrative becomes less compelling compared to enjoying well-being in the senses now. In this case it is Subject (Anatta – not self), Object (Dukkha – dissatisfaction), and Time (Anicca – impermanence). Like touching a hot stove, all that is needed is to the see the pain of contracting over a self-narrative, or partializing, and tuning into what tension and pain is there is often enough for the mind to relinquish clinging, or in Psychoanalysis, relinquish trying to make pleasant experiences last longer or unpleasant experiences to become shorter. Essentially resting in totality. Part of this practice is getting out of the conceptual mind and thinking with the body. You are noticing the depression with any particular rumination in the mind, and checking the body for physical wounds and not finding any. The Psychoanalytic method would include those things but also embrace the emotions related to the self-narrative, express those emotions, listen to them, and then respond with action to avoid any attempts at denial, numbing, and escapism through meditation. A balance and fine tuning between different functions in the brain.
Brian Eno – ‘What is Art actually for?’: https://youtu.be/XIVfwDJ-kDk
In Rank’s Will Therapy, he describes this balance of letting go of clinging, but also of affirming emotions as the best balance for emotional regulation. “…Emotion is either dissipated into impulsive action, or inhibited by will, or is hindered from expression by fear. For the expression of emotion tends always to totality, which means a giving up of self or losing of self, in the last analysis, death. He who does not perceive emotional expression as renunciation, that is, who affirms and does not fear it, will not need to use either a physical or a psychic illness to drain off his emotional life. The utilization of the rich scale of emotions of the human psychic life, with its capacity for feeling pleasure and pain in small doses, is the best guarantee for remaining well and being happy.”
That balance of not meditating too much and not partializing all the time, to regulate emotions, also makes people feel a sense of agency because they can look to their own emotions instead of parental replacements in authority figures. Control and Surrender work together to achieve things and provide rest. The problem of relying on authority figures in religions is the same problem as relying on psychoanalysts. The goal is individual independence balanced with social contracts, but the locus of control is within.
In The Trauma Of Birth, Rank noticed that “in focusing attention analytically on these facts one noticed that people, theoretically and therapeutically entirely uninfluenced, showed from the very beginning of their treatment the same tendency to identify the analytic situation with the intrauterine state…The patients of both sexes identified the analyst with the mother from the beginning in a very decided manner, and in their dreams and reactions they put themselves back again into the position of the unborn. Hence the real transference-libido, which we have to solve analytically in both sexes, is the mother-libido, as it existed in the pre-natal physiological connection between mother and child.”
Being torn away from the mother at birth, is a deeper level of regression that Rank controversially posited as a neurosis that was more fundamental than the Oedipus Complex. The process of analysis continues the same as a gathering of childhood materials, but the therapist at some point provides the suggestion, or it dawns on the analysand, that it all goes back to a desire to rely on a mother and a regression to an infantile dependence. As the mind realizes that at this later age in the patient’s development, that this can never be a possibility, the reliance on the ego, or essentially the reliance on oneself to parent oneself, is the solution. The need of the therapist dissipates and the clinging to transference abates. There’s nothing here magical that will replace the need for self-assertion, or the need for willpower for Rank, and one has to rely on oneself. The trick is to get the analysand to understand this at the right time so that the analysis isn’t ended too soon, which is like another Trauma of Birth, or lasts too long in that mother dependence. “Thus it is the matter of letting the patient, who in his neurosis has fled back to the mother fixation, to repeat and understand the birth trauma and its solution during the analysis in the transference [the trusting of the therapist like a mother], without allowing him the unconscious reproduction of the same in the severance from the analyst.”
The maternal transference is seen by the patient as being projected onto the stranger therapist and the illusion is seen through. The biological mother is either dead at this point in time or too old to really provide any of this healing so the fixation is naturally let go of. “Through the libidinal element in the identification the patient learns to overcome anxiety through the sexual side of the transference. Thus, finally, in therapy the compulsion to repetition of the primal trauma or of the primal situation is removed, in that the direction of the libido is changed in the sense of striving for adjustment.” The clinging outward to a savior is disillusioned and returns inward to rely on one’s own ego, and to power it. “…The patient has finally nothing else to do than to supplement a part of his development which was neglected or lacking…That his Ego is in the position, through identification with the analyst, to overcome the transference these actual libidinal tendencies as well as the regressive maternal tendencies, can be explained from the fact that his Ego from the very beginning was created and developed from the Unconscious for this special task. In analysis this normal means of help to development is then finally strengthened through conscious modification, and the fact of his identification with the analyst is ultimately made conscious to the patient, thereby making him independent of the analyst.”
Object Relations
Otto Rank was one of the early psychoanalysts who expounded on the Object Relation. In The Genesis Of The Object Relation, Rank provides his own Neo-Freudian developmental theory where the sense of self and boundaries are demarcated, and where the child treats the breast as belonging to its self and then has to gradually accept the independence of the mother, but not without making a copy of the mother, and eventually copies of others, in the mind. “…In the relation of object to ego, the object is invested with libido originally transferred from the ego to the mother and later taken back into the ego…But, more important still, it explains the relation of the ego to other human beings in love and social life.” The sense of “mine” pervades objects as well. We want the real people to behave the way we manipulate their object copies in our minds to make them pleasing for us. Objects are not the actual person but a memory of them. They get manipulated in the mind as the mind tries to understand and predict behavior, but it also has an emotional investment in that relationship. “The withdrawal of the object leads, as we have seen, to the search for a substitute in one’s own ego, but, on the other hand, every object cathexis [emotional investment] definitely contains ego elements.” When meditating one can see a point of view, an emotional investment, and sometimes even a vision of oneself in relation to that other person. How we want them to behave or how we defend against their independent behavior if it’s threatening to our interests. When the actual people withdraw, the mind looks for substitutes, and the old objects in the mind become a world map to navigate with. This is partly why our life experience and education often tell us more about ourselves, what we imitated from culture, and what we read, than our projections and predictions can explain accurately what the “the real world” is like. We also take on the roles of others unconsciously when there is a vacuum of their real life presence, through absence or death.
The object can be a good mother with positive transference, or a depriving mother with a negative transference. “We have shown how a substitute for the good mother—the mother as the source of pleasure gratification—is sought on one’s own body by sucking or masturbation or, later on, psychically in one’s own ego. At the same time, the depriving mother is set up in the child’s ego, through identification with maternal inhibitions, as a feared and punishing element, which manifests itself as anxiety or guilt-feeling.” Someone good was there and when they are gone the brain looks for positive replacements and sets up defenses against negative behavior. Over time the child looks at the father as the possessor of the mother and then a transference of rivalry can move from the mother to the father and siblings. When the negative transference moves to the father and siblings then the boy can bring back the memories of the good mother, which is needed to then transfer those positive expectations towards a mate. “By contrast, the girl on the way to her Oedipus situation again finds the interfering, denying mother, and she gradually has to learn to find in her father a substitute for the pleasure-giving mother or breast. This comes about through equation of breast and penis, which presupposes a displacement from above downward and with it a reestablishment in the vagina of the original, oral sucking activity.”
The Oedipus Complex begins with the good and bad mother, gets split onto a mother and father, typically on gender opposite lines, and then those mental predictions project onto the population, when the child is old enough to be concerned with worldly life. “The Oedipus situation compels the child to project onto both sexes the ambivalent attitude that originally referred to the mother only. The child has already built up this ambivalence in its ego as narcissism and guilt-feeling.” Otto talks of an unburdening that happens when the sense of lack, and he borrows Ferenczi’s “object hunger” to describe it, unburdens on others when those others become replacements for lost object relations in the past. These new relationships create a new strata of development overtop the original ones in childhood and one can regress back or develop forward. How psychoanalysts are able to learn about people is to view their object hunger in how they are treated by the patient. “One can, so to speak, unburden oneself in the love relation because one objectifies parts of one’s own ego in the partner…The aim of this unburdening is not merely reestablishment of the Oedipus situation as such, or even reestablishment of the original libido relation to the mother, as analysis of the neurosis undoubtedly teaches us. It also serves to relieve the ego of anxiety and guilt-feeling. This tendency of the ego to seize every available opportunity to unload itself of inner tensions through the object relation shows us that the ego is, as it were, built up against its own will, by necessity, as a result of deprivations. And it shows us, too, that the ego is always ready to unravel its structure in object relations as soon as it finds suitable objects and situations.” This is like his earlier “deposit” where one can co-develop with the partner in reciprocity, in ideal circumstances, or it can turn into pathological exploitation, where the “deposit” is like a soiling on the floor and the partner has to clean it up. There’s always a mixture of the co-operative and exploitative tendencies in all intimate relationships, and worldly ones. People can agree to clean up each other’s deposits, but it’s hard to balance that out when people are at different skills levels and physical health. When people can develop themselves with others, the relationship can proceed in a less parasitical fashion.
Use Somebody – Kings Of Leon: https://youtu.be/gnhXHvRoUd0
When there’s a lack of stability in the ego, partially to deprivations, abuse, and many imbalances in parenting, spoiling, smothering, and treating children as a trophy, the object relations can require unsuitable unburdening onto the general population as well. With narcissism, people are so untrustworthy, they appear only as a threat, useful, or useless. In paranoia, the lack of trust can project a prediction that doesn’t the match behavior of people in the actual social circle. Extreme forms of object relations can make healthy social relations impossible. To prevent too much blame on the parents, Rank views the Oedipus situation as not necessarily the actual personality of the parent, but it explains what the child’s ego was trying to gain from the parent. The child needs to be able to partially exaggerate good and bad qualities in parents who are mixed with good and bad in order to move expectations from one parent to another, or to the general population of authority figures, and then find a role in society with a myriad of identities. The parasitical attitude towards the parents ideally wears off so that one can take care of oneself by joining the economy. It’s a goal orientation to focus on what is good in the goal while ignoring negative attributes, because they are not a priority for that goal at that time. It’s the goal that partializes the environment, which excludes elements in totality.
Object relations explain partly the parent’s personality, but also how one’s own ego was trying to solve problems of gratification in relation to the parents and eventually others. “In general the boy, as we have said, has to find at the Oedipus situation, the bad mother in father, irrespective of whether or not his father is strict. The boy must, so to speak, make his father bad, in order to keep his picture of the good mother clear.” There’s a natural scapegoating to achieve the goals of the child to maintain love attention between mother and child. One of the examples is the typical explanation of homosexuality in psychoanalysis. If the parent IS actually all bad, there’s nothing left to preserve outwardly and it has to be generated inwardly. “In the boy, for instance, an especially intense disappointment in his mother will have as its consequence an inability to make an adequate displacement of the image of the bad mother onto his father. In life, too, he will continually have to look for and find the bad mother, which may lead to being repelled by women and attracted to men. Playing the part of the good mother himself, he will either love himself solely and narcissistically or look for the good mother in other men. The same is true for the girl, who, as a result of holding on too tightly to the depriving mother, comes to play the ideal mother toward other girls—in whom she loves herself.” Like Freud’s To Be or To Have, the child has to take the place of what was lost. “Individual character types and behavior can thus be explained according to whether an individual plays in life the good mother or looks for her in the object.”
This utilitarian attitude in object relations leads to Rank’s theory on social guilt because of how parents, siblings, and then the general public are used and treated. People aren’t just venting but they are using you to unburden themselves, and if they have a moral compass, they experience guilt for the said manipulating. “All these negative emotional relations, which play such a large part in the love life, are intelligible only as attempts to solve conflicts in the ego, which seeks to free itself from inner tensions and inhibitions…At the same time, such attempts at freeing bring a new, secondary guilt-feeling with them, since the moral ego cannot bear the idea of making use of ‘the other’ (in the Kantian sense) as a means to an end…Guilt-feeling betrays the important role played by the ego in object relations: some guilt-feeling is present in all love relations.” Rank connects this guilt with how one can feel a sense of having used another person in orgasm and that guilt can also connect with guilt over masturbation prohibition from back in early childhood.
Some of the early methods of detecting the severity of narcissism has to do with ego frustrations, defenses and responses to those early situations. “The degree of narcissism is a decisive factor in these later object relations, since it determines whether the original object is sought and found or whether one’s own ego is objectified.” So the new relationship can be a re-establishment of those early relationships in reciprocity in development or exploitation in the aggrandizement of one’s own ego. Working with people or using them. In a healthy person, one either creates a healthy bond re-created from the past, develops a new bond that is healthier, or like in narcissism one brings up defenses to try to control the relationship to meet one’s own needs, leading to boundary violations based on an extreme sense of utilitarianism towards others. Development of one partner beyond another can also be a sense of threat and insecurity that can lead to over-compensation. There’s always a sense of self-interest, concern, and prediction/projection, with relationships. “…In every object choice and love relation the two components, object and ego, are operative side by side…The greatest difficulties in the real love choice are to be explained by these two tendencies working against each other and also that most love conflicts arise when development of the ego disturbs a previously gratifying object relation.” When partnerships, teams, and businesses are able to develop together, kind of like friendships that develop when things are tough, harmony increases. When there are mismatches in skills and development, and there is an opposite movement of development in one partner and regression in another, relationships usually end.
In the situations of masculinity and femininity, the example Rank provides again are about boys, and children in this theory are looking to take the place of others, originally their parents. Freud’s To be or To Have connects with rivalry. The boy in his example envies the father’s possession of the mother and wants to take his place and sends hostility his way. The Super-ego imitates the masculine tone in this case. That desire makes him want to be in the place of the father which targets the mother as desirable. It’s a precursor for masculine rivalry to fight over a woman. It also provides the skills for protecting women as well. In reality, a person can be a fighter and a lover. If the hatred remains in the boy for the bad mother, then there is nothing to Have and so one can Be the mother in order to preserve the missing feminine energy. For Rank, this is a denial of reality, because it’s an idealized image of the actual person, and it contains a repressed hostility that causes problems in real relationships towards women when suppressed revenge towards the bad mother is transferred onto women. “In such cases it is the task of therapy to bring the patient to recognize this primal image of the bad mother, whom he tries to deny by himself playing the part of the ideal, good mother. This succeeds only if he can work off his suppressed revenge toward the strict mother in the analytic situation, instead of in a real relation to the woman.” A lot of psychoanalysis is about finding a place in society and it doesn’t allow for one to not be in the masculine or feminine role. The improbable idealistic parent to Be in this imitation, of the lost so called “good mother,” ends up being the mother that behaves perfectly to one’s own desire without deprivation. Not the realistic good enough mother in reality. In early psychoanalysis, there’s a concern that the boy or girl may turn into a homosexual because of hatred of the lost good mother and a desire to take on the missing role in worldly life. The key to this system is the Darwinian need to fulfill roles for survival. It’s survival connected with sex. Each person has a mixture of masculine and feminine, through genetics, and developmental experiences, which adds needed flexibility in life and goes counter to the cartoonish masculine and feminine examples in culture, like Leonidas in 300, or the helpless princess motif in so many stories. This isn’t to denigrate masculine and feminine roles, since there’s been recent backlash against traditional gender norms, and there should be a respect for the enormous power these archetypal ideas have because of how they trigger gender specific hormones and procreation. The provider. The nurturer, etc.
300: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAacE5ukzrs
Green Finch and Linnet Bird – Sweeney Todd: https://youtu.be/O-K3m-KJV3s
Johanna – Sweeney Todd: https://youtu.be/4yFPYFcVZfE
Psychoanalysis – Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gvgq7-psychoanalysis-sigmund-freud-and-beyond.html
Later psychoanalytic theories, in this century, try to embrace a genderless approach to allow this complexity, so that can’t be lost on the development throughout the 20th century in these reviews which almost exclusively focused on the etiology of pathology. It’s a cause and effect style that serves well in certain situations but it’s a case by case basis where theories may resonate with some people’s experiences but conversely not for others. New theories are then created for genuine experiences left out. There is also heterosexual and homosexual transferences that psychologists have where they may pollute the therapeutic experience with their own agendas. There are those who think that homosexuals need to be rescued from their plight and become heterosexual, by dropping the good mother role and looking for it in a woman, in the male homosexual example, or that a patient needs to come out of the closest. This often can keep bisexual people stuck having to choose between one identity and another while ignoring their own libido, which is a form of erasure and adds to pathologies where people only do things because of what authority figures say. People only need cultural examples for their own deliberation, and their own authentic experiences from having tried on different roles. There is also an ignorance of sexuality when it comes to love and tenderness in relationships. A homosexual or a heterosexual act that is mainly lust and devoid of love and tenderness isn’t the same as something more emotionally fulfilling. Helping people to remove compensations that impede the way to one sexuality or another is different because there is an authentic desire buried underneath trauma. On the other hand manipulating authentic desires is just another form of trauma, which is why rigid identities need to soften to allow for the varieties of experience, and changes over time that people actually go through and can be seen in psychology case studies that don’t fit labels.
There are also complexities where the man is actually the good mother and the wife wears the pants in a reverse heterosexuality. There are also complications based on when a parent is lost through divorce, death, or neglect. These situations can happen at different developmental stages for a child and have more or less intense effects. One may simply miss the good mother or father and take on their aspects without it completely taking over one’s identity. If a mother is missing due to death, abandonment, or neglect, the child unconsciously starts to take on the role of mother. The same goes for missing a father and taking on the father role. It’s way of creating one’s own comfortable psychological “home” and is a part of that nostalgic feeling that haunts people’s lives when they experience turbulence, competition, rejection, and alienation in adult life. They yearn for a stable home somewhere. Nature abhors a vacuum and has to fill the emotionally empty gap, and for some the gap can’t be filled and it’s just emptiness that one has to live with and vent out over time. Musicians and artists often use this personal material in artistic projection, and often in moving fashion, and great accuracy. A good example of this is Bono from U2, where the early death of his mother haunts many of his songs. One of the many examples is Lemon. “So it was a very strange experience to receive, in the post, from a very distant relative, Super 8 footage of my mother, aged 24, younger than me, playing a game of rounders in slow motion. This beautiful, young Irish girl, with a narrow waist, curvaceous figure, dark gypsy hair. The film was early color and it looked extraordinary. It was a wedding, where she was the maid of honor in this beautiful lemon dress…There were two things going on at once, memory and loss, a portrait of a girl in a shimmering lemon dress that kept it sexy and playful and the pathos of a man separated from the things he loves… ‘Lemon’ is about leaving home, versus not leaving home.” The emptiness of a lost mother motivates the man in this example to rebuild the woman in “banks” and “cathedrals,” to create art as a primal scream therapy, because the “midnight” of the unconscious is where the “day” begins for the adult. Endless searching for a new home is a recreation of the old one to repair the past, so that home is with you wherever you go and the emptiness trails along. New partners appear in that projection with the hope that it will fill the emptiness with varying results.
The fun of Psychoanalysis is the depth that it goes into, like exploring a waking slumber and truly waking up the individual to the unconscious nudges and pulls of the survival drive that motivates conscious behaviour. Being able to see that “oh, I REALLY miss my Mom,” and to release the emotion is a form of freedom through understanding. When one takes on the feminine role there’s also criticism for the masculine role as seen in songs from U2 like Invisible, Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own, and Love And Peace Or Else. Bono opines that, “so many rock ‘n’ rollers write from a place of abandonment to a place of abandonment… In hip hop, it’s often the father. But in rock, it’s often enough the mother, even if the mother just passes away too early for adolescence to wear itself out…” The projection of resentment towards people in power, often the father, starts with criticism of authoritative parents, because from the vantage point of the good mother object in the mind, it demands a perfect father to match the perfect mother archetype in the mind, and then transfers that to authorities in society. When the father is missing, one can take on the perfect father archetype, that no real person is, and demand a perfect mother. Eminem in My Mom, shows his resentment for abusive parenting while at the same time feeling a sense of guilt at lashing out, and in the end she is the only mom he has. All these songs, including very critical ones, have a sense of “I miss you Dad. I miss you Mom!” This was cathartically performed by John Lennon in Mother, influenced by his primal scream therapy he was undergoing at the time.
In Rank’s theory, he takes Freud’s idea that in homosexual inclinations “one loves oneself in the same sex, as one’s mother loved (or should have loved) one,” and adds more. “However, this is only one form of narcissistic object choice: the ego phenomena lying at its base is just as active as in the heterosexual object relation. In order to understand this, one must go beyond the libidinal explanation. It then becomes evident not only that one always looks for, or hopes to find, the ideal mother or the ideal ego in the love object, which is always chosen narcissistically, but that object relations in general are a kind of dumping ground for outworn phases of one’s own ego development. It may be a matter of wanting to find again the ‘original’ object or one’s own ego, at another time of wanting the ‘idealized’ object or ego or even the ‘depreciated’ object or ego. This last case, that of seeking the ‘despised’ object or ego, which is so important for an understanding of pathogenic development, makes it clear that all object relations represent attempts to solve ego conflicts.” How one could look for a depreciated object is the fact that there is stress in self-development, and people with weaker skills can feel more comfortable to be around because they are less threatening, even though development through relationships is the ideal. Sometimes mutual regression feels better in the short-term.
U2 Lemon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEcx9F_FW2U
Songfacts – Lemon: https://www.songfacts.com/facts/u2/lemon
U2 Iris (Hold Me Close): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GAbVK8pZmU
U2 Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_VHA0WsRUQ
U2 Love And Peace Or Else: https://youtu.be/C1htoqWPVus
U2 You’re Song Saved My Life: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfGRZe6rdZw
U2 Invisible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajVoeX4eqIQ
Bono on John Lennon’s Mother: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/bono-60-songs-that-saved-my-life-999226/patti-smith-people-have-the-power-999237/
Eminem My Mom: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3j2DwztCFU
Wyclef Jean New Day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXeiHQrStTs
Beatles Julia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgylB7SSrkU
John Lennon – Mother: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPYsMM1FvXs
Mother – Roger Waters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lCFaSL9aSE
Kelly Clarkson Piece by Piece: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqCqYP7hDWI&t=6s
Marvin Gaye Save The Children: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1KqO8YtXlY
Nas – Bridging the Gap (Video) ft. Olu Dara: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hq7z3JBKCTE
Modern music also betrays a sense of nostalgia where music from parents becomes inspiration for the children who listened to it in that cozy home environment, if it was cozy, and that aura of stability in a comfortable home. A “Golden Age” of regression. For example, some modern music sounds like those artists have just stepped out of a time machine from 1985. One wonders when the children of grunge parents will re-usher that resentment, rage, low self-esteem, contempt, and a reminder that not everyone is alright, that we saw in the early 90’s. Each generation is trying to borrow identities from culture, like trying on different clothes, to find a good fit authentically, and thereby accidently bumping into competition with older generations, who fear being replaced, and there is an overall struggle to maintain a sense of True Self in harmony with the world, and the world pushes back.
M83 – Graveyard Girl: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MytGLO7iqhI
M83 – Kim and Jessie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_9EQenu8mQ
M83 – New Map: https://youtu.be/vbdJE65uy1Y
The Weeknd – Blinding Lights: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NRXx6U8ABQ
The Weeknd – I Feel It Coming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFLhGq0060w
The Weeknd – Out of Time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fDzCWNS3ig
Rihanna – Kiss It Better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49lY0HqqUVc
The Arcade Fire – Modern Man: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_0PhRlfjas
Nirvana – Smells Like Teen Spirit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTWKbfoikeg
Hole – Retard Girl: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pE_IHgEGLsU
Like an imposition on another person through “deposits,” we can reward and be attracted to what makes us look good in the other person, typical of societal demands for success. There are also “deposits” from culture that provide predefined sex roles for people who would be misfits under those expectations. “As a male I need you to be this way. As a female I need you to be that way, to achieve such and such collective goal.” This is expressed the most in relationships between parents and children. “In the most favorable cases, the ego grows and develops in biological harmony with and for one’s children, in whom one deposits large parts of one’s past (depreciated) and future (ideal) ego development. At the same time parents enable children, through identification, to develop their own egos and to build up their own ego structure. Every object relation nevertheless holds destructive elements within it, since the deposit of overcome and renounced ego phases always involves a breaking up and reorganization of the ego structure, which we know and fear as the destructive side of love.” Children then develop some of the same strengths and weaknesses of their parents and have to learn to develop what is missing or find it in other people, and hence a reason to expand individual psychology to include family and cultural influences that can sometimes be left a mystery in therapy and in turn lead to stalemates in individual analysis.
What an Object-Relation understanding does is it helps to shine a light on psychological exploitation and to find opportunities to renegotiate relationships into one’s that allow mutual development. This can apply to intimate relationships or any other relationships. “What parents have to learn—in their own interest and that of their children—is to resist the temptation to exploit this natural position of power in an emotional sense. Practically, it may not always be possible, as the child’s ego becomes stronger and tries to enforce itself on parents. But, as a rule, this form of misbehavior in the child is already a reaction to parental tyranny. When the child feels itself understood and loved, it will have no need of enforcing itself as a powerful factor against parents or brothers and sisters. In a word, the pedagogic situation must be transformed and developed into a mutual emotional relationship in which parents and children grow up with—and develop—one another.” Rank’s description of love is the ability to identify and expand the ego with the other, but of course this can break apart when predictable exploitation arises. Relationships can easily build and fall apart between the love feeling and the “Thou” psychology that Rank posits as self-interest.
“Love abolishes egoism, it merges the self in the other to find it again enriched in one’s own I. This unique projection and introjection of feeling rests on the fact that one can really only love the one who accepts our own self as it is, indeed will not have it otherwise than it is, and whose self we accept as it is. At the same time, however, we do not hold firmly onto this self. We develop it by means of identification and form ourselves according to the ideal of the Thou. This conforming to the love ideal of the Thou does not occur, however, through conscious work of adjustment, indeed is not to be attained at all by this means but occurs emotionally through identification, [inspirational imitation of others]…Perhaps love feeling even creates the ability to identify; it certainly increases it. In this sense love feeling would be the gate to the world of reality. It begins in the child’s feeling toward its mother. In all its manifestations, it proves to be decisive for our relationship to the outer world. However, study of the love feeling teaches us that this feeling is something that rests absolutely on reciprocity…When the function of feeling for uniting and identifying has failed—there results the ‘pathological’ expression of feelings that I call affect. It may be that there is no real feeling of reciprocity, or it may also be that we cannot establish it by means of inner substitution…The term affect I want to reserve for expression of the feeling of separation. With such separating affects as anxiety, hate, anger, or annoyance goes admission that the uniting force is not present or has failed. But, at the same time, the affect tries to deny even the tendency, the attempt, to unite— indeed, as it were, tries to deny the object itself.” For Rank, identity is synonymous with unity and affect with separation, including the in between feelings of longing and hope with the latter.
When separation occurs the denial appears to try and prevent a normal expression of grieving, like when being dumped from a relationship. Identification, through creating an internal identity, that doesn’t manifest in a real way from without, that denies the situation, leads to a denial of feelings and reality. The denial of a healthy expression of feelings, and accepting that one has feelings, is mystifying to Rank, but I think it can betray a fear of being vulnerable around others, because vulnerability tends to be attacked. There is also a knowing that connection with others presupposes a limitation of development that is like a prison. “The emotional solution of his conflicts consists in canceling the denial of his whole emotional life. That is, in the analytic situation, he has to admit that he has feelings and, moreover, admit this not only emotionally but also verbally. In doing so, at the same time, he cancels the blocking of his emotions, which he learns to express at least verbally. The therapeutic significance of this emotional release lies in the fact that the patient learns to express feelings without having them reciprocated, just as a means of self-expression. He learns to renounce the establishment of identity, and this enables him to accept the different one, the other, as an object…He learns to accept the fact that not everything is the ego, that there is also a Thou or other egos whom he has to accept without wanting to destroy or devour them.” Without acceptance of those feelings, one can easily go into narcissism and create a false narrative of superiority, or go into masochism and denigrate oneself too far to the point that one sabotages oneself or fails to take care of oneself because the false identity is that one doesn’t deserve it. Shame and guilt feelings between separation and unity can then be a limbo region that becomes a common emotional everyday influence. There are similarities to religions from east and west with psychoanalysis, but their contribution is to accept separation emotions and emotions of unity and to learn from those emotions. “…We cannot entirely remove the cause of emotional suffering— even when we find it—because suffering is in the nature of human emotional life. The emotional life itself is full of suffering and pain, and therefore it can be only a question of the more or less. To want to prevent emotional suffering would be to uproot the emotional life, as the Indian doctrine of healing attempts in practice, the Christian doctrine in certain of its dogmas, and the psychotic in his deadened emotions.”
There’s a reduction of clinging in the meditative style in that one doesn’t try to make emotions last longer than they need to, but one feels the emotions and expresses them more freely. “Cathartically liberating therapy is uniting, seeks and finds the same emotions in the Thou, in one’s fellow beings, and thus share with them both suffering and joy…Psychotherapy again gives both—namely pleasure and pain—without doing away with conflict, without making pleasure undesirable, without making pain avoidable…What this guidance can and should have as its aim is not removal of the cause of suffering, the emotional life, but to make means of expression accessible to the emotional life, or to provide them…Denial of emotional suffering does not remove it but produces new suffering—which has to be numbed by ecstasy. Ecstasy again leads to catharsis and this again establishes a state of painful tension after a temporary alleviation…What can be done therapeutically, in essence, is chiefly one thing: to enable the patient free expression of his emotions at least in speech and so to give externally a certain discharge of affect.”
Similar to Freud’s deadline he gave to “The Wolfman,” Rank would add a loose deadline based on the patient’s displays of independence. It’s timed in such a way that the analysis doesn’t turn into a reliance on transference to the analyst, but movement towards emotional freedom. “Briefly the analysis should and must lead the patient beyond the stages of projection and identification to the development of personality, the first and most important accomplishment of which is the creation of his own analysis. The patient himself carries out the analytic task, corresponding in each case to his own type…The analysis can and should be made a personal creation of the patient’s, which he then accepts without guilt feeling and without extreme reactions, as his own accomplishment—indeed as an expression of his own newly created personality…It seems that our true self is the emotional self that is not expressed but rather is hidden. This true emotional self again seems to be closely connected with the biological I.”
The ‘Wolfman’ Part 1 – Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gucp1-case-studies-the-wolf-man-13-freud-and-beyond.html
The True Self for Rank then moves beyond the individual’s ability to express emotion, but to find others who authentically express emotion and find mutual love and care. The love bolsters self-esteem in both lovers. The only way then in dealing with separation is to be authentic with emotions, including the feeling of loss, and then connect with others where reciprocity can be developed again. “…A satisfactory love life, of which none of the three types is capable, unites all three factors in a harmonious way. The impulse-life is satisfied in sex, the individual will fulfills itself in the choice and creative transformation of the mate, while fear is overcome by the love emotion.” Connecting a True Self of emotional expressivity with an authentic intimate partner and with authentic gainful employment is the ideal situation. You like your spouse, you like your kids, you like your job, and you like your hobbies, but Rank accepted that it is an ideal to aim at and with most people there can only be an approximation at best because stable reciprocity is difficult to achieve. Psychoanalysis is also not a cure all. Rank explains the bounds and limits of Psychoanalytic success: “We are all always far too ‘theoretical,’ and are inclined to think that knowledge alone makes us virtuous. That is not the case, as Psychoanalysis has proved. Knowledge is something entirely different from the healing factor. The depths of the Unconscious can, according to the latter’s very nature, be changed just as little as the other organs necessary for life. The only result we can attain in Psychoanalysis is a changed attitude of the Ego to the Unconscious…The sphere in which Psychoanalysis can be therapeutically effective includes all those cases in which it is a question of so regulating the relation of the Ego to the Unconscious, that through an adequate distribution of libido and anxiety, there results a harmonious relationship which we denote as normal adjustment.”
Psychoanalysis is this compromise between the individual and society, and in a way Psychoanalysis is trying to reclaim Life for the analysand. There’s a deep need for attention, to find confirmation in a partner that one is attractive and desirable. When people are misfits, there’s a self-hatred and a desire to lash out for relief. So much of the reasons for wars, revolutions, addictions, depression, and suicides stems from this lack of self-acceptance. Even art becomes a way for the artists to resonate with people who feel bad about themselves and to make them feel justified or distracted by a different topic that is more entertaining. Maybe they can succeed in cheering them up, and like the clichéd songs that implore one to “hold on” and that “you are not alone,” there’s an attempt at psychological normalization. Then the idea of messing up your life becomes attractive because through that material, the audience can defend their idol who’s splashed up on tabloids, because in a way by defending them they are defending themselves. The limitation of normalization in modern society is that it relies too much on outward confirmation, and regression. A healthier approach, and more authentic would be to be accepting of oneself when one is alone and to partner up with those that are also self-accepting. The foundation of authenticity in a True Self, where emotions are recognized and worked through without needing external objects to self-regulate, and without using partners as a crutch, or an idol celebrity, or a professional, like a psychoanalyst. True Self self-esteem is needed, because if you don’t feel good about yourself enough to take care of yourself, who else is going to?
Everybody Hurts – REM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rOiW_xY-kc
The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank – Liberman, James E.: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781421403540/
Art and Artist – Otto Rank: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780393305746/
A Psychology Of Difference – Otto Rank: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780691044705/
Psychology and the Soul – Otto Rank: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781891396618/
The Trauma Of Birth – Otto Rank: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781578989768/
Truth and Reality – Otto Rank: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780393008999/
Will Therapy – Otto Rank: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780393008982/
Psychology: https://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/