Otto Rank (1884 – 1939)
Like many early psychologists, Otto Rank read from philosophy that was already starting to turn inward toward the unconscious, and he was inspired by a certain Sigmund Freud who seemed to have all of the answers. Being in close proximity to Freud by being in Vienna, there was a meeting and Otto’s life changed forever. Unlike Karl Abraham, Otto Rank worked with Freud for sometime, but then had to split off and move into his own right, even if that meant he was relegated to the shadows. Despite Otto’s pariah status throughout the years, he lived a vigorous professional life, and like Sándor Ferenczi, both Neo-Freudians moved more from theory into therapy. These moves were entirely what should be expected when theories are created, which is that they will eventually be tested and altered with the clinical results. Despite the differences between later psychoanalyst’s, there was a common theme in supporting emotional freedom and developing a True Self. Rank carved out his own path which predicted advances in Object Relations, Person-Centered Therapy, and Existential Therapy. He also brought more emphasis back on the influence of the mother on child development.
Like all other originators of a psychological movement, their personalities reflect themselves in the theories and the insights gleaned from therapeutic work. When James Liberman, in Acts Of Will, spoke to former patients of Rank’s, one woman described meeting him and was surprised to see “a small man with a potbelly, his thick glasses made his eyes look as though they were bulging. Then after a short while with him I forgot all about that. His personality became so important…[He once said] ‘I never try to cure. I utilize the neurosis’…With Rank there was no dogma. Everything was open from minute to minute. Nothing was imposed on you. Rank was not looking for disease, he was not trying to eradicate anything. He wanted you to open up and be as you might want to be but didn’t dare to. He had an overwhelming force but it did not take away from anything else – it gave you a force of your own. Talking about my husband (who was also in treatment with Rank) he said, ‘You might not like what he turns out to be.’ I felt this as a subtle suggestion to let go of any preconceived idea of what he was. I must allow the process of finding out to go forward without imposing any restraint on it.” Liberman described this type of therapy more like a psychopoiesis, a creativity added to personality development.
Otto was born on April 22, 1884 to parents Simon and Karoline Fleischner Rosenfeld. He lived with his family in an apartment in Vienna in the Leopoldstadt area which was the main location where Jewish immigrants settled in the city. The child went through diseases such as the measles, diptheria, and rheumatic fever, which had an effect throughout his life. Otto had a close relationship to his mother who focused on the children’s wellbeing, as to be expected, and he described his brother Paul as being a very optimistic type. Otto’s father was described as an alcoholic who was quiet before drinking and boisterous afterwards. The brothers had a lot of independence and would push back on the father. His elder brother Paul was chosen for more academic ambitions leaving Otto to educate himself, which often turns out to be the best education. As time passed Otto grew into a more solitary life. “…I have learned that friends are mostly props or burdens, in either case bad.” Otto was more curious about older generations than his brother, but unfortunately that trust was taken advantage of when he was seduced by a man at the age of 7, which could easily have influenced a desire for him to look at friendship with a diminished trust. It appears to be a common experience for many children who become psychoanalysts, and Arturo Ezquerro researched “Simon Partridge [who] collected evidence that before his third birthday Freud was sexually stimulated by his nanny, one of his attachment figures, in a completely inappropriate way. Tschan pointed out that there are good grounds to believe that a number of leading early psychoanalysts (including Melanie Klein, Carl Jung, Otto Rank, Wilhelm Reich and Sandor Ferenczi) were sexually abused as children to different degrees.”
Certainly within all psychoanalysis, or most talking therapies, there’s an underlying mistrust of social influences and analysts level piercing critiques of power and its uses, and ironically scandals in psychoanalysis itself, another form of power differential, was no different. There’s a desire to find personal freedom from social constraints in all these therapies. Yet social constraints can give way to inspirational choices in the form of self-learning. Doing things because you want to versus doing things because you were manipulated to. Despite Otto’s lack of high academics, he was well read and the authors he encountered included Schopenhauer, Ibsen, Schiller, Stendahl, Dostoevsky, Wedekind, and later Nietzsche, Weininger, and Freud. Otto Rosenfeld adopted a pen name Rank from Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, and he declared himself an agnostic since he lived in a non-religious family. Changing a name also helped in dealing with social stigma in the social and occupational arenas as many Jewish people felt they had to do in order to advance. In a way this is a little like Otto’s later therapies where personality can develop along individual lines outside of traditional culture.
Naturally a background like this would look congenial to Sigmund Freud. Anaïs Nin recalled Rank’s description of their first meeting. “…He was taken by a friend to Dr. Adler because of lung trouble, where Otto spoke so thoughtfully of Freud that Adler brought him to the Professor, whose pupil Rank became in 1905.” Freud thought Rank’s manuscript displayed an “unusual comprehension.”
What Otto didn’t realize was that he was embarking on a difficult excursion where what was expected was a forum for free intellectual discourse, when in fact it was anything but. Scientists in more traditional physical studies eventually learn that originators of theories can harden those theories into dogma. Followers can only develop at times by severing relationships with their inspiration. In The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank, Anaïs Nin, a former lover, recalled Rank’s point of view of his split with Freud which matched his theories on the desire for immortality. For example, Freud even considered his daughter Anna as a good match for Rank as a form of extending his dogma into posterity. The danger of non-conformity back then is the same as now with what is called “cancel culture.” Disinterested science is an illusion. “Freud tried to analyze Rank, but this was a failure…Like all fathers he wanted a duplicate of himself…The real cleavage was achieved by the others…They hoped for a fissure. Even though Rank’s discoveries were dedicated to Freud, Freud could never quite forgive him for differing from his established concepts. He began to consider Rank’s explorations a threat to his own work. The other disciples worked actively to point up the estrangement, to add to it. Dr. Rank was made to feel so alienated from the group that he finally went to practice in Paris…He lost not only a father but a master, a world, a universe.”
It’s one thing to be on the safe end of pathologizing others, but Freud and Ernest Jones flipped on Otto in that direction when they diagnosed him as a manic-depressive, Bi-polar disorder today, when he veered away from Freud’s Oedipus Complex as the main neurosis. His manic phases involved a lot of self-overcoming and the ability to produce considerably, which was then followed by depression and inhibition. These experiences helped to inform his understanding of motivation in others on how to overcome inhibition, especially in his exploration of motivation in art, which could easily be extrapolated to general creativity. For Freud, the desire to return to the security of the womb is partially explored, but he kept the Oedipus Complex as the nuclear neurosis. For Otto, that sense of separation at birth was more important.
Art and The Artist
Otto Rank’s studies of inhibition follows similar Freudian lines of past traumas, but deep down there’s an attitude of endless self-preservation. The survival part of the mind has trouble imagining things like death and tries to ignore it. “This individual urge to eternalization of the personality, which motivates artistic production, [it has shown] to be a principle inherent in the art-form itself, in fact its essence.” For Rank, this impulse goes back to the beginning with primitive peoples and develops towards the romantic notions of the individual against the mob. “The urge for abstraction, which owed its origin to a belief in immortality and created the notion of the soul, created also the art which served the same ends, but led beyond the purely abstract to the objectivizing and concretizing of the prevailing idea of the soul.” Early representations and constructions in primitive art held a desire to celebrate existence and harbor the hope for lasting existence beyond death. “It is precisely the concreteness of art as compared with the idea of the soul that makes it convincing; for it creates something visible and permanent in contrast to something which was merely thought or felt, which was at first handed down from one generation to another only by means of mystic tradition and was only fixed in literature of religious form at a very late stage…Thus primitive art must be, like the primitive idea of the soul, collective in order to achieve its aim, the continuation of the individual existence in the species. And it follows, too, that primitive art must be abstract in order to reproduce this abstract idea of the soul as faithfully as may be…It had to be made concrete, pictorial, and real, so as to prove its existence, and had to be presented in matter to demonstrate its indestructibility…It is therefore not a defective faculty of abstraction which drives to the concretization of the soul and its pictorial representation in the god, but the will to objectify it and thus to impart to it existence and, what is more, eternity.”
Portrayals of Gods and magical forces could dwell in the mind, but making them concrete was a way to communicate these ideas to others. “…In art lay the only mode of exhibiting the soul in objective form and giving personality to God.’” The pressure of individual versus the collective is throughout Otto’s work, and the artistic and creative impulse oscillates between a desire for social rewards and a desire to be free from social constraints. “Personal creativity is anti-religious in the sense that it is always subservient to the individual desire for immortality in the creative personality and not to the collective glorification of the creator of the world…He tries to save his individuality from the collective mass by giving his work the stamp of his own personality.”
There is an interplay of personal needs and social needs that individuals can rely on in an ancient community, and those forces exist today. Inspirations from culture get turned into individual creations that in turn create social responses and absorb new developments. “Religion is the collective ideology par excellence, which can only spring from a powerful group-need and mass-consciousness, which itself springs from the need of the individual for dependence and implies his subjection to higher forces. Art also, which sprang originally from self-feeling, is then subordinated to religion, just as the creative personality is subordinated to the creator. Religion springs from the collective belief in immortality; art from the personal consciousness of the individual…The artist has need of religion so as to make his own impulse towards immortality collective, while religion needs the artist in order to make concrete its abstract notion of the soul; on the other hand, the artist seeks to eternalize his individuality apart from the collective ideologies, while religion would deny the individual in favour of the community. Thus though art is in the last resort anti-collectivist — in spite of the fact that it makes use of the various communal ideologies, especially of contemporary religion and the style dependent on it — it yet needs these collective ideologies, even if only to overcome them from time to time by the force of personality.”
This pressure has an oscillating ambivalence that Rank felt was always there in the background. The trajectory from the collective primitive to the romantic individual moves towards the belief in individual genius and the dawning reality that if one wants to see change in the world, one can’t wait for a deity, but one must take action. “The idea of genius is, in its mythical origin, a representation of the immortal soul, that part of the personality which can beget what is immortal, be it a child or a work…It seems psychologically indispensable to set an impulse of self-assertion against that of self-negation if we are to understand the creative personality as it develops out of the idea of genius…Psychologically the notion of genius, of which we see the last reflection in our modern artist-type, is the apotheosis of man as a creative personality: the religious ideology (looking to the glory of God) being thus transferred to man himself. Sociologically, it meant the creation and recognition of ‘genius’ as a type, as a culture-factor of highest value to the community, since it takes over on earth the role of the divine hero.”
Going beyond Freud’s sex motivation, there’s a sense that sexuality can only really manifest if one is still alive and survival motives underlie sexual motives. “The only tangible statement which Freud’s theory could give us about the artistic process was that which asserted that the impulse to artistic productivity originated in the sex-impulse. But it is easy to see that this explanation (which I myself accepted in my first work on the psychology of artists) takes us no further in reality, being a pure paraphrase of the individual meaning already obvious in the very concept of genius (gignere = to beget). But psychology could not explain how from the sex-impulse there was produced, not the sex-act, but the art-work, and all the ideas called in to bridge this infinite gulf — ‘compensation,’ ‘sublimation,’ etc.—were only psychological transcriptions for the fact that we have here something different, higher and symbolical.”
Attributing a sexual wish-fulfillment in Dreams also didn’t shed much light on creativity and how it is subjectively experienced. “Dreams, too, which in the new interpretation of Freud seemed to promise so much for the elucidation of artistic creativity, proved, on a more careful comprehension of the problem, to be incapable of taking us beyond a superficial analogy.’ The fact that we all dream and, in dreams, are all (in the fine comparison of Schopenhauer) poets of the stature of Dante or Shakespeare is sufficient by itself to force to our notice the fact that we do not know what it is which allows a Dante or a Shakespeare to do in waking life what we all, according to Schopenhauer, do in our sleep.”
So much of psychoanalysis involves resistance, inhibition, and battling low self-esteem. For anyone creative, including those productive people not categorized with artists, the need to go to a therapist stems often from this inability to assert oneself, tolerate failure and criticism, and to learn from those enlightening experiences. “The neurotic, no matter whether productive or obstructed, suffers fundamentally from the fact that he cannot or will not accept himself, his own individuality, his own personality. On one hand he criticizes himself to excess, on the other he idealizes himself to excess, which means that he makes too great demands on himself and his completeness, so that failing to attain leads only to more self-criticism. If we take this thwarted type, as we may do for our purposes, and compare him to the artist, it is at once clear that the artist is in a sense the antithesis to the self-critical neurotic type. Not that the artist does not criticize himself, but by accepting his personality he not only fulfils that for which the neurotic is striving in vain, but goes far beyond it. The precondition, then, of the creative personality is not only its acceptance, but its actual glorification, of itself.”
Like a Nietzschean self-overcoming, Rank’s therapy is much in the same vein of reducing inhibition so that the smothered authenticity can actually do its work. The striving and struggle of the neurotic is the pressure to BE somebody in society. There’s a conflict between the individual and society, but there’s also a need to find a place in society so that one has a following, fans, customers, and consumers of one’s output. One wants to produce but not in a vacuum. There’s a need to find a place where one can effectively trade with the rest of society to balance individuality and an honoring of the interdependence one has with the rest of society. Art desires originality, but it also desires an originality that has a utility for others beyond a hobby. Similar to Freud’s ambition to be someone great, as seen in his dreams of Rome in The Interpretation of Dreams, and also his goal to be able to assimilate to the gentile world, and finally be accepted. There’s a desire in all people to be a respected pillar of society, to be welcomed, appreciated and loved. Similar to Freud’s Life-drive, Rank’s desire for immortality fits in nicely. The desire for immortality is up against the understanding of human death for all people, and like Freud’s Death Drive, there can be a sense of futility. There can be a fear of failure, an ambivalence, and indecision on the best path forward: choosing a religion, settling on a choice for lasting social contribution, whether to have children or not, or a combination of those. It becomes difficult to weigh the time sacrifice and choose amongst the array of options.
Freud and Italian Culture – by Pierluigi Barrotta, Emma Bond, Anna Laura Lepschy: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9783039118472/
Johnny and Mary – Bryan Ferry & Todd Terje: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Din_eWjJWe0
“For the creative impulse in the artist, springing from the tendency to immortalize himself, is so powerful that he is always seeking to protect himself against the transient experience, which eats up his ego. The artist takes refuge, with all his own experience only from the life of actuality, which for him spells mortality and decay, whereas the experience to which he has given shape imposes itself on him as a creation, which he in fact seeks to turn into a work. And although the whole artist-psychology may seem to be centred on the ‘experience,’ this itself can be explained only through the creative impulse — which attempts to turn ephemeral life into personal immortality. 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. He therefore again takes refuge in life, and again forms experiences, which for their part represent only mortality — and it is precisely because they are mortal that he wishes to immortalize them in his work.” This is why creation can end in depression until one finds another project to be excited about. The creation itself at best is imperfect and a compromise from the mental image. If it is truly great, then it competes with future projects, creating self-doubt, a sense of decline, and if it is mediocre or a complete failure, it’s a source for self-criticism.
The sexual desire that impulses towards social connection in the individual also contains a social fear of being engulfed, made unimportant, and disposable. Freud’s sublimation for the successful artist, or any other creator, who develops him or herself in their individual pursuit, eventually finds themselves to be socially useful and attractive. For Rank, sublimation is something similar but he emphasizes the self-renunciation of sexuality, the sense of inferiority, and that struggle to find a place in the world, which signals that sense of survival and immortality along with the ability to be attractive sexually. Signals of success and superiority from others provides the social proof that one has finally found that spot in society where one can BE somebody, even if it’s temporary. “…The fundamental problem is individual difference, which the ego is inclined to interpret as inferiority unless it can be proved by achievement to be superiority.”
Similar to Freud’s Reality Principle, Rank views control of libido, his important emphasis on willpower, as a way to differentiate a psychopathic person who justifies all impulses from that of a productive person or that of the neurotic. The Ego has to target areas of individual strength and social importance in order to gain credence and acceptance in society. An Id that has no moral guidance can’t be accepted in society and a Super-ego that is excessively inhibiting, prevents productivity. “I see the creator-impulse as the life impulse made to serve the individual will…Positively willed control takes the place of negative inhibition, and that is the masterful use of the sexual impulse in the service of this individual will which produces the sublimation…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 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 the impulse instead of controlling it. In this type —to which the criminal belongs — we have, contrary to appearances, to do with weak-willed people, people who are subjected to their instinctive impulses; 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 so it does not show itself.”
The Pleasure Principle – Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gurqv-the-pleasure-principle-sigmund-freud.html
The Ego and The Id – Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gvdo1-the-ego-and-the-id-sigmund-freud.html
Similar to existential philosophy, Rank looks at time and the certainty of death as something that motivates in the right circumstances or demotivates towards dilettantism, or an impostor syndrome when out of balance. “Only through the will-to-self-immortalization, which rises from the fear of life, can we understand the interdependence of production and suffering and the definite influence of this on positive experience. This does not preclude production being a creative development of a neurosis in objective form; and, on the other hand, a neurotic collapse may follow as a reaction after production, owing either to a sort of exhaustion or to a sense of guilt arising from the power of creative masterfulness as something arrogant.”
There is also a fear of life related to a grinding exhaustion by treating projects as a means to an end in a person forcing striving and ambition without authentic motivation, or there can be a bored satisfaction which mimics a psychological death, and can be acutely seen in bored psychopaths who manage some productivity in the world. It’s a feeling of “is that all there is?” There’s a desire in therapy to help balance out energy to maximize the energetic interest while controlling it towards worthy projects. When projects are both personally and socially interesting, and they match with social goals, a synergy between individual and the society is found, similar to descriptions of Ikigai, and the Psychology of Flow. “Instinct presses in the direction of experience and, in the limit, to consequent exhaustion — in fact, death — while will drives to creation and thus to immortalization. On the other hand, the productive type also pays toll to life by his work and to death by bodily and spiritual sufferings of a ‘neurotic’ order; and conversely in many cases the product of a type that is at bottom neurotic may be his sole propitiatory offering to Life. It is with reason, therefore, that from the beginning two basic types of artist have been distinguished; these have been called at one time Dionysian and Apollonian, and at another Classical and Romantic. In terms of our present dynamic treatment, the one approximates to the psychopathic-impulsive type, the other to the compulsion neurotic volitional type. The one creates more from fullness of powers and sublimation, the other more from exhaustion and compensation.”
When individual works match with social goals and ideologies, there’s a sense of immortality in creating a lifestyle, a psychological space, and institutions that new generations can file into and explore themselves. Appreciation from society, especially after long suffering in obscurity, can be a powerful reward and can draw tears from grown adults. “The productivity of the individual, or of the thing created, replaces—for the artist as for the community — the originally religious ideology ‘by a social value; that is, the work of art not only immortalizes the artist ideologically instead of personally, but also secures to the community a future life in the collective elements of the work. Even at this last stage of individual art-creativity there function ideologies (whether given or chosen) of an aesthetic, a social, or a psychological nature as collective justifications of the artist’s art, in which the personal factor makes itself more and more felt and appreciated.”
If one has a meditation practice, the fear of death can be detected and how it intertwines with a fear of life. Ambivalence over which projects are worth spending precious time on, and the desire for distraction from those worries, shows how commitment and investment of psychological resources remind immediately one of death, and it can manifest very quickly an anticipation of failure, leading to a need for distraction in replacement desires like entertainment, addictions, gossip, envy, and a need to blame society for the inactivity and lack of results. A victim mentality can easily arise when people feel that there’s really no point to endeavour if one cannot find a place in society where individual contributions can be appreciated. Not everyone by a long shot will be a Rembrandt. There has to be a place for mediocrity, partial or near success to relieve pressure. There also has to be a place for private contributions to smaller audiences like friends and family.
“If the impulse to create productively is explicable only by the conception of immortality, the question of the experience problem of the neurotic has its source in failure of the impulse to perpetuate, which results in fear, but is also probably conditioned by it. There is (as I have shown) a double sort of fear: on the one hand the fear of life which aims at avoidance or postponement of death, and on the other the fear of death which underlies the desire for immortality…A strong preponderance of the fear of life will lead rather to neurotic repression, and the fear of death to production — that is, perpetuation in the work produced. But the fear of life, from which we all suffer, conditions the problem of experience in the productive type as in other people, just as the fear of death whips up the neurotic’s constructive powers. The individual whose life is braked is led thereby to flee from experience, because he fears that he will become completely absorbed in it— which would mean death —and so is bound up with fear. Unlike the productive type, who strives to be deathless through his work, the neurotic does not seek immortality in any clearly defined sense, but in primitive fashion as a naïve saving or accumulation of actual life.”
Look Back In Anger – David Bowie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eszZfu_1JM0
The artist who has to find a place in society, with the endless pressure to find utility in their art, is infected by the most self-conscious strain of all. This is especially true of the modern artist who has to become as close to genius as possible and has to sacrifice their life in order to create material for their art. “[The Romantic artist] can create only by perpetually sacrificing his own life.” There is also a motivation to be rebellious and to become a leader of new generations through role-modeling, which is begrudgingly accepted by the successful artist. At times they see opportunities in current social movements to capitalize on their relevance and through association to create relevance in their art. Personal Style and Social Relevance. “That is, he is capable of forming the given art-ideology — whether of the collective kind (style) or the personal (genius-idea) — into the substance of his creative will. He employs, so to say, personal will-power to give form or life to an ideology, which must have not only social qualities like other ideologies, but purely artistic ones, which will be more closely specified from the point of view of aesthetics.” As you will see later on, there’s a difficulty in supporting social causes while balancing self-destructiveness.
Social relevance pressures can be readily seen in the need for a muse which can bring social connection to the individual. Connection to society involves friendship, sexuality and love, but also a need to be free from control and ironically the desire to control others. There’s a deep friction between individual freedom of expression and action versus balancing harmony in intimate relationships. “The ‘experience’ which arises in this manner is not, like other sorts of experience, an external phenomenon set over against creative work, but is a part of it and even identical with it, always providing that the Muse— in practice, usually a real woman — is suited to this role or at least makes no objection to it, and so long as the artist can maintain such a relation on the ideological plane without confusing it with real life. It is this case, in which the conflict between life and creation reaches extreme intensity, that we so often see actualized in the modern type of artist.” The Muse is used to project oneself into the subject which can uncomfortably interfere with their individuality. Rank later on calls this a “deposit,” which has connotations of manipulation, penetration, excretion, and projection. An early form of Object Relations. “In any case his impulse to form man in his own image or in the image of his ideal inevitably brings him into conflict with real life and its conditions.”
Artist examples of the Romantic type
As a detour into this subject, I’ll provide some examples of the modern type of artist as commonly seen in the 20th century. Sometimes there’s a better safety in cultural appropriation where the Muse can be in already recognized influences, and modern pop music is a great example. African American influenced music was a muse for Elvis and he had the ability to take those influences and make them popular to a white teenage audience. Another example was a synergy of influences between Michael Jackson and the ecstatic qualities of James Brown and the cool of Diana Ross. The role-model of best-ness is the ability to create something different, but not too different to be inaccessible, to artistically model fashion, to have good looks, to exude sexuality, to debut a newer sound, as a form of genius, and to live a lifestyle that imitators would find a social pinnacle. The audience is looking for role models where they can dream of putting themselves in the same position along with enjoyment of the artwork itself. A vicarious overcoming of social inhibition. That pressure to be a role model, instead of an imperfect human being that each person is, is incredibly hard to shoulder, as any examination of the lives of celebrity will betray. Extreme fans almost want to cannibalize their idols and internalize their strengths and powers.
Hound Dog & Dialogue – Elvis – Milton Berle Show – 5 June 1956: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJnVQDA9rHA
Jackson 5 Medley – Billie Jean – Moonwalk Debut – Michael Jackson and the Jackson 5: https://youtu.be/nlnqu2W7S18
I’m a Loser – The Beatles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukWRRNqMAZ4
Those early bursts of success leads to one to compete with oneself. To maintain that energy at those high levels, to respond to stressful criticism from a voracious public, to survive inevitable career slumps, it’s easy to fall into dependency on narcotics and pharmaceuticals, to keep the engine running and to prevent depression. For example, Elvis died of heart problems and polypharmacy. When talking to Thomas Dolby, Michael Jackson said “[I] was sad that Brian Wilson had severe psychiatric problems and that his brother Dennis was a drunk and a drug addict. ‘It’s better to die a sudden death than just deteriorate. When I die,’ said Michael, ‘I want to die like Elvis.’” In 2009 Michael died of cardiac arrest from a sleep medication overdose. Another massive artist, Prince died of an accidental Fentanyl overdose. He was addicted to painkillers to deal with his social anxiety.
One can see the life drive tussle with the death drive in that artists fear fading away in the fear life life, but use the fear of death as a way to produce. Pharmaceuticals are the modern way of maintaining energy for the productive, but exhausting fear of death, and substances on the other hand can be an escape for those with a fear of life. Echoing a bit of Otto Rank’s description of the negative feelings connected with artistic creativity, Charlie Rose’s interview with David Bowie is illuminating. “Tell me the satisfaction of completing a painting. ‘For me it’s finishing it so I can get onto something else. It’s getting through it. It’s the process. There’s something in it. It just turns me to jelly. My heart and my mind just become…I can’t explain it. It’s a very strange feeling. It’s not particularly pleasant either. I can’t say I enjoy music or painting in quite that…I mean it’s not like sex. There’s something volatile, emotive, something that makes me quite angry about going through the process of making music and doing visual arts…” There’s a hook of desire for novelty and to want to create something new, but there’s a sense of dissatisfaction with the now. That part of the mind can’t rest in contentment and is fueled by a sense of not enough. On the matter of art and insanity Bowie said “I’ve often wondered if actually that being an artist in any way, in any nature is a sign of a certain kind of dysfunction, a social dysfunction…I think it’s a looney kind of thing to do. I think the saner and rational approach to life is to survive steadfastly and create a protective home and create a warm loving environment for one’s family and get food for them. That’s about it. Anything else is extra. All culture is extra. Culture is a freebie. We don’t need particular color plates…Anything will do but we insist on making 1,000 different kinds of chairs, 15 different kinds of plates. It’s unnecessary and it’s the sign of the irrational part of man I think. We should just be content with picking nuts.”
Michael’s Eerie confession: https://nypost.com/2016/10/08/michael-jacksons-eerie-confession-i-want-to-die-like-elvis/
Prince’s ‘Former Drug Dealer’ Speaks About Pop Star’s ‘Major Addiction To Opioids’: https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/princes-former-drug-dealer_uk_571bc654e4b018a884dce83f
In Bowie In Berlin: A New Career In A New Town, author Seabrook detailed Bowie’s explanation of how stars, including himself, experience that pain of creativity and the need for energy to get things done. David Bowie explained “I didn’t really use [drugs] for hedonistic purposes…I would work for days in a row without sleep. It wasn’t a joyful, euphoric kind of thing. I was driving myself to the point of insanity.” Bowie’s guitarist Carlos Alomar explained that “the coke use is driven by the inspiration…if there’s a line of coke which is going to keep you awake until 8am so that you can do your guitar part, you do that line of coke, because it basically just keeps you up and keeps your mind bright.”
That sense of inadequate rest and bridging the gap with substances pushed Bowie to the edge. “Bowie’s drug use continued to escalate while he lived in L.A., leaving him in a state of psychosis that bordered on schizophrenia…[He was] existing on a diet of milk and green and red peppers, which had caused him to become painfully thin.” The effects of the drugs also went into paranoia and manic depression. Despite that, he was still able to put out a classic album Station to Station, and star in the cult classic The Man Who Fell To Earth, directed by Nicholas Roeg. “…Such was the level of Bowie’s drug use at the time that he now says he recalls next to nothing of the making of Station To Station, claiming only to know that the record was cut in Los Angeles because he has subsequently read about it.” There were some dry moments during the movie shoot but when returning to L.A., his old habits returned.
Station to Station – David Bowie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAj2iX9xqCo
The Man Who Fell To Earth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbgcLFj9k0U
There’s A Fly In My Milk – David Bowie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYtGDZ0K2Bg
Bowie On Cocaine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWyiFxqwfP4
In an attempt to find that muse by moving to another city, Bowie and his friend Iggy Pop tried to clean up and work together. They would create hugely influential albums in Berlin, and in other places throughout Europe. When listening to these works, you can hear how musicians of the 80s and 90s had shoplifted this era with relish. Influenced by what was called Krautrock back then, which off put Germans preferred the term Kosmische musik, they pilfered influences from Neu!, Kraftwerk, and Harmonia, etc. Bowie did allow and support some of the influencing he was responsible for because he was already influenced himself in the same way. Muses can be intimate partners, and they often show up in the cryptic lyrics of many artists, but many muses are simply past artists and present ones who stoke a mixture of envy and inspiration. Many of those artists strategize that new generations will not recognize their influences so the styles presented appear brand new. In an interview with Dinah Shore Bowie confirmed that “I’m quite a rock fan and I get influenced by other bands, other artists, and tend to steal things from them. I think that’s one of the most important elements of rock and roll.”
The Model – Kraftwerk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEnx9xS79Lc
Deluxe – Harmonia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVphe18ZlWY
Neu! – Hallogallo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zndpi8tNZyQ
David Bowie on Dinah Shore 1976: https://youtu.be/IRudpIxXZ8I
A New Career In A New Town – David Bowie: https://youtu.be/kZssy0IiyMA
Oh Berlin – U2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAtsgk02oYI
Trent Reznor David Bowie interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jONvR5zMy1w
A Warm Place – NIN: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yld7Fs-VfRE
Crystal Japan – David Bowie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tg-9pL6k3CI
While searching for a muse, substances behave as a bridge, or a limbo between inspiration and creation. “Despite their stated intention to clean up, Bowie and Iggy’s initial time spent in Berlin was very much a period of transition – of binging and purging, relapse and recovery. They might have escaped the clutches of Los Angeles, a city seemingly built on cocaine…that Bowie called ‘the most vile piss pot in the world,’ but they now found themselves in what Bowie later called ‘the heroin capital of the world’, which made life particularly difficult for Iggy. Reminiscing on VH1’s Behind The Music two decades later, Iggy described the pattern of their first weeks in Berlin thus: ‘There’s seven days in a week: two days for bingeing for old time’s sake; two more days for recovery; and that left three days to do any other activity.’ The city ‘hadn’t changed since 1910,’ according to Iggy. There were ‘organ grinders who still had monkeys; quality transvestite shows. A different world. By evening, I’d go have dinner with Bowie, see a film or watch Starsky And Hutch – that was our big thing, me and Bowie. If there wasn’t enough to do, I knew some bad people, and I’d get stoned or drunk. Sometimes I’d do the bad stuff with Bowie, and the good stuff with the bad people.’”
Nightclubbing – Iggy Pop: https://youtu.be/EpECxEO4uZM
Iggy had a Lust for Life, but his lyrics in The Idiot, showed a knowing ambivalence about the pleasure of drugs and alcohol, which makes for great material to exploit, even if one is exploiting oneself. In Funtime, Iggy describes some of those bad guys. “Last night I was down in the lab talkin’ to Dracula and his crew.” In Baby, Iggy instructs a girl “you’re so clean…please stay clean…There’s nothing to see I’ve already been down the street of chance.”
Funtime – Iggy Pop: https://youtu.be/DDYatCwJvCA
Baby – Iggy Pop: https://youtu.be/nU3EyAYg4t4
Despite escaping Los Angeles, Los Angeles was still in Bowie’s mind. Songs of isolation like in Sound and Vision, where he was waiting for inspiration, or Always Crashing In The Same Car, Bowie was processing what he went through and the anger towards himself and his dealers. In the later song, he describes his encounter with a drug dealer he recognized and how he felt after he slammed his car multiple times into the dealer’s Mercedes. “Later the same evening, he finds himself in the basement car park of the hotel in which he and Iggy have been staying, driving round in circles, pushing close to 100 miles per hour and giving serious thought to the idea of bringing a definite close to this sorry charade by ramming the car into a wall. Until, that is, it runs out of gas.” It would take some time to move on from this point in his life, process his experiences in the album titled Low, but then he found more popularity with the next album Heroes. There he was able to connect his artistic inspiration of Berlin with the Berlin wall, previously hinted at in an instrumental Weeping Wall, which was a world concern outside of dealing with personal demons and addictions. The romantic achievement is to create a personal stamp and to make a work of art that many people can see in their own way, and resonate with if they had similar experiences.
Heroes, loosely about a couple torn apart by the wall, but influenced by his struggles in his marriage and Tony Visconti’s, the song was less single material for radio, because of its length, but became a huge anthem in concerts after that, and for some East Germans, they felt it helped with in an emotional reunification when Bowie played it at the Reichstag near the wall. Max Fisher on Vox, recounts the atmosphere. “The concert was held near enough to the border that many East Berliners crowded along the wall to listen to the forbidden American and British music wafting across the city, allowing these two halves of the city to hear the same show, divided but together…’The mood was one of enjoying forbidden fruit,’ Olof Pock, then a 15-year-old kid living in East Berlin, later told Deutsche Welle. ‘We knew that this was somehow being done for our benefit.'” A song that was originally about helplessness turned into a triumphant victory in the ’80’s and ’90’s. One can see Otto Rank’s emphasis on the ambivalence between social connection and individual freedom that is omnipresent in every person’s life. People wanted the social protection that Communism promised from a perilous capitalism, but they didn’t want overregulation to hamper their freedom of choice, which is an unending conflict that is always relevant no matter what century you are in. Certainly this wasn’t completely new territory for David Bowie because he already lived at a time when there was a relaxing of anti-homosexuality laws, and he was one of the first popular artists that discussed homosexuality and bisexuality openly. People living in the closet could see a role model that was confident with their feminine side, and possibly entertain their own self-confidence, instead of entertaining depression or suicide. Again that struggle to be an individual and live with others who are different, and also being able to put a personal stamp on what is ultimately popular entertainment. Then very easily within any group, band, duo, management, etc., that same dynamic can play out in the minature, and it did with Bowie and Iggy.
Heroes – David Bowie at the Reichstag Building: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCI9o5IErwc
David Bowie at the Berlin Wall – Max Fisher: https://www.vox.com/2016/1/11/10749546/david-bowie-berlin-wall-heroes
Less triumphant version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qcAtflfVYs
Low – David Bowie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-NBeLkOZvU&list=OLAK5uy_m9x2fCIkl-ZqsbZMNM0NDtc-nAfQHRchA
“Heroes” – David Bowie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1gfKaHxIfo&list=OLAK5uy_mO2pGEUc5-vrZZDGEi9uJI33xEZfYGCh0
Lodger – David Bowie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_8Wvh4DH94&list=OLAK5uy_mXLUFAfOWT0Ax6VJTHjChWPWuWEe0jUGQ
In a revealing and surreal interview with Dinah Shore, Bowie was worried about overshadowing Iggy Pop and that tension of connectedness and a need for independence was obvious. In the interview Bowie was concerned and asked for permission, “do you mind if I talk?” Bowie explained his interest in Iggy’s music and his big influence. Iggy later opined that “I think I helped wiped out the 60’s.” David wanted to make clear about their collaboration and said “I would never want it to be considered I was some kind of hand manipulator or Svengali behind what Jimmy’s doing now because he’s getting popular now.” Inevitably their collaborations paused for a long spell since their popular trajectories were different. Bowie was also tired of the drugs. “Touring with Iggy was very enjoyable for the most part. [But] the drug use was unbelievable and I knew it was killing me.” The Ego also needs to prove itself and see itself as independent in order to feel the satisfaction that one has genius residing in one’s work. “In the handful of interviews [Iggy] did to support The Idiot, and during the subsequent tour, it soon became clear to Iggy that a lot of people were beginning to see him as Bowie’s lapdog. This is not a situation that anybody would have particularly enjoyed, but for someone in an industry as ego-driven as the record business, it was downright infuriating. The only way out of that, then, was for Iggy to prove himself, once again; and, this time, to do it on his own. ‘We have drifted away from each other,’ Bowie revealed two decades later. ‘I think there was a moment where Jim decided that he couldn’t do a fucking article without my name being mentioned, and I don’t think that’s a very comfortable feeling. I think he had to physically take himself out of the picture to become autonomous again.’”
Iggy Pop and David Bowie – Dinah Shore: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2eB8f020Pc
Ashes to Ashes – David Bowie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNqo0kIR-TU
Like in intimate relationships, friendships, and work collaborations, it’s hard to manage egos. Then the pressure to maintain success and to keep it going makes it easier for band members to argue over things like royalties, who does more work, and how they’ve been shafted. One of the bands heavily influenced by Bowie is U2. Their manager Paul McGuiness early on got the band to share the money equally to prevent resentment and the typical breakups that most bands experience. It worked out well so far with the same members being together for over 40 years. The defense mechanisms in people are quite strong and that inner struggle between independence and love can be seen in U2’s The Fly. The character that Bono put together in a way allows one to explore other characters without having to be like them. A way to avoid destroying oneself in order to create new material. Like an actor, you go into character and go out of it. “I quite liked being this character…A barfly, a self-appointed expert on the politics of love, a bullshit philosopher who occasionally hits the nail on the head but more often it’s his own fingernail he leaves black and blue.” The psychological armour and defenses are well practiced and cover overtop the unconscious desire for love and connection. Yet for the Barfly, the unconscious continues pining with the fantasy “love we shine like a burning star…..” but the fear of engulfment takes over and crushes the wish-fulfillment and he loses the belief in love by the end of the song because of the risk of rejection and conflict. “A man will rise. A man will fall, from the sheer face of love, like a fly from a wall. It’s no secret at all.”
U2 From The Sky Down: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oD5rH7yDyI
U2 The Fly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HDPenYIPtg
U2 and Alter-Egos: https://oneweekoneband.tumblr.com/post/36323690211/u2-and-alter-egos-the-fly-it-all-started-with
Bono, being an ENFJ if you follow Myers-Briggs, is definitely in the camp of trying to transcend the individual and move into the collective, with songs like One, and his goal to fight HIV in Africa. To achieve that Bono had to curry favor with his platform to make politicians pay attention. It yielded real life results because of the modern advances in HIV treatment. The side effect of this when walking with the powerful and financially abundant is that it can veer you into strange paths, and how you got success can trip you up from the original impulse of “making a difference.” Power works like a drug and it can make anyone appear hypocritical and ridiculous when they marinate in that environment, yet this wasn’t a new conflict for the band and it showed up early on as a compromise between individual spoils and sending the so called “right” message to audiences.
For example, when U2 started they always had a Christian ethos, but one that is more like a liberation theology left-wing kind, and the goal was to use Christian influences for social justice purposes. In the early Eighties, Bono, Edge, and Larry were briefly involved with a Christian group Shalom that were pressuring the band to use Christianity to proselytize to fans. They were beginning to dictate “how they should dress, what they should look like, the way they should sound. They resented being crowded, dictated to. It was time to move on. Looking around, they didn’t like the nihilism into which punk had descended. The New Romantics were as irrelevant, peddling pop of the most self-regarding and vacuous variety. Meanwhile the real world seemed to be permanently in the grip of one kind of crisis or another. Everything was out of kilter.”
The band almost broke up at that time when trying to figure out how to live with Christianity in a superficial world of entertainment. “The three Christian members of the band had been under a lot of pressure from other members of the Shalom group to quit, that they had to choose one way or the other. It was on the beach in Portrane that The Edge broke the news to Bono that he might be leaving the band. If The Edge was going, Bono decided that he would too – that they’d break up the band. The Edge asked for two weeks, to give him time to go away and consider his position. When he came back he had decided that being a Christian in a rock ‘n’ roll band involved a contradiction alright – but one he could live with.” The reality with anything, not just in the creative world, is that one has to balance self-interest with group feeling, and despite complaints of Bono’s hypocrisy, this kind of trade off happens all the time and it stays dormant until there is success. Righteous indignation about poverty in the world, and especially in Africa, and the desires for taxation and a Marshall Plan to save the world, don’t match well with the band’s “tax efficiency” which is a euphemism for tax avoidance. In the 60 Minutes Australia interview, when Bono’s wife suggested he get a hobby he said “…so I took up investing.” Sooner or later the individual finds the demands of the audience feeling tiresome and constricted. The audience wants you to be wealthy but they want to come along with you. If they can’t, then their social circles are infinitely divided and resentment builds. Success also opens doors to contact with others that are also successful and a bubble can be created. Songs like God Part II, Acrobat, The Showman, and especially The Little Things That Give You Away, it’s evident that there’s plenty of self-knowing. “You know that I know.”
God Part II – U2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dvXG18ZA1I
The Showman – U2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzYneo6Yc3U
The Little Things That Give You Away – U2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulgxq7VKB_A
Into the Heart: The Stories Behind Every ‘U2’ Song: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781842222034/
60 Minutes Australia: On The Road In Brazil With U2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mhAoVzSUig
Yet, it still hurts to lose that sense of relevance when people stop listening to you. Songs like Blackout, originally being similar in theme to Acrobat, Bono criticizing himself, eventually turned into projection towards Donald Trump. “…The song ‘started off its life about a more personal apocalypse, some events in my life that more than reminded me of my mortality but then segued into the political dystopia that we’re heading towards now.'” This is the typical projection of oneself onto others, and Rank thought this type of projection was a way to deny faults in oneself. Instead of seeing where Trump was resonating, which is that unrestricted illegal immigration was a boon for the ruling class to get cheap slave labor, and they were defending their ignoble selfishness by saying they were being less racist, yet slave labor is what? Slavery. Shhhhh! No, they don’t support that do they? In practice, yes they do, and have been doing so since the beginning of globalization. When each country develops multiple industries, restricts immigration during a recesssion, and hires unemployed people in their own country, and only increases immigration when there’s an economic boom, individual citizens become wealthier because companies are forced to pay them more, and a nationalist prescription can apply not to just the U.S., but every country can tend to their own, just like individuals can recover from codependency, which is the psychology of slavery. This wasn’t an easy realization for many of the general public that used to support globalization, and naturally there would be resistance from the ruling class who benefited from the exploitation. When you drop the masochistic pressure against oneself for being in the ruling class, a form of denial, there’s a relief when you have someone else to blame. There are racists on the right, who obviously have Cluster B personality disorders, but there are also the hidden kind on the left who disguise themselves as the opposite. The artist tries to manipulate the politicians and then gets manipulated in the end.
Bono’s lyrics repeatedly bring in the term WE to try and narrow the gap between the social justice audience and the entertainer-idol. In the same song he assures that “when the lights go out, don’t you ever doubt the light that we can really be.” In Invisible, he’s more direct with the assertion that “there is no them. There’s only us.” Yet this gap will remain because the audience will easily be able to compare their regular lives from that of the idol. Knowingly, Bono provided this contract with the social justice audience years ago in Acrobat, and ironically lets them know that it is better if they are on their own. “I must be an acrobat to talk like this and act like that, and you can dream. So dream out loud and you can find your own way out.” It is true to an extent, you are on your own, and eventually the worshippers have to find different revolutions when past revolutions haven’t bared any fruit. People look at their lives, listen to the music, and see that their lives haven’t changed and prospects are becoming slim. The celebrity idol is just another stone statue and prayers aren’t working.
New U2 album takes on President Trump: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4907432/New-U2-album-takes-President-Trump-political-dystopia.html
The Blackout – U2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaJCFHXcWmM
U2 Acrobat – U2 – eXPERIENCE tour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgNCp5VF6ww
U2’s Bono tells the WEF ‘Capitalism is a wild beast.’: https://youtu.be/SbjqbCWPNoQ
U2’s Bono Performs Pro-War Propaganda In Ukraine Subway Station – Jimmy Dore Show: https://youtu.be/Heice7eFS0U
Noor Bin Ladin Live from Geneva ‘They’re Working On An Infrastructure To Control You’ – The War Room: https://rumble.com/v15svh1-noor-bin-ladin-live-from-geneva-theyre-working-on-an-infrastructure-to-cont.html
Dr. Naomi Wolf Proven Right On ‘Global Vaccine Passports’: https://rumble.com/v164s83-dr.-naomi-wolf-proven-right-on-global-vaccine-passports.html
Globalists ‘Doubling Down’ On Lockdowns With Digital Vaccine Passports: https://rumble.com/v164h6v-globalists-doubling-down-on-lockdowns-with-digital-vaccine-passports.html
Rand Paul: This is the danger of a one-world government: https://youtu.be/KknfRwyckpM
Jack Posobiec: The Continued Cover Up Of Tiananmen Square: https://rumble.com/v17bcqv-jack-posobiec-the-continued-cover-up-of-tiananmen-square.html
Robert Lighthizer Former U.S. trade representative – “We have to have balanced trade”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4h0hDwIiQCo
Now I’m picking on U2 because so much is written about them, but this is the same for all successful romantic artists and it seems inescapable if those artists try to move from the personal into the relevant politically and try to take positions one way or another. Artists feel sorry for their fans, sometimes hate portions of their fans who have found them out, and have to come to grips that many of their fans have serious mental illnesses that are dangerous to them, as John Lennon unfortunately found out. Prior collaborator with David Bowie and U2, Brian Eno, not a person who’s a U.K. right-wing type, was still able to maintain perspective between left-wing and right-wing politics after Trump took office in 2017, and he saw that the punk attitude this time came from the right, to the left’s dismay. “You have 62 people worth the amount the bottom three and a half billion people are worth. Sixty-two people! You could put them all in one bloody bus…then crash it!…Most people I know felt that 2016 was the beginning of a long decline with Brexit, then Trump and all these nationalist movements in Europe. It looked like things were going to get worse and worse. I said: ‘Well, what about thinking about it in a different way?’ Actually, it’s the end of a long decline. We’ve been in decline for about 40 years since Thatcher and Reagan and the Ayn Rand infection spread through the political class, and perhaps we’ve bottomed out. My feeling about Brexit was not anger at anybody else, it was anger at myself for not realising what was going on. I thought that all those UKIP people and those National Fronty people were in a little bubble. Then I thought: ‘Fuck, it was us, we were in the bubble, we didn’t notice it.’ There was a revolution brewing and we didn’t spot it because we didn’t make it. We expected we were going to be the revolution.” The reality is that any revolution, whether from the left or the right, it has to resonate in the common people and it resonates when these regular people see direct improvement in their lives. That is the ONLY way a revolution succeeds. Factual and direct improvement that is readily visible. Even Eno’s interviewer goes into that territory of wealth criticism. “Eno himself is a multimillionaire, largely because of his work as a producer. He wouldn’t be one of the 62, would he, I ask. ‘I certainly wouldn’t be,’ he says with a thin smile. ‘No, I’m a long way off that.'”
We’ve been in decline for 40 years – Brian Eno – The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/jan/23/brian-eno-not-interested-in-talking-about-me-reflection
The way Iggy Pop described this trap, that all artists are tempted by when they are social commentators, but then become wealthy, is that you have to be careful not to turn into your enemy. “…You know, you go to school…You meet wonderful teachers and you meet wonderful kids, and then you meet some pricks. They’re there because they are more Anglo than someone else’s fucking parents. I took a little schtick with that when I was in high school. It put a chip on my shoulder and it made me want to succeed in the same world as the guy with the house in the Haute Bourgeois neighborhood, but I didn’t want to be a fucking Haute Bourgeois.” People with more power tend to bully and denigrate those with less power, which is rightly criticized, and this creates a motivation to prove oneself, or to get revenge. But what if that person succeeds? Even if Iggy lives life in as authentic way as he can, wealthy celebrities usually have to apply some boundaries simply because they can be recognized and stalked. Secondly, is that the lifestyle for the wealthy is usually more comfortable, and when people get used to that comfort, they tend to live in a Haute neighborhood anyways, especially if they need security, and it’s tempting after sometime to begin rejecting people who can’t keep up. It just happens naturally because your wealth will unconsciously put the rest of the population in the rear view mirror. To try and be class conscious while being wealthy is like trying to square the circle. Even the people criticizing these fallen prophets, thinking that they would be different, should look in the mirror. If they had the money they wanted they would live in the best possible location and do all the things they want to do. There usually needs to be a severe lack felt in the individual mind to bring that social mind back online, because the individual only cares about the social if they can advance along with others. When there’s abundance the individual mind takes over and just runs with personal goals. That’s how movements gain popularity and break apart.
Iggy Pop talks about his colossal career: https://youtu.be/Y0C6FkGrsWw
The pressure for artists, when they want to be the heartbeat of the world, with relevance and gravitas, to appear empathetic and caring, it’s hard to balance a personal life with a bubble of abundance and see how regular people see. It turns into virtue signaling. The works that end up resonating with people are often personal and subjective, not connected to political institutions or fads, but can connect with many other people who’ve gone through similar personal experiences. Artists have difficulty aging gracefully and updating themselves to new cultural movements. That’s the challenge in making timeless music, for example. When 10, 20 or 100 years pass by, how much of the artwork will actually resonate with future generations? Usually it’s artwork dealing with unavoidable things like relationships, power differentials, and how to handle death that resonate the most. When David Bowie died, Bono said “the sky is a lot darker here without the Starman.” Bowie’s last album was literally an embrace of death and shows some of the ways that artists find where they realize that they are making a lifestyle for themselves and a lot of their art is to make art of one’s life, but the true success is making the life one wants to live, choosing intimate relationships that are authentic, like a life designer. The message of freedom that an artist can give realistically is to model an individual life where people are free to make it what they want and let the audience find their own version of that and to face death in their own way. Death eventually is a freedom from all obligations like in Bowie’s Lazarus. “I’ll be free just like that bluebird.” One of the creepy moments of Bowie’s last album, Blackstar, are the lyrics from Girl Loves Me, “where the fuck did Monday go?” He died on a Sunday seeming like he was artistically curating his own death. A successful artist for Rank is one that faces death more than others and reduces the amount of neurosis. “The artist obtains his individual immortality by using the collective ideology for his personal creativity and, in this way, not only re-creates it as his own but presents it to humanity as a new collective ideology on an individual basis. Thus he himself becomes immortal along with his work.”
Bono remembers David Bowie: https://ew.com/article/2016/01/27/bono-david-bowie-tribute/
Starman – David Bowie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBKEt3MhNMM
Lazarus – David Bowie: https://youtu.be/Piq-_MOcnRc
Girl Loves Me – David Bowie: https://youtu.be/wDCk1X2S00A
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/
Ezquerro A. Sexual abuse: a perversion of attachment? Group Analysis. 2019;52(1):100-113.
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/
Bowie In Berlin – Seabrook, Thomas Jerome: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781906002084/
Photo Credit: During the Isolar II – The 1978 World Tour (1978) By Helge Øverås – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3473993
Psychology: https://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/