Art and Artistic Heroism: Evaluation

Though very much interrelated to the project of 'Self as the work of Art', let us still return separately to the theme of artistic creation as solution to the problem of nihilism. As for Nietzsche, we've already articulated his view – both the problem and suggested solutions – on the matter extensively. Let us focus on Freud and Rank and also summarize how they were able to use Nietzschean ideas in this matter.

Jacob Golomb (1999, 121) has pointed out that Nietzsche was used by both Rank and Jung as they liberated themselves from Freud. Both Rank and Jung resonated more with

Nietzsche's affirmative psychology rather than Schopenhauerian pessimism and crude materialism which Freud had come to represent for them. So, Rank used Nietzsche's thought to differentiate himself from Freud. This seems like a plausible idea, given what we know about Rank's life and ideas.

Freud's and Rank's view on heroism co-incided fairly smoothly around the time when Rank published The Birth of the Myth of the Hero (1910). Heroism was about a fragile ego revolting against the father and working out the Oedipal situation. Hero myths were seen as a type of compensation inwhere the infantile ego could have its way with parental figures. Story of Oedipus was a fable about the wishes of the childlike ego. Art in general, especially in narrative form, was seen in the similar manner: Expressing deep-seated instinctual drives. Yet, Oedipus could also be interpreted with a different emphasis: as a story about patricide and struggle towards individuation. A story about becoming more independent – A Heroic Escape. Later Rank claimed that this had been his perspective early on⁶¹. The seeds of discord were there, but they were not ready to sprout. At this point, Nietzsche's influence was not yet a separating factor between Rank and Freud. Rank could still point out to Freud how certain ideas of Nietzsche were pertinent to psychoanalysis and these notes would be quite welcomed. Rank's overtly Nietzschean influences, expressed in his youthful diaries and, to an extent, in his debut The Artist, had been put aside or possibly repressed, to use freudian term. It is not far-fetched to think that Nietzsche's interpretation of the Greeks had contributed to the fascination both Freud and Rank had with Greek tragedies and mythology (Seif 1984).

The situation changed dramatically in 1924 (Trauma of Birth especially) as Rank started to voice views contrary to some of Freud's core-ideas such as th Oedipus complex. Rank suggested that the primary trauma takes place already at the birth as man gets separated from the mother and the womb - where life had been undivided and free from strife. This trauma produces the primal anxiety, which is then activated by later experieneces of separation. In this schema, Oedipus-Complex comes later and is important but secondary.

Man has two impulses – and corresponding fears: There is a will to merge (back to the womb, to undifferentiated life) and will to individuate (to stand apart from others, to carve

out one's self through separation). Corresponding fears, naturally are death-fear (fear to merge) and life-fear (fear to individuate and live as a separate being). In here, Rank has derived inspiration from Nietzsche, yet his psychology is still mostly compatible with freudian paradigm. The hero here is the one who was able to balance these primary drives of unification and separation (Brown 1962, 53).

As to Freud solution to artistic creation as a source of meaning, we established in chapter four, that he had an ambivalent relationship with artists. Artists were neurotics, who struggled to break away from their infantile fantasies and adapt to the dictates of the reality-principle. In this vein, he viewed artistic pursuits as sublimations of the sexual impulses into cultural constructs. Not unlike dreams, it was an activity of wish-fulfillment and a way for the artists through compensatory means to get what they really after: Sex, recognition, power. Art was created out of unconscious desires, but transformed –

sublimated – into acceptable form. The idea of sublimation in relation to art was was also expressed by Nietzsche earlier as he had suggested that the instincts could be channeled into spiritual activity, sexual activity being at the heart of aesthetics (Cybulska 2015).

Yet there was also another side to Freud's take on the art and the artist: Here artist was seen as a somewhat mysterious, superior being. When viewing the artist from this romantic angle, the focus was more on the inaccessibility to the creative source of the artistic genius and the ingenious and moving ways artists were able to express the perennial

psychological truths. The way Freud used creations of his admired artist as an inspiration to his psychoanalytic work, spoke lengths about how he valued their access to human psyche and truths of the unconscious. In his view, it was the artistic creations – such as the Greek tragedy of Oedipus and Shakespeare's Hamlet – that had so far been most apt at describing the definitive truths about human motivation and behavior. Yet, for Freud himself, the scientific inquiry and rational mind were the basis where the detours into areas where conducted from. Aesthetic perspective needed a cool analysis to distill the truths it contained, it was not a destination in itself.

To conclude, it is unlikely that Freud would've viewed the creation of art as a seriously potential way for an individual or a culture, to dig their way out of the looming nihilism in

a post-religious world. He would've insisted that our best bet still is to rely on that faculty which sets us apart from other animals: Our superior reason and faculty of consciousness.

This is how we can shed light to the murky waters of unconscious, and still the instinctual forces. Art can provide insights for us and act as panacea to the sufferings of life, but it should not be elevated to new type of metaphysics.

Erik Erikson (Erikson 1963, 264-265) tells a story of how Freud was once asked what a person (we assume that this means a normal, psychologically healthy person) should be able to do in life? Freud answered: ”to love and to work”. While we cannot be certain of quotations authenticity, it does seem to express some core-values that Freud held on to: he was a notoriously hard worker and a person whose life revolved around the family and therapeutic and collegial relationships. In this light, it was interesting that his view of the working therapeutic relationship between the patient/client and the analyst was somewhat distant. We can imagine that instead of going after lofty goals like Ubermensch or

Dionysian culture, Freud would've rather advocated somewhat prosaic solution as our best bet strategy against nihilism: Love and work, work and love.

Let us return to Rank now, and summarize his view of the artistic heroism after his fall-out with Freud. First of all, there was a markedly more distinct differentiation between the neurotic and the Artist, compared to Freud. Rank famously defined the neurotic as the failed artist. While a potentially gifted individual, neurotic failed to adjust to the world.

And unlike the artist who could sublimate his frustration into art – and thus both transform his experience of the world and also possibly gain worldly recognition – the neurotic fails to channel his unique vision and feels increasingly isolated from his fellow man.

Psychotherapist, in the eyes of the freudian Rank was a modern hero of the psychological era, a physician of the soul, who could help the neurotic out of the maze of his own disjointed self and interpret his 'life-dream'. Freud, of course, was a good example of this new type of hero (Lieberman 1985, 163).

In the final period of his life, it can be said that Rank returned to his roots and became essentially Nietzschean. The Will and the Artist-hero became the central tenets of his philosophy. Since during his time with Freud, the personal creative will was almost an

anathema and certainly not a concept to base your psychology on, there seems to have been an over-emphasis on the Will in Rank's early post-freudian thought. A type of pendulum movement from one extreme to another. There's an impression that a person can simply create and then re-create himself by making such a choice, by sheer power of will. The Heroic Artist-type, in co-operation with nature's forces, simply moulds what one will out of himself. This bears a close resemblance to Nietzschean Superman. As Rank (Rank 1989, 4) put it: a Creative type is able ”to create voluntarily from the impulsive elements and moreover to develop his standards beyond the identifications of the super-ego morality to an ideal formation which consciously guides and rules this creative will in terms of the personality”.

This hyperbole doesn't quite last, though Rank retains Will, Creativity and Consciousness as a central concepts of his psychology. There is simply a more nuanced, and more

ambiguous view of man that is formed as one in account Rank's final works. In Art and the Artist (1932) and Psychology and the Soul (1931) Rank articulates a more interconnected (ie. less individualistic) and sociologically driven view of the Artist-Hero. Rank suggests that Artist, like almost everyone else, is driven by a desire for preservation and self-perpetuation: In other words, a desire of immortality. The artist needs social systems to validate his needs for immortality: In exchange for his 'artistic goods', the Artist gets symbolic forms of immortality: recognition, fame, money, power, sex etc. Society grants him symbolic immortality.

This does not satisfy the Artist in a permanent sense, for the artist is often a person who is not willing to succumb to the dominant immortality-ideology of the time. He is by nature more of an individual than a collectivistic person. He is only too aware that what he what he has created are his personal immortality-symbols. What has been given back for his artistic creations – are mere societal symbols. What does the artist really yearns for? He yearns to unite and connect with nature's inexhaustible creative energy in a true Dionysian sense. But he also knows that he can never merge with nature in the permanent fashion, without losing his individual identity. He stands in the middle: not quite an animal who can simply act in accordance with nature, but not quite a self-created, cultural being either, who could simply affirm his own creations and be satisfied with them.

Rank believed that neither traditional psychoanalysis, nor psychology as a scientific doctrine, could not provide relief to this lack of 'cosmic heroism'. There is no cathartic narrative, which would explain through sexual etiology, or through psychopathology, our existential anxiety in a way that would satisfy us in a meaningful enough way. Is the conclusion then, that Rank did not believe that there were any solutions to a situation where 'immortality-ideologies' have lost their meaning for us?

And what about the anxiety of influence, which we defined as a force of tension which functions both as a stiffling and creative force in the life of the artist. Well, this seemed clearly to be at work, as we observed the oedipal trajectories of Nietzsche influencing Freud, Freud struggling to both integrate and simultaneously not be affected by him. Rank, on the other hand, struggled with Freud's influence but derived strength from already deceased Nietzsche as a father-figure. Nietzsche's anxiety of influence was clearly directed to Wagner and Schopenhauer, but also to a more loftier heights towards the end of his life.

It can be argued, that they all were able to perform a heroic escape from their predecessors and father-figures, yet were more at loss what to do in the solitary heights where they then found themselves.