Along with Adler and Jung, Otto Rank was one of the intellectual giants in the inner circle around Sigmund Freud. Art and Artist, his major statement on the relationship of art to the individual and society, pursues in a broader cultural context Freud's ideas on art and neurosis and has had an important influence on many twentieth-century writers and thinkers, beginning with Henry Miller and Anais Nin.
Art and Artist explores the human urge to create in all its complex aspects, in terms not only of individual works of art but of religion, mythology, and social institutions as well. Based firmly on Rank's knowledge of psychology and psychoanalysis, it ranges widely through anthropology and cultural history, reaching beyond psychology to a broad understanding of human nature.
Rank's thought "has implications for the deepest and broadest development of the social sciences...and of all his books, Art and Artist is the most secure monument to his genius." - Ernest Becker
Some quotes from the book from 70,000 Fanthoms
Rank’s premise:
- “A common spiritual root for the meaning and origin of collective ideologies... I conceived to be the belief in immortality, and this belief I regarded (if one can say so of any one belief) as the original ideology, out of which, as it became increasingly untenable, there arose various others, more securely anchored in reality, but always animated by the same immortalization tendency… From whatever the artist achieves by his successful work is in actual fact immortality, a result from which we need only infer this intention in order to obtain an understanding of the individual will to art as a personal urge to immortality. In this sense, however, the feeling of immortality is not only the result of creating but actually the presupposition on which it rests” (xxvi).
- “Artistic productivity, not only in the individual, but probably in the whole development of culture, begins with one’s own human body and ascends to the creation and artistic formation of a soul-endowed personality” (355).
- The creative impulse has been channeled through art, the motivation for this is a desire for immortality. Art is therefore motivated by mistaking it as a means for salvation. “The artist does not create, in the first place, for fame or immortality; his production is to be a means to achieve actual life, since it helps him to overcome fear” (408-09). “In him the wheel will have turned full circle, from primitive art, which sought to raise the physical ego out of nature, to the voluntaristic art of life, which can accept the psychical ego as a part of the universe. But the condition of this is the conquest of the fear of life, for that fear has led to the substitution of artistic production for life, and to the eternalization of the all-too-mortal ego in a work of art” (430).
