Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development Review
For anyone who is interested in "Beauty and Truth" as a problem requiring intense evaluation, Chapter Eleven of this book starts by considering the conquest of nature "really her successful deception by the human intelligence." The interesting feature is "the pleasure which the individual gets from this sham activity, in that we regard this as a saving of vitality and, indeed, of life." Otto Rank associated this kind of activity with "the realm of freedom ~ even if (again as in play) this liberation can never be wholly successful." As an ideal, art can lead to a way of life which approaches the pathetic in finding pleasures in pushing the envelope which maintains order for the prone thinkers in any society. Rank considered it a component of "head-culture, . . . saturated with the scientific ideology" associated with "the egocentric outlook which produced the competitiveness and quarrelsomeness of the various Greek tribes, cities, and heroes that is evidenced even in the Trojan War stories." My knowledge of the history of American psychiatry clings to the memory of the minor role played by Harry Stack Sullivan in establishing the professional ethics that kept Otto Rank from treating his patients as a psychiatrist because he wasn't a doctor. While some memory of artistic character development clings to people's emotional problems, medical practice in the mental health field makes this book almost irrelevant to modern treatment of these problems, and I only mention it to show what fools we would prefer to be as a society dedicated to the suppression of all uncommercial efforts in the area of art, which remains a highly suspect activity, subject to ritual condemnations by the critics in the press who can't print what the artist is thinking. For people who don't expect to read this book, I would recommend the movie "I Shot Andy Warhol" as a study in character of the wanna-be kind of people which a culture that celebrates art and drama produces.
Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development Overview
"[Rank's thought] has implications for the deepest and broadest development of the social sciences . . . and of all [Rank's] books, Art and Artist is the most secure monument to his genius." —Ernest Becker 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.
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Update Post: Jun 05, 2010 10:50:16
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