3 Rank on myth
Freud’s key case of myth is, fittingly, that of Oedipus. Given Freud’s comparison of myths with dreams, his analysis of the myth of Oedipus equally fittingly appears in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) (see Freud 1953, vols. 4–5, pp. 261–264).1 As decisive as his interpretation of the case of Oedipus is for the subsequent psychoanalysis of myth, the interpretation is just four pages long. The two classic book-length Freudian analyses of myth have been Otto Rank’s The Myth of the Birth of the Hero (1909 [hereafter Rank 1914]),2 and Karl Abraham’s Dreams and Myths, also originally published in 1909 (hereafter 1913).3 Rank later broke irreparably with Sigmund Freud, but when he wrote his book he was a Freudian apostle. Freud himself even wrote the section on the “family romance.”4
Rank and Abraham alike follow Freud in comparing myths with dreams (see Freud 1964, p. 25) and in declaring both the disguised, symbolic fulfillment of repressed, overwhelmingly Oedipal wishes lingering in the adult myth maker or reader. Both Rank and Abraham dismiss those theorists, called nature mythologists, who either take myth to be about the physical world rather than about the human mind or, worse, turn myths about humans into myths about the physical world.5
Rank’s work is much fuller and livelier than Abraham’s, and the second, 1922 edition of the book, not translated until 2004, is fuller still. Rank considers more myths than Abraham, studies them in more detail, and above all establishes a common plot. He can offer a common plot because, unlike Abraham, he limits himself to hero myths, though he, like his quasi-Jungian counterpart Joseph Campbell, boldly implies that all myths can be seen as hero myths.
In addition to The Myth of the Birth of the Hero, Rank wrote Der Künstler (1907), The Incest Theme in Literature and Legend (1912 [hereafter Rank 1992]), The Don Juan Legend (1922/24 [hereafter Rank 1975]), The Trauma of Birth (1924 [hereafter Rank 1929]), The Double (1925 [hereafter Rank 1971]), Will Therapy (1929 and 1931 [hereafter Rank 1978a]), Truth and Reality (1929 [hereafter Rank 1978b]), Psychology and the Soul (1930 [hereafter Rank 1998]), Art and Artist (1932 [hereafter Rank 1932a]), Modern Education (1932 [hereafter Rank 1932b]), and Beyond Psychology (1941). In 1913 he and Hanns Sachs wrote an accessible overview of applied psychoanalysis titled The Significance of Psychoanalysis for the Mental Sciences (hereafter Rank and Sachs 1916). Their chapter “Myths and Legends” matches the analysis in the first edition of The Myth of the Birth of the Hero.
Rank’s analysis of myths in the original, 1909 edition of The Myth of the Birth of the Hero is classically Freudian. Myths are like dreams. Myths are also like fairy tales. All three evince the satisfaction of repressed, anti-social wishes. The mythic male hero topples his father rather than submits to him, and does so to secure sexual access to his mother. There is neither sublimation nor renunciation.
Post-Freudian Rank
The real issue is how much the expanded and revised 1922 second edition of The Myth of the Birth of the Hero, published only two years before the work that marked the break with Freud, The Trauma of Birth, reflects post-Freudian Rank.6
To begin with, what is meant by later, independent Rank? In contrast to Freud, Rank now makes the prime relationship for everyone that to one’s mother rather than to the parent of the same sex. Because the maternal relationship goes back to birth and infancy, the prime stage of life is pre-Oedipal rather than Oedipal. The relationship to the father comes later—in, above all, the Oedipal stage. The relationship to the mother is originally that of union, and the deepest feelings toward her are those of dependence and identification. With birth comes the first trauma—that of separation. Because the mother carries the fetus yet then bears it—kicks it out—and because the mother feeds yet also weans her child, feelings toward the mother are ambivalent. Like the father for Freud, the mother for Rank is feared as well as loved.
Rankian therapy seeks to re-establish the original bond, though now with the therapist. The therapist is not, as for Freud, a blank slate onto whom one projects—transfers—a past relationship to a parent but instead a present partner. Empathy counts more than insight. Therapy aims at re-experiencing separation—in the form of the termination of therapy—but without the trauma that accompanied the original separation.
While Freud, at least as early as 1909, was prepared to grant that “the act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety” (Freud 1953, vol. 5, p. 400 n. 3), he was never prepared to make birth the main, let alone the sole, source of anxiety and neurosis.7 He refused to subordinate the Oedipus complex, which centers on the father, to the trauma of birth, which necessarily centers on the mother. For Rank, the infant’s anxiety at birth is the source of all subsequent anxiety. Conflict with the father remains, but because he blocks the son’s yearning to return to the mother’s womb rather than because he blocks the son’s Oedipal yearning. Fear of the father is a displacement of fear of the mother, who, moreover, has abandoned, not castrated, her son. Sexual desire for the mother is likewise a means of returning to the womb, not of securing Oedipal satisfaction.
For yet later Rank, the infant, while still seeking to remain with the mother, simultaneously seeks to separate from her. Life is an ongoing struggle between the desire for autonomy and the desire for reunion. The striving for autonomy leads to the fear of any decision over one’s life and so to what Rank calls the life fear. The yearning for reunion leads to the fear of the loss of individuality and so to what Rank calls the death fear. The conflict between id and superego is simply one place where the conflict between the desire to separate and the desire to unite is played out. The conflict cannot be resolved, but it can be diminished. Mental health consists of a balance between the inclinations. One can be independent yet still connected to others.
The mother matters less as the object of fulfillment, sexual or otherwise, than as the nurturer. Indeed, the father matters in the same way. Both parents are desexualized. The child seeks not to kill one parent in order to have sex with the other but to retain the love of both without sacrificing autonomy. Even a parricidal or matricidal urge would still stem from a desire for separation. The converse urge for union with the parents would stem not from an incestuous desire but from cowardice.
For Rank, the key entity in the psyche is the will, which is much stronger than its closest Freudian counterpart, the ego. Where Freud’s ego develops out of the denial or delay of drives, Rank’s will is innate. Where Freud’s ego can at best mediate between the drives and the superego, Rank’s will can master and direct the drives. Where Freud’s ego strives only to mediate, Rank’s will strives creatively to forge an independent person. By the will Rank means not a Nietzschean or Adlerian will to power but a will to autonomy. The cause of neurosis is not a weak ego but a weak will, which therapy strives to strengthen. Resistances are taken as expressions of the will and are therefore not to be dismantled but instead to be reinforced. The will is weak because it is burdened by guilt, which is reflected in the ambivalence felt toward the act of separation.
Almost from birth, children assert their will against that of their parents in order to forge their independence. Their will becomes a “counter-will.” Refusal to submit to toilet training evinces this counter-will, and adolescent rebellion evinces it above all. At the same time children remain dependent on their parents and afraid of the world. Their would-be independence stirs anxiety. More, the pristine union with the mother makes the child empathize with her feelings of loss and rejection and thereby feel even guiltier. Therapy seeks to enable patients to experience separation without either guilt or anxiety.
There are four kinds of persons: average, creative, neurotic, and anti-social (criminal and psychopathic). Average, or “normal,” persons are conformists. They overcome the tension between separation and union by surrendering their independence to the community, and Rank has disdain for their easy conformity. Creative persons, for whom he has the most respect, vaunt their independence by setting themselves against the community. Their alienation from the group is willed. Creativity is not limited to the arts. It is to be found in science and, even more, in the creation of a distinctive self. Neurotic persons, whom Rank, like Freud, seeks to help, are also alienated from the community, but they are too stymied by guilt and anxiety to assert themselves. Their will is a counter-will. Where Freud deems neurosis failed normality, Rank deems it failed creativity. The neurotic is a failed artist, not a failed “normal.” As the expression of will, creativity signals the striving for autonomy more than sublimated sexuality (see, for example, Rank 1932a, p. 26).
Creative persons establish original selves not only for themselves but also for others. They are like Erik Erikson’s Martin Luther—Rank’s own favorite example being St. Paul.8 In giving to others, creative persons alleviate the guilt they feel for their separation. Where neurotics assert themselves by rejecting the world, average persons reject themselves for the world. Where the neurotic separates without uniting, the ordinary person unites without separating. Average persons accept themselves as society defines them. Creative persons re-create themselves. Their creation is a rebirth.
Creative persons are heroes—not, as for Freud, in asserting themselves at the expense of others but, on the contrary, in providing a self for others to emulate. Heroism is the glorification of creativity, not of assertiveness. The creative person is a successful hero and the neurotic a failed one.
The ultimate goal of separation is the forging of not just an independent self but an immortal one. Immortality constitutes the highest form of creativity. The birth of a child signifies one’s own mortality: with life looms death. For Rank, as for Freud, the father thus fears the newborn, but as a threat to his immortal self, not his mortal one.9 The creative person forges not merely a new identity but also an immortal one. Freud’s own immortality came through psychoanalysis itself. Average persons achieve immortality by adhering to an existing ideology.
The Myth of the Birth of the Hero
The issue at hand is how much post-Freudian Rank is to be found in the second or even the first edition of The Myth of the Birth of the Hero. In my opinion the second edition (hereafter Rank 2004) does not so much break with the first as exacerbate the divide already found in the first edition between Freudian and post-Freudian Rank. That the second edition drops almost nothing from the first and instead adds to it supports this view. In both editions there is a hiatus between the post-Freudian focus on the hero’s birth and the Freudian focus on the hero’s deeds—with the emphasis in the second edition shifting toward birth. In both editions there is a parallel disjunction between the post-Freudian title and the Freudian pattern, neither of which changes. While the title obviously singles out the male hero’s birth, the pattern subordinates the birth to the deeds: the birth is decisive not because of the male hero’s separation from his mother but because of the parents’ attempt to fend off at birth the prophesied parricidal consequences.
In the second edition Rank presents a series of dreams that connect birth to water, as in the pattern (see Rank 2004, pp. 53–58). But the dreams are all women’s, not men’s, and the anxiety is over giving birth, not over getting born. Rank is confident that he has shown that in hero myths exposure on water symbolizes birth, water symbolizes the amniotic fluid, and the “little chests, baskets, or ships” in which the newborn is placed symbolize the womb (Rank 2004, pp. 55, 58). But the meaning of these elements still comes from the dreams of would-be mothers, not fathers. It is not easy to tie the dreams recounted here to the two wishes that Rank retains from the first edition: the wish for perfect parents and the Oedipal wish. Similarly, there is no apparent connection between the folk belief that Rank also introduces in the second edition—the belief that birth is symbolized by exposure to water (see Rank 2004, pp. 58–67)—and either wish in hero myths. Newborns may face drowning, but not because they have been left to die by their parents. Rather, birth itself is dangerous. Indeed, as Rank’s examples recount, parents save their children from drowning.
In the second edition Rank asks rhetorically whether after “the overwhelming evidence for this birth symbolism, doubts remain about its application to the hero myth” (Rank 2004, p. 61). But in actuality, he is still trying to link two distinct subjects: the trauma of birth and the trauma of the Oedipus complex. When he declares that “a deeper generalization and clarification is expressed in the idea of birth in the water, which also represents the exposure myth par excellence—birth itself” (Rank 2004, p. 66), he is referring to the precariousness of birth. Yet in the pattern exposure in water means exposure after birth, not exposure at birth. Exposure in the pattern is the passive way that the parents plot to have their newborn die, not get born. Having failed to heed the divine warning against birth itself, they must now scurry to kill their son at birth. Rank continually conflates exposure as birth with its opposite: exposure as death. He does observe that in the myth exposure as birth is presented as exposure as death: “The children come out of the ‘water.’ The basket, box or receptacle simply means the container, the womb; so that the exposure directly signifies the process of birth, although it is represented by its opposite” (Rank 1914, pp. 69–70). But if the pattern is guiding the symbolism, exposure as birth should symbolize exposure as death, not vice versa. That Rank here makes exposure as death the symbol of exposure as birth at least underscores his preoccupation, even in the first edition, with birth itself.
Beyond simply declaring exposure as death to symbolize exposure as birth, Rank connects the disparity to the pattern: “The first reason for the representation of the birth by its opposite—the life threatening exposure in the water—is the accentuation of the parental hostility towards the future hero” (Rank 1914, p. 72). But everywhere else hostility is masked by love or neutrality. For example, Fate rather than the parents is blamed for the opposition to the birth. Why should exposure as birth be masked by exposure as death rather than vice versa? Rank never says.
Rank does employ Freud’s explanation of the source of the family romance to connect birth with death. Freud attributes the wish for other parents not just to the invidious comparison that the child draws between his parents and other adults but also to the neglect that the child feels from the parents:
For Rank, it is but a short step from feeling neglected by the parents to feeling opposed by them: “the entire family-romance in general owes its origin to the feeling of being neglected, namely the assumed hostility of the parents” (Rank 1914, p. 72). For Rank, it is likewise but a short step from feeling opposed by the parents to feeling that they opposed the birth itself: “In the myth, this hostility goes so far that the parents refuse to let the child be born” (Rank 1914, p. 72). Therefore birth represents defiance of the parents: “moreover, the myth plainly reveals the desire to enforce [the child’s] materialization against the will of the parents” (Rank 1914, p. 72). But even if Rank ties exposure as birth to exposure as death—the parents oppose birth, so that birth defies death—how does averted death symbolize birth? Birth circumvents death, not involves death.
The section of the second edition of The Myth of the Birth of the Hero with the fewest changes is the presentation of the myths themselves. Rank does add considerable examples—notably, the case of Dionysus and of parallels to it; the case of Trakhan; a parallel to the case of Sargon; additional parallels to the case of Moses; Hamlet and King David as further parallels to Kaikhosrav, himself a parallel to the case of Cyrus, according to the version presented by Herodotus; and Neleus and Pelias as a further parallel to the twins Romulus and Remus. But like the original examples, all of them retained, the new ones are varied and therefore inconclusive. Where most focus on birth, exposure, and rescue—the pre-Oedipal aspects—some proceed to eventual revenge and triumph—the Oedipal ones.
Oedipus
Strikingly, Rank alters not at all the presentation of Oedipus. The elements of the 1909 pattern remain: royal parents; a delay in conception; a prophetic warning against birth; attempted infanticide to elude the prophecy; infanticide by exposure, which in the earliest versions of the myth is on sea rather than, as for Sophocles, on land; rescue by foster parents; the eventual discovery of identity; subsequent parricide; and succession as king.10 To be sure, the foster parents are as royal as the real parents, so that the wish for better parents goes unfulfilled. Far more important, Oedipus consciously seeks to avert parricide, so that the wish to kill the father is fulfilled most unintentionally. Oedipus’s discovery of his identity comes only long after the parricide and so can hardly be what spurred it.11
Rank could have used the inadvertent nature of the parricide to downplay Oedipus’s Oedipus complex. Certainly many commentators stress Oedipus’s pre-Oedipal traumas of abandonment, mutilation, and adoption.12 For example, Peter Rudnytsky argues that Sophocles’s play “enacts a return to Oedipus’s infancy” (Rudnytsky 1991, p. 19). Working backward from the present to the past, as in analysis itself, the play fills in the picture of Oedipus’s earliest years, which Oedipus thereby relives. More than regressing to infancy, Oedipus symbolically returns to his mother’s womb, “first passing through the doors of the palace and then through the doors of the bedchamber” (Rudnytsky 1991, p. 19). Oedipus’s re-emergence from the palace symbolizes rebirth—and the beginning of healing. For Rudnytsky, Sophocles’s play fits uncannily closely both Rank’s theory and Rank’s practice in The Trauma of Birth. The key trauma occurs at birth, and therapy involves a nontraumatic re-experiencing of it (see Rudnytsky 1991, pp. 17–18).
The Trauma of Birth
The question is whether the Rank of The Trauma of Birth can be found, if only in embryonic form, in The Myth of the Birth of the Hero. Rudnytsky, like others, thinks that it can and that it can be found in even the first edition of The Myth of the Birth of the Hero. He quotes the passages, already cited by me, in which Rank goes from a boy’s feeling neglected by his parents to his feeling opposed by them to the parents’ opposition to his birth (see Rank 1914, p. 72). For Rudnytsky, Oedipus’s adult defeat of his father is simply the re-enactment of his defeat of his father at birth: “the scene at the crossroads in which Oedipus meets and slays his father, Laïus, can justly be seen as a reenactment of the birth trauma at the oedipal level” (Rudnytsky 1991, p. 23). In both situations the son triumphs over the father who threatens him. Rudnytsky further quotes part of a line from The Myth of the Birth of the Hero that seems to anticipate The Trauma of Birth: “the future hero has actually overcome the greatest difficulties by virtue of his birth, for he has victoriously thwarted all attempts to prevent it” (Rank 1914, p. 73, partly quoted in Rudnytsky 1991, p. 23).13
Rudnytsky could have drawn an even tauter tie between birth and parricide since, according to Rank’s pattern, the son’s motive for killing his father is revenge for the would-be killing of him at birth. True, the parents genuinely want a child and expose him at birth only because of the prophecy that a son, if born, will one day kill his father—a prophecy that they accept yet think that they can circumvent. Still, they choose the father over the son, who, upon discovering his lineage, returns home to kill his father. True, he kills only his father, but then the father is more culpable since the would-be infanticide was undertaken to protect only him. The mother’s limited role is to have sided with her husband against their son—and, for later Rank, even to have sided with the son against the husband.14 The pattern surely absolves the son of blame by making his motive revenge, not desire for his mother.
But the pattern covers up the Oedipus complex. Now the son is the culprit because he instigates the fight to the death with his father and does so to gain access to his mother. To quote Rank anew, “The fictitious romance [i.e., the myth] is the excuse, as it were, for the hostile feelings which the child harbors against his father, and which in this fiction are projected against the father” (Rank 1914, pp. 68–69). Is not Rank here, in a passage retained in the second edition (Rank 2004, p. 52), “exposing” the pattern as a coverup? Is he not contending that the myth maker and any reader or hearer of the myth are concocting the story of abandonment to disguise the boy’s hostility toward his parents rather than theirs toward him? Is not Rank in The Myth of the Birth of the Hero, antithetically to Rank in The Trauma of Birth, taking the pre-Oedipal traumas of abandonment, exposure, and adoption as excuses rather than reality?15 It is hard to see how Rank can be said to be subordinating the Oedipus complex to birth when, again to quote anew a passage retained in the second edition, “as a rule the deepest, generally unconscious root of the dislike of the son for the father, or of two brothers for each other, is referable to the competition for the tender devotion and love of the mother” (Rank 1914, p. 74; 2004, p. 68). The issue is not whether Rank gives up either the primacy of the Oedipus complex or the meaning of the Oedipus myth in later writings16 but whether he does so in The Myth of the Birth of the Hero. For all his increasing attention to birth, I think that he does not.
The real shift in the meaning of hero myths comes with The Trauma of Birth itself, in which Rank systematically interprets seemingly all of human life to fit the birth trauma. Fear of the dark, oral and anal activities, sexual activities of every variety, neurotic symptoms, sleeping, dreaming, symbols, attitudes toward death, religion, art, philosophy, mysticism, and not least the Oedipus complex are now all either expressions of the physical separation from the mother at birth or efforts at undoing the separation, either by returning to the womb or, as the fallback, by creating a womb-like world after birth. As Rank declares, “just as the anxiety at birth forms the basis of every anxiety or fear, so every pleasure has as its final aim the re-establishment of the intrauterine primal pleasure” (Rank 1929, p. 17). Only analysis offers a solution, by providing a nontraumatic rebirth: “analysis finally turns out to be a belated accomplishment of the incompleted mastery of the birth trauma” (Rank 1929, p. 5).
Rank continues to see myth as wish fulfillment, but the wish now fulfilled is, like that of culture as a whole, either to undo birth or to create a second womb. Oedipus’s “blindness in the deepest sense represents a return into the darkness of the mother’s womb, and his final disappearance through a cleft rock into the Underworld expresses once again the same wish tendency to return into the mother earth” (Rank 1929, p. 43). Alternatively, creation myths describe the creation of a physical world “made into a substitute for the mother” (Rank 1929, p. 103). Myths of an initial or future paradise likewise envision a womb-like ideal.
While Rank cites his own The Myth of the Birth of the Hero as if even it interpreted heroism as the birth trauma, in fact the interpretation changes sharply in The Trauma of Birth. If the male hero’s first deed is, as in Myth, birth itself—“birth is the real achievement” (Rank 1929, p. 131 n. 1)—the hero simultaneously wants to remain in the womb, and “behind the mask” of the hero’s adult “deeds of reform and conquest he constantly strives to return again” (Rank 1929, p. 107). The father seems at once to oppose the hero’s birth and to cause it. God the father’s prohibition against Adam and Eve’s eating from the Tree of Knowledge “shows the same unwillingness … to separate the ripe fruit from the maternal stem as, in the myth of the birth of the hero, the original hostility of the father to the hero’s coming into the world at all” (Rank 1929, p. 113). Here, as in The Myth of the Birth of the Hero, the father is being blamed for opposing birth, symbolized by the “breaking off of the fruit” from the tree (Rank 1929, p. 113). But God the father’s eviction of Adam and Eve “represents once again a repetition of painful parturition, the separation from the mother [i.e., Eden] by the father” (Rank 1929, p. 113). Here the father is being blamed for causing birth, symbolized by eviction.17
At the same time in The Trauma of Birth the key relationship is that between mother and son. Where in The Myth of the Birth of the Hero the father is the culprit for opposing birth, in The Trauma of Birth the mother is the culprit for giving birth. The father merely comes between mother and son. And to the line “separation from the mother by the father” in describing the Garden of Eden story, Rank adds, “to which men and women are subjected in the same way” (Rank 1929, p. 113), so, contrary to Freud, tension with the father is not limited to the son.
One other difference between The Trauma of Birth and The Myth of the Birth of the Hero is the link now drawn between the hero and the artist. Rank now proposes the substitution of the term “artist” for “hero” to identify the cultural hero—the one who in religion, art, or philosophy creates “sublime wish compensations” for the lingering frustration of life outside the womb (Rank 1929, p. 190).18 The link between hero and artist continues throughout Rank’s subsequent writings.19
Beyond The Trauma of Birth
Yet not even The Trauma of Birth contains the concepts that prove most distinctively Rankian: will, creativity, and immortality. In Will Therapy Rank contends that Oedipus is condemned by Sophocles on multiple counts: for assuming that intellect—consciousness—rather than will governs human action; for assuming that knowing—consciousness—is superior to not knowing—illusion; and for blaming Fate rather than himself for his deeds. All three condemnations of Oedipus are for Rank also condemnations of Freud, who attributes neurosis to the unconscious and so to ignorance, who seeks to make the unconscious conscious and so relies on intellect for the cure, and who absolves Oedipus of responsibility by blaming his unconscious:20
Where in The Myth of the Birth of the Hero Oedipus is the victim of his unconscious, which overrides his conscious will, in Will Therapy he consciously wills his actions.
In Truth and Reality Rank contrasts the heroic myth, as represented by the story of Oedipus, to the “religious myth,” as represented by the Garden of Eden story (Genesis 3). Now Oedipus’s fall stems from will without consciousness, where Adam and Eve’s fall stems from consciousness, or overintellectualization, that paralyzes the will. Oedipus would not have married his mother had he known who Jocasta was, and Adam and Eve would not have been inhibited sexually had they not eaten from the Tree of Knowledge:
However one reconciles Rank’s characterization of the source of Oedipus’s downfall in Will Therapy and Truth and Reality, the issue is the relationship between consciousness and will rather than, as in The Myth of the Birth of the Hero, the relationship between ego and id. The Myth of the Birth of the Hero may partly foreshadow The Trauma of Birth, but it does not foreshadow the yet later Rank.21
In Psychology and the Soul Rank traces the history, from “primitive” times down to the present, “sexual era,” of the varying ways in which humans have sought immortality. Now he confines the myths in The Myth of the Birth of the Hero to “civilized” peoples. Where “primitives” believed that the spirits of the dead impregnated women, so that the spirits rather than “fathers” passed their immortal souls onto sons, fathers came to believe that they were the begetters of their sons, onto whom they thereby passed their souls and, with it, their immortality. Where fathers at first thereby accepted this “generative immortality”—immortality through procreation—in the sexual era, fathers have sought individual immortality and have sought it by trying to kill their sons at birth to avoid ceding their souls. Sons in turn, having survived the attempted infanticide, grow up to seek immortality for themselves. They revert to the primitive belief that spirits rather than their “fathers” were their begetters—a variant of the non-Oedipal wish for alternative parents. Incest with the mother now becomes a means of procreating oneself and thereby securing immortality. Neither sex nor nurturing but immortality is what Oedipus now seeks from Jocasta. Survival remains the preoccupation, as in The Myth of the Birth of the Hero, but now it is survival after death rather than survival after birth.22
In the posthumous Beyond Psychology Rank ties heroism to the double and the double to immortality. The male hero’s survival after birth attests to his immortality, but immortality requires a second, immortal self alongside the mortal one. The mortal self is a twin, who “had to die to assure immortality to the other” (Rank 1941, p. 95). But the surviving twin then “absorbs” his brother and becomes a double. Without claiming to have found a twin for Oedipus, Rank names this myth as a case of a new element in the mythic pattern: “how the hero is saved from an early doom by the substitution of another child who is killed in his stead” (Rank 1941, p. 95). What in The Myth of the Birth of the Hero would be the killing of one brother by another over the mother is now the sacrificial killing of one brother for the immortality of the other.
The dual wishes
In the second edition of The Myth of the Birth of the Hero Rank continues to credit Freud with the discovery of both the nonsexual and the sexual wishes, and he retains the long passage from Freud on the “family romance,” a phrase that, strictly, refers to the first wish only but that sometimes seems to cover both wishes (see Rank 2004, pp. 49–51).23
Yet no more in the second edition than in the first does Rank—or Freud—recognize the incompatibility of the wishes. The wish for perfect parents is the wish that the ordinary parents with whom the boy finds himself are not the true parents: “The entire endeavor to replace the real father by a more distinguished one is merely the expression of the child’s longing for the vanished happy time, when his father still appeared to be the strongest and greatest man, and the mother seemed the dearest and most beautiful woman” (Freud, in Rank 1914, p. 67).
The child invents the “family romance” to satisfy this wish, which is nonsexual, and the adult invents the full-fledged myth to satisfy the Oedipal wish as well as the nonsexual one. The myth satisfies the nonsexual wish insofar as the boy turns out to have noble real parents and merely to have been raised by ordinary parents. The myth satisfies the sexual wish insofar as the boy grows up to kill his real father.
The problem is not that the wishes are independent—the sexual wish scarcely requires that the toppled father be royal—but that the wishes are incompatible. Where the nonsexual wish assumes reverence for the real father, whom the boy wishes to emulate, the sexual wish dictates hatred for that same father, whom the boy wishes to replace. The splitting of the father into two figures enables the boy to keep separate his conflicted feelings, but the negative feelings are toward the adoptive father in the nonsexual wish and toward the real father in the sexual one (see Rank 1914, pp. 83–85; 1992, pp. 43–44).
As Freud’s own mention of the Oedipal wish in his presentation of the family romance makes clear, he and Rank think that the two wishes work in tandem in that both get rid of the father: “The influence of sex is already evident, in so far as the boy shows a far greater tendency to harbor hostile feelings against his father than his mother, with a much stronger inclination to emancipate himself from the father than from the mother” (Freud, in Rank 1914, p. 65).
Furthermore, Freud observes that the boy’s aim comes to narrow from elevating both parents to elevating only the father. Since the sexual competition is between the boy and only his present father, there is no need to remove the present mother from the scene. The present father is removed by being pronounced not the real father:
But the Oedipal aim is still to get rid of the real, noble father, where the non-Oedipal aim is to be rid of the adoptive, lowly father and, at least initially, of the mother as well.24
Conclusion
However far Rank ventures beyond his original, classically Freudian view of myth, he continues to invoke The Myth of the Birth of the Hero as if, contrary to my own reading, it prophetically bore the seeds of post-Freudian Rank. The Myth of the Birth of the Hero is cited in Art and Artist, Psychology and the Soul, Modern Education, Truth and Reality, and Beyond Psychology. In his “Literary Autobiography” he retroactively interprets The Myth of the Birth of the Hero in light of his will psychology:
Ironically, Freud cites The Myth of the Birth of the Hero in his own last work, Moses and Monotheism (1939), though he reverses Rank’s levels: Moses, one of Rank’s own examples, is now manifestly the son of lowly parents who is rescued by royal parents but latently the son of Egyptian royalty who is simply depicted as Jewish for nationalistic reasons (see Freud 1964b, pp. 10–15). The hero here is Moses the father, not Israel the son, but the conflict remains staunchly Oedipal. No concession to the heroism of later Rank is even entertained.
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