In one crucial respect at least, the human animal does not pass the mirror test of self-knowledge: We move through the world by impulse and emotion, then look back and rationalize our choices, declaring ourselves creatures of reason. Western civilization, with its structural bias favoring the left brain, has been especially culpable in this dangerous dissociation from ourselves, our full and feeling selves. Despite everything our analytical tools have revealed about how the mind constructs the world, about how our entire experience of reality is a function of that great sieve of emotional relevance — attention — we continue casting ourselves in the theater of rationality, only to find ourselves bewildered again and again by our own nature, by the constant revelation of illusion we mistake for reality.

The pioneering psychiatrist Otto Rank (April 22, 1884–October 31, 1939) — who strongly influenced Carl Jung and served as therapist to Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, and other visionary artists — pulls the curtain on that illusion in Beyond Psychology (public library) — a book “pleading for the recognition and the acceptance of the irrational element as the most vital part of human life”; the book he knew would be his last, the wartime publication of which he never lived to see.

A century before philosopher Martha Nussbaum made her rigorous case for the intelligence of emotion, observing that “emotions are not just the fuel that powers the psychological mechanism of a reasoning creature [but] parts, highly complex and messy parts, of this creature’s reasoning itself,” Rank writes as humanity is breaking into its second world war:

Our present general bewilderment… lays bare the irrational roots of human behavior which psychology tries to explain rationally in order to make it intelligible, that is, acceptable… People, though they may think and talk rationally — and even behave so — yet live irrationally.

[…]

Bound by the ideas of a better past gone by and a brighter future to come, we feel helpless in the present because we cannot even for a moment stop its movement so as to direct it more intelligently. We still have to learn, it seems, that life, in order to maintain itself, must revolt every so often against man’s* ceaseless attempts to master its irrational forces with his mind.

Much of our self-delusion, Rank observes, is due to the fact that we live in language — “a rational phenomenon meant to communicate thoughts and to explain actions in rational terms.” (This is what makes The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows so wonderfully countercultural and altogether reality-expanding.) Art in all its forms, from poetry to painting, has tried to find the emotional language of the unconscious, to embrace the surge of the irrational. (Nin herself articulated this memorably in her insistence on the importance of emotional excess for creativity: “Great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them,” she wrote in her diary between sessions with Rank.) And yet we remain storytellers, telling the story of our own lives largely in language. With the exception of dreams — the imagistic language evolution invented in the brains of birds — the mind navigates the world by talking to itself in a constant inner stream of language. And so it may be, Rank intimates, that the “beyond” of language is simply unreachable to us, that we are trying to dismantle our own captivity with the captor’s tools. He considers the paradox:

In their extremely conscious effort to reproduce what they call the “unconscious” modern painters and writers have followed modern psychology in attempting the impossible, namely to rationalize the irrational. This paradoxical state of affairs betrays itself in the basic axiom of psychoanalysis, a mechanistic theory of life according to which all mental processes and emotional reactions are determined by the Unconscious, that is, by something which in itself is unknown and undeterminable. Modern art has adopted this rational psychology of the irrational legitimately, because art itself, like psychology, has been from the beginning an attempt to master life rationally by interpreting it in terms of the current ideologies, that is, it has striven to re-create life in order to control it. The socio-political events of our day amply justify the need for something “beyond” our psychology which has proved inadequate to account for such strange happenings.

Echoing the Scottish philosopher John Macmurray’s haunting observation that “we ourselves are events in history [and] things do not merely happen to us, they happen through us,” Rank insists that the only way of avoiding the socio-political upheavals that periodically rupture humanity is to embrace the irrational within ourselves. A century after Macmurray wrote that “our individual tensions are simply the new thing growing through us into the life of mankind” and that we must recognize them in this universal setting in order for our private difficulties to “become really significant,” Rank writes:

Because of the inherent nature of the human being, man* has always lived beyond psychology, in other words, irrationally. If we can grasp this paradoxical fact and accept it as the basis of our own living, then we shall be able to discover new values in place of the old ones which seem to be crumbling before our very eyes — vital human values, not mere psychological interpretations predetermined by our preferred ideologies. These new values which have to be discovered and rediscovered every so often are in reality old values, the natural human values which in the course of time are lost in rationalizations of one kind or another.

These elemental values, Rank observes, lie beyond reason — we rediscover them when we cease trying to control life by rationalizing it and surrender to its experiential flow, inherently irrational and pulsating through the life of the body, which, we now know, is the true locus of consciousness. He writes:

We are born in pain, we die in pain and we should accept life-pain as unavoidable — indeed a necessary part of earthly existence, not merely the price we have to pay for pleasure… Man* is born beyond psychology and he dies beyond it but he can live beyond it only through vital experience of his own.

And this precisely why you must not spare yourself.