At the end of this confusing, and often difficult to read, book the author puts forward the view on the last two pages that the human race should abandon art as something out-dated and work instead on personality development. Personality development? Imagine a world with no movies, no music, no TV, no art of any sort, just people sitting around "developing their personalities" in their heads. Give me a break. Despite Mr. Rank writing this 431 page opus of obscurity, he must not understand much about artist if he thinks they would be satisfied with a substitute of this sort. He misses the kinship artist feel towards their art, and the fact that often artists enjoy performing their art for its own sake, not merely for an interest in immortality. Artists enjoy the feeling of power that comes with creation, and they need the relief and catharsis that comes from creating something beautiful. Personality development could never replace this, since art is a means for the artist to express himself not create himself. In this little flaccid daydream of Mr. Rank's I detect a desire to have psychology replace art, since psy. is concerned with the development of personalities. In retrospect, thinking back over the previous portions of the book, it seems as if Mr. Rank's whole theory of art is constructed in order to make artistic creation seem identical to his theories; to make it seems as if art and psychology functioned by the same mechanisms. This made it easy for him to topple his own house of cards after its meticulous construction with one final blow. ***** I gave this book an extra star only because it had some interesting things to say about ancient civilization and the history of art. However, I am sure there are countless heaps of other books that cover the same subject matter more interestingly. I see no reason anyone should buy this book. It's certainly not what I was looking for. What a waste of money! ***** This book was written in the 1930's I believe. After 70 years I think it's save to say that Mr. Rank's sour obituary can be dismissed. Good art is still being produced and will be produced as long as human beings have the capacity to dream. True, there have been declines in the standards of art, but this doesn't not show a decay in the concept of art itself. Rather, there are two factors responsible for the decline. First, mass media makes the public more accessible to the artist. The culture is flooded with the worthless debris of talent hacks every year. But there are still great works being made. Second, the general trend of the public towards lower and lower taste makes for a bad reception of works of genius, and clears the field for the afore-mentioned debris. **** Beyond this there are many factors that cause different developments in art history. For instance, representational art saw a decline with the invention of photography, and abstract and non-representational art saw a growth in popularity. There have been long periods thought-out history, such as the middle ages, where art standards have dropped severely, but art has always emerged victorious in the end. Art has been with us from the beginning. It will be with us until the end, regardless of how wet blankets like Mr. Rank feel about it.

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.

Beginning with a monograph in 1907 that first brought him to Freud's attention, Otto Rank became his mentor's closest colleague until 1926. The present work, published in 1932, follows three earlier elaborations of the first monograph, and covers artistic endeavor, language, play, architecture, etc. through the ages as an expression of a striving for individual/communal immortality and a reconciliation with mortality. The creative type lives life, affirming the inevitable, while the neurotic is frozen with life-fear. A fine translation reads well but Ludwig Lewisohn's terrific preface has been replaced here with one by the lighter-weight but better-known Anais Nin. The book rewards study; see an excerpt on the Otto Rank Website.