Otto's Position of a Pioneering Mind in the Blind Spots of Reason – The Marginalian

In one important respect at least, the human animal fails the mirror test of self-awareness: We go through the world on impulse and emotion, and then look back and correct our decisions, declaring ourselves rational beings. Western civilization, with its structural bias in favor of left-brain thinking, has been largely to blame for our dangerous fragmentation, our saturation and our feelings. Despite all that our analytical tools have revealed about how the mind constructs the world, about how our entire experience of reality operates that great filter of emotional connection – attention – we continue to throw ourselves into the theater of logic, only to find ourselves still confused. often in our nature, with the constant revelation of deception we err in truth.

A pioneering psychiatrist Otto's position (April 22, 1884–October 31, 1939) — who was a major influence on Carl Jung and worked as a therapist to Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, and other visionary artists — pulls back the curtain on that idea. Outside of Psychology (public library) — a book that “calls for the recognition and acceptance of the irrational aspect as a very important part of human life”; a book he knew would be his last, the publication of which he did not live to see during the war.

A century before the philosopher Martha Nussbaum presented her strongest evidence for emotional intelligence, she noted that “emotions are not just the fuel that governs the mental functioning of a thinking creature. [but] parts, complex and strange parts, of the thinking of this creature itself,” writes Rank as humanity enters its second world war:

Our current general confusion… reveals the irrational roots of human behavior that psychology tries to rationally explain in order to make it clear, that is, acceptable… Humans, though they may think and speak rationally—and even behave like that—yet live irrationally.

[…]

Bound by ideas of a better past and a brighter future to come, we feel powerless in the present because we cannot even for a moment stop its movement in order to direct it more wisely. We still need to learn, it seems, that life, in order to preserve itself, must always rise up in man's* efforts to overcome its irrational power with his mind.

Much of our self-deception, Rank notes, is due to the fact that we live in language — “a rational object intended to communicate thoughts and describe actions in rational terms.” (This is what you do Dictionary of Ambiguous Grief in an incredibly counter-cultural way and a growing reality altogether.) Art in all its forms, from poetry to painting, has tried to find the emotional language of the unconscious, to accept the rise of the irrational. (Nin himself expressed this memorably in his emphasis on the importance of emotional extremes in creation: “Great art is born from great events, great loneliness, great obstacles, instability, and always balances itself,” he wrote in his diary between sessions. Position.) Yet we are always storytellers. , we tell the story of our lives mostly through language. Without dreams – an evolution of imaginary language developed in the brains of birds – the mind navigates the world by talking to itself through an internal fixed language system. And it is possible, Rank intimates, that “beyond” language is inaccessible to us, that we try to unravel our captivity with the tools of the captor. Consider the paradox:

In their most conscious attempt to reproduce what they call “ignorant” modern artists and writers have followed the workings of the modern mind in attempting the impossible, i.e. fixing the absurd. This paradoxical state of affairs manifests itself in the basic axiom of psychoanalysis, the mechanical theory of life in which all mental processes and emotional reactions are determined by the Unconscious, that is, by something that is itself unknown and undiscovered. Modern art has accepted this rational psychology of formal irrationality, because art itself, like psychology, has been from the beginning an attempt to find a rational life by interpreting it according to current ideas, that is, it has tried to recreate. life to control. The social and political events of our day amply justify the need for something “beyond” the workings of our minds which seem inadequate to account for these strange events.

Echoing the Scottish philosopher John Macmurray's view that “we ourselves are events in history. [and] things don't just happen to us, they happen to us,” Rank insists that the only way to avoid the social and political upheavals that destroy humanity from time to time is to accept the irrational within us. A century after MacMurray wrote that “our differences with one another are but a new thing that grows upon us in the life of mankind” and that we must be aware of it in this global situation so that our private difficulties “become truly great,” Rank writes:

Because of the nature of human nature, man* has always lived beyond the workings of the mind, in other words, without reason. If we can grasp this paradoxical truth and accept it as the foundation of our lives, then we will be able to find new values ​​to replace the old ones that seem to be crumbling before our eyes—essential human values, not just psychological values. pre-determined meanings of our favorite ideas. These new values ​​that need to be found and rediscovered are old values, innate human values ​​that over time are lost in consideration of one kind or another.

These basic values, noted Rank, are beyond reason – we also find them when we stop trying to control life by making it balanced and surrender to its flow of experience, naturally irrational and dynamic in physical life, which, we now know, is the true place of consciousness. You write:

We are born in pain, we die in pain and we must accept the pain of life as an inevitability—a necessary part of life on earth, not just a price to pay for our pleasure… but he can live beyond it only through his essential experience.

And this is why you shouldn't avoid them.