Otto Rank

Otto Rank (born Otto Rosenfeld; April 22, 1884 – October 31, 1939) was an Austrian psychoanalyst, writer, and teacher.

The neurotic ... suffers, not from all the pathological mechanisms which are psychically necessary for living ... but in the refusal of these mechanisms, which is just what robs him of the illusions important for living.

Quotes

Truth and Reality (1936)

• If man is the more normal, healthy and happy, ... the more successfully he can repress, displace, deny, rationalize, dramatize himself and deceive others, then it follows that the suffering of the neurotic comes ... from painful truth. ... Spiritually the neurotic has been long since where psychoanalysis wants to bring him without being able to, namely at that point of seeing through the deception of the world of sense, the falsity of reality. He suffers, not from all the pathological mechanisms which are psychically necessary for living ... but in the refusal of these mechanisms, which is just what robs him of the illusions important for living.
  • pp. 42-43

• The neurotic ... is not the voluntary happy seeker of truth, but the forced, unhappy finder of it.
  • p. 43

• While the average well adjusted man can make the reality that is generally accepted as truth into his own truth, the creative searcher after truth seeks and finds his own truth which he then wants to make general.
  • p. 43