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and to banish the facts of life Traherne had to remold his paradise, even to lying about it in his memory as we all do. True, the earth was the place of mystical beauty that he painted it andthat Carlyle later agreed to be “a mystic temple”; but it was at the same time “a hall of doom” that Traherne chose to deny in his memory of childhood.
    The totality of the human condition is the thing that is so hard for man to recapture. He wants his world safe for delight, wants to blame others for his fate. Compare to Traherne a modern poet’s consciousness of the full roundness of the human condition. Marcia Lee Anderson tells us with penetrating brilliance how we have to live in a hall of doom, what we need to do to protect ourselves:

    We multiply diseases for delight,
Invent a horrid want, a shameful doubt,
Luxuriate in license, feed on night,
Make inward bedlam—and will not come out.
Why should we? Stripped of subtle complications,
Who could regard the sun except with fear?
This is our shelter against contemplation,
Our only refuge from the plain and clear.
Who would crawl out from under the obscure
To stand defenseless in the sunny air?
No terror of obliquity so sure
As the most shining terror of despair
To know how simple is our deepest need,
How sharp, and how impossible to feed. 19

    The irony of man’s condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive. Marcia Lee Anderson draws the circle not only on Traherne, but on Maslow, on humanistic psychoanalysis, and even on Freudian Norman O. Brown himself. What exactly would it mean on this earth to be wholly unrepressed, to live in full bodily and psychic expansiveness? It can only mean to be reborn into madness. Brown warns us of the full radicalness of his reading of Freud by stressing that he resolutely follows Ferenczi’s insight that “Character-traits are, so to speak, secret psychoses.” 20 This is shaking scientific truth, and we have also subscribed to it with Brown. If it has seemed hard for men to get agreement on such a truth during the age of Freud, one day it will be secure.
    But the chilling reality behind this truth is even more upsetting, and there doesn’t seem to be much that we can do with it or will ever be able to do with it: I mean that without character-traits there has to be full and open psychosis. At the very end of this book I want to sum up the basic contradictions of Brown’s argument for new men without character defenses, his hope for a rebirth of mankind into a “second innocence.” For now, it is enough to invoke Marcia Lee Anderson’s complete scientific formula: “Stripped of subtle complications [i.e., of all the character defenses—repression, denial, misperception of reality], who could regard the sun except with fear?”

PART II
THE FAILURES
OF HEROISM

    Neurosis and psychosis are modes of expression
for human beings who have lost courage. Anyone
who has acquired this much insight … will
thenceforth refrain from undertaking with persons
in this state of discouragement tedious excursions
into mysterious regions of the psyche.
    —A LFRED A DLER

PART III
RETROSPECT AND
CONCLUSION: THE
DILEMMAS OF HEROISM

References
    Note: As the following works of Otto Rank are mentioned frequently, for the sake of convenience they are abbreviated in the references as follows:

    PS   
Psychology and the Soul
, 1931 (New York: Perpetua Books Edition, 1961)
    ME   
Modern Education: A Critique of Its Fundamental Ideas
(Agathon Press, 1968).
    AA   
Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development
(Agathon Press, 1968).
    WT   
Will Therapy and Truth and Reality
(New York: Knopf, 1936; One Volume Edition, 1945).
    BP   
Beyond Psychology
, 1941 (New York: Dover Books, 1958).

    Excerpts from new translations of other of Rank’s works have appeared in the Journal of the Otto Rank Association,