ABSTRACT
Otto Rank’s discussion really only applies to the romantic artist whose exceptional creative powers are brought about by accidents of birth and circumstance as much as through wilful effort. Rank’s emphasis on emotion over intellect is essentially romantic in orientation and links his early analytic work in The Artist and The Double with his later humanistic work on patient-centred therapy. The daybooks portend Rank’s interest in romantic science by recording, in his words from 1903, ‘an image of a quivering human soul under the microscope’. Henry Miller’s fiction in the 1930s explores the romantic themes of growth, freedom and self-creation but with none of the noble sentiments of the mid-nineteenth-century American romantic writers Whitman and Emerson. Stanley Cavell thus understands the ‘handsome’ part of the human condition to be ‘what Emerson calls being drawn and what Heidegger calls getting in the draw, or the draft, of thinking’.
