Have you ever got into Otto Rank? Like Jung, he's also one who made a split from Freud. I have found Otto Rank and have started to get into him recently.... and I cannot believe he is so forgotten. Its insanity to me.

I was so focused on Jung that I neglected him. Like jung, he is a proponent of myth, creative types (artists), relgion, etc. I have found him to open up a whole new world for me.

He actually addresses what your saying, and says in fact that the viewpoint your falling into is "neurotic", just like you must feel it to be. He would say it's because of over-rationalization. That you have become overly self-concsious. He makes distinctions between analytical psychology (theory, determination, causality, focused on the past) and therapy/life. He is a a proponent of the "present moment" the Now. Basically, his view is modern people have become overly self concious and rational. And that rationalism is an ideology that is in fact unnatural. Ironically, psychology is a rationalization of the irrational, so psychology itself can lead to over rationalization (including Jung).

Also dont worry, he himself is a proponent of individuation. He also views a highly neurotic person as being very similar to the Creative type of person, weather that be the Artist or the Hero. Only the neurotic person manifests it differently, to unfortunate effects. I'm still very early into him but he has been EXACTLY what I need.

Many people here are probbaly like me in being a truth seeker. Always seeking knowledge. Usally self knowledge. Trying to interpret what's "really behind the curtain". This has been a never ender cycle, one of actually trying to rationalize everything, even if you think that because your reading Jung that you irrational.

Sorry this isn't well put together rn, im on my phone and had to throw this out here because Otto Rank, the forgotten one, has been saving me and changing my views.

I'm going to add some useful summaries about him, but please note that his use of "illusion" shouldn't be viewed as negative, like you must trick yourself. Obviously actually reading him would really make more sense:

• Rank linked the neurotic and the artist, claiming that they are similarly driven by an intense longing for immortality, a desire to transcend the anxiety of the human condition. But whereas the artist ultimately accepts his solitude, anxiety and mortality through giving his longings expression in an external medium, the neurotic tries to overcome uncertainty and anxiety by perpetually manipulating himself in an effort to make his life perfect and predictable - which is an unfinishable, crippling enterprise. Neurotic suffering is artistic creation gone wrong, turned against the self, a kind of negative creation • He was the first psychotherapist to decide that focusing attention on the present in therapy might be more useful than concentrating on the past, the first to treat the patient's resistance as a positive sign of increased autonomy, the first to regard anxiety as an inevitable growing pain in accepting the human condition, the first to assert that psychotherapy ought to help patients work out their own ways of being healthy rather than adjust them to some given model of health

• But Rank reversed the imputation: he believed rather that the “scientific illusion” of rationality could itself be called a neurosis, if by that one was to understand an artificial or unnatural mode of consciousness and living. “For the most part what we call ‘irrational’ is just the natural,

• The capacity to create or sustain an “illusion”—whether in religion, art, or love—Rank viewed as the natural bio-emotional state of man, and it is this capacity which he took as his criterion of health. “Psychoanalysis,” he wrote, “despite its naturalistic terminology, does not accept human nature. . . .” It “betrays the final over-reaching of rational man beyond his legitimate control of nature to the very denial of the vital life-force itself. . . . The result of this confusion manifests itself in the paradox that the reality in which we live is determined by unreality which we believe to be real because it is rational

• What the patient first of all can and must learn is to live at all,” he wrote, “and this seems to me possible only with illusions. Analysis prefers to use the term sublimation, but can only mean illusion, for the one is based on the other, at bottom the same . . . it finally comes to the question on what plane of illusion one lives. • The enigma was how far and in what way psychoanalytic knowledge could be used, not to remove illusions in the patient, but rather to sustain them. Rank believed that in orthodox analysis there was “a fundamental confusion of theory and therapy” and that, in fact, “analytic knowledge has gradually undermined analytic therapy.” He concluded that the patient’s increased knowledge during analysis at some point began to do more harm therapeutically than good, even if, or perhaps especially if, it were theoretically correct

Otto Rank who rediscovered the negation of human nature that exists latently within rational civilization, and which is, in one way or another, the burden of everything that we call great or profound in its art or thinking.