The only remedy is an acceptance of the fundamental irrationality of the human being and life in general, an acceptance which means not merely a recognition or even admittance of our basic “primitivity,” in the sophisticated vein of our typical intellectuals, but a real allowance for its dynamic functioning in human behavior, which would not be lifelike without it. When such a constructive and dynamic expression of the irrational together with the rational life is not permitted, it breaks through in violent distortions which manifest themselves individually as neurosis and culturally as various forms of revolutionary movements which succeed because they are irrational and not in spite of it.
Even if a more harmonious medium is struck temporarily by any given civilization, it seems to challenge the irrational by introducing a foreign element into its dynamic functioning. Thus I understand the need for a complementary psychology as we find it operating on every plane of life: from the individual conception of the Double, manifested in what we termed “twin-relationship” to the acceptance of the exceptional psychology of the deviate by the masses, to the world-wide process of the diffusion of cultures in which one civilization reacts necessarily upon the other. The ego needs the Thou in order to become a Self, be it on the individual plane of human relationship or on the social plane of a foreign group-ideology, or on the broadest basis of one civilization needing another one for its development and maintenance. The tragic element in this process is that the ego needs a Thou to build up an assertive self with and against this Thou.
Just as in individual therapy this complementary Thou is only partly assimilated, while partly reciprocated, so all inspirational ideologies as well as cultural diffusions are in the last analysis therapeutic, that is, serve the purposes of strengthening a self—be it personal, social or national —by borrowed support from the opposite type, whether directly as borrowed strength or indirectly as strengthening the assertive forces by stimulating them antagonistically. In this sense, we do not have to carry the personality build-up beyond the psychology of the individual by showing the real stuff it is made of because we find it to be by its very nature beyond the individual. The psychology of the Self is to be found in the Other, be that Other the individual Thou, or the inspirational ideology of the leader, or the symbiotic diffusion of another civilization. Inasmuch as this symbiotic twinship operates as mutually complementary it is therapeutic, that is, strengthening, although at best on borrowed strength which can last only temporarily. But inasmuch as the two opposing personalities or ideologies or civilizations assert their difference, it is bound to produce violent reactions of a revolutionary nature in personal relationships and of social crises on a bigger scale, which are then condemned as neurotic by the rational self. Granted an acceptance of the fundamental irrationality of the human being and life in general with allowance for its dynamic functioning in human behaviour, we have the basis for the emergence of everything of which mankind is capable in personal and social capacity for betterment.
Rank, Otto. Beyond Psychology (pp. 289-291). Dover Publications. 1941, Kindle edition.
now, this is the end of that famously not-completed last chapter "Psychology beyond the self", and we come full circle, back to the other, again
