Freud attempted to explain human behavior, scientifically, as the consequence of the clash between reason and unconscious sexual drives. Rank, whose early work applied psychoanalytic understanding to an analysis of myth, returned to the core of religious activity as the basis for human activity-its preoccupation with death and meaning-and concluded that the capacity to create myth, religion and art represents a kind of solution to the matter of death by affirming life and what is valuable about life existentially.
