Rereading Henry James' short story "The Beast in the Jungle" after several years' involvement with Rank's writings has been an exhilarating experience. With regard to Otto Rank, his insights into problems of contemporary life seem even more relevant when fleshed out with such a concrete example. And with reference to James, his tale of a man who shapes his surroundings after the pattern of a monstrous anxiety and then discovers that the world so created has denied his self its chance to unfold, vibrates all the richer against such a conceptual background as Rank's dyad of fear and growth.

On the surface James' story is that of John Marcher, who from early years feels marked off from others by the conviction that he will experience a unique fate. In time he pictures that lurking future "something" as both magnificent and monstrous, a sleek invisible beast. He engages his acquaintance May Bartram to watch for its spring with him. So he spends decades waiting for an imaginary encounter, while May, remaining beside him, perceives and tries to help him see also that his real affliction is an inability to love and grow. Thus on a deeper level the story can be taken as that of whole groups of us whose exaggerated fears conjure up chronic speculations and thereby keep us from relating to life in another way, ever at hand, that might support an equally natural self-development. On yet a third level, suggested by submerged hints especially toward the close of the tale, Marcher's case is that of Everyman—an inner dialogue between forces of fear and growth which Rank discussed as perhaps the central bipolarity of everybody's life.

James composed the story between July and October 1902. Somewhat atypically for him he entered in his notebook only a reticent clue to his inspiration for it, speaking impersonally of the instance of a man who indulges fears that haunt him and so fails to marry a woman who had always waited at his side. Yet according to Leon Edel, the James biographer, the seeds of the situation probably derived from a striking incident in James' life which proves that he too was an Everyman caught between the pulls of fear and growth (or love). Edel remarks that from adolescence James showed in both his behavior and writings a pronounced distrust of close involvement with women. However during his "middle years" in Europe he befriended the deaf lonely American novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson, who became warmly attached to him. When James eventually noticed the drift of their relationship he retreated to a safe distance, limiting their exchanges to occasional letters and one meeting a year. Then in Venice a winter night in 1894 she threw herself from her bedroom window and died of the injuries. James was appalled at the outcome, saw belatedly the wide gap in their regard for each other, and met Miss Woolson's heirs in Italy to help settle her estate and dispose of her personal effects. Yet even here, Edel speculates, two forces may have continued to influence James' behavior: his affectionate courtesy may have been yoked to the worry that Miss Woolson's private papers revealed too much about him. However, unlike John Marcher who so justified his fear that he achieved a negative fate, the author in real life arranged matters in Venice, if there were matters to arrange, and then cultivated the possibilities for late growth from the friendship until he produced a great piece of psychological fiction.

The outcome in the case is quite consistent with Rank's discussions of the Janus-type dyad. Rank proposed that the fear response is likely the first content of human consciousness; yet he did not see it as always winning the battle because of its early appearance upon the field. It has to contend with a strong urge and capacity for growth ("the will") which also seems to be present in men just as a consequence of their birth into the human species. Rank pointed to the long record of man's religions, art, institutions and products as demanding that the positive coping response be given its due. Even though separation and loss, having occurred once, may recur at any moment; even though if man focuses his attention on his feelings of negative difference he may make his life, like John Marcher's, a vast barren expanse; it is always open to a person to turn his energies in the opposite direction, cultivate the positive aspects of his individuality and respond with love to the same characteristic in others. Instead of dwelling on a possible future threat and drawing fearfully back from each new chance, so cutting himself off from opportunities which the new is always offering (like a May Bartram beside every man) he can choose to relate warmly to the other, the outer, and so involve both of them in richer present experience. Rank said in Will Therapy that overconcern for the future can serve as a means of denying the possible threat in the here and now; yet the model of psychotherapy which he described in the same work also took the immediate relationship between client and helper as the context from which more-productive selves may grow. Marcher's fixation upon his future meeting with the imaginary beast displaced successfully the threat he may have sensed in closest union with Miss Bartram; still that other companion was always present to remind him tactfully in endless ways that his forebodings might be read as perhaps due only to the "expectation—or at any rate the sense of danger, familiar to so many people—of falling in love." James presents the possibilities of growth through the relationship to May with a vividness and poignancy that reaches its climax when she confides just before her death, "I would live for you still—if I could—but I can't." Marcher in the grip of his obsession rejects even that appeal; and later he thinks of her demise as just another aggravation, the end of her usefulness in keeping the watch with him.

Then in the last two or three pages of the story (as in the last chapter of the James-Woolson friendship recorded by Edel, and in the final stage of successful therapy as described by Rank) the darker force is shown up as not necessarily invincible. Marcher shakes off the "neurotic" role he had embraced and takes an impressive step toward growth so long denied. In the cemetery while visiting May's tomb he sees at a nearby grave a man so completely the image of "scarred passion" as to cause Marcher to ask, "What had the man had, to make him by the loss of it so bleed and yet love? Something that he, John Marcher, hadn't.… No passion had ever touched him, for this was what passion meant." He realizes, even so late, that passive before the beast he had projected into the world he has turned his whole life into a long negative adventure when the many years might have been full of love shared with May. The pain of his lost opportunity cannot be undone. Yet, we feel, something of worth has come out of it in the end.

It is apparent that only two characters figure in the story, which is told so consistently from Marcher's point of view that it might be taken as his account of an hallucination in which May and the beast represent projections of a deep bipolarity in his nature. John Marcher chooses to identify with the beast until during his visit to the graveyard he suddenly rises to a new outlook. There among the tombstones he feels first that, on his travels away from London since May's death "he had been separated so long from the part of himself that alone he now valued." Then he realizes that, unacknowledged by him at the time, May Bartram (even whose name suggests a mirror-image of his own) had been something more than a useful fellow spectator. She had been, rather, "the truth of his life" in which he could have loved himself; she had been "his other younger self." Finally, he admits, to have loved her would have been precisely to have turned the tables on the beast and led a rich full existence. With that realization by his protagonist James ends "The Beast in the Jungle." It is a note in close harmony with the one Edel sounds in his final pages on the James-Woolson friendship. And the dual chord fixes vividly for us those poles of fear and love (or growth) to which Rank referred over and over in his writings.

So much for the novelist and John Marcher. Now I wonder if we Marchers and Jameses of a later decade can face down our own beasts more successfully than the poor solitary bachelor in the tale? The path through our years seems beset with even more threats than his: with specters of changed life styles, widely divergent outlooks, startling demands and proposals. To meet them with anxiety and skepticism is of course one natural response, as Rank would be the first to tell us—but at the same time he might add, "a futile sterile response, that." Another way, of course, is to grasp and use the chance for growth in relationship with "the other." John Marcher could not until too late see the opportunity presented by his other, younger half. He chose instead to justify his fear. I wonder if we shall too?