Otto Rank and the Consciousness of Living

Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 2025

Otto Rank is an innovative and holistic thinker who ventured beyond subject–object division, reductionism, mechanism, and classical notions of causality in his understanding of human becoming and therapeutic relationship. Rank has in uenced object–relational; interpersonal, experiential; and time-limited approaches, while his will psychology and theory of creativity are unique contributions to modern psychotherapy (Kramer, 2019; Merkur, 2010; Mitchell & Black, 1995; O’Dowd, 1986; Rudnytsky, 2018; W. Wadlington, 2012). There are links to be drawn between today’s relational psychoanalysis and Rank’s early (pre)ontological work, where Rank’s ideas underlie developments in the direction of some of Wilfred Bion’s1 and Donald Winnicott’s conceptions, as well as later explorations of betweenness and thirdness (Aguayo, 2013; Ekenstierna, 2024; Ogden, 2019; Winnicott, 1984). More so, Rank can be considered a formative force behind existential–humanistic psychology in the United States (deCarvalho, 1999; Kramer, 2019; Lieberman, 1985; Menaker, 1982; Schneider, 2022). Jessie Taft, Rollo May, Carl Rogers, Irvin Yalom, and Stanislav Grof are among those who bodied forth modern (re)interpretations and real-world applications of his framework. In this article, I draw on Rank’s transitional (1924–1926) and post-Freudian eras (1926–1939). I consider the existential and metaphysical roots of Rank’s psychology in a larger context of meaning and expand on what such notions implicate for practice. Areas of focus include Rank’s relational and experiential understanding of therapy, as well as his embodied and cosmic notion of (un)conscious process. Publication: OnlineFirst. ©American Psychological Association, 2025. This paper is not the copy of record and may not exactly replicate the authoritative document published in the APA journal. The final article is available, upon publication, at: 10.1037/teo0000311

This review of the remarkable book "The Birth of Relationship: Carl Rogers Meets Otto Rank" by Robert Kramer suggests a revolution in our thinking about the founding figure(s) of the American version of existential-humanistic (E-H) psychology. Despite traditional emphases on the European philosophical and psychiatric lineages of Martin Heidegger, Medard Boss, and Ludwig Binswanger, it now appears that the most central and comprehensive inspiration for the movement--and thus Carl Rogers and Rollo May's importation of it in the 1930s and 1950s--was Otto Rank. This review elaborates why and raises compelling questions about both the long-standing neglect of Rank in the E-H and neo-analytic therapy communities, as well as ways to revive Rank's critical body of work for a fuller and deeper understanding of human lives.

Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 2020

In The Decline of the West Spengler puts forward a type of philosophical anthropology, an account of the structures of human experiential consciousness and a method of 'physiognomic' analysis, which I argue has dimensions that can be understood as akin to existential phenomenology. Humanity, for Spengler, is witness to the creative flux of 'Becoming' and constructs a world of phenomena bounded by death, underpinned by the two prime feelings of dread and longing and structured by the two forms of Destiny (Time) and Direction (Space). Human existence, Spengler argues, is future-directed and open in the sense that there is a certain degree of freedom in the ways in which humanity can actualise its existential possibilities. In the course of elaborating the existential implications of this future-orientation, Spengler introduces the concept of care (Sorge), the fundamental experiential structure.

International Journal of Psychotherapy, 2003

This paper surveys the implications of Daniel Stern's new book on 'The Present Moment', in conjunction with a parallel collection of Gestalt Therapy papers on creativity. I consider how Stern both demarcates himself from, and places himself in a subtle relationship with, classical psychoanalysis, whilst at the same time mapping a model of implicit intersubjective knowledge of 'the present moment', in psychotherapy, which gives him strong affinities with approaches in the humanistic-existential tradition-affinities he courageously owns in this book. I further suggest, drawing from both literature and the work of Julian Jaynes, that some of the oppositions he invokes in this book are, as such, still within the classical psychoanalytic tradition and way of thinking, that he simply has inverted them, and that, on a wider, societal and historical view of human reality, it is possible to achieve a comprehensive concept of 'being-in-the-world' (Heidegger), for which the psychoanalysis/existential approach antithesis collapses, and which, nevertheless is still psychodynamic in the fundamental sense. Stern's work is a major pioneering work in its own right.

Unfolding the drama of being., 2022

Jacques Lacan formulated one of the psychoanalytic theories of the formation of the mental world of the individual in 1938 in his article "The Family", which was written for the French Encyclopedia. Many of Lacan's ideas from his «The Family» article appear to be closely related to theses put forward 15 years earlier by one of Freud's early associates, Otto Rank, in his book «Birth Trauma and its Significance for Psychoanalysis». This article describes the formation of the individual's psychic world on the basis of the claims made by Jacques Lacan and Otto Rank in their above-mentioned works. The two authors' common understanding of the logic of becoming an individual and the concurrence in minute details of some of the given examples allows us to consider their works as two benchmarks for achieving the same goal. Also, this paper proposes the original interpretation of Freud's death drive as a main driving force of a human existence.

Journal of the Society for Existential Analysis, 2022

This is a heuristic project attempting to integrate personal lived-experiences with professional understanding of human suffering. Developmental theories and existential concerns are synthesized in an effort to explicate human dilemmas and existential psychotherapy. Thus, the article focuses on three main elements. First, it briefly relates the philosophical roots of the concept of 'becoming' and describes an existential-developmental understanding of human existence and growth. Secondly, it highlights the presence of basic developmental themes that together with our ontological givens create a dialectic between such antithetical forces as: need for stability and continuity with change and impermanence; separateness and individuation with need of and desire for connection with others; efficiency and confidence with insecurity and diffidence. These paradoxical dilemmas are integral to being human and are constantly renegotiated throughout our life. Finally, the article connects this existential-developmental understanding of the life span to existential psychotherapy; to the psychotherapeutic process and the creation of the therapeutic alliance. The creation of a safe space and the presence of a caring, empathically attuned, open and non-imposing therapist can facilitate the process of what Heidegger called "authentic historicalness"; the acceptance of thrownness, the freeing up of inherited possibilities, and thus of "choosing one's fate."

Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, 2007

Janus Head (Special Edition on Philosophical Practice), Winter 2005. 8(2) © 2005 by Trivium Publications, Amherst, NY.

This essay examines the similarities and dissimilarities between Freudian psychoanalysis and the form of analysis outlined by Sartre in Being and Nothingness in relation to the theory of intentionality developed by Brentano and Husserl. The principal aim of the paper is to establish a suitable starting point for a dialogue between these two forms of analysis, whose respective terminologies with respect to consciousness and the unconscious appear to cancel each other out.

University of Queensland. School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry, 2024

This thesis provides a comprehensive study of the connections between psychoanalyst Otto Rank's work, the so-called Therapeutic Third, and physicist David Bohm's implicate order. It explores the interface of psychoanalysis, modern physics, existential philosophy, and creativity. The mind-body-matter relation and the client-therapist dyad are examined through decompositional dual-aspect monism, which embraces a psychophysically neutral realm and a tripartite picture, mirrored in Bohm’s implicate order of the undivided universe, and Rank's Beyond. This realm is empirically inaccessible but is subject to experience via being. In the therapeutic situation it is what I call the Therapeutic Third: the at-once intersubjectively-generated and self-cosmically contextualized Unio Mystica between client and therapist.