Three

Otto Rank’s Will Therapy

Rank began developing original clinical techniques as early as 1921; and The Development of (1923), which he co-authored with Ferenczi, published a portion of his innovations in impeccably Freudian terminology. seems to have been fully abreast of Rank’s innovations, unpublished as well as published, and to have considered them acceptably psychoana- lytic. Following Rank’s break with Freud over The Trauma of Birth, Rank’s work was shunned by the psychoanalytic establishment. Grinker (1940, p. 183) reported, however, that in private conversation Freud “had nothing but good to say about Rank--his imagination and brilliance--but simply stated ‘he was a naughty boy.’” Because was indebted to Rank, and Thompson analyzed , many of Rank’s most impor- tant technical innovations came to be preserved by Sullivan’s school of in- terpersonal psychiatry--even though Sullivan personally participated in Rank’s expulsion from the American Psychoanalytic (Lieber- man, 1985, pp. 236-37, 293). At the same time, American ego psychologists called the interpersonalists “Neo-Freudian,” and Rank’s admiration by and (pp. 396-97) did his reputation no good among self- styled Freudians. The rehabilitation of Rank’s reputation and technical in- novations within psychoanalysis awaited the rise in the 1980s of the Ameri- can school of relational psychoanalysis. We are here concerned, however, less with Rank’s technical inno- vations than with original theories that he first published only after break- ing with Freud. Like Burrow, Rank had come to Freud after an enthusiasm for Nietzsche, and he drew on Nietzsche as a resource for the elaboration of his own version of ego . In 1935, Rank went so far as to call Nietzsche “the greatest psychologist of modern times” (Rank, 1996, p. 255). Nietzsche’s metaphysics were mystical. He postulated a chaotic, ever inno- vative, Dionysian “Primal Unity” underlying an equally unified illusion of the Apollonian form, structure, order, and truth of phenomenal reality. The rare individual, the Übermensch or “superman,” critiques the conscious façade and so facilitates a reconnection with primal unity; but instead of being engulfed in its oneness, expresses his own creative individuation. Rank reconceptualized Nietzsche’s metaphysics in developmental terms as a 54 EXPLORATIONS OF THE PSYCHOANALYTIC MYSTICS progression from infantile solipsism to adult creativity. In this way, Rank conceptualized mysticism as a line of ego development that commences with primary and ends with the individuation of creative adults. Al- though Rank (1927b) scorned “the concept of the Id (Es) which...is just as mystical as the old unconscious” (p. 9), he was no more successful than Freud at eliminating metaphysics from his theories. Appropriating mystical ideas by psychologizing them reductively removes a patina of supernatural- ism while leaving the interior logic of the mystical intact. Another major resource for Rank was the Christian philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard, which was then only beginning to be known outside Denmark. Rank drew selectively on Kierkegaard’s (1980) ideas about the interrelation of con- sciousness, self, moral choice, , and guilt in order to enrich his analy- sis of the ego. In the process, Rank eliminated the torturous casuistry that Kierkegaard sometimes indulged in rationalization of Christian dogmas. Because Rank opened his diary for 1905 with a quotation from Kierkegaard (Lieberman, 1985, p. 34), we know that his familiarity with Kierkegaard antedated both his meeting with Freud later the same year and Jaspers’s at- tention to Kierkegaard eight years later.

THE MYSTICAL CORE OF THE PERSONALITY

The better to distinguish his clinical approach from psychoanalysis, Rank came to call it “will therapy.” Rank’s innovations had their basis in several simple but far-reaching corollaries of Freud’s theory. Without using Freud’s term “primary narcissism,” Rank invoked the theory of neonatal solipsism and concluded that a natural, biological urge to mysticism informs much of human culture.

Already, in that earliest stage of individualization, the child is not only factually one with the mother but, beyond all that, one with the world, with a Cosmos floating in mystic vapours in which present, past, and future are dissolved. The individual urge to re- store this lost unity is...an essential factor in the production of human cultural values. (Rank, 1932a, p. 113)

Rank insisted that he was not simply interpreting the biological through a mystical lens. He suggested that the psychical was incompletely understood biologically. A philosophical approach was a necessary addition (Rank, 1996, p. 228). Rank agreed that the drives that Freud allocated to the id were “su- pra-individual” phenomena that were shared by the human species. Because