Embracing the Ambivalence: Otto Rank's Complementary Approach and Its Relevance Today

What is it about?

This article highlights existential psychoanalyst Otto Rank's focus on the therapeutic relationship, the co-creative nature of the encounter, and his logic of complementarity. Spiced up with excursions into Eros, the daimonic, and quantum holism. Drawing on my work on Rank and David Bohm, I also touch on my concept of the "therapeutic third": a tacit dimension beyond concepts and categories, which is more existentially known than cognitively apprehended. This intermediary realm, or "tertium quid",  serves as a mediating interface between mind and matter, client and therapist, and extends into a notion of therapy as a co-creative venture. This way, the goal of constructive therapy is not to overcome various dualities and negative expressions but to transform these into creative manifestation, by embracing the diversity of experience, in a spirit of spontaneity, aliveness, and transcendent mutuality.

Featured Image

Photo by Susan Wilkinson on Unsplash

Photo by Susan Wilkinson on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Otto Rank has contributed significantly to contemporary experiential and relational psychotherapy, influencing theorists such as Jessie Taft, Rollo May, Carl Rogers, Stanislav Grof, and Irvin Yalom, while his ideas also underlie developments in the direction of some of Wilfred Bion’s and Donald Winnicott’s conceptions. However, Rank’s innovative, post-Freudian work is also valuable to the continued development of humanistic psychoanalysis and existential-humanistic psychology. Rank diverges from classical psychoanalysis, behavioristic views, as well as some of the counter-positioned humanistic motivational theories, where personhood is understood as a closed system, concerned with the actualization of the own, individual self. He proposes instead a holistic approach, which navigates between objective and subjective psychology. Part of this is reflected in his understanding that human existence is best approached at the interface of physics (matter and macrocosm) and psychology (mind, body, and microcosm). Existential philosophy in turn seems to function as a medium in his transdisciplinary inquiry, or as a way to unify different aspects of human reality without reducing psychology to physics itself. While his incorporation of philosophy constitutes a unique contribution to early psychoanalytical theory, it does not detract from Rank’s scientific relevance. On the contrary, the strong relationality that Rank propounded harmonizes with implications and results from modern psychotherapy research. More so, Rank's interpretation of observer-dependency, where the human being is understood to co-create with the world at-large, through acts of will, is closely related to the emerging field of quantum holism.

Perspectives